The biggest counterfactual that hangs on the assassination of JFK is this: Would JFK have launched a ground war in the jungles of Vietnam? Don Wildman and his guest Fredrik Logevall explore what might have happened if JFK didn't die.Fredrik Logevall is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian at Harvard who is working on a definitive three-part biography of JFK. The first volume is out now, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
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Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 As the film spools forth, the motorcade is seen gliding around the corner, slowly. And the young president, John Kennedy, side by side with his wife in the rear seat of the limousine, bathed in sepia tones, in the last flush of a more hopeful era, smiles and begins to wave. We all know what happened next.
Wir wissen alle, wie sich die Welt an dem Tag verändert hat, wie die Geschichte einen neuen Kurs nach dem anderen und für immer mehr folgte. Aber was, wenn es anders war, an dem tragischen Tag im November 1963? Was, wenn Lee Harvey Oswald verpasst hätte, oder seine Waffe verpasst hätte, oder ein Dutzend andere Möglichkeiten? Was dann? Was, wenn JFK nicht gestorben wäre?
Hello everybody, I'm Don Wildman. Welcome back to American History Hit. Thanks for listening. Today we are in the realm of the counterfactual, asking the burning question, what if President John Kennedy had lived? What if Dallas never happened? What if those shots had missed? Of all the forks in the road that appear on that fateful day, one of the big questions seems to be this.
Would Kennedy have started a war in Vietnam? Many people argue this point, questioning whether he would have or would have not. But we have an excellent guest today to discuss this interesting question in the person of Frederick Logevall, historian at Harvard, a leading authority on JFK and the Vietnam War,
His 2013 book, Embers of War, The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, won the Pulitzer Prize. Wow. He is currently working on a three-volume biography of JFK. The first volume, JFK, Coming of Age in the American Century, published in 2020. Volume 2 is out next year. Dr. Logevall is a former guest on American History Hit back in 2023. And here back again.
Thank you very much for joining us. Oh, I'm pleased to be with you, Don. Counterfactuals, I know, can bother established historians, so thank you for indulging us today.
Well, I'm happy to do it. I should tell you right off the top that to my students I make the argument, and I should really also make this argument to my colleagues, some of whom are skeptical, but to the students I say, counterfactuals actually, if you do them carefully, and there are some ground rules, help us better understand what did happen in history. In other words, they have real utility.
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