The Czar asked Confucius’s* opinion on the oft-stated theory that President Kennedy, had he lived, would have withdrawn the U.S. from Vietnam. Confucius does not have a strong opinion one way or the other. Here’s why:

Historical counterfactuals are awesome! Buy some Great Grizzly Assault Emancipator swag from sharpwriter here.

What-would-have-happened-if-only counterfactuals are flimsy reeds on which to hang historical projections. History is just too damn complicated—there are just so many damn dependent variables to deal with. In this case, when, exactly, would he be supposed to have pulled out? Would he have ramped up first? Would he even have been reelected in ’64?

In favor of the liberal theory, Kennedy did cut his losses quickly at the Bay of Pigs, overruled Lucius Clay’s desire to knockdown the Soviets’ barbed-wire first draft of the Berlin Wall, and cut a secret deal in favor of the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This suggests that had the Soviets or Ho seriously escalated their aggressions on the South, he might have cut and run. Whether this speaks creditably of their putative hero is an open question.

Against it, one suspects that Kennedy, having been faced down by Castro and Khrushchëv in Cuba, Vienna, and Berlin, might finally have indulged his Cold Warrior fantasies when they were backed up by the considerable might of the U.S. military. He might well have decided that was the ground to die on, so to speak, and actually prosecuted the war more aggressively than Johnson. And certainly, if JFK had lent his charisma to the cause, like FDR, another smooth-talking lightweight, the American people might have stayed behind the cause more steadfastly. The kids who grew up idolizing Kennedy might have followed his lead more than turning against hey-hey-hey LBJ, and Kennedy undoubtedly would have been able to articulate the cause better.

Given James Piereson’s argument that the Kennedy assassination was the Wendepunkt at which American liberalism conclusively turned anti-American, a living JFK might have kept the Democratic Party out of the hands of the hard left, and kept to the anti-Communist line, particularly if he’d been shot at by a defector to the Soviet Union who’d probably given them the altitudes needed to shoot down Gary Powers’ U2 and who was in contact with the Cubans.†

Or not. Who knows? Kennedy was not even close to a great president while he lived, and attributing future strategic foresight and statesmanship to a man who seems to have had little is foolish. But…can we rule out he might have grown in office? Cut down on the pain pills and cleared his judgment? Found better advisors and listened to them? Simply lucked into a military victory or timely withdrawal? No! Heck, had he picked up the phone and called Richard Nixon, the old Red-hunting buddy of his brother Bobby, Nixon might have spelled out a plan similar to the one that got the U.S. out of Vietnam with a militarily defeated North and fairly secure South. (Remember, it was the hard-left Watergate Congress’s withdrawing aid from the South Vietnamese they held in contempt which directly precipitated the 1975 fall of South Vietnam, not the U.S. military withdrawal two years earlier.)

Kennedy is a particularly bad case for historical speculation, since he was in many ways such a vacillating mediocrity. He did not have the temperament of a strong leader which would have left tracks showing where he might have gone. If Alexander the Great hadn’t died young, he likely would have kept attempting to expand his domains. If Julius Caesar isn’t stabbed, he may anticipate his close nephew and adopted son Octavian’s imperial consolidation and internal pacification (or may find someone new to fight). If Mehmet the Conqueror doesn’t die suddenly, he likely invades the Italian Peninsula from his beachhead in Otranto. If Lincoln isn’t shot, he probably resigns at the end of his term, worn out, but Reconstruction definitely takes a different path than under Johnson. But Kennedy?

But, ok, you insist on a JFK counterfactual. Fine. Joe Kennedy Jr. doesn’t die in World War II; his father makes him president. John follows his natural, dilettantish curiosity and love of language into journalism. He ends up as Editor in Chief of one of the big newsweeklies (maybe one started de novo by Daddy), wining and dining the nation’s elite at mansion parties hosted by Jackie, and bedding scores of women at a Park Avenue pied-à-terre. He trumpets the Missile Gap, denounces Castro and Ho ceaselessly, bolstering his brother’s aggressive foreign policy. The Democrats, an alliance of the wealthy, the ethnic, and the working, leave the Rockefeller Republicans muttering curses into their cocktails at the country club and the long-haired radicals fuming in impotent fury on campus. The 1960s don’t explode, and when they try, the alliance of bien-pensants, arrivistes, and Old Guard are confident, indeed arrogant, enough to crush them.

With apologies to Orwell, “Imagine Don Draper’s wingtip stamping on a hippie face—forever.”‡

*For those who came in late: Confucius is the name of Gormogons’ Œcumenical Volgi. Also, for those who came in even later: Confucius used to write on this site. Like a lot.

†For an extremely persuasive circumstantial argument that Oswald was almost certainly Soviet asset of some sort (who probably was acting out of rogue zeal since Khrushchëv had temporarily halted his otherwise enthusiastic foreign-assassination program some months before when an assassin was caught in West Germany), see the fascinating book on the assassination by Ion Pacepa, a Romanian DIE (=KGB) higher-up at the time.

‡Would Confucius have cared to live in this world? Might well have beaten our broken, demoralized mess of a culture in the ’70s. But pace James Lileks, the brittle, boozy, stilted, swoopy, mod insincerity of early ’60s swank generally makes the Volgi’s skin crawl. But it too would have passed, and in this scenario, might have contained greater continuity with what came before. One suspects there would have been big winners: unborn children, for example, and losers as well. Black America, in particular, would probably have had to bear the burden of public bigotry and, in the South, the boot of the Dixiecrats longer. The welfare state might well have proceeded apace, though without LBJ’s arm-twisting ability, might have been watered down appreciably in Congress. But again, who knows?

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.