What If JFK Wasn't Shot?

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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All music from Epidemic Sounds.

American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.

Transcript

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1:02.7	The weather had changed that day, from overcast gray to a bright, beautiful autumn sun.
1:09.7	Gleeful crowds lined the streets in downtown Dallas.
1:13.4	As the film spools forth, the motorcade is seen gliding around the corner, slowly.
1:19.3	And the young president, John Kennedy, side by side with his wife in the rear seat of the limousine,
1:24.9	bathed in sepia tones in the last flush of a more hopeful era,
1:29.8	smiles and begins to wave.
1:32.5	We all know what happened next.
1:35.9	We all know how the world changed that day, how history followed a new course afterwards, and forevermore.
1:43.1	But what if it had gone differently, that tragic day in November 1963?
1:48.2	What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed, or his gun jammed, or a dozen other possibilities?
1:56.1	What then?
1:58.0	What if JFK hadn't died?
2:13.4	Hello, everybody. I'm Don Wilden. Welcome back to American History Hit. Thanks for listening.
2:18.2	Today, we are in the realm of the counterfactual, asking the burning question,
	...

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