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[Spider Jerusalem]

45. I don't think so

Kennedy was already pretty sold on Vietnam, people seem to forget that (there's footage of him on the Huntley/Brinkley show talking about the "domino theory" and how he absolutely believes that you have to fight Communism in Vietnam to prevent all of Southeast Asia going Red)...and Kennedy presided over the largest expansion of the US military in history; if JFK had lived? The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts may never have passed--the day he died? Every bill on JFK's legislative agenda was hopelessly stalled in Congress; it took LBJ, with his ability to work the Senate, pleading and cajoling and bullying, to first get a budget passed...by promising Senator Robert Byrd that he'd limit it to the symbolic figure of $100 billion...and then to get the Civil Rights Act passed by browbeating recalcitrant Democrats into voting for it as the legacy of a martyred President and shaming Republicans into voting for it by calling on their history as "the party of Lincoln". I don't see any of that happening if Kennedy had lived, I'm afraid. As for the rest, "decline" as such was inevitable; the USA was the only major industrial power still standing at the end of WWII (Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan? All bombed pretty severely, with years of rebuilding ahead of them) and the USA produced HALF the world's oil at the time; the USA's economic dominance in the immediate postwar period was pretty much inevitable, as was the relative decline as the rest of the world recovered and as Middle Eastern oil production ramped up and American production declined (US oil production peaked in 1970, by the way).