If President John F. Kennedy had lived, would he have committed U.S. ground forces to Vietnam, as his successor Lyndon B. Johnson eventually did?  Few historical “what ifs” have haunted the minds of Baby Boomer Americans more than this one, a generation for whom the Vietnam War became the great defining historical event of their lives.  As the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s became large, indeterminate, costly, and divisive, the question of what JFK might have done became central to the JFK historical legacy.  Kennedy’s own advisors, then writing the first drafts of Read more