Comentator Jeff Greenfield has turned his knowledge
of politics and history to explore the history that never happened in
his book Then Everything Changed. Beginning with Richard
Pavlick's aborted plan to assassinate John F. Kennedy before
Inauguration Day, Greenfield posits three possible versions of the
United States, each based on a more-or-less realistic change in
history. He traces those changes, all of which center on the
Presidency, to create credible versions of the United States that
mirror, sometimes in horrific ways.
Beginning with the aforementioned assassination,
Greenfield examines the roles played by Republicans and Democrats as a
Constitutional crisis looms with Kennedy's death before the Electoral
College meets. With Lyndon Johnson eventually ensconced in the
White House three years earlier, and facing opposition and hatred from
Robert Kennedy, Greenfield tweaks history, offering a mixed scenario as
Lyndon Johnson tried to create a world which met both his own and
Kennedy's vision in a world where Kennedy never had a chance.
Greenfield doesn't shy away from the conflict between those two men, or
the individuals around them. He follows Johnson's administration for
only two years, until the midterm elections before he returns to our
world to introduce the second branch point.
In Greenfield's 1968, nothing has happened
different from our own timeline. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and
Johnson took over. However, Robert Kennedy did survive Sirhan
Sirhan's bullet in the Ambassador Hotel and went up to face Richard
Nixon in the general election. Looking back on 1968 from our own
vantage point, the aura of the fallen Robert Kennedy makes a Kennedy
nomination seem as if it would have been unstoppable, but Greenfield is
careful to view the events as they were seen at the time. His
surviving Kennedy is a long shot and must use his political acumen to
beat out the other candidates as well as the mechanizations of Lyndon
Johnson. This scenario fully shows the complexity of history.
The final scenario may be the most outlandish,
requiring Greenfield to spin a Gerald Ford victory over Jimmy Carter in
1976. Pursuing Ford's second term, Greenfield then explores a
Reagan campaign that must deal with a country dissatisfied with his own
party's policies while facing a candidate who he was not expecting to
face. The key figure, however, is not Ford or Reagan, but rather a
political operative who was sidelined in our own history, John Sears,
driving home the point that the big names may attract all the attention,
but their are millions of other people just as important who fly under
the radar.
One of the strongest points made in the three
essays that make up Then
Everything Changed is that by using such recent history, the process
of building a believable alternate history is clearly demonstrated.
Greenfield makes use of actual individuals and situations, showing their
complexity by making minor changes and seeing what reverberations they
might have. He tracks them, creating a world which is familiar, yet
different, and occasionally ironic. They are complex versions of the
world, with strengths and weaknesses different from our own, and not
always believable, but then, the real world has its fair share of
unlikely occurences.
Greenfield does have a tendency to repeat himself
in each of the three sections, reminding the reader of points already
made. It doesn’t happen
often, but enough that it is noticeable.
He also inserts historical figures who make comments which can
only be seen as ironic given their actions in the real world.
Although it would have been easy to get away with this once or
twice, Greenfield does it often enough that it goes beyond the stage of
a wink and becomes distracting instead.
Not exactly a collection of short stories and not exactly a series
of essays, Greenfield does a wonderful job bringing the history of the
last fifty years to life by examining alternatives to what actually
happened. His sketches are details and masterful, showing a firm
understanding that history is not just made up of the individuals who
live it, but by chance and the tides of change as well.
