Ideas: History, Pivoting On the Unpredictable

[question everything]

Ideas: History, Pivoting On the Unpredictable
By Michael Beschloss
Newsweek

(snip)

Bright middle-school students know the most notable cases. Woodrow Wilson's stroke in 1919 robbed him of the diplomatic skills that might have allowed him to make peace with the Senate and save the League of Nations, which might have spared the world the rise of Adolf Hitler. John Kennedy's assassination arguably deprived the nation of a president more skeptical of escalating the Vietnam War than Lyndon Johnson proved to be.

Other examples take more time to ponder. Had FDR suffered his fatal stroke a year earlier, he would have been succeeded by President Henry Wallace, who, if elected in 1944, would have scoffed at the need to fight a cold war with the Soviet Union. Had Chief Justice Fred Vinson survived another 18 months, Vinson—not Earl Warren—would have been leading the Supreme Court when it decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Kentuckian might not have been so motivated or effective as Warren was in shoving the nation toward racial integration.

Had Richard Nixon not been hospitalized with viral pneumonia in 1973, he could have saved his presidency by burning his incriminating White House tapes at the moment they were revealed to the world. Had Nixon served two terms and retired with his party's respect, it would have been far more difficult for Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, both of whom he privately deprecated, to become the next Republican president and vice president. And in such a political universe, George W. Bush would almost certainly never have left Texas.

We insist that ours is a government of laws, not men, but it is striking how often large historical forces pivot on something so unpredictable as the continued good health of a politician.


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16243570/site/newsweek/

[Psephos]

1. "...but time and chance happeneth to them all."

There's a whole genre of literature called Alternate History that explores in detail what might have happened if key random events had not occurred.

Here's a site that offers a feature called This Day in Alternate History. It also explains the A.H. literary culture.

http://www.othertimelines.com/

Peace.