h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Taken all into account, I'm thinking that the Sixties may have been a decade to forget in the United States.
I mean, right from the beginning of the decade you had the Cuban Missile Crisis after the fruitless invasion @ the Bay of Pigs; the terrible assassination of the youthful and ever popular (at least in €urope) John F. Kennedy in 1963; the division & rancour of the devastating Vietnam War (the first modern war to take place as much in the living rooms of American viewers as on the battlefields); the racial tension of the Civil Rights Movement, especially following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr (prompting the U.S. Democrats to lose their grip on the Southern states of the 'old' Confederacy held since the Civil War).
& if that weren't enough, "Tricky Dicky" Nixon arrived to take the U.S. Presidency @ the end of decade in 1969.


Kindda makes you even more grateful for the Beatles & free love @ Woodstock, doesn't it?

But if Kennedy had lived, would we still think of him so warmly? By the logic of the time, going into Vietnam was virtually inevitable: we blame Lyndon Johnson for making that decision, but had the bullets missed or only winged him, the decision would have been Kennedy's and there's every indication he would have said "yes".

Also, from a British point of view, the family patriarch was pure poison: Joseph Kennedy had been an abysmally disastrous choice as American ambassador to Britain in 1940. His anti-British attitude (stemming from the usual sort of Irish-American hostility to Britain)led him to be pro-German to a ludicrous extent. His pessimistic reports to Roosevelt about how near Britain was to collapse in the summer of 1940 set back any sort of effective American support for Britain by nearly a year.

How much knee-jerk Irish-American hatred of Britain did Kennedy get from his family?