Two historians put Kennedy legacy in context

What might have been, asked historians Fredrik Logevall and David Greenberg at the Cornell Club Oct. 15, if Lee Harvey Oswald's 1963 gunshot had missed? Nearly 50 years later, the question of what might have come to pass - particularly in Vietnam - if President John F. Kennedy had survived his trip to Dallas isn't an easy one to answer, even for Logevall, the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, vice provost for international affairs and director of Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and David Greenberg, associate professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University . "There is something in particular that captivates people about the Kennedy question, and especially with Vietnam," Greenberg told the audience. To historians like Greenberg, author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image , "the Kennedy assassination stands out as an inflection point separating the Camelot idealism of the Kennedy White House from the social upheaval of the antiwar movement and later Watergate. "The Kennedy assassination seems like an engine of history. Where, if only he had lived, it all might have been different. We might not have plunged into Vietnam.