Mitchell Freedman wrote an alternative history, A Disturbance of Fate, back in 2003: What if Robert Kennedy had lived? What if he had survived walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel that night, and became President? It’s a fascinating story of logical conclusions — the Democrats, for example, with their Catholic President, became the anti-abortion party. His ending, however, could not be more prescient.
Robert F. Kennedy was my Senator until he was killed when I was 9. At the end of his life, there was thought that only he could pull the country together during the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1960’s. I remember waking up one June morning in 1968, anxious to hear how Kennedy had done in the California primary, only to found that he won, but had been shot. He was still alive. For the next day, my cartoons were “interrupted for a Special Report” — words that created dread in the 1960’s — that he was still in “Critical but stable condition.”
Then he died.
But Freedman wrote a very compelling “What if” alternative history. Unfortunately, history continues through the end of time, but books have to end. How do you end an “alternative history” that by definition has no natural conclusion?
SPOILER ALERT
Answer: You create an apocalypse, and write about it as a lecture, after the fact.
I read this book years ago, maybe 15 years ago, shortly after its release. I did not like his ending. It was not plausible. He was attempting to do two things in this novel. For most of the book, he wrote an engaging, plausible narrative of what could have happened had RFK lived. But then, in the epilogue, he decided to tell us, proportionately, through a professor’s lecture, the number of people in the US, by percentage, who would have died if the Civil War of the 1860’s happened in the late 20th century -- IF a celebrity with little political experience and a big ego became President.
Freedman wrote his book after the Bush-Gore debacle, and saw the issue of the electoral college as a cause leading to the Civil War. It seemed to me, as I read the book, that he had these two ideas: of Kennedy’s Presidency, and of what the Civil War would have looked like had it happened in our lifetime, He wanted them to both get into print, and so he conflated them into one book.
Yet — I’ve been thinking a lot about this book recently. An awful lot. I was going to write this diary when Trump was first elected, but I didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.
Unfortunately, the ideas are already here.