"Certainly, there is no denying that history would have been different if Kennedy had survived to win in November, and especially if he had managed to fulfill a campaign pledge to quickly wind down the Vietnam War. "If he gets to be president, then there’s no Nixon," said Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school who worked as a legislative assistant to Kennedy. "I know this as much as anybody could know, because he was gone, but he had every intention of ending the war right away." "And of course then there’s no Watergate," he added. This is the rosiest version of what could have been: plausible, but unprovable. Perhaps the better question is not what would have happened if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated — inherently speculative — but what did happen because he was. His death had a powerful and immediate effect on the American political psyche, intensified by its proximity to King’s. Why, many people asked, should they continue to pursue change peacefully, through the ballot box and nonviolent protest, when two of the biggest evangelists of that approach had been gunned down?"