What if you could prevent the Kennedy assassinations?

Horror novelist and master storyteller Stephen King is out to answer that question in 11/22/63: A Novel and frankly I am on the edge of my seat. My wife and I just started listening to this story on audio for road trips (which we take a lot of) and the narrator is great. Craig Wasson has incredible vocal range to give real distinctiveness to the characters. I have to admit that when I first saw the title, I thought it would be a really in-depth look at that day but I really sold King short. Maybe I was just had Bobby (Widescreen Edtion) in mind, where it was just a bunch of people working at the hotel the day RFK was assassinated. A good film, but did not have the emotional impact I thought it would. Maybe because I was not around in 1968 to experience that awful year.
Now, it must be said that I have never read a King story that did not grip me and to my knowledge he has never written a bad story. Also I do not know of any time travel stories he has written but I admit there are many I have not read. There are quite a few that bounce around from past to present in the characters minds, flashbacks and the like but nothing like the incredible counterfactual opportunities 11/22/63 offers. A comment about counterfactual history. You may have heard of What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been and other titles in the series edited by Robert Cowley. These are fun, but very hard to defend academically. Serious historians try to avoid counterfactuals whenever they can because they are just too tricky. One might be able to predict changes along a small number of variables very close to the time a change was made, but as time marches forward and the number of variables increases a counterfactual history becomes statistically untenable. Historians love to debate, and love to defend and criticise ideas in journals, panel discussions, and online forums. But counterfactual scholarship is like painting a big, red target on yourself.

And so we usually leave contemplating changes to the past for novelists and science fiction writers. People with far more imagination than an historian grounded in facts can hope to muster. Occasionally there is a crossover, such as Harry Turtledove, but most of the time you end up with dreck like Newt Gingrich's pathetic reimagining of the Battle of Gettysburg. Enter Stephen King, a man with intimate knowledge and memory of the 1950s and 1960s, access to the historiography of the period, and more imagination than the next 50 writers could ever hope for.

You can see why I'm excited to travel back to 1958 with Jake Epping.

As I said before, I just started the story but already the possibilities are jaw-dropping. I wrote my MA thesis on Cold War Liberalism and Vietnam, so JFK was a central figure in my research. I have always been facsinated by the era. My own interpretation of what happened to the US after Dallas '63 was that "we" swallowed one too many bombs and have been just limping along ever since. American society could have weathered the Civil Rights movement and all the other movements for equality and justice, or we could have weathered Vietnam but not both. The scars of too many body blows haunt us to this day almost fifty years later. Please don't misunderstand, it was right and it was just for African-Americans to march and demonstrate for equal rights as it was for women and all disenfranchised groups but white male backlash against freedom and justice for all tore our social fabric to the core.

Vietnam was another story altogether. I have yet to find convincing evidence that JFK would have pursued escalation in Southeast Asia differently than LBJ did, it is one of the daunting tasks of historians on the subject. Many historians' interpretations of just what the hell happened in Vietnam are confusing and contradictory. Obviously, over 58,000 Americans died there, many many more were wounded terribly both mentally and physically, to say nothing of the indigenous population's suffering. But the slip and slide down to the massive military operations in SEA is tangled. To speculate is almost to be irresponsible. But to tell a story...