If many of the distinguished heros from the 60's had lived, we probably would not have had the Vietnam war, to boot!
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Well, yes we would have had Vietnam in some form. It was started way back in the 1950's when the agreement to partition Vietnam and withdraw the French troops (who were partially armed by the US, by the way) after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, was to hold elections in all of VN to determine who would rule the whole country.
John Foster Dulles and his equally colonialist brother CIA chief Allen Dulles, advised NOT to allow these elections, since they didn't think the Communists could lose. And the US supported a guy named Diem and his dragonlady wife. When he proved incompetent, he was assassinated and another puppet was chosen, and in 1960, the US started sending "advisers". The plan, which Kennedy approved, was to score an easy triumph over the Communists. This came before the major push for civil rights occurred. The Civil Rights Act was passed after JFK was assassinated in 1963. LBJ promoted it a lot more than JFK would have been able to do, based on LBJ's political vsion: "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow".
Right before MLK went to Memphis to support the sanitation workers, he was panning a major thrust against the VN War, being as it was soaking up most of the funds that he felt should have been spent on the War on Poverty.
And it was then that a penniless minor thief named James Earl Ray, using the pseudonym of Eric Starvo Galt (Galt as in the Ayn Rand novel 'Atlas Shrugged', by the way) suddenly flew to Portugal and South Africa on a bogus Canadian passport, bought himself a brand new white Mustang and shot MLK, and had about $10,000 in his account.
We are to believe that there was no conspiracy. We are to believe that the money Ray had with him and the price of his new Mustang fell out of the sky.