President Kennedy aboard the Honey Fitz, off Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 31, 1963.

Cecil Stoughton

What if Adolf Hitler had been more encouraged in his painting? Would the fate of the 20th century have been very different?

What if King Henry VIII had not fallen for Anne Boleyn? Would the pope still be head of the English church?

What if President John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in November 1963? Would the Vietnam War have happened?

That last intriguing question is the premise of director Koji Masutani’s documentary Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived which opens today at the Cable Car Cinema. In his fascinating “What if?” film, Masutani makes a strong case that if Kennedy had lived and been re-elected in 1964, the war might never have happened and the fate of the half-million U.S. troops who served in Vietnam as well as the 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese who died in the war would have been remarkably different.

Even the current presidential election, one might argue, could have been very different had JFK lived. If there had been no American troops fighting in Vietnam, one might ask, would John McCain have found the momentum to run for the presidency?

Up front, the film addresses naysayers who snub their noses at “virtual history,” described as “the study of history that seeks to answer ‘what if’ questions.” They call it “counter-factual history.” But James G. Blight, who is the author of a dozen books on the recent history of U.S. foreign policy and currently is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, narrates the film and explains our fascination with these “what if” questions which are cogently explored in Virtual JFK.

Masutani uses film and taped newsreel footage from JFK’s 1,000 days as president to show a pattern of avoiding war, even as Kennedy was belittled in the press by former opponent Richard M. Nixon and the Republican National Committee for his appeasement efforts with the Soviet Union. Yet early in the film, at one of his press conferences, Kennedy talks about the small band of guerrillas that were wreaking havoc in parts of Vietnam and said it would be “a problem which is going to be with us all through this decade.” How right that turned out to be.

To promote the theory that the history of the 1960s would have been vastly different had Kennedy lived, Blight says, “Let’s see what Kennedy did” as he looks at six “episodes” in JFK’s tenure when he avoided war, despite pressure from his military commanders to do otherwise.

The “episodes” include the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro forces and Kennedy’s subsequent much maligned decision not to send in the Marines to help (which led Nixon to declare that JFK “lacked the spine” to install a new government in Havana); the Berlin Crisis of August through November of 1961 when the Soviets put up the Berlin Wall and Kennedy had to personally call back Gen. Lucius Clay, who had moved his tanks to the border in a face-off with Soviets; the “Showdown Over Vietnam” late in 1961 when his underlings were trying to build a case for sending U.S. troops into the country and JFK vowed that “not one combat troop will be committed” there; the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when Kennedy resisted Gen. Curtis LeMay’s urgings to attack Cuba to remove Soviet missiles that were being installed there, fearing such action would encourage the Russians to attack Berlin.

There may be people who say these arguments showing JFK’s aversion to war amount to the equivalent of collegiate navel gazing, that in the end he probably would have been pushed into committing troops to Vietnam in an ever-expanding escalation toward war.

But the fact is that in 1963 the United States had 16,000 U.S. military advisers deployed in Vietnam and that just days before his death, Kennedy is heard in archival recordings with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara urging a withdrawal of American forces.

Five years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson (a man who early in his tenure had said, “We do not want a war; we do not expect a war”) had 500,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Vietnam and had blackballed his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, for warning against sending more troops into the country.

Blight says JFK was under more pressure than any other president in his first 1,000 days to go to war. He believes that if Kennedy had managed to withstand the pressure on all those other fronts, then one can “conclude that he was not going to go to war in Vietnam.”

It’s a strong argument. But we will never know. After all, one might ask: What if Kennedy had died during World War II in the South Pacific? What would history have been like then?

Yet in the end, the film’s central question — In matters of war and peace does it matter who is elected president? — is answered with a resounding yes.

****Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived

Rated: No rating, contains war images.

mjanuson@projo.com