In the fictional alternative history created by Philip Roth in The Plot against America, the journalist and radio commentator Walter Winchell declares himself a candidate for the presidency, with the aim of preventing a second term for the incumbent, Charles Lindbergh, and he is assassinated. Roth's narrator writes of his assassination:
[T]he murder of a mere candidate for the presidency was unprecedented in America. Though Presidents Lincoln and Garfield had been shot and killed in the second half of the nineteenth century and McKinley at the start of the twentieth, and though in 1933 FDR had survived an assassination attempt that had instead taken the life of his Democratic supporter Chicago's Mayor Cermak, it wasn't until twenty-six years after Winchell's assassination that a second presidential candidate would be gunned down - that was New York's Democratic senator Robert Kennedy... on Tuesday, June 4, 1968.My initial reaction on reading this passage was: 'Hey, you can't do that!' If the history we're inside has Roosevelt failing to win a third term and a Lindbergh presidency instead, you're not going to have a Bobby Kennedy candidacy down the line - everything will be too different. But then I saw that in principle it could be the way Roth tells it (and indeed the denouement of the novel makes this more likely than it appears at the point of the Winchell assassination). It could be the way Roth tells it because if you change event E at time t so that it's event F instead, not everything at time t + 26 has to be different. If some guy catches a fish somewhere in Scotland in 2005 and takes it home to cook and eat, and a woman in Brighton watches The Ballad of Cable Hogue on DVD 26 weeks later, it could be that she still does the same thing on the same day if back in Scotland the guy decides to throw the fish back into the river. As to the Walter Winchell and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, who knows?
However, one thing you can be confident of is that, had there been no war in Iraq in early 2003, things would have looked different in that country than they do today. The funny thing is that some critics of the war have a way of only half seeing this. You may take Geoffrey Wheatcroft for an example of what I'm talking about. He rehearses everything bad that's happened and wouldn't have happened if there'd been no war. But so far as anything else that might have been different in the history, you'll learn nothing from him. Wheatcroft is good enough to mention in passing that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. But he offers no hypothesis about how many more Iraqis would have been murdered had Saddam been left in power, how many more tortured, how much longer his regime would have lasted and what might have been the manner and the human cost of its eventual demise. This is just a great blank; and so Wheatcroft can say that 'no single good reason for it [the war] can any longer be adduced' as if this was always the case, and he can refer to 'the dreaded liberal hawks' as if there never was any consideration that might have influenced anyone to think differently from him. His is the voice of the true liberal - in the rather debased meaning this word has come to assume as it is exemplified by the section of anti-war opinion for which the Baathist regime and what it did to people has come to be of vanishing moral significance.
