Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics by Jeff Greenfield

(Putnam, $27)

“The ‘what if?’ genre of alternate history” generally produces a very unpredictable reading experience, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. In exploring what-ifs that range from the intriguing (what if the Nazis won World War II?) to the outlandish (what if time-traveling white supremacists gave the Confederacy AK-47s?), past practitioners have rarely achieved high art. But veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield’s “shrewdly written, often riveting” foray into the genre satisfies by positing three “smaller-scale” scenarios: What if a real-life 1960 attempt on John F. Kennedy’s life had succeeded? What if Kennedy’s brother Robert had survived Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets? And what might have happened if Gerald Ford had defeated Jimmy Carter in 1976?

“The key to Greenfield’s success is that he knows politics,” said Frank Davies in The Miami Herald. His Robert Kennedy what-if benefits from the fact that he was a speechwriter for Kennedy in the 1960s. He’s also done his homework. For his JFK scenario, which makes a paranoid and impulsive Lyndon Johnson the nation’s commander in chief during the Cuban missile crisis, Greenfield took his characterization of Johnson from fresh interviews with two former Johnson aides. Only the Ford tale, which imagines a series of repercussions for Middle Eastern history over the past 30 years, feels “widely speculative.”

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Even when Greenfield strays, though, it’s clear he’s “having fun here,” said Bryan Burrough in The Washington Post. In a small cameo, a young John McCain returns from Vietnam and enters politics as a Democrat; in 1977, freshman congressman Al Gore starts a push to abolish the Electoral College. But there’s also real value in acknowledging history’s penchant for throwing us curves. Though this book ultimately produces more “hmm” moments than “wow” moments, it leaves you asking new questions—like “what if Monica Lewinsky went to the dry cleaners more often?” Does anyone else smell a sequel?