Jfk As God

--In the end, McNamara says today, Kennedy would have withdrawn, realizing "that it was South Vietnam's war and the people there had to win it."

--"He would have recognized Cuba," Milt Ebbins, a Hollywood crony of J.F.K.'s, says today.

--When Khrushchev got the news from Dallas in November 1963, he broke down and sobbed in the Kremlin, unable to perform his duties for days. Despite his youth, Kennedy was a "real statesman," Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir, after he was pushed from power less than a year following J.F.K.'s death. If Kennedy had lived, he wrote, the two men could have brought peace to the world.

--If J.F.K. had lived, [Sorenson] adds, "there is no doubt in my mind [that] we would have laid the groundwork for detente. The cold war would have ended much sooner than it did."

--Years later, when Bobby Kennedy's widow Ethel made a trip to Havana, she assured Castro that "Jack and Bobby had nothing to do with the plots to kill you." The tall, graying leader--who had survived so long in part because of his network of informers in the U.S.--looked down at her and said, "I know."