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Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, a Vulcan belief, meets the Hierarchy of Needs of Abraham Maslow. That's a new universe of mine, which draws from James Bond, not to say that you only live twice, but you come of age twice:
Once as a youth
Once as an adult defining where you want to go, in this case, polyamorously.
Characters are drawn from my own experience, and I hope are more real, complex, and yes, sexy, than in other tales.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson were never close as Senators. Kennedy was a child of privilege, while Johnson came from humble roots. Something they both shared was hypersexuality.
Both, however, did have a vision for a better United States. One of the things explored in this do-over is "what if they had been a more effective team?"
Obviously, the characters in "Ask Not What..." are do-overs on their experience of high school. The story, however, is beginning to go into what I consider interesting historical divergence.
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was a brilliant man, but in the wrong role. In our timeline, he subsequently regretted many of his decisions that led to suffering and death in the Second Indochina War (i.e., Vietnam War, or what the Vietnamese call the American War). What if his talents were redirected, putting a square peg in a square hole? What if his deputy, Ross Gilpatric, perhaps the only senior official to whom both the top generals and the White House listened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, became the round peg in the round Secretary of Defense hole?
Major historical trends, however, do not preclude the extremely pleasant insertion of other pegs in other sorts of holes. It is a turnon to be told that you're having excellent sex with someone that just had it with the President.
It is worth mentioning, I think, that historians now do not question that John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and, yes, Martin L. King Jr. had very active and extensive sex lives outside wedlock, probably a good deal more extensive than the potential First Gentleman spouse of a U.S. Presidential candidate. I don't fault any of them for it. Certainly, Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Johnson seemed to be aware, and may have had their own activities. Mrs. King was aware, less happy, but tolerant. As I've written earlier, some very great historical figures compartmented their lives.
Especially with the events of the past week, it's well to remember that the Kennedy Administration had major roles in improving civil rights at home, not only acting in Southeast Asia. While in our world LBJ wasn't a great wartime leader, education and civil rights were important to him at a deep personal level. He and JFK, in our world, didn't work closely enough. But what if…
See Chapter 10 of "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do" to start looking at civil rights as well as war.
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