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When I was just a little kid—four, maybe even three—a drunk uncle told me the story of “Little Red
Riding Hood.” Not the one in the standard fairy-tale books, but the R-rated version, full of screams,
blood, and the dull thump of the woodsman’s axe. My memory of hearing it is vivid to this day, but
only a few of the details remain: the wolf’s teeth bared in a shining grin, for instance, and the goresoaked
granny being reborn from the wolf’s yawning belly. This is my way of saying that if you’re
expecting The Concise Alternate History of the World as told by Harry Dunning to Jake Epping, forget
about it. It wasn’t just the horror of discovering how badly things had gone wrong. It was my need to
get back and put things right.
Yet a few things stand out. The worldwide search for George Amberson, for instance. No joy there
—George was as gone as Judge Crater—but in the forty-eight years since the assassination attempt in
Dallas, Amberson had become a near-mythical figure. Savior, or part of the plot? People held actual
conventions to discuss it, and listening to Harry tell that part, it was impossible for me not to think
of all the conspiracy theories that had sprung up around the version of Lee who had succeeded. As we
know, class, the past harmonizes.
Kennedy expected to sweep Barry Goldwater away in a landslide in ’64; instead he won by less than
forty electoral votes, a margin only Democratic Party stalwarts thought respectable. Early in his
second term, he infuriated both the right-wing voters and the military establishment by declaring
North Vietnam “less a danger to our democracy than the racial inequality in our schools and cities.”
He didn’t withdraw American troops entirely, but they were restricted to Saigon and a ring around it
that was called—surprise, surprise—the Green Zone. Instead of injecting large numbers of troops, the
second Kennedy administration injected large amounts of money. It’s the American Way.
The great civil rights reforms of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no LBJ, and as vice
president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered
for a hundred and ten days; one actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero. When
Kennedy finally gave up, he made an off-the-cuff remark that would haunt him until he died in 1983:
“White America has filled its house with kindling; now it will burn.”
The race riots came next. While Kennedy was preoccupied with them, the North Vietnamese
armies overran Saigon—and the man who’d gotten me into this was paralyzed in a helicopter crash on
the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Public opinion began to swing heavily against JFK.
A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Chicago. The assassin
turned out to be a rogue FBI agent named Dwight Holly. Before being killed himself, he claimed to
have carried out the hit on Hoover’s orders. Chicago went up in flames. So did a dozen other American
cities.
George Wallace was elected president. By then the earthquakes had begun in earnest. Wallace
couldn’t do anything about those, so he settled for firebombing Chicago into submission. That, Harry
said, was in June of 1969. A year later, President Wallace offered Ho Chi Minh an ultimatum: make
Saigon a free city like Berlin or see Hanoi become a dead one, like Hiroshima. Uncle Ho refused. If he
thought Wallace was bluffing, he was wrong. Hanoi became a radioactive cloud on August ninth,
1969, twenty-four years to the day after Harry Truman dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Vice President
Curtis LeMay took personal charge of the mission. In a speech to the nation, Wallace called it God’s
will. Most Americans concurred. Wallace’s approval ratings were high, but there was at least one
fellow who did not approve. His name was Arthur Bremer, and on May fifteenth, 1972, he shot
Wallace dead as Wallace campaigned for reelection at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.
“With what kind of gun?”
“I believe it was a .38 revolver.”