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Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (Audiobook) By Jeff Greenfield, read by the author and Michael Kramer

The “what if?” genre of alternate history has attracted a disparate a crew of practitioners including Newt Gingrich (“1945,” written with William R. Forstchen), Philip Roth (“The Plot Against America”) and Philip K. Dick (“The Man in the High Castle”). It’s yielded best sellers like Robert Harris’s “Fatherland” and literary gems like Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” And it’s addressed staggering questions like: What if the Nazis won World War II? What if a group of time-traveling white supremacists from South Africa gave Robert E. Lee’s troops AK-47 assault rifles to help the Confederacy win the Civil War?

In his shrewdly written, often riveting new book, “Then Everything Changed,” the veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield ponders some smaller-scale and more plausible what-ifs: three events, he says, “that came within a whisker of actually happening.” What if an actual attempt on John F. Kennedy’s life, shortly after his election to the White House, had succeeded? What if Sirhan Sirhan had been thwarted in assassinating Robert F. Kennedy in 1968? What if President Gerald R. Ford had corrected a misstep in the 1976 presidential debates and defeated Jimmy Carter?

Thanks to Mr. Greenfield’s own familiarity with American politics and a lot of energetic research, he turns these twists of fate into accelerating historical snowballs that rumble through our recent history, altering the social landscape in ways both small and large. In doing so he’s produced three slyly observed novellas that (with the exception of a couple of laughable lapses in the third story) have the verisimilitude of real life. His descriptions of the vicissitudes of the campaign trail have a wonderfully immediate, you-are-there feel, just as his accounts of primary face-offs between Hubert H. Humphrey and Robert Kennedy and, years later, between Edward M. Kennedy and Gary Hart attest to his detailed knowledge of the complexity and absurdities of delegate math.

Mr. Greenfield’s clever narratives are also rooted in a reporter’s understanding of how character and personal relationships inform politics and policy decisions. His insights into the personalities of his central players come partly from firsthand knowledge (he worked as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy and has covered politics for CBS News, CNN and ABC News). Partly from interviews and conversations with experts like Richard N. Goodwin, an assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and Brent Scowcroft, Ford’s national security adviser. And partly from a close reading of news accounts and political biographies — most notably, Robert A. Caro’s multivolume portrait of Johnson; Evan Thomas’s “Robert Kennedy”; and “Mutual Contempt,” Jeff Shesol’s 1997 book about the bitter feud between Johnson and R.F.K.

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