The little man on the wedding cake

Reading The Longest Winter, Halberstam's book on the Korean War, in which he throws out the thought experiment; what would have happened if Dewey had in fact beaten Truman? The Korean War would have happened on the Republican watch, blunting the McCarthyite push; the internationalists would have dominated the GOP; there's no real reason to believe that they would have been worse on the race front; the Right wouldn't have got to be the frothing horror that it did.... You can quite easily hypothesise a much less fraught America, though I suspect that things would have changed around the time of Goldwater anyway to bring us to much the same place we are now.