Greater impact -- Pearl Harbor or JFK assassination?

Pearl Harbor had a more immediate impact.
The JFK shooting is more a kind of What-If? thing. One of the reasons it seems equitable to compare the two is that the What-If? scenario is better fodder for all kinds of arguments.

 

Yeah, this is a Jim Thorpe vs. Jim Brown type of argument...it all depends on very subjective criteria. Hard to say.

Here at the radio station, there's actually some good coming from Pearl Harbor Day. The morning DJ's playing WWII-era songs...Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Dorsey Brothers, etc. Great stuff...my dad had a radio show playing this music while I was growing up. Good memories of the old man.

Fortunately for my dad, he had bad eyesight...he enlisted after Pearl Harbor, but the Army said, no combat for you, ye blind bogtrotter! So he served in the Home Guard in Detroit during WWII. In case there was a Nazi coup in Windsor...

As a JFK footnote, I suspect that the people who were the most unhappy about the NFL playing that Sunday in 1963 were the Dallas Cowboys. Read any of the players' accounts of that game in Cleveland. They really, really did not want to be there.

 

Maybe they felt safe because they had the air raid drills, bomb shelters and communist hunts. "Hey, we're doing something. We're prepared." As opposed to being attacked "out of the blue", which I'm sure many americans perceived Pearl Harbor. Unless, of course, the were communists or someone thought they were communists. Those people probably didn't feel so safe.

 

And Pete Rozelle regretted that until the day he died.

 

Pearl Harbor eventually led us to two mushroom clouds over Japan. There's where I lean.

 

Both were overrated:

 

Oh, boy. I have a bias here since I have studied the JFK assassination and my brother is a total maniac about it. My bias may also be that I remember the JFK assassination (we came back from a fire drill in 4th grade).

From everything I have read about Pearl Harbor, the people in the know were aware that the US would eventually enter World War 2. The attack at Pearl Harbor was a massive and brutal attack, but if it had not happened, there probably would have been an incident in the Pacific or a German attack on a US ship or submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. The result would have been the same - the US would have entered the war against the Axis.

With the JFK assassination, that affected a lot of things. The Civil Rights Bill might not have been passed (and I'll grant mighty wingman's point that things would have been done eventually) in 1964. I have never been completely sold on the idea that JFK would not have escalated the Viet Nam war, although many historians believe that. I also believe the incredible affect the Beatles had in 1964 was a result of people looking for something after the JFK assassination.

I think the biggest difference was that America lost innocence. Also, with the resulting Warren Commission report and the widespread doubt, people lost the belief that the government would pretty much tell the truth. I think that is the biggest affect of the JFK assassination, and you can see it in the anti-war movement during the 60s and even in the conservative movement by such people as Ronald Reagan in the late 70s - the distrust of a democratic US government by American citizens.

Like I say, that may be my age or my bias, but I believe JFK assassination had a more long-lasting impact.

 

Pearl Harbor and its response begot a post-war, which begot Kennedy, which begot his assassination. It's all part of one continuum.

And it's way too over-simplistic to attach world-turning significance to either.

America was well on its path towards WWII when Pearl Harbor occurred (Lend-Lease Act, etc.), and the social changes that were allegedly triggered by the JFK assassination had started before that. The civil rights movement, for example, had a full head of steam at least two or three years before it.

The Vietnam War was well under way during most of JFK's administration and I agree with Gold that the conventional wisdom that JFK was going to reign in the war probably has a lot to do with people projecting wish fulfillment over reality. It's easy to forget that the Democrats had as many hawks as the GOP did back then, it would have been politically dangerous for Kennedy to scale back, lest he be accused of being "soft on Communism."

When did the country change? When women started wearing pants! That's when it all went to shit! [/1960s.oldmanchauvinist]

 

It could also be noted that WWII also directly led to the rise of the American middle class, the Interstate highway system, the largest investment in K-12 and higher education in American history because of the Baby Boom and GI Bill, the change from a rural society to an urban society as many from the farms moved into cities for wartime jobs and remained, the centralization of power in Washington, D.C., the expansion of suburbs, which hastened the decline of American inner cities, women in the workplace and in other positions of leadership, the rise of desegregation, and countless other social changes.

WWII was the watershed event of the 20th century.

 

JFK will remain on my list of favorite public figures in my lifetime, if for no other reason than that his cool, detached personality during the Cuban missile crisis gave me a chance to become an old guy.
The "What-if" will always be there. I remember sitting in an Irish bar on May 29 one year and talking with a friend about how this country might be different if a small story in that day's paper had said, "Former president John F. Kennedy plans to spend a quiet 72nd birthday at home with his family."
But JFK's death was television sorrow for most people. World War II brought real, personal sorrow into hundreds of thousands of homes. It formed the lives of millions, for good and for ill, who were in the military or had a loved one in the military. It is not an exaggeration that it saved Western Civilization from the barbarians.
You have to give it to WW-II.

 

game, set and match

 

All JFK proved was that the government could successfully pull off its own assassination attempt, then seal the information until well after everyone guilty is sleeping with the worms.

Pearl Harbor, arguably, was an intentional government oversight/conspiracy too, pushing us into a war that we would have eventually gotten into anyway. Considering that substantially more people, and specifically Americans, died in that skirmish by comparison to Iraq - and that's not to say the Iraqi deaths aren't just as tragic one by one - I think the answer to your question is obvious.