If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History
Page 1
ALSO BY JEFF GREENFIELD
NONFICTION
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FICTION
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Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Greenfield
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenfield, Jeff.
If Kennedy lived : the first and second terms of President John F. Kennedy : an alternate history / Jeff Greenfield.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-13844-5
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. Imaginary histories. I. Title.
E841.G653 2013 2013030929
973.922092—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
FOR DENA
CONTENTS
ALSO BY JEFF GREENFIELD
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PREFACE
THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
CHAPTER ONE
DALLAS, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, 7:30 A.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
CHAPTER TWO
DEALEY PLAZA, DALLAS, TEXAS, 12:30 P.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
CHAPTER THREE
THE SECOND CASUALTY
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FIGHT FOR A SECOND TERM
CHAPTER FIVE
THE OTHER CAMPAIGN: RESOLVING THE VIETNAM DILEMMA
CHAPTER SIX
A DIFFERENT COUNTRY—BUT HOW DIFFERENT?
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE THREAT
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE LAST CHAPTER
AFTERWORD
THE SOURCES OF SPECULATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
It was Thursday, July 14, 1960, in Room 9333 of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and Kenny O’Donnell was furious at the man he had just helped nominate for president of the United States.
Again and again, John Kennedy had assured the unions, the civil rights leaders, the liberals and intellectuals whose support he needed, that Texas senator Lyndon Johnson would not be his choice for vice president. For those constituencies, the majority leader of the Senate was too tied to the corporate interests of his home state, too willing to weaken or abandon strong civil rights legislation, too much the symbol of wheeler-dealer insider politics.
Yet now, little more than twelve hours after Kennedy had won a first ballot nomination with a razor-thin margin of five delegates, he had offered the second slot on the ticket to Johnson—and Johnson had accepted.
“I was so furious I could hardly talk,” O’Donnell remembered years later. “I thought of the promises we had made . . . the assurances we had given. I felt that we had been double-crossed.”
So O’Donnell demanded to confront Kennedy face-to-face, and the nominee complied, taking O’Donnell into the bathroom for a private conversation and assuring him that the job would actually diminish Johnson’s power by placing him in a powerless, impotent job.
“I’m forty-three years old,” Kennedy said, “and I’m the healthiest candidate for president in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
The man who gave his disaffected aide this reassurance had already lost a brother and a sister in airplane crashes; had almost died when his ship was destroyed in the South Pacific during World War II; had been stricken with an illness so serious in 1947 that he had been given the last rites of his church; had undergone a life-threatening operation in 1954 to save him from invalidism—an operation so serious that he was away from his Senate seat for nine months; and had been living with a form of Addison’s disease—hidden from the press and public—that required a regular dose of powerful medicine and made him live virtually every day in pain.
For a man so often described as “fatalistic”—who on the day of his murder mused to his wife, and to that same Kenny O’Donnell, about the ease with which “a man with a rifle” could kill him—Kennedy’s blithe assurance about his invulnerability to fate seems astonishing. If nothing else, his immersion in history must have taught him that seven presidents had died in office, three violently; that FDR had barely escaped assassination in 1933; and that Harry Truman had been the target of assassins in 1950. Kennedy himself would escape death at the hands of a suicide bomber less than five months after speaking those comforting words.
Maybe, though, Kennedy’s words are not so astonishing. They reflect an impulse deep within the human spirit: to push aside the power of random chance in favor of a more orderly, less chaotic universe. Even someone like John Kennedy, who had come close to death more than once, could casually dismiss the whole idea of considering that possibility when choosing the man to stand “a heartbeat away.”
Many historians take the same approach in dealing with the what-ifs that drive excursions into “alternate history.” For them, it is at best a parlor game, at worst a nuisance. “What did happen,” they argue, “is what matters. Playing the alternate history game is like asking, ‘What if Spartacus had had a jet?’”
I take a different view. Historian H. R. Trevor-Roper wrote:
“At any given moment in history, there are real alternatives . . . How can we ‘explain what happened and why’ if we only look at what happened and never consider the alternatives . . . ?”
The alternatives, however, are not boundless. Asking “What if JFK had become a born-again evangelical?” or “What if a Soviet scientist had invented the Internet in 1965?” might make for an entertaining piece of fiction, but it violates the single most critical element of alternative history: plausibility. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson (who prefers the term “virtual history”) says, “By narrowing down the historical alternatives
we consider to those which are plausible . . . we solve the dilemma of choosing between a single deterministic past and an unmanageably infinite number of possible pasts.”
If you’re going to argue that history would have been very different if someone else had occupied the White House in a time of crisis, you have to show why: what in this individual’s character, beliefs, impulses, and past actions would have made the difference. In Then Everything Changed, my previous excursion into alternate histories, the small twists of fate that would have seen John Kennedy killed before ever taking office, or that would have saved Robert Kennedy from assassination, or that would have seen Gerald Ford keep the presidency in 1976, were all rooted in hard facts. And the hugely consequential changes that would have flowed from those small twists of fate were based on the beliefs, impulses, and character traits of these men and their contemporaries, gathered from biographies, oral histories, interviews, and memoirs.
I’ve brought this same approach to a question that is as prominent in the what-if realm as any: What if John Kennedy had not died in Dallas? The very small alteration of meteorological history that would have saved his life is well-known already—indeed, many in Dallas were painfully aware of it within minutes of the shots—and it is completely, deeply plausible.
And after that tiny twist of fate saves the President? I’ve sought to keep that plausibility as my polestar. As I did in Then Everything Changed, I’ve consulted biographies, oral histories, and memoirs (my debt to them is explained specifically in the afterword). I’ve also conducted interviews, in person, on the telephone, and via e-mail, with a variety of observers, including Dick and Doris Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Norm Ornstein, Walter Shapiro, Meryl Gordon, Tom Hayden, Fred Kaplan, David Talbot, and Todd Gitlin (though they bear no responsibility for the speculative history I offer). Most of the fictional events presented have their origins in reality: the “facts on the ground,” as they existed in November 1963. The opinions, the speeches, the conversations I recount from the days and months and years leading up to November 22 did in fact occur. More broadly, the political currents that shape the 1964 Kennedy reelection campaign, the decisions about Vietnam and the cold war, the forces that reshape America’s culture, the threats to Kennedy’s political survival and reputation, all were in place before Kennedy went to Texas. The question I try to answer is: How might John Kennedy’s instincts, his understanding of history, his core impulses, have led him to deal with these forces? For instance, John Kennedy tended toward a dispassionate, detached, analytical approach to issues; he was in this sense the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson, who saw political threats and opportunities through an intensely personal prism. A detached, dispassionate president might not have had the commitment to fight hard for a civil rights bill or commit the nation to “war on poverty.” But that same detached, dispassionate approach might have prevented a president from escalating a war out of a refusal to be “the first president to lose a war” (as LBJ once famously put it). This does not mean that my version of what happens is “right,” but it does mean that it starts from what is known.
Two final notes: First, I essentially put aside the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy. For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought that the evidence of Oswald’s guilt is strong, but to plunge back into decades of speculation would simply overwhelm everything else. This book is about what happens after the assassination attempt fails.
Second, the story I tell here is neither hagiography nor pathography. Anyone seeking to imagine an eight-year Kennedy presidency has to come to grips with his strengths and weaknesses, his admirable and deplorable character traits. My intention here is to do just that, and to suggest how that mix of traits might have altered one of the most turbulent periods in our history.
CHAPTER ONE
DALLAS, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, 7:30 A.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
It’s raining, Mr. President.”
“I’m up,” he said to his valet, George Thomas, through the door of the master bedroom of Suite 850, and walked to the window. His hosts had borrowed priceless paintings from local museums—a Monet, a Picasso, a Van Gogh—but his eyes were drawn to the gloomy weather, and to a large crowd gathered on the sidewalk eight stories below: a fitting blend of bad and good news for this trip.
He’d come to Texas because it had seemed a state crucial to his reelection next year. Its twenty-four electoral votes, won with a margin of only 46,000 votes, had provided a badly needed cushion three years earlier—without them, his election would have rested on a highly questionable 8,000-vote margin in Illinois—and with twenty-five votes this time around, Texas might well have to be his firewall in the South, where his embrace of sweeping civil rights legislation had made his prospects below the Mason-Dixon Line thin at best. It was important enough that he’d persuaded Jackie to join him: her first political trip since 1960, and one that came just three and a half months after the death of their infant son.
At every stage of the visit so far—from the dedication of the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, to a Houston dinner for Congressman Albert Thomas, to the motorcade route to and from the airports—the crowds had been large and enthusiastic. If we get a break in the weather, he thought, we can let the crowds get a good look at us here and in Dallas and Austin; maybe that’ll shake some cash loose from the big-money boys.
Only . . . there were clouds hanging over this Texas visit that had nothing to do with the weather.
For one thing, the Democratic Party was in the middle of a full-fledged civil war between conservative Democrats, led by Governor John Connally, and liberals led by Senator Ralph Yarborough. Just before leaving Washington to join the President on Air Force One, Yarborough had learned that he’d been denied a seat at the head table at the big $100-a-plate fund-raiser in Austin and had not been invited to the Governor’s reception later that evening. He’d taken his anger out on Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a key Connally ally, repeatedly refusing increasingly desperate requests from the President’s political team to ride in the motorcades with Johnson.
That had produced exactly the kind of headline John Kennedy did not want to see, splashed across the front pages of the Dallas papers: YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ, with others inside no better: PRESIDENT’S VISIT SEEN WIDENING STATE DEMOCRATIC SPLIT.
What is it with Lyndon? he wondered. He’d put him on the ticket in 1960 in the face of puzzlement, even anger, from his liberal and labor supporters, not to mention some of his closest political aides. Kenny O’Donnell had been in shock; Bobby, whose contempt for the Texan didn’t just border on outright hatred but had crossed that border years ago, had tried three times to talk Johnson off the ticket. Thank God he hadn’t. Johnson, riding the “Cornpone Special” across the South, had kept Texas in the Democratic column, and had likely made the difference in the Carolinas and maybe even Missouri. As for rumors that Kennedy might dump Johnson in ’64, he’d brushed them aside: just this week, on a swing through Florida, he’d told his old friend Senator George Smathers, “Lyndon’s going to be my vice president because I need him!” But if Lyndon didn’t even have the power to hold Texas Democrats together, and if the civil rights issue was going to make the South a lost cause, then just how much did he need him? Last night he’d summoned Johnson to his suite and told him in no uncertain terms that this public spat between Connally and Yarborough had to be healed, and healed now.
Besides, there were these rumors out of Washington and New York that might turn out to be more than just rumors. Johnson’s longtime protégé, Senate secretary Bobby Baker, had just resigned, and the rumors suggested that some of the stories about payoffs and kickbacks were getting very close to the Vice President. And some of the stories were about more than money: they were about prostitutes—“party girls” used to win the favor of important politicians. (He was more than familiar with that side of the story—uncomfortably so.) And one of his
reporter friends in the Time-Life empire had passed along to Pierre Salinger another unsettling rumor: Life magazine was looking into Johnson’s money—how had a man on the public payroll all his life become a multi-millionaire?
I wonder which one of my geniuses decided to end this trip with a barbecue and an overnight at the LBJ ranch . . . Maybe I can get Rusk or McNamara to gin up a crisis and get me the hell out of there.
He walked across the living room into Jackie’s bedroom, where there was a better view of the crowd on the street below. Her presence was a gift, he knew; the crowd was here as much for her as for him, and he thought he’d rephrase the line he’d used on their European trip: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” She and the kids were potent political weapons, and those photo spreads in Look magazine—John-John frolicking in the Oval Office, Caroline and her cousins at Hyannis, piling into a golf cart as he drove them for ice cream—were pure gold. God knows, he was going to need the affection of the voters next year . . . because the track record of his administration was something less than overwhelming.
Yes, the economy was good—no inflation, unemployment under 5 percent—but there was a real concern from his economic team that things could be slowing down without a tax cut, and in Congress his own Democratic committee chairs were spooked by the idea that a tax cut was a liberal gimmick that would mean deficits. The civil rights bill he’d embraced was going nowhere; even that huge, peaceful March on Washington last summer hadn’t budged the Southerners who ran the Congress, and the country still told the pollsters that Negroes were pushing too hard, too fast. Things in D.C. were so paralyzed that the press corps had begun to use terms like “gridlock,” “breakdown,” even “constitutional crisis.”
And while there’d been real progress on the foreign front—the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signs of a thaw in the cold war after the Cuban missile crisis of a year ago—there were troubles from one side of the globe to the other. The CIA’s attempts at covert action in Cuba had been as futile as that insane Bay of Pigs invasion; Bobby had been up in their face for two years, and all they’d come up with was to try and depose or kill Castro with the help of American gangsters. He’d begun to think it was time for something different, some kind of live-and-let-live understanding with Castro. That French journalist, Jean Daniel, was meeting with Fidel now; he’d asked Daniel to get back to him and let him know what Castro was thinking.