If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History

by Greenfield, Jeff

  The reaction within the campaign was explosive. Bobby was so furious that he phoned Shriver and tore into him with such vehemence that it opened a years-long rift. Summoning Wofford and Louis Martin, the top Negro in the campaign, he said: “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their state to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

  What Bobby didn’t tell them was that, on the advice of the secretary of the Georgia Democratic Party, he had already called the judge who had thrown King in prison and urged him to release the minister on bond. Along with pressure from the Governor, the judge did exactly that, and that’s when King’s father stepped front and center.

  He didn’t just officially endorse Kennedy; he did much more.

  “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  Almost immediately, Louis Martin began calling black journalists around the country. (He scrupulously avoided the white press.) Papers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Washington Afro American prominently featured the story. For its part, the campaign distributed some 2 million pamphlets under the name of the “Freedom Crusade Committee” with the headline “NO COMMENT” NIXON VERSUS A CANDIDATE WITH A HEART, SENATOR KENNEDY. (For Nixon, the frustration must have been palpable; he’d urged the Justice Department to intervene, only to be told that it was a matter for the state of Georgia to resolve.)

  It was impossible to prove the impact of those phone calls, or Daddy King’s statement, or the massive distribution of that pamphlet in black neighborhoods across the country; the analytical tools of 1960 weren’t that sophisticated. But here’s what was known. In a black enclave in Philadelphia, where Stevenson had won about 75 percent of the vote, Kennedy won almost 85 percent. In a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where Stevenson had won two to one, Kennedy won four to one. In New York’s most heavily black neighborhoods, Stevenson had won two-thirds of the vote; Kennedy won three-fourths of the vote. In New Jersey, some 125,000 blacks had voted for JFK: he won the state by 30,000 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent. As for Illinois, where Kennedy won by 8,000 highly dubious votes, one aide noted, “Without the Negroes, it wouldn’t have been close enough to steal—not that I’m saying we stole it.” Even in the South, the black vote was critical; for all the talk of LBJ as the key to Texas, the black vote in Houston, which had given Stevenson 12,000 votes, gave Kennedy more than 22,300 votes. And the Negro vote in Louisiana and the Carolinas was crucial to Kennedy’s narrow victories there.

  The link between those phone calls and his historically close victory was not obvious. But there were times when he allowed himself to think: if he had not called Coretta Scott King, if his brother had not called the judge, if Daddy King had not expressed his gratitude so powerfully, if the black vote had not come out as enthusiastically as it did . . . then Richard Nixon would likely have won the White House.

  And what would a President Nixon have done if he had been confronted with Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba? It had taken every ounce of presidential insistence to keep Kennedy’s advisors—military and civilian—from launching an air strike with God knows what consequences. With a Nixon in the White House . . . ? Incredible that Kennedy’s presidency, and the fate of the world, might have hinged on a couple of telephone calls. Then again, it might also have hinged on how his wife had been feeling on a Sunday morning almost three years ago . . .

  SHE CAME TO THE DOOR TO SEE HIM OFF . . .

  It was Sunday morning, December 11, 1960, and he was at the family’s oceanfront Palm Beach home on Ocean Avenue. He was working on his tan and—more important—his inaugural address, after surviving one of the closest elections in American history. Now he was getting ready to head to St. Edward Church, a gesture politically necessary even for a Catholic as secular as he was. He headed for the front door, where the Secret Service would be waiting to drive him the short distance.

  Parked just down Ocean Avenue was a 1950 Buick in which Richard Pavlick, a seventy-three-year-old retired postal worker, sat behind the wheel, holding a switch wired to seven sticks of dynamite.

  He had been stalking Kennedy across the country, driven by hatred of the Catholic Church and the conviction that Joe Kennedy had stolen the presidency for his son. He’d been sending threatening postcards back to his hometown of Belmont, New Hampshire, promising that they’d soon be hearing from him “in a big way.” Now, to save the country from papist tyranny, he was preparing to ram his car into the back of Kennedy’s automobile and detonate his explosives.

  And the Secret Service was, inexplicably, completely indifferent to his presence. Pavlick had a clear, unimpeded path to Kennedy’s car—and, in the words of a shaken Secret Service chief, “enough dynamite to level a mountain.”

  And then, as Kennedy was leaving, Jacqueline Kennedy came to the door with their three-year-old daughter, Caroline, to see him off.

  It was the most casual, insignificant of gestures. On another morning she might have stayed in bed; it was, after all, little less than a month since the difficult birth of John Kennedy Jr. She might have been reading the Sunday papers or been chatting on the phone with a friend or relative.

  But she came to the door. And Richard Pavlick . . . did nothing. He was a man of firm if twisted conviction—he spent endless hours protesting the mishandling of the American flags that flew around his hometown—and the idea of killing a man, even a Kennedy, in front of his wife and small child was simply unthinkable. He would wait for another time, perhaps next Sunday. He was arrested four days later when a postmaster from Belmont alerted Florida authorities to the threats he’d been mailing back home. The story barely merited more than a brief mention in the press.

  And if Jackie had not come to the door? We were, the Secret Service chief said to his shaken staff, “seconds away” from the first-ever murder of a president-elect—and a full-fledged constitutional crisis. John Kennedy in fact was not yet the president-elect, not officially. That designation wouldn’t apply until after 270 electors had cast their ballots for him at the fifty state capitols a week from Tuesday. If Kennedy had died, what were his electors supposed to do? What were they allowed to do? What if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives? What if Southern congressmen voted for Senator Harry Byrd or Senator Richard Russell and said they’d tie the system up in knots unless Johnson—or Hubert Humphrey or whomever the Democratic insiders chose—agreed to back off civil rights?

  And suppose the country had wound up with Lyndon Johnson in the White House? He’d seen Johnson during the missile crisis—seen him reflexively follow the lead of the military men and the more hawkish of his advisors. If there was one thing Kennedy’s years in the White House had reaffirmed, it was his instinct to put himself in the other fellow’s shoes; back during those thirteen days, he was always looking to give Khrushchev a path out of the crisis, always looking as well to avoid his biggest fear: miscalculation. For Johnson, everything was personal; the fights were about his need to dominate, his need to avoid humiliation, his need to crush the spirit of the other guy. If Johnson had been president then . . .

  Damn good thing Jackie came to the door . . .

  • • •

  He went back to the master bedroom and began to dress, beginning with the back brace and the elastic bandage that he wound around his waist and thighs. It was awkward, but it was better than the intense, chronic pain that would otherwise strike him throughout the long day of speeches, rallies, and motorcades. After he’d put on the crisp white shirt with the short straight coll
ar, the red tie, the dark blue Paul Winston two-button suit, he looked down across the street, where he’d be speaking in a few moments.

  Just this morning, right after he’d told Jackie, “We’re heading to nut country,” he’d added, “but if someone wants to shoot me with a rifle through an open window, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so we might as well not worry about it.” He’d said almost exactly the same thing to Kenny O’Donnell as he pointed out the window to the stage where the labor rally would take place.

  “Look at that platform. With all those buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”

  • • •

  He went downstairs and walked across the street through a light drizzle to a labor rally where 5,000 supporters had gathered in the early morning damp. When some in the crowd began yelling for Jackie, he offered a mock apology.

  “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but of course she looks better than we do when she does it.”

  He was grateful for her willingness to make this trip, especially just a few months after the death of their infant son, Patrick Bouvier. He was grateful to her for other reasons as well: had his compulsive, sometimes reckless behavior driven her from the marriage, his political career would have stalled if not ended. Maybe it was because her own mother had ended her marriage because of the philandering of her father; maybe Jackie had looked at her father, and Jack’s father, and decided that it was just the way men are. What was clear was that, without her forbearance, he would never have become president.

  Then, after a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, they had driven to the Fort Worth Airport for the ten-minute flight to Dallas. He climbed up the stairs to Air Force One, angling slightly to ease the pain of his back. There’d be no time to rest on the short flight to Dallas, but there would be time for a quick, blunt chat with Governor Connally. As soon as the plane took off, he summoned the Governor into his cabin, and after a three-minute conversation the Governor agreed to put Senator Yarborough at the head table for the Austin fund-raiser and invite him to the post-dinner reception at the governor’s mansion. Sure, it would just paper over their blood feud, but at least the headlines on Saturday wouldn’t trumpet that feud.

  OF COURSE HE WAS GOING TO DALLAS

  There was uneasiness about visiting the city from some of his staff and political allies. It was ground zero for the far right in Texas; the John Birch Society, whose founder Robert Welch had gained fame (or infamy) by branding President Eisenhower “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” had a highly visible presence, and a celebrity supporter in the form of retired major general Edwin Walker. (A few months ago, some unknown assailant had taken a shot at Walker through the window of his home with a high-powered rifle; the shooter, whoever he was, had escaped, and the trail had long grown cold.) On a visit to Dallas on October 23, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been jostled and spat on by a crowd of demonstrators.

  But Dallas was the second-biggest city in the state, home to some of the most powerful corporate and business interests anywhere in the region. If he had any hopes of winning Texas in ’64, he needed the support, not just from the liberals and the labor folks in the state, but from Governor John Connally’s conservative wing as well.

  So, yes, he was going to Dallas, but that didn’t mean the visit would be free of the bitter intraparty split. Hell, even the location for the President’s luncheon speech was a source of endless contention.

  For Connally and his allies, the only place for the luncheon was the Dallas Trade Mart, a five-year-old, $12.6 million, 980,000-square-foot architectural gem located on North Stemmons Freeway just north of the city’s downtown center, in the Dallas Market Center. It was a magnet for Dallas’ establishment—at least for those not convinced that John Kennedy was a dangerous leftist eager to sell America out to the Russians.

  Kennedy’s own team preferred another site: the Women’s Building, located on the site of the state fairgrounds, southwest of the downtown center. Because it could hold 4,000 people—twice the capacity of the Trade Mart—it could easily accommodate the Kennedy supporters from the liberal-labor-minority wing of the Texas Democratic Party. That was precisely what Governor Connally and his allies in the State Democratic Party did not want. On November 18, Kennedy’s top political aide, Kenny O’Donnell, called advance man Jerry Bruno and told him, “We’re going to let Dallas go. We’re going to let Connally have the Trade Mart site.”

  So the Trade Mart was selected as the luncheon site; invitations went out on behalf of the Dallas Citizens Council, the very embodiment of the conservative white establishment.

  And there was one more consequence of that site selection. Had the Women’s Building been chosen, the route from Love Field to the site would have taken the motorcade east through downtown Dallas—on a more southerly route hundreds of feet farther away from the Texas School Book Depository on the corner of Houston and Elm Streets. And because the President always sat in the right rear of the presidential limousine, anyone looking at the motorcade—say, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository—would have found Mrs. Kennedy between him and the President.

  • • •

  Just after 11:00 a.m. central standard time, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter for the Dallas Times Herald walked to a fence at Dallas’ Love Field and picked up a telephone linked by an open line to the paper’s downtown office. Normally, Jim Lehrer covered the “federal beat”—the FBI, IRS, courts, that sort of thing—but with the President coming to Dallas, and with the tight deadlines of an afternoon paper, all hands were deployed for the visit. Lehrer was to follow the motorcade through downtown to the Trade Mart, cover Kennedy’s speech, and follow the motorcade back to Love Field, where Air Force One would depart for Austin and the big fund-raising dinner.

  On the other end of the phone was Stan Weinberg, the rewrite man who would turn Lehrer’s observations and notes into the finished story.

  “Look,” Weinberg said, “I’m going to be writing this story under a lot of pressure later. Do they have the bubble top on the President’s car?” The rain that had been falling all morning in the Dallas‒Fort Worth area was on the minds of more than just the President.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Lehrer replied. “I can’t see his car. Let me go look and see.”

  He walked down the ramp where the President’s limo, a highly modified deep-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental SS-100-X, was parked, and where Forrest Sorrels, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Dallas bureau, was standing. The bubble top was still on the car.

  Lehrer and Sorrels were familiar to each other, so the reporter approached the agent, saying: “Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top’s going to be on or not.”

  “Don’t know,” said Sorrels, and called out to a subordinate. “Why don’t you check downtown, see if it’s still raining.”

  It was a matter of the purest chance. On another day, a small, insignificant shift in pressure of wind would have moved the bad weather out, and sunshine would have broken out over Dallas. “Take off the bubble top,” Sorrels would have told his men, and the President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally would have been driving through downtown Dallas at high noon in an open car, waving to the cheering crowds that lined the streets, crowds pressing in, slowing the motorcade down, the open convertible giving everyone in the crowd—anyone looking out a building window—a clear, unobstructed view.

  But on this day the weather did not change. On this day the answer that came from downtown was: “Still raining here, and no sign of clearing. Better leave it on.”

  “All right,” said the chief. “It stays on.”

  And Jim Lehrer walked back up the ramp, went over to the fence, picked up the open line, and told Stan Weinberg what he’d learned.

  “The bubble top’s staying on.”

/>   No one—not Weinberg, not Lehrer, not Sorrels, not one of them—gave it a second thought . . . for another hour and eight minutes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DEALEY PLAZA, DALLAS, TEXAS, 12:30 P.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME

  They were in downtown Dallas now, and the thin crowds that had clustered along the motorcade route in the industrial suburban streets were gone; in their place were big crowds cheering as the midnight-blue Lincoln drove by. The steady, light rain hadn’t kept them away, and while the umbrellas blocked the view of those behind the first rows of spectators, the enthusiasm of the crowds was unmistakable. This was why the motorcade was driving through downtown Dallas, after all: it would have been much quicker to take Lemmon Avenue to the North Dallas Tollway to Stemmons Freeway; but, as the Secret Service had come to understand with the Kennedy White House, “politics trumps protection.” In 1964, Governor Connally would be running for reelection on the same ticket as Kennedy; it was crucial that he saw the President as an asset, not a liability, and the bigger the crowds, the louder the cheering, the more likely that outcome was, and the more likely that the wealthy Texas Democrats would start opening their wallets for the President’s reelection campaign.

  The President and Governor Connally were waving to the crowds; Jacqueline was clutching a dozen red roses she had been given at Love Field. The bouquet was visible even through the mist and the bubble-top canopy.