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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  “Did that man who just ran in here buy a ticket?” Brewer asked clerk Julia Postal. When she realized the man had slipped inside, Postal—who had heard a radio flash about the Kennedy shooting—told him, “I don’t know if this is the man they want in there, but he is running from them for some reason.” Minutes later Brewer was onstage with police officers and was pointing a man out to Officer McDonald.

  When he was ordered to stand, the man put up his hands, then yelled, “Well, it is all over now!” punched the policeman in the face, and pulled a pistol out of the waistband of his slacks.

  And Officer McDonald, faced with the threat of imminent death, pointed his service revolver at his assailant and fired two shots. The man clutched his stomach and collapsed.

  When the ambulance arrived barely a minute later, the police carried the wounded man out of the theater, and Detective Paul Bentley pulled a wallet out of the man’s left hip pocket.

  “Who is he?” asked Officer C. T. Walker.

  “Well, this ID says he’s A. L. Hidell. But this one says he’s Lee Harvey Oswald. We may have to wait awhile to find out who he really is.”

  “Or who he was,” Walker said.

  • • •

  For 100 million Americans, the shooting and the survival of John Kennedy became, in the words of the Times of London correspondent Louis Heren, “a collective national experience surely unprecedented anywhere in the world and anytime in history . . . [C]lustered around millions of television screens, most Americans were involved in the fate of Kennedy to a degree unimaginable before the age of electronic communications.” From the first scattered reports interrupting the early afternoon soap operas, to the countless clusters of passersby peering into the windows of appliance stores to follow the news, to the cautious optimism and then confident assertions of his survival, the now-dominant medium of television that might have become a repository of national mourning became instead a source of national relief and exhilaration.

  That first afternoon and evening, viewers saw surgeons and physicians, holding enlarged images from anatomy textbooks, explaining where the President had been hit, how his subclavian artery had been repaired, where his rib had been cracked, along with highly incomplete accounts of John Kennedy’s medical history. They saw footage from the day: the speech to a labor rally and the chamber of commerce in Fort Worth; the reception at Dallas’s Love Field, Jackie in her two-piece pink suit and pillbox hat, clutching a large bouquet of roses, still photos of the First Couple waving to the crowd; then a grainy image of the bubble top exploding and the President clutching his upper left chest. The networks carried the press briefings from Parkland—microwave relays had been hastily installed to permit live coverage—and viewers saw and heard Admiral Burkley assert that “the President has been in excellent health, which should help ensure his recovery,” and that there was “no reason” to fear any long-term injury.

  They saw footage of Attorney General Robert Kennedy arriving at Parkland Hospital at 8:00 p.m., surrounded by a phalanx of Dallas police and Secret Service; heard reports from Washington that the plane carrying six cabinet officers and Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, on its way to Tokyo for a major economic conference, was safe. They heard historians talk of past attempts, successful and failed, to kill presidents, and heard one wonder aloud about whether the absence of more than half the cabinet had been timed to create maximum chaos.

  “Remember,” he said, “the conspiracy to kill Lincoln—and it was a conspiracy—also involved an attempt to kill the Vice President and Secretary of State.”

  And increasingly that first evening, the networks turned their attention to Lee Harvey Oswald, the twenty-four-year-old who had been pronounced dead on arrival at Methodist Dallas Medical Center after being shot in that Texas Theatre scuffle with Officer McDonald. He had worked at the Texas School Book Depository, from which a raft of witnesses said the shots had been fired; he’d been the head—and apparently the only member—of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization supporting the Cuban leader and urging an end to embargoes and confrontations with the country. He’d served in the Marine Corps; defected to the Soviet Union, where he’d lived for three years; married a Russian woman; returned to the U.S. a year and a half ago. And if the eyewitnesses were right, he’d shot and killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit on a street in the Oak Cliff neighborhood after the officer, hearing a description of the alleged Kennedy assailant, had beckoned him over to his police car. The more that was learned about Oswald, the less he seemed to fit the narrative that had emerged in the first moments after the shooting: Dallas was a center of the white-hot radical right. That very morning a full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News had all but accused the President of treason. In the first moments after the shooting, the “climate of hate” in Dallas became something of a theme.

  But Oswald? Neighbors and acquaintances—he didn’t seem to have many friends—were telling the press he was a self-taught Marxist. A search of his rooming house turned up copies of the Militant, a publication of the Socialist Workers Party. His wife, Marina, was telling the police that he had been trying to visit Cuba, perhaps return to the Soviet Union. It just didn’t seem to fit . . . unless Oswald wasn’t who he seemed to be.

  The speculation about Oswald, and the mounting evidence of his guilt—he’d ordered the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano model 91/38 by mail under an assumed name; he’d posed in a photograph holding the rifle; his palm print had been found on the rifle—was intense. But it would soon be overwhelmed by the images that defined that “collective national experience.” The nature of television was that it conveyed national leaders in a personal, intimate way, almost as if these once distant Olympian figures were members of a family. And what America experienced in the following days was a family member’s narrow escape from death.

  On Sunday, November 24, the front page of virtually every American newspaper carried a photograph of a smiling John Kennedy, in pajamas and bathrobe, standing next to his wife, Jacqueline. The photo, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, was powerful, compelling, and incomplete; it had been cropped to eliminate a nurse holding a bag connected to the President’s chest. But it set the tone for what followed: Sunday was just four days before Thanksgiving, and the timing guaranteed that in almost all of the 300,000 churches in the country, there were sermons and celebrations giving thanks that Kennedy had not died. In a hastily arranged nationally televised appearance at the University of Illinois basketball arena—site of the yearly InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana student missions conference—the Reverend Billy Graham told a crowd of 16,000 that “surely no one can doubt that it was the hand of Providence that saved the life of our President with that sheltering rain; indeed, God did ‘shed his grace’ on our blessed land.”

  Over the next two weeks, the White House press office, with Pierre Salinger now a daily presence in the makeshift press briefing room, supplied a steady stream of news all built around one theme: President Kennedy was the functioning head of state. There were pictures of him on the phone with British prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, French president Charles de Gaulle, and Germany’s new chancellor, Ludwig Erhard. He accepted with thanks the public good wishes of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev (and a private, urgent message assuring him that the Soviet Union “had nothing to do at all with this dastardly crime” and promising the full cooperation of Moscow in “any investigation into the history of L. H. Oswald”). He talked by phone with his key aides: O’Donnell, who had remained in Dallas; Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and advisor; and Larry O’Brien. He conferred at least half a dozen times a day with Robert Kennedy, who had returned to Washington after three very eventful days in Dallas; their conversations were not the subject of any White House press releases. He met once, for seven minutes, with Vice President Johnson, who was told, “You might want to go to the ranch. We’ll let you know if the President needs you here.
”

  Every day, he signed a piece of (routine) legislation, or issued a new (routine) executive order. On December 3, the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving holidays, Kennedy “met” with his cabinet, using a speakerphone, beginning by saying, “That’s the last time I let half my cabinet leave town at the same time.”

  Without question, though, the moment that remained in everyone’s memory happened shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 11, on the White House lawn. The President left Parkland Hospital at 9:30 a.m.; photographers were allowed a brief moment to snap pictures of the President, standing and smiling, his wife by his side. When they left, Kennedy slowly, painfully maneuvered himself into the waiting limousine for the ride to Love Field. No one was permitted near Air Force One—“for security reasons,” the White House explained—so no one saw the President being carried up the stairs by four Secret Service agents.

  Four hours later, at 4:00 p.m. eastern standard time, Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and fifteen minutes later, the Marine One helicopter touched down on the White House lawn. There, six-year-old Caroline and three-year-old John Jr. were waiting. And as the President stepped down from the helicopter, John stood at rigid attention and offered his father a crisp military salute before running with his sister across the lawn and into his arms.

  “I think of myself as a pretty composed reporter,” Walter Cronkite said later. “But I’m very grateful the camera wasn’t on me just then. My heavens, if you didn’t have tears in your eyes at that moment, what kind of human being are you?”

  That night, from the Oval Office, John Kennedy gave his first public remarks since the shooting. It was, as Ted Sorensen said later, “vital that the President reject the notion that the shooting was somehow evidence of a national sickness, that there was any kind of collective guilt for what had happened.”

  So he began by expressing his thanks “to the doctors, nurses, and staff at Parkland Hospital, and to the people of Dallas and all of Texas for their warmth and good wishes. The actions of a single deranged individual cannot be permitted to define that city or that state. So it is my firm pledge to return to Texas at the earliest possible time, to convey my thanks in person.

  “Nor can we permit this single act to define us as a nation. There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

  “But those strident voices cannot be allowed to drown out that great silent majority that understands that we are a strong and peaceful people who indeed seek ‘liberty and justice for all.’ May God grant us success in that effort.”

  By the end of 1963, the shock of what had happened—and what had almost happened—on November 22 had begun to ease. But for some, what America had escaped was very much on their minds. One of them, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, found himself musing about what it might have meant had John Kennedy not survived that morning in Dallas.

  “It would not have been bewilderment at the loss of a great and tried leader, as with FDR, because JFK was not that,” Acheson wrote to a British friend. “What his death would have evoked was . . . fear from the utter collapse of all sense of security which lay at the bottom of the emotion . . . If a leader is old and should die of a heart attack, as Ike might have done, we would be upset. But if this young and vibrant man had become a corpse within an hour, the vast factor of chance and insecurity in all our separate lives as well as in our collective life would have become oppressive and paralyzingly terrifying. In this sense, President Kennedy’s survival spared us, not a constitutional crisis, but a profound wound to the spirit. Thank God we will not have to learn at what cost.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SECOND CASUALTY

  The Vice President of the United States was not having a good day when November 22 began.

  But then, he had not been having many good days lately.

  As he rode through the streets of Dallas, he was seventy-five feet behind the President and Governor Connally, the distance prescribed by the Secret Service. Really, though, he was much, much farther away from the President.

  The morning papers were filled with stories of The Snub—Senator Yarborough’s adamant and repeated refusal to ride in the same car as Johnson. It was a deliberate, calculated, and successful exercise in humiliation, and humiliation was what Lyndon Johnson had feared all his life, back to his childhood days when his neighbors would look pitifully on his once-prosperous and successful father, who had been reduced to menial labor. He still bore the sting of last night’s tongue-lashing from John Kennedy in the President’s Fort Worth hotel suite. The Secret Service agents guarding the suite said Johnson had bolted from the room, face flushed with fury or embarrassment or both. It was the latest, full-frontal example of what he had endured for almost three years: the scorn and the mockery of the well-born, well-educated Kennedy clan (“Rufus Cornpone,” they called him behind his back); the exclusion from any hint of power or responsibility; the refusal to listen to his advice on how to work the Congress that he knew so well and had mastered for so long.

  It wasn’t Jack Kennedy who was doing this, he was sure; it was that snot-nosed runt Bobby, the man who had tried to throw him off the ticket after Jack picked him, the man who’d humiliated him time after time at meetings of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the man who’d reduced him to the stature, as he put it to friends, of “a cut dog.” Well, maybe he’d had enough. More than once he thought about chucking it, going back to Texas, maybe running his old alma mater, Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He’d even told an old friend that this Friday evening he was going to tell Jack that he wasn’t going to run again in ’64. (Then again, threatening to quit was something he’d said at one time or another in just about every campaign he’d ever run.)

  Now Senator Yarborough was sitting beside him—the President had more or less ordered him to do so on pain of political isolation—but he refused to say so much as a word with Lyndon, or with Lady Bird. For her part, Lady Bird was obsessing over the impending visit of the Kennedys later that evening to the LBJ Ranch after the Austin fund-raiser. Would they have the right food, the right liquor, the right wine, the right bath soap? Would the entertainment be welcomed, or scorned as the stuff of rubes, hicks?

  Nor was Johnson in any mood to exchange pleasantries. His thoughts were back in Washington, where a threat to his political future was growing more serious by the day. His longtime Senate protégé, Bobby Baker, a young man he’d installed as secretary of the Senate, his vote counter, his dispenser of campaign cash and favors of every sort, had become caught up in a firestorm. A small legal dispute over a vending machine contract—Baker owned a piece of the company—had exploded into charges of influence peddling, pay-to-government contracts. The press began asking how a man with a net worth of $11,000 in 1954 could have a net worth of nearly $1.8 million nine years later while serving full-time on the government payroll. And then sex had been added to the combustible mix: Baker owned the Carroll Arms Hotel, close by Capitol Hill, where, the stories went, important government officials and prostitutes found common ground.

  From the moment the Baker story surfaced, Johnson had panicked; he’d cut short an official visit to Europe and used his clout in Texas to make sure none of the state’s papers published a story by a Washington journalistic gadfly named Sarah McClendon (the story appeared in an obscure wire service, but that was enough to put the tale in circulation). Johnson then tried to distance himself from Baker; he claimed he barely knew the man, that his fellow Democrats had chosen Baker as secretary of the Senate, but the idea was laughable on its face (Baker’s nickname on the Hill was “Little Lyndon”), and when Life magazine published a cover story on the scandal—THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL: CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES—the piece made prominent mention
of the close ties between Baker and Johnson.

  So on this late morning of November 22, riding through the light rain in downtown Dallas, the Vice President of the United States was not having a good day.

  What he did not know was that he was having a much, much worse day than he could have imagined.

  • • •

  In Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, a Maryland insurance executive named Don Reynolds was being questioned by the Democratic and Republican staff lawyers of the Senate Rules Committee. Reynolds claimed that in return for selling Johnson a $100,000 insurance policy on his life—a policy difficult to get for a man who’d had a near-fatal heart attack a few years earlier—Reynolds had been compelled to buy advertising time on the Johnson-owned Austin TV station and had been forced by Baker to buy Johnson a high-end stereo set. What had begun as an investigation into a staff aide was now directly implicating the former Senate majority leader and current vice president.

  And as the lunch hour grew near, Reynolds produced two checks; one to KTBC for the advertising time, one to the Magnavox Company for a stereo, to be delivered to the Johnson home.

  And then a secretary burst into the room, sobbing hysterically, barely able to get the words out . . .

  Two hundred miles to the north, on the ninth floor of the Time & Life Building on Manhattan’s Fifty-First Street, a dozen reporters and editors were meeting in the office of managing editor George Hunt. Life magazine’s look into the finances of Bobby Baker had yielded a much richer vein of inquiry: if it was a mystery how Baker had accumulated a net worth of nearly $2 million, it was an even deeper mystery how Lyndon Johnson, who had been on the public payroll all his adult life, had managed to accumulate a network many times greater—an estimated $14 million worth. How had he managed to win a license for the only radio station in Austin, Texas, back in 1943 (his wife, Lady Bird, was the nominal owner, but everybody knew who really ran it), and how was it that the Johnsons now owned the only commercial TV station in the town? How had the company managed to build such significant holdings in other radio and TV stations, in banks, in real estate?