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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  That might make a second term worthwhile in and of itself, he thought, and stood with the rest of the cabinet for another standing ovation.

  • • •

  The drama of John Kennedy’s reappearance on the political stage overwhelmed the substance of his talk. It was dominated by two themes: an appeal to the Congress to pass his stalled legislative agenda (a tax cut, a civil rights bill, medical care for the elderly, federal aid to education), and a promise to pursue “peace through strength” by combining continued increases in defense spending with new agreements with the Soviet Union. In the eyes of his audience and the press, though, there was no question about the real import of his speech: it was the opening round of his fight for a second term.

  And it was a fight he was not at all sure he could win.

  • • •

  He had come to the presidency by the narrowest of margins: one-tenth of 1 percent of the popular vote, a difference of 112,827 out of 69 million votes cast. It was a fact that was never far from his thinking; he carried that number with him on a slip of paper, and when a Time magazine piece described his staff as “corsucatingly brilliant,” he noted: “A few thousand votes the other way, and we’d all be coruscatingly stupid.”

  A week before he left Washington for Florida and Texas, on November 13, Kennedy convened the first meeting devoted to his 1964 campaign. Along with Bobby, Sorensen, O’Donnell, O’Brien, and brother-in-law and campaign manager Steve Smith, Kennedy brought in Richard Scammon, director of the U.S. Census Bureau and—more important—a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of voting demographics. What they confronted was a glass half full, half empty.

  On his side, he had the twin pillars of any incumbent reelection strategy: peace and prosperity. The chill of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had been replaced by the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate had approved by a wide (80‒19) margin. Unemployment had been under 6 percent all year, and inflation was all but nonexistent—1.3 percent in the latest numbers.

  That was the good news.

  The trouble came when the view from 30,000 feet was replaced by the view on the ground. America didn’t elect a president; fifty states did. And the picture was gloomier on the ground. The South and the border states held more than 120 electoral votes, and his popularity in the region was under 40 percent; even New York governor Rockefeller, with a commitment to civil rights clearer than his, was running ahead of him in the region. Washington columnist Roscoe Drummond had written of “a Republican iceberg of unknown force” threatening Democrats in the region they had dominated for almost a century. (A few months earlier, Kennedy had described his Southern dilemma more pungently when he said to Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence, “I can kiss the South good-bye next year.”) No wonder he was heading to Florida and Texas in late November: the thirty-nine electoral votes of those two states were critical. The West was also troubled turf: of the eighteen states west of the Mississippi River he’d won only New Mexico (barely) and Nevada in 1960; and in Arizona senator Barry Goldwater the West would have a native son with a message about the overbearing, intrusive federal government that had powerful regional resonance. So the forty electoral votes of California—a state he’d lost by less than 1 percent in 1960—would be critical. (At the end of the ’60 campaign, he’d said to Kenny O’Donnell, “Well, it’s all over. I wish I’d spent forty-eight hours more in California.”)

  There was unsettling news as well from places he’d won in 1960 and had to win again this time. A year ago, the 1962 midterms had seen moderate Republicans win governorships in three big states: New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Each of those governors, Rockefeller, William Scranton, and ex‒auto industry executive George Romney, had appeal across party lines that would serve them well in a presidential campaign. The Kennedy team was unworried about Rockefeller this time around. He’d dithered in 1960 about running when he’d had an excellent chance at the White House—“Nobody had any doubt he could beat me in 1960. I knew that,” Kennedy had told the Post’s Ben Bradlee—but Rockefeller had recently divorced his wife of thirty-two years to marry a woman eighteen years his junior. It was Michigan governor Romney, a devout Mormon, who was their chief concern.

  “People buy that God-and-country stuff,” Bobby said.

  “You have to be a little suspicious of somebody as good as Romney,” the President added. “No vices whatsoever . . .”

  That was not, some on the team may have noted to themselves, an issue with John Kennedy.

  By contrast, Kennedy said with a laugh, “Give me Barry. I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”

  Kennedy had come to this political gathering with the idea of making poverty a central campaign issue. He’d been inspired by The Other America, a detailed look by Michael Harrington at the millions living in poverty. They could, he thought, “deracialize” the poverty issue by linking poor whites in rural America with poor blacks in the inner cities. That, he’d told O’Donnell, was how he wanted to campaign.

  But Census Bureau director Scammon thought otherwise.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Mr. President,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people. I was thinking of photographs with policemen in the cities. Then you should go to the new shopping centers on the highways. The voters you need, your people, men with lunch pails, are moving out to the suburbs.”

  Kennedy was intrigued. How much income, he wanted to know, did it take for Democrats to turn into suburban Republicans? Scammon said he’d find out.

  “It’s going to be a new kind of politics,” Kennedy said.

  “It’s a new country,” Scammon replied.

  Then the President went to Texas.

  • • •

  In the first aftermath of the shooting in Dallas, John Kennedy’s political prospects brightened dramatically. Life and Look, the mass circulation magazines with millions of readers, carried lengthy photo spreads of the recovering President, playing with his children, meeting with congressional leaders, convening an informal gathering of prominent religious leaders to examine the roots of intolerance in American life. The photos, taken under the rigorous eye of the White House Press Office, did not capture the slow, sometimes unsteady gait of the President, nor the frequent breaks he took for rest and medication. “You know all those Westerns where the hero is up on his horse two minutes after getting shot?” one aide remarked to a reporter. “Well, this is no Western. The President took a real hit, and his health wasn’t exactly in A-1 shape in the first place—and that’s so off the record that if I see a word of this conversation, you’ll have to join a tour to see the inside of the White House again.”

  Life also featured a compelling joint interview with President and Mrs. Kennedy conducted by Theodore H. White, whose Making of the President 1960 had cast the presidential campaign in a romantic, heroic light. The interview was notable for Jacqueline Kennedy’s dramatic recollection of the moments after the shooting: “I remember reaching out, pulling him over to me, cradling him in my lap; for some reason, what flashed in my mind was that statue, The Pietà, with Mary holding the body of Jesus.”

  For the President, the goal was to damp down any talk of a plot involving the Soviet Union or Cuba, or to cast blame on a defect in the American spirit.

  “Everything we know so far,” Kennedy told White, “points to a single deranged individual with a twisted hunger to make his mark on history—the same impulse that drove other assailants in years past. Yes, there are voices of intolerance and extremism in the land; I’d intended to address that issue in the luncheon speech in Dallas. But it is wrong to indict a hundred ninety million Americans for what happened.”

  From the Congress came calls to deal with the trafficking in mail-order weapons: Should it really be that easy for a customer to buy a rifle by answering an ad in the National Rifle Associati
on’s magazine? The NRA didn’t think so: it endorsed a bill by Connecticut senator Tom Dodd to eliminate such sales. In congressional hearings, NRA executive vice president Franklin Orth supported a ban on mail-order sales, saying, “We do not think that any sane American who calls himself an American can object to placing into this bill the instrument which almost killed the President of the United States.” (After angry protests from its members, the NRA encouraged them to oppose the bill with letters and phone calls; the bill died in committee.)

  In the wake of such coverage, the countless prayers of thanksgiving offered up in churches and synagogues for Kennedy’s survival, the photo spreads in women’s magazines of the Kennedy family, the CBS special on The Men Who Saved the President’s Life, the emotionally gripping State of the Union speech, it was unsurprising that Kennedy’s favorability rating soared above 90 percent in the first weeks of 1964. But by the spring it was clear that John Kennedy’s political survival was no sure thing. His dilemma, the Achilles’ heel of his reelection prospects, was the primal issue that had the potential to upend all the conventional wisdom about the invincibility of an incumbent president in a time of peace and prosperity.

  It was race.

  The impact of the issue was starkly clear in the South. However tepid the White House response had been to the sit-ins and Freedom Rides; however much John and Robert Kennedy treated the demonstrations as international embarrassments and domestic political nuisances, rather than as the product of legitimate outrage; however much the administration tried to placate the Southern segregationists who ran Congress by appointing racist judges to the federal bench, much of the white South had come to see John and Robert Kennedy as leading a Second War of Northern Aggression against their most cherished institutions: first and foremost, white supremacy. “Raul,” they had started calling the younger Kennedy, in a mocking reference to Fidel Castro’s brother. And when federal marshals and troops fought bloody clashes with mobs of whites in Oxford, Mississippi, in the fall of 1962, as James Meredith became the first black student at Ole Miss, the anger at the Kennedys had hardened into outright hatred—and the political consequences became clear in the 1962 midterms. The Republican share of the Southern votes jumped from 660,000 in 1958 to more than 2 million; a Republican won a Texas Senate seat, and another nearly picked off a powerful Democratic incumbent in Alabama. A year later, after the White House introduced a far-reaching bill to block discrimination in hotels and restaurants, the President’s popularity in Dixie cratered. A Gallup poll in September of 1963 showed that in the eleven states of the Confederacy (plus Oklahoma and Kentucky), Barry Goldwater would swamp Kennedy by a 59‒41 margin.

  But it wasn’t just the South.

  Race was beginning to look like a “wedge” issue, cleaving two of the Democratic Party’s core elements: working-class whites and Negroes. In the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, crime rates were beginning to rise—50 percent between 1960 and 1964—despite economic good times; and in these cities, crime and race were tightly interwoven. So was the issue of welfare. So was the issue of school integration: in most Northern cities, blacks and whites were segregated not by law but by neighborhoods. In New York, Negro leaders like Reverend Milton Galamison were organizing school boycotts and demonstrations to demand integration; white parents in Queens had formed a parent-teacher association to push back against those demands. In Boston, pressures to end the deeply embedded school segregation led to a massive response by whites—“backlash,” they were beginning to call it—and Boston School Committee chief Louise Day Hicks won a landslide reelection by promising to preserve neighborhood schools. In the suburbs, where the increasingly prosperous working class was moving in ever larger numbers, the demand for “fair housing” laws from Negroes and liberals stirred primal fears of declining property values and rising crime. The voters in liberal cities like Seattle and Berkeley had repealed local fair-housing ordinances, and in California a measure would be on the 1964 ballot to nullify a fair-housing law.

  The primal political threat to Kennedy’s party had been bluntly expressed more than a year earlier in a letter from liberal Michigan congresswoman Martha Griffiths, who warned about the impact of a federal fair-housing law:

  “No Democratic congressman, from suburbia, to whom I have talked, believes he is in any danger of losing colored votes; but he does feel such an order [to integrate] could cost white votes. [If] I lose this election . . . can I have the next Supreme Court vacancy, where I can legislate in safety far from the prejudices of the precincts?”

  By the time Kennedy went to Texas, Griffiths’s warning seemed prescient. Even after the massive, peaceful March on Washington, half of all Americans thought he was pushing civil rights too hard. Alabama governor George Wallace, who had “stood in the schoolhouse door” in 1962 to symbolically resist the integration of the state university, embarked on a speaking tour across the North. He delighted in taunting Northerners for hypocrisy, asking them: “You see Jack and Bobby and Teddy putting their little children on buses to send them into colored neighborhoods? You see a lot of black faces in the newsrooms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe? If you’re so eager for integration, why don’t you try it in your schools, your neighborhoods, instead of telling us in the South how to live our lives?”

  The Harvard students might boo and taunt Wallace, but the cops sent to protect him, the cabdrivers bringing the audiences to his speeches, they were cheering him on; by early 1964, Wallace had declared his intention to run in Democratic presidential primaries outside the South. In city after city, nervous mayors and Democratic county leaders were sending warnings back to the White House: Our homeowners, our craft union workers, our parents, are listening to Wallace. And if this crude Southern demagogue could win their cheers, there was a real danger that an Arizona senator, without any tint of personal racism or thuggery, might be able to win their votes. No wonder Look magazine, which devoted so many pages to endearing photos of the President and his family on Cape Cod, titled a story: “JFK Could Lose.” No wonder that Time could report that “Barry Goldwater could give Kennedy a breathtakingly close race.”

  And if white working-class defections from the Democrats made a huge black turnout imperative, the spring of 1964 brought little encouragement on that front. Yes, he’d introduced sweeping legislation in 1963; yes, he’d been the first president to pronounce civil rights “primarily a moral issue”; but he and his White House had proved no match for the Southern committee chairs in the House and Senate with their mastery of the rules and control of the machinery. Just before the Easter recess, with Kennedy’s bill hopelessly stalled in both houses of Congress, Senator Richard Russell sat with a few colleagues and shared a thought that would never leave the inner sanctum of his office.

  “We should be very grateful that Oswald fellow was a poor shot,” Russell said. “We couldn’t have beaten a President Lyndon Johnson on civil rights. A Southerner with Lyndon’s skills making the cause a martyr’s legacy? No, we couldn’t have beaten Lyndon. But beat John Kennedy? Yes, we will.”

  Without question, the Kennedy White House had committed some serious missteps. Back in ’63, Vice President Johnson had warned Ted Sorensen, “Don’t send up civil rights until you’ve got your other bills cleared; otherwise they’ll tie up your whole legislative agenda.” But they hadn’t listened—they never listened to Lyndon on anything—and now the congressional machinery had come to a dead stop: not just on civil rights but on aid to education, the tax cut, pretty much everything Kennedy was planning to run on. That paralysis, in turn, had triggered a fever of pessimism among academics and journalists about the health of the American governing process. Historian James MacGregor Burns wrote a whole book whose title summed up the concern: The Deadlock of Democracy. The most influential columnist in the country, Walter Lippmann, suggested the paralysis was nothing less than “a grave danger to the Republic.” Life magazine said it “put our whole syst
em of parliamentary democracy in question.” In that climate, it would not be hard for a challenger to turn Kennedy’s 1960 argument—“Let’s get America moving again”—against him.

  No wonder Robert Kennedy, in the midst of a strategy session in mid-May, looked up and said flatly, “Civil rights is something around our neck.” And no wonder there was real concern in the White House that a credible Republican candidate—a big-state governor with broad voter appeal—could pose a serious threat to Kennedy.

  In February of 1964, it was that threat that brought the Kennedy political team into the Oval Office—an office whose new red rug and pale curtains bore the mark of Jacqueline Kennedy’s hand. The President sat in his high-back black leather chair, cradling a book on his lap.

  “Let me ask you all something,” he began. “Have many of you actually read Teddy White’s book—apart from looking at the index to see how many times you were mentioned?”

  There were embarrassed chuckles.

  “When Teddy wasn’t turning us all into the Knights of the Round Table,” he said, “he did some pretty interesting reporting with the census numbers, especially about the Negroes. Our fine Southern statesmen have made life so inhospitable that Negroes have fled en masse: half of all the young Mississippi Negroes fled the state in the last twenty years. They’ve been uprooted, packed into slums, shut out of jobs. That’s meant an epidemic of crime, welfare, broken families; he says that almost a fifth of all black children are illegitimate. And you know what federal welfare laws say? You can only get help if there’s no man in the house.