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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  “He also raised a political question we might think about.” Opening the book, he began to read.

  “‘The abrasions and frictions of urban life in the Northern big cities have begun to rub off in politics. No Northern political boss has yet begun to make political capital of these frictions as race-blind Southern politicians have done for decades; yet more than one Northern big-city boss has privately considered the matter.’”

  He clapped the book closed.

  “And we can be goddamn sure that Governor Wallace is considering the matter. He’s going to tuck it to me pretty good in some of these primaries.”

  “It’s a web White’s talking about,” Bobby Kennedy said. “I see it every time I walk the streets about a mile from here: no work in the ghetto, no jobs, an economy built on welfare checks, no men in the house to raise the sons . . . You know who the kids have to look up to? The gang leader and the drug dealer.” He shook his head. “And when you listen to our liberal friends . . . Hubert and Douglas and Hart and Javits . . . it’s not just the politics of integration and open housing that are so awful . . . I just don’t know why they think their ideas are going to help the people they say they’re trying to help. If you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County or Westchester or Cicero . . . you take them out where 40 percent of them don’t have any jobs at all, that’s what you are talking about. But if you are talking about hitting the problem in a major way—taking those people out, putting them in the suburbs where they can’t afford the housing, where their children can’t keep up with the schools, and where they don’t have the skills for the jobs—it’s just going to be catastrophic.”

  “I think we have to face the facts,” the President added. “A lot of these people are going to live in the ghettos for another several decades. And they can’t live under the conditions that exist there. So, Bobby, why don’t we see if somewhere in the two and a half million people in our civilian workforce there’s someone who has an idea or two.”

  And there was.

  • • •

  When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote of broken families and a hardscrabble life, it was not the product of academic research. His father had left when he was six months old, leaving a wife and three children to fend for themselves. They moved from tenement to tenement in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, with Pat working as a shoeshine boy in Times Square, then finding work as a longshoreman after high school. He’d found his way to New York’s City College, where tuition was free, then to a life in the academy, then to politics and the Kennedy campaign. By 1964, he was an assistant secretary of labor with a special interest in urban and minority group issues, and co-author of Beyond the Melting Pot, a widely praised book about racial and ethnic tensions. When the President asked him for a memo, Moynihan’s first words were blunt.

  “The racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us,” the memo began. “What afflicts the Negro family today is the product of that virus.” And the key to strengthening that family, he argued, was to put black men to work: on public works projects, in schools as teachers, in job-training and apprenticeship programs. Put men to work, he argued, and they will be more likely to marry the mothers of their children and stay to raise those children. If they stayed, their children were less likely to turn to street gangs for a sense of purpose, more likely to stay in school. If neighborhoods grew safer, stores and businesses would be more likely to locate in those neighborhoods, replacing a vicious circle with a virtuous one.

  “All well and good,” the President said three days later. Moynihan was in the Oval Office, where Robert Kennedy, Labor secretary Arthur Goldberg, Health, Education, and Welfare secretary Anthony Celebrezze, and the political team heard the President’s response. “Done right,” he said, “this could be politically potent. But done wrong, it could be politically damaging.

  “So,” the President said. “First, this cannot be a ‘Negro’ program. I want to cut a ribbon in Appalachia or Macomb County for every office we open in Harlem or Watts. Second, we need to frame this idea as an anti-welfare program as much as a jobs program.”

  “Might get some pushback from the black caucus on that,” Larry O’Brien said. “In fact, you might get some pushback on the whole picture this will paint about Negro families and neighborhoods: crime, welfare, illegitimacy . . . ‘Blaming the victim,’ they’ll say.”

  “It’s not blaming the victim,” Moynihan interjected. “It’s diagnosing the disease.”

  “That’s right . . . but so is Larry,” Kennedy said. “You’ve done great work, Pat, but it will be wasted if this becomes a bunch of white men in suits acting like missionaries to darkest America. We need to think this through a lot more carefully. And when we do have something to propose . . . keep it small at the start; keep the language modest. ‘A Marshall Plan for the cities’ sounds great until people start asking how much it’s going to cost and whether the folks in the suburbs are going to pay for it.”

  It was mid-May when a White House Conference on Jobs and the Family was convened, under the chairmanship of Dr. Kenneth Clark, professor of the City College of New York, whose psychological tests of black children’s self-worth helped convince the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation. Clark’s credentials as a prominent Negro academic and a fervent integrationist made the conference’s findings broadly palatable. (“If this had been The Moynihan Report instead of The Clark Report, we’d have had the first White House sit-in,” Moynihan himself remarked.) Kennedy managed to finesse the end-welfare-as-we-know-it case by casting welfare as a case of white condescension.

  “These men might have wanted a job,” he said in his remarks to the conference. “We have given them a check and told them there is no meaningful work for them to do. Of all the injustices that have befallen the Negro in America, this remorseless indifference may rank among the worst.”

  There was no illusion at the White House that this approach would eradicate the political threat of racial discord. It would be months before the first concrete, modest steps toward a clear-eyed jobs program would begin. Still, for all the justified political concern, there was a strong counterpoint of optimism; and one of those most optimistic about the President’s prospects was John Kennedy. His optimism rested on two key foundations: first, the issue he believed would be at the center of his campaign; second, the identity of his opponent.

  • • •

  If race was the “iceberg” that could sink Kennedy’s second-term hopes, there was one issue that could conceivably melt it. It had emerged, almost by accident, in the weeks before his near-fatal journey to the South. In September, he’d embarked on a “conservation” tour of eleven states, mostly in the West, where he’d been all but shut out in 1960 and where he’d likely not have time to visit in 1964. There were dams to be dedicated, national parks to be celebrated; but then, on September 25, at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds in Billings, Montana, came one of those increasingly rare unscripted political moments. Kennedy, in praising Montana senator (and majority leader) Mike Mansfield, had singled him out, along with Republican leader Ev Dirksen, for their work in winning Senate approval of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and cheers erupted for a long, long moment. The next day, in Great Falls, he touched on the same theme, and the cheers once again were loud and long. And that night, in Salt Lake City, Utah, in a state where he’d lost decisively in 1960, he’d devoted much of his speech to peace, to the need to understand the limits of American power, to the dangers posed to children’s health of radiation in the atmosphere. And from a block away, Kennedy’s chief advance man, Jerry Bruno, could hear cheers as loud as he had ever heard for his boss. By the time he’d returned to Washington, Kennedy was convinced he’d found the key to his reelection; an issue that had become even more primal, personal, visceral, than race.

  A year earlier, for thirteen days in October 1962, Americans had watched their television sets and listened to
their radios, wondering if the crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba would lead to a nuclear war. High government officials were being briefed on when and how to leave the capital for relocation to a post-nuclear government headquarters, built deep into a mountain in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. On the campus of the University of Wisconsin, a teaching assistant told his philosophy seminar, “Your assignment for next Thursday—if there is a next Thursday . . .” No longer was this a matter of diplomatic exchanges and ponderous foreign policy debates and New York Times columns that nobody read. Now the specter of nuclear war had come home, posing a threat to the United States that not even World War II could equal. (American boys might be dying on faraway beaches and waters in 1943, but no one in America feared that their neighborhood or city might be reduced to rubble and ash.)

  In the autumn of 1963, during the Test Ban Treaty debate, Americans had learned of radiation—“strontium 90,” it was called—that could wind up in the teeth and bones of their children. An ad backing the treaty featured an internationally famous baby doctor with the headline: DR. SPOCK IS WORRIED. In the same sense that race had migrated from a distant concern about peaceful demonstrators seeking basic rights to pressing issues of personal safety and the value of a home, peace had migrated into the homes and neighborhoods of the American family. The audiences on his Western tour had brought that home to Kennedy. More and more, he began to make that the central focus of his campaign. If it was true, as U.S. News & World Report wrote in the spring, that “it’s been a generation or more since the world was as quiet as now,” Kennedy intended to turn that quiet into his major campaign theme.

  On a gray, wet April 22, he opened the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park with a lighthearted “salute” to the Unisphere, the twelve-story-high globe built with 900,000 pounds of stainless steel.

  “It was supplied, I understand, by U.S. Steel—at a very reasonable price,” he laughed, recalling the bitter fight he’d had in 1962, when he’d forced U.S. Steel and other companies to roll back their price increases.

  Then he turned serious.

  “Twenty-five years ago,” he said, “President Franklin Roosevelt opened an earlier World’s Fair on this same site, and offered a prayer that ‘the years to come will break down many barriers to intercourse between nations.’

  “Neither he nor anyone else foresaw that, barely four months later, the world would be devastated by war, or that millions of the helpless would be slaughtered. No one foresaw power that was capable of destroying man, or a cold war that would bring conflict to every continent.

  “Now, after a conflict that brought us perilously close to a war that could have wiped out all of the achievements past, present, and future that we celebrate today—a war that could literally have threatened human existence—we may be at the start of a new era that replaces conflict with cooperation. But to achieve that new era, we must deal with the world as it is—not as we might wish it to be.

  “We must first of all recognize that we cannot remake the world simply by our own command. When we cannot even bring all of our own people into full citizenship without acts of violence, we can understand how much harder it is to control events beyond our borders.

  “Every nation has its own traditions, its own values, its own aspirations. Our assistance from time to time can help other nations preserve their independence and advance their growth, but we cannot remake them in our own image. We cannot enact their laws, nor can we operate their governments or dictate our policies.” I sure hope they heard that in Saigon, he thought.

  Two weeks later, he took that message to the other side of the world, to Japan—the first American president to do so since World War II (a 1960 visit by Eisenhower had been canceled in the wake of massive student protests). He traveled to the Diet along Tokyo streets lined with hundreds of thousands of spectators, and in his speech he began by thanking the Japanese “for your invaluable contribution to my political career by turning a lowly junior officer into an involuntary hero.” He struggled to render a Japanese proverb—Juu-nin to-iro: “Different strokes for different folks”—to argue that “not every nation will follow the path to democracy that our two nations walk, but this does not mean we cannot find common ground on which to stand . . . No nation knows more than yours about the horrors of nuclear war; today, with fearsome weapons a thousand times more lethal, it is our moral obligation to find that common ground.”

  It was another trip, a month later, that demonstrated just how much John Kennedy intended to make peace the central theme of his reelection . . . a trip that would radically reshape the destinies of guest and host.

  • • •

  It was born by accident, during a visit to the Soviet Union by Bill Walton, a journalist turned painter who was a friend and confidant to both John and Jacqueline Kennedy—close enough to the President to act as escort for a number of women who would visit the White House; close enough to the First Lady to serve as her companion at parties and occasional off-the-radar trips to Cape Cod. Walton was supposed to travel to Moscow on November 22 as part of an exchange between Soviet and American artists but postponed that trip when he learned the President had been shot. When he traveled to Russia a week later, his mission had grown dramatically: he had a message to deliver to the leaders of the Soviet Union from the leaders of the United States; and those Soviet leaders had a message for him to deliver back home as well.

  It was at a luncheon at a Moscow restaurant where Walton sat down with Georgi Bolshakov, a high official with the GRU, the intelligence wing of the Soviet military. For almost three years, Bolshakov had been stationed at the Russian embassy in Washington, where he and Robert Kennedy had formed an extraordinary back-channel relationship—so extraordinary that Bolshakov would sometimes show up at the Department of Justice and walk into the Attorney General’s office without an appointment. During the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy had passed assurances to the Kremlin through the Bolshakov connection that the United States was prepared to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba . . . assurances that could not be made public for political reasons.

  Now Walton and Bolshakov were exchanging confidences both reassuring and alarming.

  “The President and the Attorney General want to reassure Chairman Khrushchev that we know your government had nothing whatever to do with the events in Dallas,” Walton began. “They believe that since the resolution of the Cuban conflict, there have been significant steps in improving relations, and they have high hopes for further progress.”

  “You should know,” said Bolshakov, “that when Khrushchev heard of the shooting, he was distraught, in tears—and when he learned that the President would live, he wept for joy. Our fear however is that there were powerful forces in reactionary circles that may have tried to kill the President . . . We know that your generals, your financiers who profit from the weapons trade, your ‘Birchers,’ may have wanted the Texan with his oil friends in the White House. But”—and here Bolshakov lowered his voice—“your President is not the only leader who is threatened in his own house. The Chairman has his enemies as well; they think him too eager to deal with the United States, too eager to embrace ideas that do not fit their orthodoxies. Some of them never forgave him for exposing the crimes of Stalin—they tried to remove him six years ago—and after the missile crisis, some of them condemned the settlement as a defeat.”

  “Let the Chairman know that some of our top military men said the same thing about President Kennedy,” Walton said.

  “What is important,” Bolshakov said, “is that your President knows that the Chairman’s political survival is very much at issue in the next year. Anything that improves the material situation of the Soviet people will improve his chances to remain in power. We may not have the same political process as you do,” he said with a smile, “but it’s not as it was with Stalin. The Presidium members would think tw
ice about removing a leader who has the support of the people.”

  Six months later, on June 1, John Kennedy, along with his wife, members of his cabinet and national security staff, and a group of congressional leaders, stepped off Air Force One into the chilly afternoon at Vnukovo airport in Moscow, where Chairman Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a carefully assembled crowd of onlookers greeted them. It was a trip surrounded by controversy from the moment it had been announced. Barry Goldwater called it “another step on the President’s misguided march to Munich.” Richard Nixon wrote in a column for Time magazine, “While of course I wish the President well, I have real concerns that political and public relations considerations may lead him into ill-considered agreements that would have serious repercussions for the security interests of the United States.” Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. was less diplomatic:

  “Back in the days when Vice President Henry Wallace was looking at the Soviet Union through his rose-pink-colored glasses, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce labeled his delusions ‘globaloney.’ We now offer a modest addendum to her vocabulary: President Kennedy will soon embark on an exercise in ‘summ-itiocy.’”

  There were cautionary notes from the press as well: Time magazine pointed to “the abject disaster of the first Kennedy-Khrushchev confab in Vienna, where the rotund, bellicose Kremlin boss browbeat the untested, ill-prepared Kennedy—which led to a wall in Berlin, and Soviet missiles on our doorstep.” Columnist Joseph Alsop, a friend of the President’s and a militant hawk, urged the President to reconsider his “foolhardy mission to Moscow, where his hunger for an election-year success poses a real danger of long-term strategic disaster.”