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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  The White House surrounded the trip with built-in safeguards. Kennedy brought with him congressional leaders from both parties: Senate minority leader Dirksen, Aiken of Vermont, Kuchel of California, and Saltonstall of Massachusetts were among the Republicans; so was North Dakota’s Milton Young, whose presence was explained by the agreement to sell 6 million tons of grain to the Soviet Union over the next three years—a boon to the wheat-growing farmers of the Midwest. And on his way to Russia, the President stopped off in Warsaw, where he was greeted by a crowd of 300,000 in Krasinski Square, who serenaded him with “Sto Lat! May You Live a Hundred Years.” (He sang to them what he called “a traditional American song, ‘When Polish Eyes Are Smiling.’”) His speech, carefully vetted to avoid unsettling Moscow, spoke of “the irrepressible spirit of the Polish people, which no would-be conqueror will ever dominate.” It was a speech aimed more to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cleveland than to Warsaw. He also met with a gathering of Poland’s Catholic leaders, including the forty-four-year old archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla, whose striking looks and youthful energy had made him a hero to the city’s young.

  “They tell me you’re called ‘the John Kennedy of the Church,’” the President said. “If you plan to seek higher office, give me a call.”

  “Well, Mr. President,” Wojtyla said, “our religion would not be a problem as it was for you, but my geography might be.”

  Then came four days of official formality and private conversations: dinner in the Great Hall of the Kremlin, a visit to Leningrad’s Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery to honor the fallen during the World War II Nazi siege, and an evening at the Bolshoi Ballet that tested the President’s back and his patience.

  “My God, the things I do to avert a Third World War,” he groaned.

  The heart of the trip was a string of agreements between the two nations—on cultural exchanges, increased trade, and a preliminary effort toward limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and the stockpiling of nuclear arms. In an unprecedented address on Soviet television, Kennedy recalled the words of his inaugural address.

  “Your country and mine,” he said, “have different traditions, different beliefs, different ideas of what a just and free nation looks like. But just as we joined together to fight a common enemy twenty years ago, so we can join together to fight the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease—and war itself.”

  The most important words were spoken in private—words exchanged by the two leaders in three separate meetings, with only their interpreters present; words spoken by two men who had brought the world to the brink of annihilation, and who had been profoundly shaken by that experience. They spoke of China’s growing militancy, its contempt for Khrushchev’s overtures to the United States, its casual acceptance of a nuclear war that might kill 300 million people as long as it ended in a Communist triumph.

  “Our schism began,” Khrushchev said, “when I refused to share our nuclear weapons technology with them. But our intelligence services tell me they will have the bomb soon—maybe before the year ends.”

  “Perhaps,” Kennedy said, “instead of a joint space venture, we might launch a joint venture to ensure that doesn’t happen . . . I mean that in jest, of course.”

  “Too bad,” said Khrushchev.

  Kennedy’s address to the Soviet people—broadcast on all three American TV networks—was a message aimed squarely not just at the Soviet leaders but at the broad American electorate, designed to confront the opponent he was most likely, and most eager, to face in November. Kennedy’s political calculus was simple: if the Republicans nominated a candidate with a reputation for caution and good judgment, they could neutralize or at least minimize the peace question and give voters the freedom to vote on other issues, like the paralysis in Washington, or the growing racial divide. But if the 1964 campaign could be cast as a choice between a careful, prudent president, and a challenger who seemed casually indifferent to the dangers of nuclear weapons, the contest would be over before it started.

  And in his fervent hope, Kennedy had no stronger allies than those who were working most feverishly for just that opponent.

  • • •

  They weren’t going to let it happen again.

  For a quarter century and more, they’d seen their Republican Party—the party of the Main Street shopkeeper, the farmer and rancher, the third-generation owner of a small factory, the school board member, the town doctor—railroaded by the big Eastern banks, the corporate giants, the newspaper and magazine titans, the Wall Street law firm partners with Roman numerals after their names, the blue-blooded families of Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, Philadelphia’s Main Line, the men who sat on the governing boards of Harvard and Yale. They’d seen their hero, Ohio senator Robert Taft, denied the presidential nomination three times, losing to a millionaire utility executive, Wendell Willkie; to a Wall Street lawyer, Tom Dewey; and, in 1952, to a war hero who hadn’t even decided he was a Republican until that year. Taft had come to that convention with more than enough delegates to win, but the East Coast didn’t want a solid Midwestern conservative; so the New York Herald Tribune, Time and Life, New York governor Dewey, and the big banks cooked up a naked power grab, a “fair play” resolution that took away his Texas and Georgia delegates and gave them—and the nomination—to Ike.

  “Every Republican nominee since 1936,” Taft had said afterward, “has been picked by the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

  Sure, Ike had won the White House, but so what? In eight years, he hadn’t undone a single piece of the New Deal—even added a cabinet department; sent troops to Little Rock to force blacks and whites to go to school together; shoveled as much foreign aid abroad as Truman had ever done . . . even invited Soviet dictator Khrushchev to visit the United States.

  Well, not this time. Four years ago, Barry Goldwater had declined to fight Richard Nixon for the 1960 nomination—it was too late anyway—but he’d told conservatives to “grow up” and take the Republican Party back. And that’s what they were doing precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. They’d actually openly borrowed a tactic from the hard left, packing meetings, staying late, wearing out their opponents with parliamentary warfare, until they’d grabbed control of so much of the party’s apparatus that the fight was over before it had officially begun. They’d had a moment of doubt, even panic, on November 22 when they first heard the news that the President had been shot; if John Kennedy had died in Dallas, their efforts might have been wasted.

  “America’s not going to change presidents twice in one year,” they nervously told each other as they waited for news about Kennedy’s condition. But he’d lived . . . which meant they were looking at a clean sweep in the South, a strong showing in the mountain West, and some real possibilities in the Midwest, where middle-class folks were getting an unappetizing taste of what an overbearing, intrusive government could do to their schools, their homes, their values. And who better than Barry Goldwater to run against a slick, rich, glamorous aristocrat whose father had bought him the White House? Maybe Americans did admire the Kennedys—their youth, their good looks, their wealth—but the other side of admiration is envy, even resentment, and if that resentment were to feed anxiety, that could even trump a low jobless rate and a growing economy. As Clif White, the strategist who organized the Goldwater insurgency, put it, “Pocketbook issues can take a backseat if you’re afraid someone’s going to steal your pocketbook on the way to the grocery store.”

  Besides, even if electing Goldwater was an uphill battle, better to lose with a leader who fought the battle than to win with someone who surrendered before the first shot was fired—someone who captured the conservative cause boldly.

  “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient,” he’d written, “for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal th
em.” On civil rights, his personal views diverged sharply from his political positions. In Phoenix, he’d desegregated his family’s department store and led the efforts to integrate local schools and restaurants and the state’s National Guard. But he’d been telling Southern audiences for years that the federal government should not enforce school segregation by force, because the Supreme Court’s decision “was not grounded in law.” And he’d opposed Kennedy’s public accommodations civil rights law as an intrusion on a private citizen’s right to do as he wished with his own property.

  His foreign policy approach was equally uncompromising. Why Not Victory? he’d asked in a book title. Why not challenge the Soviet Union’s conquest of Eastern Europe? Why not unleash Chiang Kai-shek and give him the support to retake China from the Communist rulers? Why not put the full force of American might behind the toppling of the Cuban dictator who’d established a Communist beachhead ninety miles from Miami? He’d been openly contemptuous about Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge that helped end the Cuban missile crisis. “We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” he said. And if Goldwater was untroubled by the idea of nuclear weapons as useful tools for the U.S. military, that was no different from the views of the Joint Chiefs and other key military men. “Disarmament” was a Soviet ploy to end America’s nuclear superiority, a critical counterweight to the massive Red Army spread out across Eastern Europe. “Let others talk about test bans; I want the ability,” Goldwater said, “to lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin.”

  To his fervent supporters, these and other views—ending diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, repudiating the Test Ban Treaty, making Social Security voluntary (which would effectively end the system)—were squarely in the mainstream of muscular, patriotic conservatism. To the broader electorate, which had lived through three decades of a moderate-liberal consensus and twenty years of a cold war framed by a balance of power, they sounded odd, eccentric, dangerous. Throughout the nominating season, moderate and liberal Republicans warned again and again that the nomination of Barry Goldwater would split the party and ensure the reelection of President Kennedy. And the conservatives replied, again and again: You don’t understand America; there’s a conservative majority that’s stayed home in November because they’ve never had a candidate of their own. Hell, one of FDR’s original brain trusters, Raymond Moley, was making the same argument. Besides, the quarter century of frustration at the power of the Eastern liberal Republicans was not about to be deterred. So when Goldwater won the winner-take-all California primary on June 2—helped immeasurably by the birth of a son to Nelson and Happy Rockefeller just three days before—the fight was essentially over.

  • • •

  On July 15, President Kennedy and his inner circle watched Barry Goldwater win the Republican nomination from the family compound at Hyannis Port.

  They’d watched the convention all but boo Nelson Rockefeller off the podium when he argued for a convention plank denouncing extremism. They’d nodded with professional admiration when Goldwater made a politically savvy choice of a running mate. Michigan’s Gerald Ford—fifty-one years old, Eagle Scout, war veteran, football star, fifteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives—had an engaging smile, and a broad regular-guy/Main Street appeal. (Ford also supplied the comic moment of the convention when he picked up the oversize gavel to proclaim that “when this campaign is over, John Kennedy will never know what had hit him!”—an unfortunate, unintended reference to the events in Dallas—and then lost control of the gavel, which flew out of his hand, over the stage, and wound up opening up a nasty gash on the forehead of former senator William Knowland, chair of the California delegation.)

  The next night they heard Goldwater, in his acceptance speech, assail the President’s foreign policy: “He has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom. Now, failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” They heard him denounce the spiritual and moral climate of the nation.

  “Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders, and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives.”

  (“Exactly!” shouted a young Goldwater supporter, Hillary Rodham, as she watched from her parents’ home in Park Ridge, Illinois. “I’ll remember that line if I ever get to give a speech.”)

  And they heard him issue an unprecedented challenge to Kennedy, a challenge stemming from some informal conversations the two men had had.

  “Mr. President,” Goldwater said, “you and I have a historic opportunity to turn this political campaign into a civic crusade; to take politics out of the hands of the Madison Avenue hucksters, the cynics who would substitute sixty-second slogans for real debate. I propose that you and I travel the nation together and engage in a series of debates on the great issues confronting us. I do not fear the outcome of an open clash of ideas. Do you?”

  (“We’re going to have to finesse that debate issue,” O’Donnell said.)

  And, with unanimous delight, they heard Goldwater answer critics of his allegedly “extremist” view by proclaiming, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

  As Goldwater’s speech ended—with images of liberal Republicans like New York senator Ken Keating leaving the convention floor—the President raised a bottle of beer.

  “Gentleman,” he said, “I propose a toast to the Republican National Convention. Tonight, they’ve given us exactly what we’ve asked for.”

  In fact, in nominating Goldwater, the Republicans gave John Kennedy something more, something neither he nor any of his aides even imagined. With the Goldwater nomination, the Republicans had unknowingly protected him from the gravest threat to his presidency . . . a threat that was brewing not in the ranks of the opposition, but inside his own house.

  • • •

  For more than three years the Kennedy administration had been at war with itself, a war whose roots were in the contradictions the new president had brought to the office. He was skeptical of the assumptions that underlay American foreign policy: the monolithic view of communism; the support for every foreign ruler, no matter how brutal, as long as he protected U.S. interests; the dismissal of nationalism as a powerful source of revolt. But he also saw international affairs as a global contest between Moscow and Washington, looked for new ways to engage the cold war struggle through counterinsurgency, launched a campaign of subversion against Castro’s Cuba, and touted a nonexistent “missile gap” with the Soviets as a motive for inflating the defense budget.

  Moreover, many of the highest-ranking members of his administration fully shared the foreign policy orthodoxies of the postwar American establishment. Dean Rusk at State, Mac Bundy at National Security, Walt Rostow, the top men at the CIA, the generals and admirals at the top of the Pentagon firmly believed that only the threat of overwhelming force ever deterred the Communists from their march to world domination; and if threats of force did not work, then force itself was required—up to and including America’s vastly superior nuclear forces.

  And by 1964 some of these men—small in number but not in influence—had come to the unsettling realization that President Kennedy did not share these bedrock convictions; worse, that he had embarked on a course that would, in their minds, pose a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

  Yes, he’d given a steely inaugural address, promising to “pay any price, bear any burden” to protect freedom around the world. Yes, he’d pumped serious money into the Defense Department and enthused over a new breed of counterinsurgency warriors. But at the very start of his presidency, faced with the advice of the
military and outgoing president Eisenhower to inject American forces into Laos, Kennedy refused, and shaped a highly shaky “neutralization” plan with Soviet leader Khrushchev. Three months later, when the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was faltering, he refused to use any American forces to save the plan. It had been a huge black eye for the United States, a huge propaganda victory for Castro. And then the President fired CIA director Allen Dulles, and Richard Bissell, deputy director for plans. These were the men who’d overthrown U.S. adversaries like Iran’s Mossadegh and Guatemala’s Arbenz. Now this callow, inexperienced president was ending the careers of men of proven judgment and effectiveness. And it got worse: in October 1962, Kennedy and his brother rejected the counsel of the Joint Chiefs, and wise men like Acheson and Nitze, who advised them to take those missiles out. “Moscow will understand it’s our sphere of influence, they’ll do what we did in Budapest in ’56—nothing.” And now a Communist dictator, fomenting subversion throughout Latin America, was shielded by a no-invasion pledge from the American president.

  “The greatest defeat in our history,” Air Force chief Curtis LeMay called it, and many of these men agreed. The resolution of the crisis had been, as Dean Acheson had it, a matter of “luck”; in the long run, they were sure, the United States would pay for such feckless leadership—if indeed you could call it “leadership” at all.

  Some of these men did not.

  “Kennedy is weak, not a leader,” Allen Dulles was saying from his forced retirement.

  “We have to face the fact that the United States has no leader,” Acheson told former colleagues at a dinner.

  Others were far more acerbic, at least in private. Richard Helms, a career CIA official who took Bissell’s place as deputy director for plans, thought Kennedy weak, cowardly. Air Force chief LeMay despised the Kennedys, calling the President and his brother “vermin, cockroaches.”