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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  These views only hardened after the Cuban missile crisis, when Kennedy seemed embarked on a course of conduct that would effectively call a truce in the cold war. He’d given that speech at American University, asking Americans to “reexamine” their attitudes toward the Communist world, to acknowledge the limits of American power. He’d signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Moscow and, if Dean Rusk was right, he was looking to “normalize” relations with the Communist Chinese in a second term.

  By 1964 a few of these men had come to believe that the policies and intentions of John Kennedy posed nothing less than a clear and present danger to the United States. Some of them—we will never really know—may have spent the time on November 22, 1963, between the shooting of the President and word of his survival with this assessment: A President Lyndon Johnson, far more deferential to the orthodoxies of his time, far less engaged in foreign and military matters, would be far more likely to follow the wisdom that had guided the nation for twenty years or more.

  That hadn’t happened. Kennedy had survived; Lyndon Johnson was gone, his spot on the ticket yet to be filled. But in the weeks and months before the Republican convention, they came to an understanding that it might be in their collective power to do politically what that bullet in Dallas had not done. Given the right dissemination of information—or disinformation—to the right people in politics and the press, a portrait could be painted of an administration paralyzed by incompetence. Confidential assessments by military and intelligence operatives—shaped for maximum political effect—could highlight weakness worldwide: an ally in South Vietnam increasingly threatened by collapse; allies in Europe doubting America’s commitment to defend the continent against a Soviet assault; allies in Latin America who feared the United States had given Castro a free hand on the continent. If Kennedy in 1960 could turn polls about U.S. prestige abroad into a campaign weapon, then these assessments of American weakness, coming (under deep cover) from high counsels of power, could prove devastating.

  Indeed, they’d had a very recent, unsettling example of just how far President Kennedy had drifted from his 1960 commitment to “pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe” to resist the advance of communism. On August 2, the destroyer Maddox had engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam. A brief sea battle erupted; the Maddox sustained light damage, the torpedo boats were heavily damaged. Two days later, when reports reached Washington of a second attack on the Maddox and the destroyer Turner Joy, President Kennedy and his top civilian and military advisors gathered to decide how to respond—most likely with a reprisal attack on North Vietnamese military installations.

  And then Kennedy said no. For one thing, he argued, wasn’t there some dispute about whether the Maddox was in international or North Vietnamese territorial waters? Hadn’t the South Vietnamese navy been engaged in a series of coastal raids (perhaps, he thought silently, with the whispered okay of American agents)? As for the second “attack,” there was no evidence at all that such an attack had even taken place. It could just as easily have been the faulty conclusion of a nineteen-year-old sonar operator on board the Turner Joy.

  Remember what had happened during the missile crisis, he asked, when a Soviet sub thought we were dropping depth charges and almost launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo against the Essex? Miscalculation, Kennedy said, was the single biggest cause of military blunders—never more so than in a nuclear age.

  “Well, Mr. President,” Bundy, the national security advisor, interjected. “If the North Vietnamese are engaging us, it wouldn’t be very difficult to get Congress to pass a resolution of support.”

  “Support for what?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well,” Secretary of State Rusk said, “for pretty much anything you thought necessary to—”

  “You mean a blank check,” Kennedy said. “Dean, that’s the last thing I want. As soon as they write me a ‘blank check,’ I’m going to start getting flak, not just from Barry, but from our own party—Jackson, Dodd, Smathers—about when I plan to cash it. It’s going to be tough enough to figure out what the hell to do there once this election’s over. We start turning up the heat now, and it’s likely to have a very bad outcome.”

  For the most zealous among these men, it was more evidence that, in John Kennedy, the United States had a president who simply did not understand what was necessary to protect the long-term national security of the nation he was leading.

  This conviction, in turn, raised the possibility of an even more radical step. Apart from the potential use of military and defense intelligence, there was in the hands of a very few of them intelligence of another sort, intelligence that raised the most unsettling of questions about the President himself—questions of personal behavior and morality—though for most of those desiring the end of the Kennedy presidency that kind of information was something of a “nuclear option,” as likely to injure those handling it as the intended target. Better to concentrate on serious issues of weakened national security and the unraveling of the cold war consensus.

  These men might have pursued that path if the Republicans had chosen a different nominee, like George Romney or Bill Scranton or Nelson Rockefeller. The New York governor in particular was an attractive possibility: a strong-on-defense politician with an appetite for big increases in military spending (he’d pressured Nixon into endorsing just such spending as the price of his non-candidacy in 1960) who was comfortable enough with the concept of massive retaliation to propose a massive nationwide fallout-shelter building program. But Goldwater? He was too reckless with his language, like his talk of wanting the ability to “lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin,” for heaven’s sake; and while Curtis LeMay might find him a plausible president, the men who’d held the levers at State and Defense and CIA over the years—the “wise men” among current and former diplomats, journalists, House and Senate members, the men who formed an unofficial council of elders—did not. And besides, Goldwater was likely so weak a candidate that their efforts would fail to alter the outcome in November.

  So they stayed their hand, and waited. If Kennedy continued on this dangerous path of appeasement, if he moved closer toward a naive accommodation with Moscow, then they could revisit how to render him politically impotent. Indeed, one key test would be coming very soon: whether and how to save an increasingly vulnerable South Vietnam, whose fall, they believed, would jeopardize all of Southeast Asia and whose survival required a large force of American troops, hundreds of thousands of them. If Kennedy faltered in South Vietnam after giving a clear commitment to saving the country, that would be conclusive evidence that Kennedy had to be stopped. And once he’d been reelected and was immune from accountability to the voters, the only effective weapon at their disposal would be that “nuclear” option.

  • • •

  They sat on an open porch under a clear blue, late August sky, in shirtsleeves and shorts, lunching on clam chowder, lobster rolls, corn on the cob, and beer, bemoaning the performance of the Boston Red Sox—eighteen and a half games out of first place—and choosing the man who would almost certainly become the next vice president of the United States.

  From the moment Lyndon Johnson stepped down some seven months ago, speculating about the identity of John Kennedy’s running mate had been one of Washington’s favorite indoor sports. Some of it reached the outer limits of whimsy. In late spring, Kenny O’Donnell showed the President an Art Buchwald column in which the humorist asked: “Why doesn’t Bobby Kennedy move to New York, change his residency, and run with Jack? Think of all the money they could save on bumper stickers.”

  (“Bobby as a New York politician? With his accent,” the President laughed, “they’d run him out of town in a week.”)

  Now, just three days before the opening of the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, there was nothing whimsical about the conversation. With the Goldwater nomination, the Repu
blicans had made the terms of their case clear: the Kennedy administration was committed to socialistic Big Government at home and paralyzed by weakness and indecision in the face of a worldwide Communist threat abroad. Kennedy and his team had little concern about the domestic argument: voters had shown their approval of an expansive government for thirty years. When Ike became the first Republican president in twenty years, he’d done nothing to undo the programs of the New Deal. But the charge of weakness in the face of a Communist foe? Yes, that had the potential to cause real political damage, especially given Kennedy’s call for a dramatic reexamination of cold war thinking.

  That’s why the President was determined to keep a contentious issue like Vietnam off the political radar screen as much as possible; why he’d brushed aside the possible confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin; why he’d told Senator Mansfield that he could do nothing about winding down America’s role until after November. (“If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red Scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damn sure that I am reelected.”)

  It was also why Kennedy and his advisors agreed that the defense credentials of his running mate had to be unassailable—which pretty much ruled out Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey.

  “He’s been a good friend,” O’Brien said. “Really pushed hard for our agenda in the Senate.”

  The President added, “And no one’s better at standing up for us with the ‘honkers,’” the term he used for the more assertive liberals.

  But Hubert was an all-out advocate for peace. He’d been pushing for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty for years; had called for a “hard look” at defense spending. Beyond the specifics, his very identification with the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party—civil rights advocates, intellectuals with a fondness for government planning—was not going to help Kennedy as he reached for independents and liberal Republicans for whom Goldwater was suspect goods.

  By contrast, several Democratic senators were undeniably hawkish on defense matters; two of them had been serious contenders for the vice presidency four years ago. Washington State’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a pro-labor, pro‒civil rights liberal who was also a champion of ever larger military spending (“the senator from Boeing,” he was called, after the aerospace and defense giant whose headquarters were in Seattle). His anti-Soviet credentials were impeccable, so much so that he’d forced Kennedy into significant concessions before signing on to the Test Ban Treaty. And that was a problem.

  “I can’t be campaigning on a promise of peace while my running mate is going all over the country promising to liberate Eastern Europe and unleash Chiang Kai-shek,” Kennedy said.

  Moreover, Jackson shared a liability with Humphrey: geography.

  Because the legacy of the Civil War had made it impossible for a Southerner to win a presidential nomination, the Democratic Party was all but required to pick someone from a Southern or border state for the second spot on the ticket. Only FDR had broken that tradition when he chose Iowa’s Henry Wallace in 1940; and when he dumped him four years later, it was Missouri’s Truman who took his place.

  It had always been Kennedy’s intention, despite the rumors, to keep Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, to help him once again in Texas and the South. And when scandals forced Johnson off the ticket, he and his aides had looked first to the South for a running mate: to a progressive like North Carolina governor Terry Sanford or Tennessee senator Al Gore Sr. Neither, however, had the kind of national security credentials Kennedy was looking for, and in any event it was highly possible that the South was more or less a lost cause.

  “Well,” Kenny O’Donnell said, “I think we’re back to Stu.”

  “Isn’t this where we came in?” Sorensen cracked.

  Four years ago in Los Angeles, Symington was widely assumed to be Kennedy’s choice for running mate—so much so that he’d begun drafting his acceptance speech. There were still some around the President, including his brother, who insisted that the offer to Lyndon Johnson had been a formality, a courtesy, and that once Lyndon said no, they’d turn to Symington. Now the twin demands of policy and geography made him an even stronger choice. Domestically, he was in good standing with labor unions, big-city machines, and the civil rights movement. On defense, he’d been the first secretary of the Air Force during the Truman administration, and he fully embraced the argument that a loss of any nation to communism would send the dominoes crashing.

  And he was from Missouri—a border state with twelve electoral votes that Kennedy had won by just 12,000 votes—a quarter of 1 percent—in 1960. If it wasn’t the home run that LBJ had been for them in 1960, it was a prudent, safe choice, “just like the Hippocratic oath the doctors take,” Sorensen said. “‘First, do no harm.’”

  It would be almost two years before Sorensen, and every other close Kennedy hand, realized how wrong that judgment was.

  • • •

  “Mr. President, I think we’ll be getting to bed a lot earlier than we did last time,” said Kenny O’Donnell. It was just after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, and they were settling in at the Hyannis Port family compound, shuttling back and forth between Jack’s home and Bobby’s, converted into an Election Night headquarters with dedicated phone lines and tickers from AP and UPI. They all remembered the endless night in 1960: the early lead from the East eroding, the bad news from Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio, the razor-thin margins in Texas and Illinois, the agonizingly close loss in California. Not this time, the polls were saying.

  He’d begun the day in Boston, driving with his wife from his official residence at 122 Bowdoin Street to the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library on Cambridge Street, carefully navigating the steps to the basement, where the voting booths were. They voted, smiled for the cameras, then flew by helicopter to the Cape, where the President soaked his chronically painful back in a hot tub, napped, played with his children outside in the brisk fall air. Pictures would be supplied to the wire services in time to hit the afternoon papers; if they inspired a voter to head to the polls and vote for the handsome young father with the adorable children, so much the better.

  If he and his team exuded confidence this night, there was good reason. Presidents are almost never turned out of office in a time of peace and prosperity, and he had both working for him. The jobless rate was still under 6 percent, inflation was nonexistent, and in the words of U.S. News & World Report, “It’s been a generation or more since the world was as quiet as now.” The Republicans had never united behind Goldwater; traditional voices of the party, like the New York Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post, either refused to endorse him or even backed Kennedy.

  The Democratic Party’s mid-August convention in Atlantic City was a model of civility—at least, compared with many past Democratic conventions. (Sure, it might have been better to hold it in Miami, given that Florida’s fourteen electoral votes were up for grabs; but they could not risk disruptive, even violent demonstrations from Miami’s Negro population or from the city’s rapidly growing Cuban exile community.) There was only one potential for disruption in Atlantic City: the demand of an ad hoc integrated “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” to be seated in place of the all-white segregationist official delegate slate, headed by the unrepentant white supremacist senator James Eastland. The Kennedy White House had persuaded a broad coalition of civil rights groups to declare a moratorium on demonstrations to avoid stirring up white resentment, but an outbreak of disorder between white police and black residents in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia put the issue back on the front pages. For the White House, seating the integrated “Freedom Democrats” meant trouble: since they had organized outside party rules, the organization Democrats—the Mayor Daleys, the John Baileys, the Jesse Unruhs—were bound to be unhappy. What saved the peace was Kennedy’s very weakness in the South. With little need to placate the region,
it was easy to pass a strong civil rights plank and a pledge that, in 1968, no delegation would be seated unless it could demonstrate an open, unsegregated process. With that, the Mississippi delegation walked out, and five Freedom Democrats were seated as at-large delegates.

  In a convention with no doubt about the identity of the nominees and no dispute over platform planks and credentials, the energy level was low, and vice presidential nominee Stu Symington’s vapid acceptance speech did nothing to excite the crowd, provoking NBC’s Sander Vanocur to comment, “They say in Missouri he tried to give a fireside chat and the fire went out”—a crack that earned him a formal censure vote from the Missouri Democratic Party.

  That all changed when John Kennedy walked to the rostrum.

  When the cheers and applause finally stopped after fifteen tumultuous minutes, he offered good-natured but pointed humor directed at his Republican rival.

  “I note with some amusement,” he said, “that my opponent has expressed a desire to debate. So let me suggest to my distinguished opponent that if he wishes to get a little experience under his belt before the ‘main event,’ he might start by debating the Republican governor of New York, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, and the Republican governor of Michigan, all of whom have called his ideas and proposals wholly outside the mainstream of American thinking.”

  Then he turned to the major themes of his address. He’d told his speechwriting team he wanted to steer a middle course between blunt appeals to personal interest and sweeping, gauzy visions.

  Back in the spring, White House aide Dick Goodwin had been taken with a phrase from older Progressive journalists like Herb Croly and Walter Lippmann: “The Great Society.” It might be a way, he thought, to elevate the campaign with a vision of an America that went beyond a series of reforms and legislative ideas.