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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  “If the Americans put their armies into Vietnam, it will take a decade for them to realize their folly. Before they follow the French out, before Ho Chi Minh enters Saigon, millions may die. If Kennedy can save face with a coalition, Vietnam will fall like a ripe fruit into Ho’s hands in, what, three years, five years? And we save billions in the arms we would be sending.”

  “You place a lot of trust in Mr. Kennedy,” Leonid Brezhnev said.

  “Trust? Only that I trust him to want to avoid catastrophe.”

  • • •

  The historian in President Kennedy no doubt appreciated the irony that two of his most important assets in his approach to Vietnam were the man running against him for president and the ruler of his country’s longtime adversary. There was one more potential ally, equally unlikely—one whose support would come with a heavy price tag. And even as he asked Evelyn Lincoln to place the phone call, he was hoping that the price would be worth paying.

  • • •

  There was no more powerful member of the United States Senate than Richard Brevard Russell Jr. of Georgia. He’d mastered its arcane rules and procedures almost thirty years earlier, as a newly elected thirty-five-year-old senator. Now, thirty years later, he was the courtly, unfailingly polite chief strategist and tactician of the coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans that had effectively ruled the Senate since the days of FDR. For Russell, two issues dominated his concern:

  First, the protection of “the Southern way of life,” which meant resisting any efforts by the federal government to stop racial segregation and outright racial subjugation, which ranged from intimidating prospective voters to lynchings. Unlike Southern colleagues like Mississippi’s Bilbo and South Carolina’s “Cotton Ed” Smith, Russell never resorted to outright race baiting, never uttered the word “nigger” on the Senate floor, always spoke in terms of high-minded constitutional principles. (Rarely did he let his true feelings emerge, as when he told the Senate: “Any white man who wants to take the position that he is no better than a Negro is entitled to his opinion of himself. I do not think much of him, but he can think it.”)

  Second, the worldwide struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, which required a never-ending commitment to massive defense spending—a commitment he protected as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’d been one of only nineteen senators to vote against the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, warning his colleagues that the Soviets were not to be trusted, that they would use the treaty to strengthen their nuclear arsenal, and that the treaty was a step on the road to some form of world government.

  There was, however, one other dimension to Richard Russell: he was uncommonly clear-eyed about strategy and tactics, whether on the Senate floor or in the international arena. He demonstrated that in the opening moments of the call, when the President asked him to share his thoughts about Vietnam.

  “Well, frankly, Mr. President,” Russell said, “it’s the damn worst mess that I ever saw, and I don’t like to brag and I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew that we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “How important do you think Vietnam is to us?” Kennedy asked.

  “It isn’t important a damn,” Russell said. “It’s a hell of a situation. It is a mess, and it’s going to get worse, and I don’t know how or what to do. If it came down to an option of just sending the Americans in there to do the fighting—which will, of course, eventually end in a ground war and a conventional war with China—or just pulling out, I’d get out. But then, I don’t know. There is undoubtedly some middle ground somewhere.”

  “And how do we do that without . . . You know, Rusk and Bundy keep telling me it would be a devastating humiliation, shake the confidence of our allies . . .”

  “Well,” Russell said, “I’d get the same crowd that got rid of old Diem to get rid of these people that are in power now—get some fellow in there that said, ‘We wish to hell you Americans would get out.’ That would give us a good excuse for getting out. But then, I can just see the Russians going to town about the weak Americans, threatening us . . .”

  “I think I can give you some assurances on that, Dick. Khrushchev fears what we might do a lot more than I fear what he might do. There’s a weapon we could deploy that must be giving him the night sweats every time he thinks about it.”

  “You have a weapon I haven’t been told about?” Russell asked sharply.

  “No,” the President said. “I mean we can simply spend them into bankruptcy . . . as long as your committee gives us the go-ahead.”

  “You’ll never get a fight from me on that score,” Russell chuckled.

  “I thought not,” Kennedy said. “But, Dick, if I’m determined to find a way out—and I am—you know how important it will be to have you with me. I know the Republicans will be all over me, but I can’t afford to have Dodd and Scoop Jackson and Carl Vinson talking about ‘retreat, defeat, surrender, national dishonor . . .’”

  “From what I can see,” Russell said, “getting in there would be like Korea only on a much bigger scale, with a terrain that’s just right for a guerrilla army. Hell, the French lost two hundred fifty thousand men and spent a couple billion of their money and two billion of ours down in there. Just got the hell whipped out of them. And you know, Mr. President”—here Russell paused for a moment—“as I see it, it’s never a good idea for a large outside force to try to move in and tell another people how to live their lives.”

  And John Kennedy understood clearly the price he would have to pay if he wanted Dick Russell to help him out of Vietnam.

  He made the case to Sorensen on a flight back from a campaign swing through Ohio.

  “If I go all in on civil rights, I’ll almost surely lose anyway—and I’ll have Russell on my ass every time we pull another five hundred men out of Vietnam.”

  “And if we turn and run on civil rights, what do we say to those Negroes who risked their lives to sit in at Woolworth’s and ride those buses?” Sorensen asked.

  “You really think I’ll lose a lot of Negro votes to Barry Goldwater? But, Ted, you tell me what’s worse for that young Negro sitting at an Alabama lunch counter: not being able to order a hamburger and a Coke, or getting his ass shot off in a jungle ten thousand miles away? There’ll be time once he gets the vote to change those stupid laws. But right now there’s a different fight I have to win.”

  “And if you win it,” Sorensen said, “not one of those Negroes—not one of our liberal friends—is going to know what they were saved from.”

  “Like I’ve said before, Ted, life is unfair. Although not entirely, and not always,” he added, ringing for a steward to bring him a bowl of chowder and a beer.

  “You know,” Kennedy said, “anyone who calls the presidency the toughest job in the world has never flown on Air Force One.”

  • • •

  It was past 3:00 a.m. when Kennedy reached the White House at the end of his long inauguration day and night. He’d made it to his second term with more than half of the 16,000 “advisors” home from South Vietnam, with 12,000 more due home by the end of 1965. Averell Harriman was in Geneva, working with his Soviet counterparts on a possible treaty to limit strategic arms, while highly private, highly informal negotiations were going on with the State Department’s Roger Hilsman and his Soviet counterparts over the shape of a neutral coalition government in Saigon—with representatives from Hanoi and Saigon. Maybe something will come of them, maybe not, he thought. But it buys us time.

  More significant, in his new foreign policy and defense team, he finally had a group in place that would be allies rather than adversaries. Dean Rusk was gone at
State, replaced by Robert McNamara—who, Kennedy had come to realize, was a world-class courtier, determined to support with absolute certainty whatever the President favored. If Lyndon were in charge, Mac would be telling him we had to go to war. George Ball, who had warned Kennedy early on of the danger of Vietnam escalation, was installed as McNamara’s deputy.

  At Defense, Kennedy had made his most controversial of moves, installing his brother Bobby, who had lobbied hard for a role on the domestic side.

  “I can’t do it, Bobby,” the President said. “If we’re serious about these negotiations, if there’s any opening to China, I need someone at Defense who has the absolute confidence of the President, so there’s no room for end runs or passive insubordination. And that’s you.”

  It was a contentious confirmation fight: the New York Times editorially chastised the President for “once again appointing his brother to a job for which he has no qualifications. On-the-job training may have worked at the Justice Department, but is nothing short of dangerous at Defense.” Several Southern senators sarcastically “endorsed” the nomination. (North Carolina’s Sam Ervin said, “If Bobby Kennedy can annoy and harass the Russians as much as he did the American South, victory in the Cold War is assured.”)

  If all went well, Vietnam would be in Kennedy’s rearview mirror by year’s end. And then? There were no guarantees. If Ho Chi Minh’s more militant colleagues grew impatient—if the South Vietnamese government collapsed and the red flag were raised over Saigon—Kennedy would take a political hit. (“I’m likely to become a very, very unpopular president,” he’d said to O’Donnell.) Some of his critics were not waiting for that outcome.

  “Each American fighting man, each advisor, that returns from Vietnam is a symbol of presidential failure,” Time magazine wrote. “Among seasoned geopolitical observers, there is a growing fear that the United States will be paying the costs of Kennedy’s fecklessness for years, even decades to come.”

  Nor was there any guarantee that the cost would be worth it. He had fences to mend with a disappointed civil rights community; he had to do something about the poverty that afflicted tens of millions beyond a few nice words in a speech.

  As he slipped into bed, Kennedy thought of one of his favorite stories about risk, a story told by the Irish writer Frank O’Connor that Kennedy himself related:

  “As a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them.”

  He had thrown his cap over the wall. There would be no war in Vietnam.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A DIFFERENT COUNTRY—BUT HOW DIFFERENT?

  It was March 8, 1965, and the President of the United States was in a lousy mood.

  Some of it could be chalked up to the weather. It was a gray, drizzly day, and the evening promised to be no better . . . which meant that the Potomac cruise on the Honey Fitz with a few close friends would be a chill, gloomy affair, even if the weather didn’t turn foul enough to call the whole thing off.

  Some of it was a matter of health and well-being. The ills that had plagued him all his life were back with a vengeance; when he wasn’t in pain, he was still weakened by the afflictions of his body. Even worse, his wife and his brother had effectively walled him off from Dr. Max Jacobson, whose injections had been a source of instant energy. As for well-being, for more than a year and a half, since the death of his infant son Patrick and the shooting at Dallas, he’d completely curbed the impulses of a lifetime . . . well, almost totally . . . but he could sense those impulses returning. He’d once told Harold Macmillan that three days without a woman left him with headaches. By now I should be suffering from terminal migraines, he thought. And that brought him thoughts of Mary Meyer . . .

  She had not been a casual, quick romp, nor even a long-term lover. She was that, but she was also a friend, an intimate of the family—along with her sister, Toni Bradlee, and Toni’s husband, Ben, Mary was a frequent guest at White House dinners, cruises on the Honey Fitz down the Potomac, weekends at the Cape. She was that rare woman Kennedy could find intellectual as well as sexual pleasure with . . . one of the few women whose company he sought back in the fall of ’63, after the death of Patrick. And then, last year, she’d been murdered during a walk along the canal towpath in Georgetown, most likely by a would-be robber or rapist. Her brother-in-law Ben had mentioned something about a diary, but as with all such matters, Kennedy trusted his friends to keep his secrets. Still, he missed her greatly.

  More than personal discontent, President Kennedy’s foul mood was the product of a painful political dilemma. There was in John Kennedy’s makeup an acute sense of timing: he would temporize, delay, avoid making a decision unless he absolutely had to. And then he would act. He pushed back against the urgings of his advisors to strike the missiles in Cuba, even held back when a U-2 was shot down, waiting until Khrushchev found the running room to end the standoff. He’d split the difference in South Vietnam, telling his military, Okay, there’ll be support troops and we’ll see if they’re willing to help themselves, but we are not putting combat troops in there; it’s a recipe for disaster. And now the Americans were on their way out.

  He had brought that same innate sense of caution to the civil rights issue. He’d readily bought support among powerful Southern congressmen for his economic program by appointing racist judges to the federal bench. He’d repeatedly delayed the executive order he’d promised to sign that would “end discrimination with a stroke of the pen.” Then, in June of 1963, after the Birmingham cops had turned police dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators, his sense of timing had told him to go on national television and proclaim civil rights “primarily a moral question,” then ask the question of white America in a way no president had ever done: “Who among us would willingly trade places with a Negro?”

  Now, in March of 1965, he had decided it was once again time to act.

  But he was damned if he could figure out how.

  • • •

  Just a day earlier, on Sunday, March 7, a crowd of peaceful marchers on their way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand the right to vote were set upon by club-wielding cops on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Television beamed the images—bloodied heads, clouds of tear gas, black marchers beaten by white police and state troopers—into millions of American homes. The calls on the White House for action were loud and tinged with more than a touch of disappointment. When the Civil Rights Act died in the Congress in 1964, a suspicion rippled through the liberal community that Kennedy might actually be relieved to be rid of so divisive an issue in the midst of his reelection fight. One of his few black advisors, Louis Martin had once said to him, “You care more about Germany than Alabama,” and that sentiment was echoed by other disappointed liberals.

  Walter Lippmann, the dean of Washington columnists, wrote with unusual acidity: “Mr. Kennedy once spoke—inaccurately, to put it mildly—of a ‘missile gap’ between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now he faces a real gap between the reach of his proclaimed intentions and the timidity with which he has sought to bring life to those intentions. It is nothing less than a ‘credibility gap,’ and one he must close if his second term is to be anything close to a success.”

  It was a stern judgment, but one that Kennedy could not dismiss. Losing the fight to desegregate coffee shops and hotels had been a blow, but if it had been the price for Senator Russell’s silent assent on his stealth Vietnam plan, it had been a price worth paying. This fight, however, was about the right to vote: the issue Kennedy himself had argued was the key to racial progress. Besides, there were new voices out there that made the nonviolent civil disobedience of Martin Luther King seem the mildest of provocations. There was Stokely Carmichael, who talked of vindicatin
g civil rights “by any means necessary” and who had engineered a significant change in the name of the organization he led: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had become the Student National Coordinating Committee. There was Carmichael’s SNCC colleague James Foreman, who had said publicly, “If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off.” There was Malcolm X, the onetime Black Muslim spokesman, who had talked of “white devils.” (True, he had disavowed his more incendiary anti-white rhetoric before he was murdered, but those earlier, harsher sentiments were resonating across black America.)

  So, yes, he had to get a voting rights bill through the Congress, but the 1964 election had left it a Congress where, despite the big Democratic majorities, that conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats still held the whip hand, tying his own team in knots.

  There had to be some answer.

  And there was . . . even if it did come in the form of a telephone call from the unlikeliest imaginable source.

  • • •

  “How are you, Lyndon? Or should I say, ‘Mr. President.’”

  “Doing the Lord’s work down here,” the president of Southwest Texas State Teachers College said. “We’ve got plans for eighteen buildings now, aiming for close to sixteen thousand students, and I’m squeezing some of my oil friends to join me in doing serious penance for their evil ways with some serious donations. In a year or two I’m gonna have a few thousand young coloreds and Mexicans here who wouldn’t have dreamed they’d ever set foot on a college campus except as maids and porters. I’ve got to tell you, Jack—Mr. President—I’ve never been happier.”

  When Lyndon Johnson resigned the vice presidency in early 1964 and retreated to Texas, the investigations into his finances ended. Most of those who knew Johnson, and who knew his primal fear of humiliation, assumed he would end his days in seclusion and that his end might come swiftly. It was a shock to almost everyone when he stepped into the presidency of his old alma mater and turned his ferocious energy into a massive fund-raising and expansion program.