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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  There’s a white house in the capital

  And inside are the Kennedys,

  And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

  And they all sound just the same.

  There’s Bobby, and Teddy,

  And Jacqueline and the President,

  And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

  And they all sound just the same.

  • • •

  What that dismissive view missed was how Kennedy’s political caution was offset by a stylistic boldness. In his youth, his good looks, his use of language, in the frank embrace of the arts, high fashion, and physical exertion, Kennedy was demonstrating a presidential energy not seen since the days of Theodore Roosevelt; in an age of mass media, that energy was reaching millions. Back in 1960, novelist Norman Mailer had written about the potential impact of a Kennedy presidency this way:

  “If one had a profound criticism of Kennedy, it was that his public mind was too conventional, but that seemed to matter less than the fact of such a man in office because the law of political life had become so dreary that only a conventional mind could win an election. Indeed there could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable. It was the changes that might come afterward on which one could put one’s hope. With such a man in office the myth of the nation would again be engaged . . .”

  Kennedy’s aide Richard Goodwin put it this way: “He seemed to embody the idea of America . . . [I]t had to be constantly renewed, always contemporary . . . JFK expressed, in words, in action, in manners, his own belief in America’s possibilities; that we were a nation with a large purpose, a mission.”

  Five years later, that myth had taken hold, especially among younger Americans. Even before Dallas, there was something attractive, even cool, about the idea of their country being governed by a young, handsome, apparently physically robust man with a younger, undeniably hot wife. When a photo of a grinning, dripping-wet President on a public beach in Los Angeles surrounded by admiring onlookers appeared, one editor said, “Can you imagine seeing Ike or Harry Truman like that? And would you want to?”

  And it wasn’t even that surprising when, in February of 1964, four young men from Britain found themselves invited to the White House after their concert at the Washington Coliseum. In a surprise event, kept off the public schedule, Kennedy introduced them to an audience of 200 at the White House East Room with a mocking complaint.

  “Not since the British burned the White House in 1812,” Kennedy said, “has a foreign invader conquered our land as swiftly and thoroughly as have John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And not since the Volkswagen,” he added, “has there been a greater threat to the U.S. trade balance than the emergence of the Beatles.” In the days that followed their brief performance, newspapers and magazines had a field day with composite photos showing what Kennedy’s hair would look like on the foursome—and what JFK would look like with a moptop.

  It was, of course, impossible to measure what the impact on the national mood would have been had that all been lost in Dallas. Dean Acheson had tried to capture it when he wrote to a British friend, observing that “if this young and vibrant man had become a corpse within an hour, the vast factor of chance and insecurity in all our separate lives as well as in our collective life would have become oppressive and paralyzingly terrifying.”

  Kennedy himself pursued that line of thought in a conversation with Arthur Schlesinger on an early June evening in 1965 when he scoffed at the notion that great sweeping forces make history inevitable.

  “Do any of your colleagues,” he asked, “really believe that if Zangara had killed Roosevelt in Miami that John Nance Garner would have led us out of the Depression? Or that if Halifax had been chosen as prime minister instead of Churchill the British would have survived the Blitz? Or, not to compare myself with those giants—”

  “Of course not, Mr. President—”

  “—if that nut outside my home in Palm Beach had blown me up, do you think it might possibly have made a difference if Lyndon had been president during the missile crisis?”

  “As long as you’re being morbid,” said Schlesinger, “if it had stopped raining in Dallas, and the bubble top wasn’t on your car, it has occurred to me to wonder where we’d be in Vietnam . . .”

  But the rain hadn’t stopped; the bubble top had stayed on. And John Kennedy was still president, a figure with a force of personality that resonated far more than did his cautious politics. For example, if he was the symbol of the government, then there was something attractive, even cool, about signing up out of college for something more than immediate lifetime employment. It wasn’t as if anyone with a college education was going to find trouble getting a job—not in this economy, with steady growth, low unemployment, and no inflation. You could hardly walk across a campus without stumbling across a recruiter for GM or IBM or GE or U.S. Steel or any of the other corporate behemoths that were promising twenty-one-year-olds generous salaries, health care, and retirement benefits. Signing up for two years with the Peace Corps even came with a draft deferment—not that anyone was worried about the prospect of being drafted for a nonexistent war.

  Now, after Kennedy survived an attempt on his life, the power of his image had grown far more powerful. Norman Mailer himself had captured the power of that survival in an Esquire essay, “Lazarus in the Oval Office,” when he wrote, “To the myth of the Outsider was now added the myth of the Invincible; Superman had come not to the supermarket, but to the streets of an inhospitable city at high noon, and had returned to us whole. Led by a man with such powers, who would not follow?”

  So when in early 1965 the Congress authorized AmeriCorps, Kennedy’s domestic version of the Peace Corps, the response was overwhelming. AmeriCorps recruiters saw lines at Columbia University snaking out of Low Library, doubling back over the length of College Walk. At the University of Wisconsin, a line of more than a thousand students stretched down the steps of the Memorial Union, down Langdon Street for three blocks; and at Berkeley, where a university ban on off-campus political activity on campus had led to an explosive confrontation a year earlier, another near riot ensued, this time when the AmeriCorps recruiters ran out of applications. SDS, while expressing “clearly warranted skepticism,” encouraged its members “to test the ability or willingness of a government agency to challenge the injustices.” In Newark, SDS cofounder Tom Hayden left the Community Union Project to sign on as the regional deputy director of AmeriCorps.

  (Not everyone followed Hayden’s example. A twenty-seven-year-old Berkeley graduate student named Jerry Rubin left his studies to work as a high school organizer for Junior Achievement, which taught teenagers how to start a company, sell stock, and produce and sell a product. “I’ve found the New Frontier and its address is Wall Street,” said Rubin, who would go on to build a hugely successful penny-stock company before his youthful treasurer fled the country with his fortune. “I never should have trusted an accountant under thirty,” he said to the sentencing judge.)

  Even as the youth culture was setting hands to wringing and stomachs to churning, even as young men’s hair began to grow longer and young women’s skirts began to grow shorter, even as the lyrics of the music grew racier, there was an absence of darkness, of rage. Elders might be dense, clueless, intolerant, but it wasn’t as if there were a war raging; it wasn’t as if there were a chance that the young men pursuing lingerie or protesting racial discrimination might be plucked off a campus to face combat and possible death 10,000 miles away; it wasn’t as if their television screens were filled with pictures of carnage at the hands of their own countrymen.

  In fact, the news seemed to be of a very different kind: from the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, to the 1964 JFK-Khrushchev Moscow Summit, to the negotiations on a coalition government in Vietnam, to the Harriman-Dobrynin Geneva negotia
tions on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, there was tangible evidence that the superpowers were slowly, steadily stepping away from the cold war precipice.

  Even more newsworthy was what wasn’t being reported in the news. More and more, Kennedy was tapping the journalists he had turned to before as a way to opening channels that could not be tapped through regular sources. Former Look magazine editor William Attwood, now a special representative to the United Nations, was in regular contact with Cuban diplomats, probing for possible openings toward renewed diplomacy. (This had led to a rare, sharp argument between the President and his brother, who still looked for ways to topple Fidel Castro. “Give it up, Bobby,” the President finally said. “This isn’t some grudge match.”) Norman Cousins, the Saturday Review editor who had played a crucial role in the Test Ban Treaty negotiations, had left the magazine to devote himself and his considerable family fortune to lobbying work, hiring director John Frankenheimer to create a “Promise of Peace” series of television commercials.

  Most remarkable was the role about to be played by one of the country’s best-known journalists.

  Theodore H. White—“Teddy” to everyone who knew him—was the author of The Making of the President 1960, a groundbreaking look at the election that took readers behind the scenes, and turned the Nixon-Kennedy contest into a romanticized battle, with Kennedy clearly wearing the white hat. Long before this success, Teddy White’s beat had been China. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a degree in Chinese studies; he’d spent years in the country and had written a book, Thunder Out of China, that noted the corruption of the Nationalist pro-American government led by Chiang Kai-shek, and chronicled the power and popularity of Mao’s Communist force. That viewpoint had forced White to leave the employ of Time owner Henry Luce, whose devotion to Chiang bordered on the messianic.

  Kennedy and White had talked about China often, White chiding Kennedy for his “Who lost China?” demagoguery as a young congressman, Kennedy asking White early in his presidency whether he thought there’d be any point in pursuing a meeting with Mao in Asia.

  Now, in July of 1965, Kennedy invited White up to Hyannis for a strictly off-the-record chat. “I think it’s time,” Kennedy said, “for Americans to get a long, inside look at China from someone who knows the country well. Someone like you.”

  “Well,” White said, “there is that small matter of a travel ban on U.S. citizens traveling to the mainland. I’ve grown quite fond of my passport.”

  “Travel regulations are not writ in stone,” the President said, and pressed the issue. “We’re talking about the most populous nation on earth, an atomic power. I read the speeches of some of their leaders, and they seem perfectly happy with a war that leaves three billion dead, as long as the survivors are Communists. You know those leaders; they’ll talk with you. And when they do, I want you to deliver a message from me. I want them to know we’re open to the idea of a different relationship with them.”

  Teddy White chuckled.

  “I’m missing the joke,” Kennedy said.

  “I’m just imagining what Richard Nixon is going to say when he learns the President is interested in opening the door to Red China. I think he’s going to throw a fit . . . and then he’s going to see how much trouble he can cause you.”

  Neither White nor the President could imagine it, but it wasn’t Richard Nixon who posed potentially fatal political trouble for President Kennedy. That would come from a few men who had occupied some of the most powerful positions in America’s public and private power centers. Two years before, they had seen Kennedy as a potential threat to the nation’s long-term security. Now, for a handful of them, the threat was no longer potential. It was clear and present. In 1964 they had stayed their hand for fear that the alternative, Senator Barry Goldwater, was too hot-tempered, too impetuous, to occupy the Oval Office. Now, in Vice President Stuart Symington, they saw a serious, levelheaded statesman with a commitment to a strong defense and a tough-minded approach to the Soviets.

  And so, they decided, the time had come to render President Kennedy politically impotent, with the one weapon against which he had no real defense: himself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE THREAT

  Mistah Speak-ah . . . the President of the United States . . . and one very sexy brother-in-law!”

  The sixteen guests gathered around the dining room table stood and applauded in a semi-serious salute as Ethel Kennedy sat down. The President raised his champagne glass and gestured to his younger brother, then began his toast by mocking his most famous speech.

  “Let the word go forth, from this time and place, that the torch must soon be passed from an officially middle-aged, increasingly frail Secretary of Defense . . . a man who, to paraphrase my good friend and former adversary, has always believed that ruthlessness in defense of the President is no vice—and moderation in pursuit of our common enemies is no virtue. To my older younger brother: May your next forty be as tranquil, as peaceful, as trouble-free as your first forty. Happy birthday, Bobby.”

  Bobby Kennedy stood and acknowledged the raucous cheers with a tongue-in-cheek response of his own.

  “My thanks, Mr. President—for all you have given me over the period of the last two decades: every gray hair, every wrinkle in my forehead, as well as every terror that awakens me at three o’clock in the morning. If there is anyone who seeks to know what torment an older brother can inflict on his helpless younger sibling, let them come to Hickory Hill!”

  The men and women at the table on this late November evening in 1965 were among the closest of Kennedy confidants: Ben and Toni Bradlee, Red Fay, David Hackett, LeMoyne Billings, Charlie Bartlett. It is doubtful that any of them, no matter how close, fully grasped the truth behind Robert Kennedy’s remarks. They all knew that from the moment John Kennedy entered public life, Bobby’s life had been spent in the service of his brother. They all knew of the endless hours he’d spent organizing the campaigns, using the power of persuasion and threat to extract support. What none of them knew was just how much energy Bobby had spent in protecting his brother from mortal threats to his political life—none more dangerous than the threats that had emerged just before the President had gone to Texas exactly two years ago. As he concluded his brief thank-you and sat down, he was again struck by a thought he could not share with any of them: the bullet that had almost taken John Kennedy’s life may well have spared him from an end to his presidency.

  • • •

  Where did it stem from, this compulsive, careless, reckless pursuit of women, this apparent indifference to the risk to his political career, this behavior that had continued—even accelerated—after he’d won the White House?

  Maybe it came from the example his father had set. Joe Sr. would bring his mistresses home, invite them to dinner with his wife and children; he’d enter the guest rooms where friends of his daughters were staying; his sons would warn their dates to be careful. His children not only knew of Joe’s philandering, they would sometimes look for female companionship for him during his travels.

  Maybe it came from his many brushes with early death, in hospital beds, on operating tables, and in the waters of the South Pacific, which taught him that his life would likely end early, and that pleasure was to be taken whenever and wherever he could find it.

  Maybe it came from the medication he’d been taking since youth; the corticosteroids he’d been ingesting to deal with his many intestinal maladies were thought to spark the libido.

  Maybe it came from a sense of entitlement as the handsome, charming son of one of the richest men in the United States. He’d never had to pay a bill, wait on line, or defer any desire, so why deny himself a woman he fancied? The fact of his marriage was of no matter; when he was escorting his youngest brother, Ted, down the aisle, he’d whispered, “Just because you’re getting married doesn’t mean you can’t have other women.” As for Jackie . . .
of course he loved her, but that was another part of his life, far removed from the diversions of the moment.

  And if he thought himself invulnerable to exposure—if it was true that he’d once said, “They can’t touch me while I’m alive, and when I’m dead, who cares?”—he had good reason for his confidence. The press culture of the time drew clear lines between a man’s public and private behavior, in part, no doubt, because of the people-who-live-in-glass-houses rule: How many reporters, editors, or news executives could survive scrutiny of their behavior? When there were hints that a story might surface, the power of the Kennedy family or its money could usually compel or purchase silence. Whatever the reasons, from the time he’d entered public life, his compulsive, reckless sexual behavior had never become a matter of public knowledge, save for the occasional rumor, even when there was a determined effort to make his conduct a public scandal—even when there was proof of a sort . . . as Leonard and Florence Kater had learned.

  One night in 1958, the Katers were awakened at 1:00 a.m. by the sound of someone throwing pebbles at the upstairs window of a room they had rented out to a young Senate aide named Pamela Turnure. It was her employer, Senator Kennedy, who was demanding—and got—entrance to her room. The Katers, straitlaced folks, were sufficiently outraged to rig up a tape recorder in the air vent that led to Turnure’s room and recorded what went on during Kennedy’s next visit.

  The Katers threw Turnure out—but Florence Kater didn’t stop there.

  “I was so outraged that this Irish Catholic senator, who pretended to be such a good family man, might run for president, that I decided to do something about it,” she said. That was an understatement; what she launched was something of a crusade. She and her husband staked out Turnure’s new residence and snapped a picture of Kennedy when he next visited her. They called his father. They drove to his Georgetown home and waited for him—provoking Kennedy to warn: “If you ever bother me or my father again, I’ll see to it that you never work in Washington as long as you live.” They picketed Kennedy’s campaign appearances with homemade signs, and inundated more than thirty reporters at newspapers and magazines. Only the Washington Star began looking into the story, then dropped it for unknown reasons. And the one source that did publish that photograph helped undermine the story. It was the Thunderbolt, a neo-Nazi white supremacist newsletter. (It wasn’t even that clear a picture—Kennedy had covered his face with a handkerchief, and besides, it could have been taken anywhere.)