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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  So John Kennedy’s indifference to the dangers of his behavior might be understandable, but Robert Kennedy knew it was badly misplaced. For one thing, the administration had been paying a heavy political price for silence almost from the beginning. For another, on the eve of his departure for Texas, some of the details about John Kennedy’s private life were in danger of public exposure.

  The FBI’s files on John Kennedy’s liaisons reached back to the early 1940s, when he’d had an affair with a Danish-born expatriate named Inga Arvad, who was suspected of being a Nazi agent. They were as recent as his affair, while president, with Judith Exner, who was also the mistress of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. (Frank Sinatra had introduced her to both men, before Robert Kennedy forced his brother to cut off all ties with the singer out of concern for Sinatra’s gangland friendships.) More to the point, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was at pains to let the President and his brother know what he knew about the link between Exner, Giancana, and Kennedy; it was nothing less than a gold-standard job-security guarantee. (Hoover would turn the mandatory retirement age of seventy in 1965 and was determined to stay in the job he’d held for more than forty years.) There was a “mutually assured destruction” tinge to all this—given what the Kennedys knew about Hoover’s own private life, they had protection against Hoover spreading secrets—but Lyndon Johnson had been right, if inelegant, when he observed that “Hoover has Kennedy by the balls.”

  It was bad enough for Bobby that he had to yield to Hoover’s imperious demands: signing off on the bugging of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel rooms and offices, enduring Hoover’s obsession with a virtually nonexistent U.S. Communist Party and his indifference to organized crime. But in October of 1963 he’d been forced to beg for Hoover’s help in containing a potential public scandal. It arose from the stories coming out of one of Capitol Hill’s most influential figures: Senate Democratic secretary Bobby Baker, the thirty-four-year-old protégé of Lyndon Johnson. When Baker’s financial dealings became the focus of official and press inquiries—how did a young man on the government payroll accumulate a net worth of $2 million?—investigators learned that Baker was a source not only of limitless campaign cash but of women—“party girls” as they were called—courtesy of the Quorum Club, which he’d run out of a Capitol Hill hotel. The problem for Bobby was that one of the prostitutes, twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Rometsch, had been a frequent visitor to the White House. And because Rometsch had fled East Germany and now worked at the West German embassy, Hoover was convinced that she was a Communist spy.

  Bobby Kennedy thought he’d contained the Rometsch problem back in July, when he’d had her summarily deported to West Germany in the company of her boyfriend—who happened to be one of Kennedy’s old investigators from his Senate Rackets Committee days. Now, however, with the Bobby Baker story exploding, her name had come to the attention of one of the most fearless investigative reporters in Washington: Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register. On October 26, Mollenhoff reported, “Evidence is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials” who Rometsch had partied with.

  The story sent the White House into a frenzy of urgent telephone calls. And Bobby had been forced to turn for help to the man he most despised, begging Hoover to meet with Senate leaders from both parties, assure them that Ellen Rometsch was not a spy, that there was no evidence that she’d had sex with any White House official . . . but that the trail from Baker’s prostitutes to any number of senators was clear and crowded. (“Boy,” President Kennedy had said with no apparent irony to his friend Ben Bradlee, “the dirt [Hoover’s] got on those senators, you wouldn’t believe it.”)

  That effort by Hoover did little to ease Bobby’s mind. What if the press kept following the story of the President’s extracurricular behavior? Back in June, he’d had to confront two reporters from the New York Journal-American for publishing a story linking a British prostitute to a “high elected American official”—by which, they said, they meant the President. That kind of pressure was just not going to work with Mollenhoff, who’d had run-ins with Bobby Kennedy in the past and who was already driving the administration crazy with his investigations into a huge defense contract. What if Ellen Rometsch, furious at her deportation, went public? What if Mollenhoff put her in touch with Senator John Williams, the Delaware Republican who often acted as his own Sergeant Friday, and whose zeal in exposing corruption had put more than one official miscreant in prison? What if Williams brought her back from Germany? He wouldn’t be diverted by pleas from the leadership. And what of all those people privy to the President’s behavior—a rogue Secret Service agent, say, or one of the partygoers at those highly private social gatherings?

  And then the President went to Texas . . .

  No one—not Mollenhoff, not anyone—was going to write about the President’s sexual behavior while he lay in a hospital bed, fighting for his life, any more than they would have written about LBJ’s financial behavior had he succeeded to the White House if Kennedy had not survived his wounds. In a moment of national trauma, there was simply no appetite for such a story. Even the best-selling book in America, a highly critical, non-salacious account of the President called JFK: The Man and the Myth, disappeared from bookshelves within hours of his shooting. Mollenhoff put it bluntly in his diary a week after Dallas: “Any reporter who wrote about where the President might have been putting his penis would have been ridden out of town on a rail . . . if he was lucky.”

  The expected revelations about Bobby Baker, the “party girls,” and “high executive branch officials” never developed; in an ironic twist, it was Baker’s mentor, Lyndon Johnson, who was the victim when the stories about financial kickbacks and his rise to great wealth forced him from office. Even among those who knew of Kennedy’s behavior, there was a belief that he had changed—that the loss of his infant son and the shooting that had happened with his wife at his side had curbed his appetites—at least for now.

  So by the time the President was raising his glass to celebrate Robert’s fortieth birthday, his brother could relax, more or less confident that John Kennedy’s private life would remain just that . . .

  Unless, of course, there were powerful people with a powerful motive to make it public.

  • • •

  By late 1965, John Kennedy’s determination to move out of the cold war framework of the last two decades had become steadily more apparent. His long-held belief that nationalism was the dominant force in the developing world was now more or less official policy. Back in May, for example, he had refused the urgent requests of his military and hard-line elements in the State Department to send Marines into the Dominican Republic to prevent a leftist politician from assuming the presidency.

  “If our boys set foot on that island,” his aide Dick Goodwin had argued, “it will give Fidel ten years’ worth of speeches denouncing ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ Juan Bosch may make some of our multinationals unhappy, but he’s certainly no threat to us.”

  At the United Nations, special representative William Attwood was in the second year of intermittent conversations with Cuban diplomats, testing the possibilities of a thaw between Washington and Havana. Sometime over the summer, Cuban official Carlos Lechuda brought with him a gift for the President: a box of one hundred of the finest Havanas. They were H. Upmanns, Hoyo de Monterreys, and two dozen Cohiba Robustos cigars that would not be formally introduced in Cuba until the next year, for the exclusive enjoyment of Fidel Castro and the inner circle of his government and the Communist Party.

  When the Secret Service said the cigars needed to be tested for possible contamination, Kennedy refused.

  “No,” he said, “only our intelligence people would be stupid enough to try something like that.”

  As for the central players in the cold war, the Harriman-Dobrynin talks in Geneva had yielded a framework for negotiations on strategic arms limitations . . . although the
President himself was dubious about the real significance of such agreements.

  “I think the idea that we’re closer to peace if we each have five hundred missiles instead of a thousand is an illusion,” he said in an off-the-record conversation with half a dozen columnists. “We don’t distrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we distrust each other. But I suppose, as a symbol, it has its uses, and it’ll make the folksingers happy. You know that song by Joan Baez that says ‘The paper they were signing said they’d never fight again’? They actually did sign a piece of paper back in 1928. It was called the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Didn’t quite work, did it?”

  In fact, the symbolism was more powerful than Kennedy had imagined. When U.S. and Soviet diplomats met to draft the specifics of a treaty, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists “Doomsday Clock,” which had been set at seven minutes to midnight in 1960, and twelve minutes to midnight after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, was moved back to twenty minutes to midnight. The thaw between the two powers led to more openness on the cultural front. CBS broadcast a two-hour special from the Bolshoi Ballet, while Soviet TV carried a two-hour pop and jazz festival from Lincoln Center’s newly opened New York State Theater, although one band had to be cut because Soviet officials made it clear that they would not broadcast the “degenerate music” of the Beach Boys. (“Apparently,” Kennedy said at a press conference, “KGB agents discovered that if you play ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ backwards, it says ‘Marx was wrong.’”)

  No piece of symbolism was more powerful and controversial than the issue of Life magazine that hit the newsstands on September 17, 1965, with its striking cover headline: INSIDE RED CHINA TODAY. To the surprise of its readers—and the smoldering resentment of its competitors—Life carried a 25,000-word report from Theodore H. White, accompanied by photographs from the magazine’s most celebrated photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt. (Time-Life owner Henry Luce had signed off on the project, insisting only that a flattering profile of Chiang Kai-shek be included in the issue.) White was unsparing in his portrayal of a ruthlessly authoritarian regime, and also wrote of “a potential schism within the Communist leadership that could propel a cadre of fanatics into positions of authority—fanatics who seem determined to launch a new revolution, to wipe out every trace of traditional culture.”

  By contrast, his portrait of Premier Chou En-lai, whom White had met decades ago during his years in China, was benign—as were some of Chou’s words.

  “Ten years ago,” Chou said, “your secretary of state, Mr. Dulles, refused to shake my hand at the Geneva summit. It was the clearest signal imaginable that your government was determined to impose the puppet Chiang regime on the people who had thrown him out—as you yourself, Mr. White, witnessed and reported. Your political leaders call us an ‘outlaw nation.’ So how is it that we have normal, civil diplomatic relations with virtually all of your allies—Britain, Canada, France? We trade with each of these nations . . . none of which have anything in common, nor any admiration, for our social system (as we have little admiration for yours). So, perhaps it is time for you Americans to ask yourselves two questions: First, which of us is the truly ‘isolated’ one? Second, if you are so proud, so confident of your way of life, what is it about us that you fear?”

  When asked about the Life spread at his next press conference, Kennedy at first said only: “I read it with interest.” Then, in an answer that seemed clearly crafted in advance, he added:

  “If we were to have diplomatic relations only with those countries whose principles we approved of, we would have relations with very few countries in a very short time. We recognize and trade with the Soviet Union; does anyone seriously argue that this means we endorse communism? We recognize and trade with Spain and Portugal. Does that mean we endorse dictatorships? I’ve said many times that we have neither the ability nor the intention to impose our will on any nation; our test is whether a nation abides by the norms of international diplomacy and respects the integrity of its fellow members of the world community.” He ignored the shouted follow-up question: “Do you believe Red China meets those standards?”

  DID JFK HINT AT RED CHINA RECOGNITION? the Washington Post headline asked the next morning. For some of the President’s political foes, the answer was clear.

  “An ill-conceived, naive, dangerous notion,” Richard Nixon said in a last-minute addition to his speech at the Chicago Commonwealth Club. “Mao and Chou lead a totalitarian regime that has openly welcomed the idea of a nuclear war that would kill billions as long as it ended in a Communist conquest. They have called the United States ‘a paper tiger,’ and the President’s remarks will only confirm their belief.” Connecticut senator Tom Dodd, a prominent Democratic hawk, took to the Senate floor to denounce “this latest demonstration of a profound weakness of will.” At the White House, 600 members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom marched with picket signs and an oversize white flag, chanting: “Hey! Hey! JFK! How many Reds did you hug today?”

  And Time reported that “from Tokyo to Manila to Jakarta, from Singapore to Bangkok to Melbourne, a sense of unease has fallen across the Asian continent: Was Uncle Sam preparing to abandon its commitment to its free world allies, to usher in Red China as the ruler of a new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

  “‘It took war to free us from the Japanese tyrant,’ remarked a frowning cabdriver in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Does Mr. Kennedy not understand that we will fight another to save us from a Red one?’”

  Despite its harsh words, Time was one of dozens of magazines and newspapers to apply for permission to report from mainland China. When the requests were granted, New York Herald Tribune columnist Roscoe Drummond wrote, “This is another signal—cryptic though it may be—that the Kennedy administration is preparing the nation for a new relationship with Communist China . . . and a broader change to the two-decade-old core of U.S. foreign policy.”

  To many of those who had shaped and executed that policy, and who still believed in it to their core, there was nothing cryptic about the signal. They would turn to their allies in Congress and in the media to resist what they saw as President Kennedy’s dangerous views. For a few of these men, however, the matter was far more urgent; in fact, it was nothing less than an emergency. The President was pursuing a course that threatened the United States . . . and he had to be stopped.

  • • •

  This was no group of conspirators that had set out to plot against a president. Many had voted for Kennedy in 1960; some had gone to work in his administration, and still held key posts inside the national security-defense-intelligence complex, while others occupied corner offices in law firms or held tenured posts at prestigious universities. Within that group was a much smaller circle: men who believed that John Kennedy’s course would weaken the nation irreparably. They had watched him flinch from decisive force at the Bay of Pigs and during the missile crisis . . . stage a furtive retreat from South Vietnam . . . begin to bargain away the country’s military superiority over Moscow . . . permit a leftist to assume power in the Dominican Republic . . . and open the door to legitimizing the most militant Communist power on the planet. Their years-long doubts about his ability and character—“a weak leader,” “a coward,” “a degenerate”—had hardened into a blend of contempt and fear: contempt for his judgment and character, fear over where he would leave America when his term ended in 1968.

  Look at what he’d done with his staff in his second term. Dean Rusk was out at State, exiled back to the Rockefeller Foundation. Walt Rostow was packing up at his State Department post, from which his stream of memos to the White House had gone largely unread. Now McNamara, that numbers-obsessed technocrat, was at State, with George Ball his chief deputy. And Bobby Kennedy, of all people, was at Defense, driving the Joint Chiefs crazy with his assaults on “waste” and his edicts about racial discrimination.

  In their most private of conversations, some of these men pointed
to an unhappy accident of fate that had left John Kennedy in the Oval Office. Were it not for the weather in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson would very likely have become president, with instincts and judgments very different from Kennedy’s. He was, they believed, far more traditional in his approach to America’s adversaries—“You have to treat them like any bully,” he’d long argued, “show them you’re willing to fight and they’ll back down”—far more deferential to the recommendations of the military and the wise men of the Democratic Party, the Achesons and Nitzes and Cliffords. During the missile crisis, Johnson had sat virtually silent during the ExComm meetings, but he let it be known later that he would have gone with the Chiefs and taken those missiles out promptly.

  Now Johnson was gone, but in Vice President Stuart Symington they saw something of a kindred spirit, with a mind-set firmly anchored in cold war assumptions; one who would never have set out on the path Kennedy was following, and who would not continue on that path should he be in charge.

  If Symington was unhappy at Kennedy’s policies, he made it certain that no one but a few intimates knew of it. (He’d be sixty-seven in 1968, but that did not mean he couldn’t try once more for the White House.) Had he known there was a determined effort under way to undermine Kennedy’s hold on the presidency, he would have been appalled. But he didn’t know, and none of those behind the effort had any intention of telling him . . . especially considering the weapon they intended to use.