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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  If alternate history is a work of imagination, the “alternate historian” has one obligation to readers: plausibility. That’s why many of the words spoken here have been taken from real life, although not at the same time and place as they appear here. The thoughts and opinions have been drawn, wherever possible, from the historical record. In telling this story, I’ve tried as much as possible to draw conclusions based on what the principals said and thought in “real life.” I’ve also sought the guidance of others to help me paint as plausible a portrait as possible.

  What follows is in no sense a “bibliography.” It’s simply a way of letting you know some of the sources for this speculation—apart, of course, from my fevered imagination.

  DALLAS, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 22, 1963: The events of that day, the political atmosphere in Texas, the feud within the Democratic Party, as well as the conversations, are drawn from three books: Richard Reeves’s President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993); Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life (2003); and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV (2012).

  Kennedy’s instructions to Michael Forrestal to organize a top-to-bottom review of Vietnam after the first of the year, and his assessment of the 1964 political climate, can be found verbatim in Reeves’s book.

  JOSEPH KENNEDY JR.: The political ambitions of the eldest Kennedy son are recounted in The Lost Prince (1969) by Hank Searls and in The Patriarch (2012) by David Nasaw. Nasaw also details Joe Sr.’s influence on John Kennedy’s career.

  LUCKY TO BE ALIVE: Dallek, who had unprecedented access to Kennedy’s health records, has detailed accounts of the President’s lifelong health woes in his book, and in an Atlantic magazine piece (2002). The best account of John Kennedy’s ordeal in the South Pacific can be found in Caro’s LBJ book, which argues that Kennedy in fact performed heroically.

  TWO TELEPHONE CALLS: The most detailed account of the phone calls that helped free Martin Luther King Jr. from a Georgia jail—and thus may have helped determine the 1960 election—is found in The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (2006) by Nick Bryant, a largely critical account of Kennedy’s record. The specific election results I cite, and many more, are also taken from Bryant’s book.

  SHE CAME TO THE DOOR: The near death of JFK in Palm Beach at the hands of a suicide bomber has been largely forgotten by history. The most detailed account I have found is in a newspaper article by Robin Erb in the Toledo Blade of November 21, 2003. In his memoir, Secret Service Chief, U. E. Baughman provides a brief account.

  I dealt at length with this incident in my previous alternate history book, Then Everything Changed, which imagines what might have happened had Mrs. Kennedy not come to the door, and had Pavlick in fact killed Kennedy.

  THE DALLAS VENUE: The dispute over where JFK was to appear at a luncheon is described by Kennedy’s advance man, Jerry Bruno, in his book The Advance Man (1971), which I cowrote.

  JIM LEHRER AND THE BUBBLE TOP: Jim Lehrer recounted his experience in Dallas, when his inquiry to the Secret Service led to the call downtown, and the decision to remove the bubble top, in an interview marking the fortieth anniversary of the assassination. It can be found here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/kennedy/lehrer.html. I’ve altered the interview to make it conform to the alternate history.

  THE SHOOTING, THE AFTERMATH, AND THE MEDICAL CARE: The details of the motorcade come from a variety of sources, including extensive viewing of the on-air coverage, both network and local. The reporters and anchors described here all appear more or less as they did on November 22. Moments after the shooting, KRLD’s Eddie Barker was reporting live from the Dallas Trade Mart, where he noted that weather forecasters had been predicting rain all day, and that the skies had cleared shortly before the President arrived in Dallas. The actions of the Secret Service detail are taken from Warren Commission testimony, as are the accounts of the medical personnel. Admiral Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician, in fact told the doctors treating the President to “get him some steroids . . . because he’s an Addisonian.”

  RFK: The accounts of Robert Kennedy’s actions on November 22 come from Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy: His Life (2000), including his immediate suspicion that the CIA, or organized crime, or the Teamsters, may have been involved with the shooting. Both Thomas’s book and David Talbot’s Brothers (2007) describe Robert Kennedy’s suspicions that others besides Oswald were involved in the President’s death. There is no concrete account of any specific evidence Robert Kennedy had for this suspicion, but it is clear that he was fully aware of any number of people who would have been happy to see either Kennedy dead.

  Thomas’s book tells of a Teamster enforcer who set out to assassinate RFK until Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa called him off, fearing government reprisals against the Teamsters.

  While this is speculation, it is possible that Robert Kennedy’s doubts stemmed from the same feeling millions had: How could one insignificant, dysfunctional, trouble-plagued individual have committed so historically significant an act?

  OSWALD’S CAPTURE: The details of Lee Harvey Oswald’s capture come from Gerald Posner’s book Case Closed (1993, 2003), which argues that Oswald was in fact the lone assassin. He drew his account in large measure from the Warren Commission testimony of police officers and other witnesses to the shooting of Officer Tippit and the capture of Oswald in the Texas Theatre. Obviously, the shooting of Oswald in the theater did not happen.

  KENNEDY’S RECOVERY: The imagined recovery of Kennedy is patterned after President Reagan’s 1981 recovery after being shot by John Hinckley. A photograph of the Reagans, cropped to hide the nurse standing beside the President, appeared in newspapers all over the world. I’ve “reframed” the most memorable image of the post-assassination period, that of three-year-old John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin.

  More broadly, given the impact of that four-day period, captured with special vividness in Caro’s The Passage of Power, it is not hard to imagine the sense of relief that would have greeted Kennedy’s survival. Indeed, we don’t have to imagine it: Look back to the surge in good feeling toward President Reagan after he lived through an assassination attempt. The Acheson letter is a reworking of a letter he wrote to a British friend after JFK’s death, portions of which are quoted in Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953‒71 (1994) by Douglas Brinkley.

  LYNDON JOHNSON’S FALL: The Senate and Life magazine investigations into Lyndon Johnson are reported in great detail in Caro’s The Passage of Power. After JFK’s assassination, Caro reports, the Senate investigation faded away, and Life magazine’s editors decided, in effect, that the new president needed a chance. NBC did launch a topical political comedy program, That Was the Week That Was, in January 1964. Johnny Carson’s joke about an “impeachment”-flavored ice cream was told by the comedian about Nixon after the Watergate scandal emerged.

  “PARKLANDERS”: The tradition of a president punctuating a State of the Union speech by citing people in attendance began in 1982, when President Reagan acknowledged Leonard Skutnik, who helped rescue victims of a Washington plane crash. In the years that followed, such individuals were labeled “Skutniks” by the press.

  CIA-FBI MALFEASANCE: For the CIA’s performance in the weeks and months preceding JFK’s assassination, see Jefferson Morley’s “JFK at 49: What We Know for Sure,” Huffington Post, November 22, 2012. The FBI’s performance, and Hoover’s directive to destroy a note from Oswald to the Dallas FBI bureau, is covered in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (1994) by Curt Gentry.

  THE FIGHT FOR A SECOND TERM; JFK’S REELECTION PROSPECTS: Richard Reeves’s book has a detailed account of the first (and only) reelection strategy meeting, which took place ten days before the President’s death. The quotes from the participants are all real. Many books (including the Caro and Dallek books) offer assessments of Kennedy’s political strengths and weaknesses. For an exhaustive lo
ok at the Democratic Party’s prospects before and after Kennedy’s death, see JFK, LBJ and the Democratic Party by Sean Savage (2004).

  NRA: The organization did endorse a ban on mail-order gun sales in the words quoted, before pressure from its members forced it to retreat.

  RACE AND POLITICS: See Savage’s book for descriptions of the emergence of “backlash,” and for Governor George Wallace’s campaigns in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries. See also Rick Perlstein’s book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) for a vivid account of the emergence of “backlash” as a political issue. Representative Griffiths’ letter to the President is quoted by Reeves. The assessments by Time and Look are real.

  Richard Russell told colleagues that JFK could not have passed a civil rights bill, but that Lyndon Johnson could (the actual comment is in Caro’s book). I have reversed it, of course.

  Teddy White’s prescient words about backlash come from his classic The Making of the President 1960.

  THE MOYNIHAN REPORT: In 1965, a leaked, incomplete account of Daniel Moynihan’s report The Negro Family created a political firestorm, forcing President Johnson to retreat from its findings and triggering a blaming-the-victim controversy. For a contemporary, measured account, see Thomas Meehan’s article in the New York Times Magazine, July 3, 1966. For a current “revisionist” assessment, see “Revisiting the Moynihan Report” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic, June 18, 2013.

  THE PEACE ISSUE: Kennedy’s “discovery” of the peace issue’s potency is described by advance man Jerry Bruno in our book. The World’s Fair speech borrows a few lines delivered by President Johnson when he opened the Fair, and adds lines that JFK delivered on several occasions, including his American University speech of June 10, 1963.

  JFK’S MOSCOW VISIT: Artist and Kennedy friend Bill Walton did meet with Soviet officials shortly after JFK’s death. Details of Kennedy’s “visit” are borrowed from Richard Nixon’s 1972 journey to the Soviet Union.

  THE GOLDWATER CAMPAIGN: The movement that led his nomination is the subject of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2009). Hillary Rodham (Clinton), a “Goldwater Girl” in 1964, used language strikingly similar to the line quoted from his acceptance speech in her Wellesley College commencement address in 1969.

  THE HAWKS’ DISAFFECTION: The critical comments about Kennedy are found in David Talbot’s Brothers.

  SYMINGTON AS VICE PRESIDENT: By all accounts (see, for example, White’s Making of the President 1960) Stuart Symington was Kennedy’s likely pick as running mate.

  DEBATES: Barry Goldwater often spoke of conversations he’d had with Kennedy, about the possibility of “Lincoln-Douglas” debates held across America. Historian Michael Beschloss, in a phone interview on April 9, 2013, discounted the likelihood of debates. “He wouldn’t have debated Goldwater in a million years. Can you imagine Kennedy giving a platform to someone that far behind him?”

  By contrast, former Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, in an interview in Concord, Massachusetts, on May 17, 2013, thought Kennedy would have debated, “but no more than one or two.”

  RESOLVING THE VIETNAM DILEMMA: WHAT WOULD JFK HAVE DONE? It is at the center of speculation about what would have happened if Kennedy had lived: What would he have done about Vietnam? It is often entangled in motives; “keepers of the flame” are certain he would not have escalated the war; Kennedy skeptics suggest he would have been compelled by the same “facts on the ground” as Johnson was, or note that his avowed goal to begin withdrawing U.S. forces had been overtaken by the coup that deposed Ngo Dinh Diem less than three weeks before Dallas.

  There is, of course, no definitive way to answer this question. An excellent starting point, however, is Vietnam: If Kennedy Had Lived (2009) by James Blight, Janet Lang, and David A. Welch. The book contains the transcripts of a three-day conference held at the Musgrove Plantation in 2005 among historians, other academics, and policy makers from the Kennedy-Johnson era. It also includes extensive declassified documents from the National Security Council and other sources (many of the quotes in this section of the book come from those documents).

  At the end of the conference, a majority of participants concluded that Kennedy would not have escalated the war in Vietnam and would have been willing to accept the political cost of disengagement. Kennedy raised the idea of a Geneva-conference-Laos-like solution to Vietnam in a conversation with the State Department’s Roger Hilsman, according to Hilsman’s oral history at the JFK library.

  All of the pre‒November 1963 comments by Kennedy, his advisors, and media voices are real.

  THE CAMP DAVID MEETING: Paul Kattenburg was the head of the State Department Working Group. He recounted his “emperor has no clothes” moment during a National Security Council ExComm meeting on August 31, 1963, in a 1981 interview with WGBH:

  “I blurted out, perhaps it was imprudent for me to do it, but I blurted out that we consider the possibility of withdrawing with honor, that this was, in other words, a time to review our stake . . .” A few weeks later, Kattenburg was removed as head of the Vietnam Working Group.

  KHRUSHCHEV AND VIETNAM: The fictional “understanding” here parallels the diplomatic maneuvering that led to the neutralization in Laos in 1961.

  RICHARD RUSSELL: The phone call between Kennedy and Russell is a near-verbatim rendering of a call between Russell and President Johnson on May 27, 1964. The audio and the transcript are available from many sources, including the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program. The frustration of both men is apparent, as is the chilling sense of foreboding. Both seem to know disaster is coming; neither can figure out how to avoid it. My premise is that a president inclined to disengage would have seen the Russell conversation as a potential opening.

  A DIFFERENT COUNTRY—BUT HOW DIFFERENT? THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT: The idea of a deposed Vice President Johnson calling JFK to offer advice is a fantasy. What is true is that the Kennedy White House did not possess anything like the legislative shrewdness of Johnson; he had offered advice to Ted Sorensen in 1963 about the timing of civil rights legislation and the advice was ignored.

  The biographies of the African-American participants at the imagined “Vets for the Vote” rally are all historically accurate.

  LIBERAL OPTIMISM AND THE SIXTIES: Would the protest movements of the 1960s been different had President Kennedy lived? An affirmative answer comes from both sides of the political spectrum. In interviews conducted in the spring of 2013, SDS founders Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin argue that—with one crucial caveat—the counterculture would have had a very different tone.

  “I think you have a very different history if JFK lives,” Todd Gitlin says. “The whole left would have had a soft landing; you’d have had cultural estrangement but not bitterness.” But Gitlin’s premise rests on the idea that Kennedy would not have escalated Vietnam.

  “The Vietnam War is what drives the movement crazy,” he says. “Without Vietnam, there’s no way to get from anger to ‘Blow it up!’”

  Tom Hayden, who described the early sixties SDS as “reformist . . . the model was peaceful transition,” says that the assassination drained a sense of optimism out of the movement.

  “There was a sense that ‘if this could happen, anything can happen.’”

  Author David Talbot argues that “if there’s no JFK death, and no Vietnam, there’s no Weather Underground, no bomb throwers, no ‘cops as pigs’ . . . [T]he assassination robbed us of the possibility of change.”

  At least one view from the right shares some of this view. In his book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (2007), James Piereson argues that the essentially optimistic, patriotic liberal outlook was fatally damaged by the failure to acknowledge that JFK had been killed by a deluded
Marxist. Assigning blame on a “culture of hate” meant a much harsher, less benign view of the United States, which enabled conservatives to “capture the flag” as the champions of patriotic values. Two points here: First, if you believe that Kennedy was in fact killed by a right-wing conspiracy, this argument is fatally flawed. Second, it may not put enough emphasis on the way the Vietnam War darkened the assumptions of the protest movement. The speculative question I do not deal with is: If JFK had lived and escalated the war, would the darker, more violent aspects of the protest movement still have emerged?

  TEDDY WHITE AND CHINA: Richard Reeves’s book says JFK had a conversation with Theodore H. White in 1961 about the possible benefit of a meeting in Asia with Mao Tse-tung. Dean Rusk is cited in several works as saying Kennedy intended to normalize relations with China in his second term.

  THE THREAT: JFK’S PRIVATE LIFE: The accounts of President Kennedy’s sexual behavior range from the cautious to the salacious; at one level or another, they are recounted in Reeves’s and Dallek’s books; in Sy Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot (1997); in John F. Kennedy’s Women: The Story of a Sexual Obsession (2011) by Michael O’Brien; and in others too numerous to list. O’Brien’s book contains a detailed look at the efforts by the Katers to expose Kennedy’s affair with Pam Turnure. The most recent book, Once Upon a Secret by Mimi Alford (2012), tells the story of her affair with the President while working in the White House Press Office.

  BOBBY KENNEDY AS PROTECTOR: Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy: His Life (2000) provides specific details of Bobby Kennedy’s efforts at damage control, including his concessions to FBI director Hoover as the price of keeping John Kennedy’s behavior private.

  TEDDY WHITE’S CHINA REPORTING AND THE FALLOUT: The author-journalist did go to China, but not until February 1972, when he was part of the press entourage that followed President Nixon on his historic visit to the country. Some of Kennedy’s press conference remarks on diplomatic recognition are taken from a speech he delivered in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 26, 1963.