If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History
Authors: Jeff Greenfield
ALSO BY JEFF GREENFIELD
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FICTION
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Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Greenfield
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenfield, Jeff.
If Kennedy lived : the first and second terms of President John F. Kennedy : an alternate history / Jeff Greenfield.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-13844-5
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. Imaginary histories. I. Title.
E841.G653 2013 2013030929
973.922092—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
FOR DENA
THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
DALLAS, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, 7:30 A.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
DEALEY PLAZA, DALLAS, TEXAS, 12:30 P.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME
THE OTHER CAMPAIGN: RESOLVING THE VIETNAM DILEMMA
THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
I
t was Thursday, July 14, 1960, in Room 9333 of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and Kenny O’Donnell was furious at the man he had just helped nominate for president of the United States.
Again and again, John Kennedy had assured the unions, the civil rights leaders, the liberals and intellectuals whose support he needed, that Texas senator Lyndon Johnson would not be his choice for vice president. For those constituencies, the majority leader of the Senate was too tied to the corporate interests of his home state, too willing to weaken or abandon strong civil rights legislation, too much the symbol of wheeler-dealer insider politics.
Yet now, little more than twelve hours after Kennedy had won a first ballot nomination with a razor-thin margin of five delegates, he had offered the second slot on the ticket to Johnson—and Johnson had accepted.
“I was so furious I could hardly talk,” O’Donnell remembered years later. “I thought of the promises we had made . . . the assurances we had given. I felt that we had been double-crossed.”
So O’Donnell demanded to confront Kennedy face-to-face, and the nominee complied, taking O’Donnell into the bathroom for a private conversation and assuring him that the job would actually diminish Johnson’s power by placing him in a powerless, impotent job.
“I’m forty-three years old,” Kennedy said, “and I’m the healthiest candidate for president in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
The man who gave his disaffected aide this reassurance had already lost a brother and a sister in airplane crashes; had almost died when his ship was destroyed in the South Pacific during World War II; had been stricken with an illness so serious in 1947 that he had been given the last rites of his church; had undergone a life-threatening operation in 1954 to save him from invalidism—an operation so serious that he was away from his Senate seat for nine months; and had been living with a form of Addison’s disease—hidden from the press and public—that required a regular dose of powerful medicine and made him live virtually every day in pain.
For a man so often described as “fatalistic”—who on the day of his murder mused to his wife, and to that same Kenny O’Donnell, about the ease with which “a man with a rifle” could kill him—Kennedy’s blithe assurance about his invulnerability to fate seems astonishing. If nothing else, his immersion in history must have taught him that seven presidents had died in office, three violently; that FDR had barely escaped assassination in 1933; and that Harry Truman had been the target of assassins in 1950. Kennedy himself would escape death at the hands of a suicide bomber less than five months after speaking those comforting words.
Maybe, though, Kennedy’s words are not so astonishing. They reflect an impulse deep within the human spirit: to push aside the power of random chance in favor of a more orderly, less chaotic universe. Even someone like John Kennedy, who had come close to death more than once, could casually dismiss the whole idea of considering that possibility when choosing the man to stand “a heartbeat away.”
Many historians take the same approach in dealing with the what-ifs that drive excursions into “alternate history.” For them, it is at best a parlor game, at worst a nuisance. “What
did
happen,” they argue, “is what matters. Playing the alternate history game is like asking, ‘What if Spartacus had had a jet?’”
I take a different view. Historian H. R. Trevor-Roper wrote:
“At any given moment in history, there are real alternatives . . . How can we ‘
explain
what happened and
why
’ if we only look at what happened and never consider the alternatives . . . ?”
The alternatives, however, are not boundless. Asking “What if JFK had become a born-again evangelical?” or “What if a Soviet scientist had invented the Internet in 1965?” might make for an entertaining piece of fiction, but it violates the single most critical element of alternative history:
plausibility
. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson (who prefers the term “virtual history”) says, “By narrowing down the historical alternatives we consider to those which are
plausible
. . . we solve the dilemma of choosing between a single deterministic past and an unmanageably infinite number of possible pasts.”
If you’re going to argue that history would have been very different if someone else had occupied the White House in a time of crisis, you have to show why
: what
in this individual’s character, beliefs, impulses, and past actions would have made the difference. In
Then Everything Changed
,
my previous excursion into alternate histories, the small twists of fate that would have seen John Kennedy killed before ever taking office, or that would have saved Robert Kennedy from assassination, or that would have seen Gerald Ford keep the presidency in 1976, were all rooted in hard facts. And the hugely consequential changes that would have flowed from those small twists of fate were based on the beliefs, impulses, and character traits of these men and their contemporaries, gathered from biographies, oral histories, interviews, and memoirs.
I’ve brought this same approach to a question that is as prominent in the what-if realm as any: What if John Kennedy had not died in Dallas? The very small alteration of meteorological history that would have saved his life is well-known already—indeed, many in Dallas were painfully aware of it within minutes of the shots—and it is completely, deeply plausible.
And after that tiny twist of fate saves the President? I’ve sought to keep that plausibility as my polestar. As I did in
Then Everything Changed
, I’ve consulted biographies, oral histories, and memoirs (my debt to them is explained specifically in the afterword). I’ve also conducted interviews, in person, on the telephone, and via e-mail, with a variety of observers, including Dick and Doris Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Norm Ornstein, Walter Shapiro, Meryl Gordon, Tom Hayden, Fred Kaplan, David Talbot, and Todd Gitlin (though they bear no responsibility for the speculative history I offer). Most of the fictional events presented have their origins in reality: the “facts on the ground,” as they existed in November 1963. The opinions, the speeches, the conversations I recount from the days and months and years leading up to November 22 did in fact occur. More broadly, the political currents that shape the 1964 Kennedy reelection campaign, the decisions about Vietnam and the cold war, the forces that reshape America’s culture, the threats to Kennedy’s political survival and reputation, all were in place before Kennedy went to Texas. The question I try to answer is: How might John Kennedy’s instincts, his understanding of history, his core impulses, have led him to deal with these forces? For instance, John Kennedy tended toward a dispassionate, detached, analytical approach to issues; he was in this sense the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson, who saw political threats and opportunities through an intensely personal prism. A detached, dispassionate president might not have had the commitment to fight hard for a civil rights bill or commit the nation to “war on poverty.” But that same detached, dispassionate approach might have prevented a president from escalating a war out of a refusal to be “the first president to lose a war” (as LBJ once famously put it). This does not mean that my version of what happens is “right,” but it does mean that it starts from what is
known
.
Two final notes: First, I essentially put aside the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy. For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought that the evidence of Oswald’s guilt is strong, but to plunge back into decades of speculation would simply overwhelm everything else. This book is about what happens after the assassination attempt
fails
.
Second, the story I tell here is neither hagiography nor pathography. Anyone seeking to imagine an eight-year Kennedy presidency has to come to grips with his strengths and weaknesses, his admirable and deplorable character traits. My intention here is to do just that, and to suggest how that mix of traits might have altered one of the most turbulent periods in our history.