If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (10 page)

Now Walton and Bolshakov were exchanging confidences both reassuring and alarming.

“The President and the Attorney General want to reassure Chairman Khrushchev that we know your government had nothing whatever to do with the events in Dallas,” Walton began. “They believe that since the resolution of the Cuban conflict, there have been significant steps in improving relations, and they have high hopes for further progress.”

“You should know,” said Bolshakov, “that when Khrushchev
heard of the shooting, he was distraught, in tears—and when he learned that the President would live, he wept for joy. Our fear however is that there were powerful forces in reactionary circles that may have tried to kill the President . . . We know that your generals, your financiers who profit from the weapons trade, your ‘Birchers,’ may have wanted the Texan with his oil friends in the White House. But”—and here Bolshakov lowered his voice—“your President is not the only leader who is threatened in his own house. The Chairman has his enemies as well; they think him too eager to deal with the United States, too eager to embrace ideas that do not fit their orthodoxies. Some of them never forgave him for exposing the crimes of Stalin—they tried to remove him six years ago—and after the missile crisis, some of them condemned the settlement as a defeat.”

“Let the Chairman know that some of
our
top military men said the same thing about President Kennedy,” Walton said.

“What is important,” Bolshakov said, “is that your President knows that the Chairman’s political survival is very much at issue in the next year. Anything that improves the material situation of the Soviet people will improve his chances to remain in power. We may not have the same political process as you do,” he said with a smile, “but it’s not as it was with Stalin. The Presidium members would think twice about removing a leader who has the support of the people.”

Six months later, on June 1, John Kennedy, along with his wife, members of his cabinet and national security staff, and a group of congressional leaders, stepped off Air Force One into the chilly afternoon at Vnukovo airport in Moscow, where Chairman Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a carefully assembled crowd of onlookers greeted them. It was a trip surrounded by controversy from the moment it had been announced. Barry Goldwater
called it “another step on the President’s misguided march to Munich.” Richard Nixon wrote in a column for
Time
magazine, “While of course I wish the President well, I have real concerns that political and public relations considerations may lead him into ill-considered agreements that would have serious repercussions for the security interests of the United States.” Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. was less diplomatic:

“Back in the days when Vice President Henry Wallace was looking at the Soviet Union through his rose-pink-colored glasses, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce labeled his delusions ‘globaloney.’ We now offer a modest addendum to her vocabulary: President Kennedy will soon embark on an exercise in ‘summ-itiocy.’”

There were cautionary notes from the press as well:
Time
magazine pointed to “the abject disaster of the first Kennedy-Khrushchev confab in Vienna, where the rotund, bellicose Kremlin boss browbeat the untested, ill-prepared Kennedy—which led to a wall in Berlin, and Soviet missiles on our doorstep.” Columnist Joseph Alsop, a friend of the President’s and a militant hawk, urged the President to reconsider his “foolhardy mission to Moscow, where his hunger for an election-year success poses a real danger of long-term strategic disaster.”

The White House surrounded the trip with built-in safeguards. Kennedy brought with him congressional leaders from both parties: Senate minority leader Dirksen, Aiken of Vermont, Kuchel of California, and Saltonstall of Massachusetts were among the Republicans; so was North Dakota’s Milton Young, whose presence was explained by the agreement to sell 6 million tons of grain to the Soviet Union over the next three years—a boon to the wheat-growing farmers of the Midwest. And on his way to Russia, the President stopped off in Warsaw, where he was greeted by a crowd of 300,000 in Krasinski Square, who serenaded him with “Sto Lat!
May You Live a Hundred Years.” (He sang to them what he called “a traditional American song, ‘When Polish Eyes Are Smiling.’”) His speech, carefully vetted to avoid unsettling Moscow, spoke of “the irrepressible spirit of the Polish people, which no would-be conqueror will ever dominate.” It was a speech aimed more to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cleveland than to Warsaw. He also met with a gathering of Poland’s Catholic leaders, including the forty-four-year old archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla, whose striking looks and youthful energy had made him a hero to the city’s young.

“They tell me you’re called ‘the John Kennedy of the Church,’” the President said. “If you plan to seek higher office, give me a call.”

“Well, Mr. President,” Wojtyla said, “our religion would not be a problem as it was for you, but my geography might be.”

Then came four days of official formality and private conversations: dinner in the Great Hall of the Kremlin, a visit to Leningrad’s Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery to honor the fallen during the World War II Nazi siege, and an evening at the Bolshoi Ballet that tested the President’s back and his patience.

“My God, the things I do to avert a Third World War,” he groaned.

The heart of the trip was a string of agreements between the two nations—on cultural exchanges, increased trade, and a preliminary effort toward limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and the stockpiling of nuclear arms. In an unprecedented address on Soviet television, Kennedy recalled the words of his inaugural address.

“Your country and mine,” he said, “have different traditions, different beliefs, different ideas of what a just and free nation looks like. But just as we joined together to fight a common enemy twenty years ago, so we can join together to fight the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease—and war itself.”

The most important words were spoken in private—words exchanged by the two leaders in three separate meetings, with only their interpreters present; words spoken by two men who had brought the world to the brink of annihilation, and who had been profoundly shaken by that experience. They spoke of China’s growing militancy, its contempt for Khrushchev’s overtures to the United States, its casual acceptance of a nuclear war that might kill 300 million people as long as it ended in a Communist triumph.

“Our schism began,” Khrushchev said, “when I refused to share our nuclear weapons technology with them. But our intelligence services tell me they will have the bomb soon—maybe before the year ends.”

“Perhaps,” Kennedy said, “instead of a joint space venture, we might launch a joint venture to ensure that doesn’t happen . . . I mean that in jest, of course.”

“Too bad,” said Khrushchev.

Kennedy’s address to the Soviet people—broadcast on all three American TV networks—was a message aimed squarely not just at the Soviet leaders but at the broad American electorate, designed to confront the opponent he was most likely, and most eager, to face in November. Kennedy’s political calculus was simple: if the Republicans nominated a candidate with a reputation for caution and good judgment, they could neutralize or at least minimize the peace question and give voters the freedom to vote on other issues, like the paralysis in Washington, or the growing racial divide. But if the 1964 campaign could be cast as a choice between a careful, prudent president, and a challenger who seemed casually indifferent to the dangers of nuclear weapons, the contest would be over before it started.

And in his fervent hope, Kennedy had no stronger allies than those who were working most feverishly for just that opponent.

•   •   •

They weren’t going to let it happen again.

For a quarter century and more, they’d seen their Republican Party—the party of the Main Street shopkeeper, the farmer and rancher, the third-generation owner of a small factory, the school board member, the town doctor—railroaded by the big Eastern banks, the corporate giants, the newspaper and magazine titans, the Wall Street law firm partners with Roman numerals after their names, the blue-blooded families of Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, Philadelphia’s Main Line, the men who sat on the governing boards of Harvard and Yale. They’d seen their hero, Ohio senator Robert Taft, denied the presidential nomination three times, losing to a millionaire utility executive, Wendell Willkie; to a Wall Street lawyer, Tom Dewey; and, in 1952, to a war hero who hadn’t even decided he was a Republican until that year. Taft had come to that convention with more than enough delegates to win, but the East Coast didn’t want a solid Midwestern conservative; so the
New York Herald Tribune
,
Time
and
Life
, New York governor Dewey, and the big banks cooked up a naked power grab, a “fair play” resolution that took away his Texas and Georgia delegates and gave them—and the nomination—to Ike.

“Every Republican nominee since 1936,” Taft had said afterward, “has been picked by the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

Sure, Ike had won the White House, but so what? In eight years, he hadn’t undone a single piece of the New Deal—even
added
a cabinet department; sent troops to Little Rock to force blacks and whites to go to school together; shoveled as much foreign aid abroad as Truman had ever done . . . even invited Soviet dictator Khrushchev to visit the United States.

Well, not this time. Four years ago, Barry Goldwater had declined to fight Richard Nixon for the 1960 nomination—it was too late anyway—but he’d told conservatives to “grow up” and take the Republican Party back. And that’s what they were doing precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. They’d actually openly borrowed a tactic from the hard left, packing meetings, staying late, wearing out their opponents with parliamentary warfare, until they’d grabbed control of so much of the party’s apparatus that the fight was over before it had officially begun. They’d had a moment of doubt, even panic, on November 22 when they first heard the news that the President had been shot; if John Kennedy had died in Dallas, their efforts might have been wasted.

“America’s not going to change presidents twice in one year,” they nervously told each other as they waited for news about Kennedy’s condition. But he’d lived . . . which meant they were looking at a clean sweep in the South, a strong showing in the mountain West, and some real possibilities in the Midwest, where middle-class folks were getting an unappetizing taste of what an overbearing, intrusive government could do to their schools, their homes, their values. And who better than Barry Goldwater to run against a slick, rich, glamorous aristocrat whose father had bought him the White House? Maybe Americans did admire the Kennedys—their youth, their good looks, their wealth—but the other side of admiration is envy, even resentment, and if that resentment were to feed anxiety, that could even trump a low jobless rate and a growing economy. As Clif White, the strategist who organized the Goldwater insurgency, put it, “Pocketbook issues can take a backseat if you’re afraid someone’s going to steal your pocketbook on the way to the grocery store.”

Besides, even if electing Goldwater was an uphill battle, better
to lose with a leader who
fought
the battle than to win with someone who
surrendered
before the first shot was fired—someone who captured the conservative cause boldly.

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient,” he’d written, “for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” On civil rights, his personal views diverged sharply from his political positions. In Phoenix, he’d desegregated his family’s department store and led the efforts to integrate local schools and restaurants and the state’s National Guard. But he’d been telling Southern audiences for years that the federal government should not enforce school segregation by force, because the Supreme Court’s decision “was not grounded in law.” And he’d opposed Kennedy’s public accommodations civil rights law as an intrusion on a private citizen’s right to do as he wished with his own property.

His foreign policy approach was equally uncompromising.
Why Not Victory?
he’d asked in a book title. Why not challenge the Soviet Union’s conquest of Eastern Europe? Why not unleash Chiang Kai-shek and give him the support to retake China from the Communist rulers? Why not put the full force of American might behind the toppling of the Cuban dictator who’d established a Communist beachhead ninety miles from Miami? He’d been openly contemptuous about Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge that helped end the Cuban missile crisis. “We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” he said. And if Goldwater was untroubled by the idea of nuclear weapons as useful tools for the U.S. military, that was no different from the views of the Joint Chiefs and other key military men. “Disarmament” was a Soviet ploy to end America’s nuclear superiority, a critical counterweight to the massive Red Army spread out across Eastern Europe. “Let others
talk about test bans; I want the ability,” Goldwater said, “to lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin.”

To his fervent supporters, these and other views—ending diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, repudiating the Test Ban Treaty, making Social Security voluntary (which would effectively end the system)—were squarely in the mainstream of muscular, patriotic conservatism. To the broader electorate, which had lived through three decades of a moderate-liberal consensus and twenty years of a cold war framed by a balance of power, they sounded odd, eccentric, dangerous. Throughout the nominating season, moderate and liberal Republicans warned again and again that the nomination of Barry Goldwater would split the party and ensure the reelection of President Kennedy. And the conservatives replied, again and again:
You don’t understand America; there’s a conservative majority that’s stayed home in November because they’ve never had a candidate of their own.
Hell, one of FDR’s original brain trusters, Raymond Moley, was making the same argument. Besides, the quarter century of frustration at the power of the Eastern liberal Republicans was not about to be deterred. So when Goldwater won the winner-take-all California primary on June 2—helped immeasurably by the birth of a son to Nelson and Happy Rockefeller just three days before—the fight was essentially over.