If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (12 page)

•   •   •

They sat on an open porch under a clear blue, late August sky, in shirtsleeves and shorts, lunching on clam chowder, lobster rolls, corn on the cob, and beer, bemoaning the performance of the Boston Red Sox—eighteen and a half games out of first place—and choosing the man who would almost certainly become the next vice president of the United States.

From the moment Lyndon Johnson stepped down some seven months ago, speculating about the identity of John Kennedy’s running mate had been one of Washington’s favorite indoor sports. Some of it reached the outer limits of whimsy. In late spring, Kenny
O’Donnell showed the President an Art Buchwald column in which the humorist asked: “Why doesn’t Bobby Kennedy move to New York, change his residency, and run with Jack? Think of all the money they could save on bumper stickers.”

(“Bobby as a New York politician? With his accent,” the President laughed, “they’d run him out of town in a week.”)

Now, just three days before the opening of the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, there was nothing whimsical about the conversation. With the Goldwater nomination, the Republicans had made the terms of their case clear: the Kennedy administration was committed to socialistic Big Government at home and paralyzed by weakness and indecision in the face of a worldwide Communist threat abroad. Kennedy and his team had little concern about the domestic argument: voters had shown their approval of an expansive government for thirty years. When Ike became the first Republican president in twenty years, he’d done nothing to undo the programs of the New Deal. But the charge of weakness in the face of a Communist foe? Yes, that had the potential to cause real political damage, especially given Kennedy’s call for a dramatic reexamination of cold war thinking.

That’s why the President was determined to keep a contentious issue like Vietnam off the political radar screen as much as possible; why he’d brushed aside the possible confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin; why he’d told Senator Mansfield that he could do nothing about winding down America’s role until after November. (“If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red Scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damn sure that I am reelected.”)

It was also why Kennedy and his advisors agreed that the defense credentials of his running mate had to be unassailable—which pretty much ruled out Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey.

“He’s been a good friend,” O’Brien said. “Really pushed hard for our agenda in the Senate.”

The President added, “And no one’s better at standing up for us with the ‘honkers,’” the term he used for the more assertive liberals.

But Hubert was an all-out advocate for peace. He’d been pushing for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty for years; had called for a “hard look” at defense spending. Beyond the specifics, his very identification with the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party—civil rights advocates, intellectuals with a fondness for government planning—was not going to help Kennedy as he reached for independents and liberal Republicans for whom Goldwater was suspect goods.

By contrast, several Democratic senators were undeniably hawkish on defense matters; two of them had been serious contenders for the vice presidency four years ago. Washington State’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a pro-labor, pro‒civil rights liberal who was also a champion of ever larger military spending (“the senator from Boeing,” he was called, after the aerospace and defense giant whose headquarters were in Seattle). His anti-Soviet credentials were impeccable, so much so that he’d forced Kennedy into significant concessions before signing on to the Test Ban Treaty. And that was a problem.

“I can’t be campaigning on a promise of peace while my running mate is going all over the country promising to liberate Eastern Europe and unleash Chiang Kai-shek,” Kennedy said.

Moreover, Jackson shared a liability with Humphrey: geography.

Because the legacy of the Civil War had made it impossible for a Southerner to win a presidential nomination, the Democratic Party was all but required to pick someone from a Southern or border state for the second spot on the ticket. Only FDR had broken that tradition when he chose Iowa’s Henry Wallace in 1940; and when
he dumped him four years later, it was Missouri’s Truman who took his place.

It had always been Kennedy’s intention, despite the rumors, to keep Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, to help him once again in Texas and the South. And when scandals forced Johnson off the ticket, he and his aides had looked first to the South for a running mate: to a progressive like North Carolina governor Terry Sanford or Tennessee senator Al Gore Sr. Neither, however, had the kind of national security credentials Kennedy was looking for, and in any event it was highly possible that the South was more or less a lost cause.

“Well,” Kenny O’Donnell said, “I think we’re back to Stu.”

“Isn’t this where we came in?” Sorensen cracked.

Four years ago in Los Angeles, Symington was widely assumed to be Kennedy’s choice for running mate—so much so that he’d begun drafting his acceptance speech. There were still some around the President, including his brother, who insisted that the offer to Lyndon Johnson had been a formality, a courtesy, and that once Lyndon said no, they’d turn to Symington. Now the twin demands of policy and geography made him an even stronger choice. Domestically, he was in good standing with labor unions, big-city machines, and the civil rights movement. On defense, he’d been the first secretary of the Air Force during the Truman administration, and he fully embraced the argument that a loss of any nation to communism would send the dominoes crashing.

And he was from Missouri—a border state with twelve electoral votes that Kennedy had won by just 12,000 votes—a quarter of 1 percent—in 1960. If it wasn’t the home run that LBJ had been for them in 1960, it was a prudent, safe choice, “just like the Hippocratic oath the doctors take,” Sorensen said. “‘First, do no harm.’”

It would be almost two years before Sorensen, and every other close Kennedy hand, realized how wrong that judgment was.

•   •   •

“Mr. President, I think we’ll be getting to bed a lot earlier than we did last time,” said Kenny O’Donnell. It was just after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, and they were settling in at the Hyannis Port family compound, shuttling back and forth between Jack’s home and Bobby’s, converted into an Election Night headquarters with dedicated phone lines and tickers from AP and UPI. They all remembered the endless night in 1960: the early lead from the East eroding, the bad news from Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio, the razor-thin margins in Texas and Illinois, the agonizingly close loss in California.
Not this time,
the polls were saying.

He’d begun the day in Boston, driving with his wife from his official residence at 122 Bowdoin Street to the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library on Cambridge Street, carefully navigating the steps to the basement, where the voting booths were. They voted, smiled for the cameras, then flew by helicopter to the Cape, where the President soaked his chronically painful back in a hot tub, napped, played with his children outside in the brisk fall air. Pictures would be supplied to the wire services in time to hit the afternoon papers; if they inspired a voter to head to the polls and vote for the handsome young father with the adorable children, so much the better.

If he and his team exuded confidence this night, there was good reason. Presidents are almost never turned out of office in a time of peace and prosperity, and he had both working for him. The jobless rate was still under 6 percent, inflation was nonexistent, and in the words of
U.S. News & World Report
, “It’s been a generation or more
since the world was as quiet as now.” The Republicans had never united behind Goldwater; traditional voices of the party, like the
New York Herald Tribune
and the
Saturday Evening Post
, either refused to endorse him or even backed Kennedy.

The Democratic Party’s mid-August convention in Atlantic City was a model of civility—at least, compared with many past Democratic conventions. (Sure, it might have been better to hold it in Miami, given that Florida’s fourteen electoral votes were up for grabs; but they could not risk disruptive, even violent demonstrations from Miami’s Negro population or from the city’s rapidly growing Cuban exile community.) There was only one potential for disruption in Atlantic City: the demand of an ad hoc integrated “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” to be seated in place of the all-white segregationist official delegate slate, headed by the unrepentant white supremacist senator James Eastland. The Kennedy White House had persuaded a broad coalition of civil rights groups to declare a moratorium on demonstrations to avoid stirring up white resentment, but an outbreak of disorder between white police and black residents in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia put the issue back on the front pages. For the White House, seating the integrated “Freedom Democrats” meant trouble: since they had organized outside party rules, the organization Democrats—the Mayor Daleys, the John Baileys, the Jesse Unruhs—were bound to be unhappy. What saved the peace was Kennedy’s very weakness in the South. With little need to placate the region, it was easy to pass a strong civil rights plank and a pledge that, in 1968, no delegation would be seated unless it could demonstrate an open, unsegregated process. With that, the Mississippi delegation walked out, and five Freedom Democrats were seated as at-large delegates.

In a convention with no doubt about the identity of the
nominees and no dispute over platform planks and credentials, the energy level was low, and vice presidential nominee Stu Symington’s vapid acceptance speech did nothing to excite the crowd, provoking NBC’s Sander Vanocur to comment, “They say in Missouri he tried to give a fireside chat and the fire went out”—a crack that earned him a formal censure vote from the Missouri Democratic Party.

That all changed when John Kennedy walked to the rostrum.

When the cheers and applause finally stopped after fifteen tumultuous minutes, he offered good-natured but pointed humor directed at his Republican rival.

“I note with some amusement,” he said, “that my opponent has expressed a desire to debate. So let me suggest to my distinguished opponent that if he wishes to get a little experience under his belt before the ‘main event,’ he might start by debating the Republican governor of New York, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, and the Republican governor of Michigan, all of whom have called his ideas and proposals wholly outside the mainstream of American thinking.”

Then he turned to the major themes of his address. He’d told his speechwriting team he wanted to steer a middle course between blunt appeals to personal interest and sweeping, gauzy visions.

Back in the spring, White House aide Dick Goodwin had been taken with a phrase from older Progressive journalists like Herb Croly and Walter Lippmann: “The Great Society.” It might be a way, he thought, to elevate the campaign with a vision of an America that went beyond a series of reforms and legislative ideas.

“No,” Sorensen said. “Too grandiose; it’s overreaching. It’d be fine for Hubert or Lyndon, but you need to remember,” he added, “the President doesn’t think the way you do or I do. In a sense, he’s a conservative—in the real meaning of the word.”

So in place of “the New Frontier,” Kennedy called for “a New Patriotism.” It was designed as an answer to the patriotic themes of the Goldwater campaign—“a real-life, grown-up version of that old playground game, ‘Capture the Flag,’” as
Washington Star
reporter David Broder put it.

“The New Patriotism of which I speak,” Kennedy said to the convention, “is clear-eyed, tough-minded, unafraid. It remembers that ‘America the Beautiful’ asks God not just to ‘shed His grace on thee’ but to ‘mend thine every flaw.’ It reveres our freedom so much that it seeks to ensure those freedoms to every one of our citizens, of every race and creed. It recognizes the patriots in uniform who stand on the watchtowers of freedom—and the patriots who are giving two years of their lives as Peace Corps volunteers, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, teaching the young, nurturing the old, on every continent of the globe. And next year we will be asking other patriots to join in that work in the inner cities and rural hollows of our own nation—when we launch AmeriCorps early in 1965.”

He ended by reframing the most famous line from his 1961 inaugural.

“Four years ago,” he said, “I asked Americans to ‘ask what you can do for your country.’ In that same spirit, I ask you tonight to consider not ‘Are
you
better off than you were four years ago?’ but ‘Are
we
better off than we were four years ago? Is our land more just? Is the world at peace? Are we bringing hope to the hopeless?’ That is the measure by which I ask you to judge these past four years. If you once again give us your hand, your heart, your voice, and your vote, I will spend every day so that four years from now, all of us can answer: ‘Yes, we
are
better off than we were, because we have helped to build a world more peaceful, more just, more free.’”

For the next eight weeks, Kennedy pursued that theme relentlessly as his campaign never stopped reminding voters of the peril a
Goldwater presidency would mean. In what became the most controversial message of the entire election, a one-minute ad appeared on daytime television on CBS and NBC on September 7, 1964, in the middle of
Days of Our Lives
and
As the World Turns
: A four-year-old boy wanders into a kitchen as his mother turns away; he walks toward a stove where a pot sits, just coming to a boil; he reaches his hand out to it. As his mother lunges to save him, the film cuts to a massive nuclear explosion as an announcer’s voice intones, “Every mother knows . . . a moment’s miscalculation can mean disaster for her family. In a nuclear world, it can mean disaster for mankind. A steady course is our best hope to avoid that disaster. On November third, vote for President Kennedy. Stay the course.”