If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (14 page)

However, Kennedy’s reelection did not come with coattails. Democrats picked up five seats in the House and held their majority in the Senate, which meant that the coalition of Southern conservative Democrats and Republicans still had the power to stall much of Kennedy’s agenda. The one Democratic Senate loss was painful: with Governor Connally’s all-but-open help, Ralph Yarborough lost his Senate seat to a transplanted New Englander, George Herbert Walker Bush. By contrast, the one Senate pickup gave Kennedy a special sense of satisfaction. All during the run-up to the Cuban missile crisis, New York Republican senator Kenneth
Keating had been warning of a Soviet missile buildup on the island; in ten speeches on the Senate floor, he urged the President to take action, and when the presence of the missiles was revealed, Keating’s warnings were a source of embarrassment to the White House. So when New York City mayor Robert Wagner Jr. won the Democratic nomination to oppose Keating, the Kennedy campaign funneled cash, campaign aides, and personal campaigning by the President across New York. On Election Night, Wagner defeated Keating by a 700,000-vote margin.

(Wagner’s victory had a decisive impact on New York City politics: when he resigned the mayoralty to take his Senate seat, Wagner was replaced by city council president Paul Screvane, who had enough support from the reform wing of the Democratic Party that he was able to defeat liberal Republican congressman John Lindsay a year later in a close race for mayor.)

Just after 11:00 p.m., Barry Goldwater called Kennedy to offer a gracious concession, and the two men agreed to meet at the White House in two weeks’ time. When the call ended, Kennedy and a half dozen aides and friends spent a few quiet moments over a bottle of fifty-year-old brandy and H. Upmann cigars (some of the 1,200 cigars Kennedy had sent Pierre Salinger out to buy just before announcing an embargo in 1961).

“He never had a chance, did he?” LeMoyne Billings asked.

“No, not Barry, not this year,” the President said. “But don’t forget: this is a conservative country at heart. It took a Republican Party split in half to put Wilson in the White House; it took a Depression to get FDR in and keep us there. But what happens if there are race riots not in three or four cities but thirty or forty? What happens if there’s another ‘little war’ like Korea where our boys are dying and no one really knows why? What happens if the economy stalls on our watch, which Heller thinks might happen if we can’t
get that damn tax cut passed.” He shook his head. “Why can’t these damn conservatives understand: a tax cut will give us so much growth, we’ll actually have
more
revenue. It’s so obvious.

“And what happens if somebody can make Barry’s arguments without scaring the country half to death? You all saw Ronald Reagan’s fund-raising pitch for Barry, didn’t you? Pat Brown tells me there are a bunch of millionaires in California already talking about running him for governor. Pat’s praying for his nomination, thinks he’d slaughter him, but I’m not so sure.”

As a president focused, if not obsessed, with his place in history, there was another concern: one he’d raised with Arthur Schlesinger the week before the election.

“You’re his historian, so you tell me,” he’d said, sitting in his rocking chair in the Oval Office. “Second terms haven’t exactly been raging successes, have they?”

“Lincoln and McKinley were shot . . .”

“I took care of that one in my
first
term,” Kennedy said.

“Grant left in scandal,” Schlesinger continued. “Wilson was paralyzed by a stroke, FDR lost his Congressional majority, Truman left with all-time low ratings, Ike had a stroke, Sputnik, and a recession. Of course, there
is
Teddy Roosevelt—he could have won another term if he hadn’t said he wouldn’t run; he spent the rest of his life trying to get back.”

“Well,” Kennedy said, “it’s too late to demand a recount, and I doubt we can get the twenty-second Amendment repealed. Still, there are a couple of close relatives of mine who might have an interest in seeing that the Kennedy name does not become an epithet.”

As he left the Kennedy compound for the short trip to the Hyannis National Guard Armory and his victory speech, he could be forgiven for a sense of satisfaction. He had survived an attempt on his life; he had won a victory big enough to justify an ambitious
second term. Yes, there were minefields to navigate. He was going to have to face the question of race head-on without stirring more resentment in the middle class. That meant working for two things: the vote and
jobs
.
Lyndon had been right: a white may not want to share a lunch counter or a pool with a Negro, but not letting someone vote because of skin color? He could win that fight, and once he did, as Johnson had put it, “Strom Thurmond will be kissing every black ass in South Carolina.” And, yes, welfare drove taxpayers crazy, but getting people off the dole and into a job? Sure—as long as it’s not
their
job.

And he’d have to steer a careful course abroad. There was a real chance to move away from the cold war, but not if the country thought he was letting its guard down. He’d have to find a way to untangle the mess in Vietnam—a mess in good part of his own creation—without setting off a new round of recriminations and fears that the dominoes were falling. It wouldn’t be easy, he knew, but he was determined to avoid the wounds that had afflicted his predecessors in their second terms.

Had he thought more deeply into history, he might have remembered that some of the worst wounds inflicted on even the most gifted of leaders are
self
-inflicted.

T
here was no blizzard this time to paralyze Washington on the eve of the inauguration, and predictions of a freezing cold January 20 proved happily off the mark. It was 38 degrees and the sky was all but cloudless when President Kennedy, clad in a formal morning coat and a top hat, walked down the Capitol’s east front steps to take the oath of office. (The hats were a concession to politics: he rarely wore one, but the hatters’ union vice president, Alex Rose, was the boss of New York’s powerful Liberal Party.) He’d been up late the night before, at an inaugural gala that was already provoking controversy. Along with the more traditional performers—Louis Armstrong, Barbra Streisand, Perry Como—the Gala featured for the first time stars from rock and roll, the now decade-old dominant American music that still stirred fears among some of the old that it fed rebellion and licentiousness among the young.

The Beach Boys sang “Fun, Fun, Fun (in a Second Term with JFK)”; Roy Orbison sang “Oh, Pretty Woman”—introducing it by
saying, “This one’s for you, Jackie!”—and the Supremes offered a version of Mary Wells’s hit “My Guy” with lyrics tailored for the occasion:

Here’s to JFK

On Inauguration Day,

He’s our guy,

Leader of the land,

With our future in his hand,

He’s our guy.

Three cheers from sea to shining sea

For John Fitzgerald Kennedy,

It’s genuinely great

That you’re still the head of state,

You’re our guy.

(The next day,
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock decried the “unappetizing spectacle of a celebration once steeped in tradition and grandeur sullied by an exercise in vulgarity. What next? Shall we have a hip-shaking ‘pop star’ sing the National Anthem?”)

“Four years ago,” Kennedy said in his second inaugural, “I offered a series of challenges to the American people, and said, ‘Let us begin.’ Today we can say to ourselves and to each other, ‘We have begun.’ The horror of nuclear holocaust has receded; the prospects for cooperation with our adversaries are brighter. Nuclear weapons no longer threaten to poison our atmosphere. Here at home, our economy has enriched not just the well-being of this generation but the possibilities for the next.

“And yet, that very progress shines a harsh light on those left behind: those who are denied the most basic of rights because of the color of their skin, those—of every color—condemned to a life of
poverty generation unto generation. Even as we join others in an effort to combat the tyranny of poverty and hopelessness around the globe, we must face the hard fact that, in this wealthiest of all nations, poverty still tyrannizes millions of our own.

“I have spoken often of the need for a ‘New Patriotism.’ Nothing more demonstrates a genuine love of country than the desire to see its blessings reach every one of our citizens—and the willingness to invest ‘our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor’ to make that hope real.”

The inaugural parade had been designed to his specifications; it was much shorter than the first, and featured no military hardware. He noted with satisfaction the two Negroes marching with the Coast Guard Academy honor guard. Four years ago he had been startled by the all-white honor guard and told aide Dick Goodwin to follow up. Within a year the first black member of the academy had been admitted. After a long night of five inaugural balls, with Jackie’s silver Givenchy gown the center of attention, he’d ended the evening at 2:00 a.m. as he had four years ago, dropping by the Georgetown home of columnist Joseph Alsop, the wellborn WASP who sat at the center of the capital’s aristocracy. After a brief retreat upstairs for a private engagement, he lingered over champagne and terrapin soup. Alsop, however, had something else on the menu.

“You’ve been dithering for four years, Jack,” Alsop said. (He was the only person, other than family members and the closest of friends, not to call him “Mr. President,” and thought nothing of lecturing the Chief Executive as though he were a wayward student.) “I was in Vietnam two months ago, and I can tell you without an ounce of doubt that if we do not commit combat forces into Vietnam—at least two hundred thousand of them—it will be in Communist hands within a year, and every nation in the region will be in mortal peril.”

“It’s not that simple, Joe,” Kennedy said, then held up his hand defensively. “But could I ask, as a matter of personal presidential privilege, that I might be spared such weighty matters of state at least until sunrise?”

It did not take that long—only until he was back in the limousine headed home to the White House—for him to reflect again on what the start of his second term would mean. For four years he had been feeling his way along a narrow path between a disastrous military folly 10,000 miles away and political disaster right here at home. For four years he had been telling friends and colleagues that he could not do what he wanted to do about Vietnam unless and until he was reelected.

Now, in winning that second term, he had found what just might be a path out of the Vietnam trap—a trap that had, in good measure, been of his own creation.

•   •   •

He had run for and won the presidency calling for a more offensive stance against America’s Communist adversaries from Havana to Moscow: “They have taken the lead in space, they are building bigger bombs and missiles, they are fomenting insurgencies in Latin America, Africa, Asia.”

As president, he had pressed the military for a more assertive strategy in Vietnam. If the Communists could infiltrate the South, he demanded, why couldn’t anti-Communist forces infiltrate the North? If insurgency was the big threat to Saigon, why couldn’t that threat be defeated with counterinsurgency? Kennedy had authorized $19 million for a 3,000-man special forces group to provide that capability. The “Green Berets,” they were dubbed, and they held special appeal for John and Bobby Kennedy’s faith in freelance, unbureaucratic, James Bond‒like initiative.

In his inclination to take the offensive, Kennedy was reflecting a long-standing national consensus that the loss of any territory to a Communist insurgency was a threat to every other nation in the region. His top foreign policy and defense aides believed it. At the end of 1961, Rusk and McNamara captured that consensus perfectly when they concluded: “The fall of South Vietnam to communism would lead to the fairly rapid extension of Communist control, or complete accommodation to communism, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia and in Indonesia. The strategic implications world-wide, particularly in the Orient, would be extremely dangerous.”

The major journals of opinion believed it too. When Kennedy shunned military force in Laos in favor of a neutral government,
Time
called it “a cold war defeat” and warned that “if South Vietnam falls, the fall of all of Southeast Asia would only be a matter of time. If the U.S. is to save South Vietnam, it must be willing to get far more deeply involved—to the point of fighting if necessary.” It was a consensus that was embraced, at least rhetorically, by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign.

There was, however, another side of John Kennedy, one that had long doubted the wisdom or the effect of combating an insurgent threat with a massive injection of combat troops. He and his family had visited the region in 1951, and he’d come away convinced it would be folly to “ally ourselves to the desperate efforts of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire.” In 1956 he’d spoken on the Senate floor in favor of independence for Algeria, which at that time was fighting a bloody war against its French colonial rulers. (The speech drew scorn both from the Eisenhower administration and from voices in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, like former secretary of state Dean Acheson.) And a year later he’d argued that “the single most important test of American foreign
policy today is how we meet the test of imperialism,” and decried America’s “failure to appreciate how the forces of nationalism are rewriting the geopolitical map of the world.”

Yet, in a striking irony, Kennedy’s very skepticism about the use of military force pulled him into an expanded U.S. role in South Vietnam. By the fall of 1961 he had refused to support the collapsing Bay of Pigs invasion with American forces; refused to follow the advice of Ike and the Joint Chiefs to send the U.S. military into Laos; suffered a psychological defeat at the hands of a bellicose Premier Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit; and stood by as the East Germans built a wall to trap their citizens in East Berlin. The politics of the moment demanded that he draw a line somewhere—and that “somewhere” was in South Vietnam, where he dispatched “advisors” to support the struggling army. By late 1963 there were 16,000 of them; more than 100 had been killed.

And it wasn’t enough. The National Liberation Front—the “Viet Cong”—supported and supplied by the North, was striking with impunity across the South. American journalists, like the
New York Times
’ David Halberstam and
Time
magazine’s Charlie Mohr, were writing almost daily dispatches undercutting the optimistic assessments of American officials. (Kennedy had tried to talk
Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger into pulling Halberstam out—which ensured that he would remain.) And more and more, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, once celebrated as “the George Washington of Vietnam” by stalwart liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, was losing the support of the people with his crackdowns on the Buddhist majority. Some of the monks were dramatizing their disaffection by setting themselves on fire; the images of their self-immolations filled the front pages and the evening newscasts. It had reached the breaking point just before Kennedy went to Dallas in November 1963. After a
fractious dispute among his advisors, Kennedy authorized a coup against Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu; both men were quickly murdered, and Kennedy recorded a tape chastising himself for a hasty, ill-informed decision. More than once, he found himself shaking his head over a lost opportunity. One of the reasons for wanting Diem and Nhu out was that they were reportedly looking to cut a deal with Hanoi. When those rumors surfaced at a press conference, Kennedy said acidly, “The day after it was suggested, we would have some troops on the way home.”
Maybe,
he’d thought more than once,
we should have just
left them to their own devices, let them cut that
deal, and leave.

Indeed, that was part of the dilemma he faced. From the beginning, just about every member of his national security and defense team had been telling him he needed to put American combat troops—lots of them—into South Vietnam. But there were other voices telling him the whole idea was crazy.

When he’d visited Charles de Gaulle on his way to Vienna in 1961, de Gaulle told him that putting troops in Vietnam would be “a bottomless military and political quagmire.”

George Ball, the number three man at State, had warned him back then of the dangers of introducing even combat support troops.

“Within five years,” he said, “we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again . . . Vietnam is the worst possible terrain from a physical and political point of view.”

“George, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys around here,” Kennedy replied sharply. “But you’re crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, from his perch as ambassador to India, cautioned that it would be folly to “spend our billions in those
distant jungles,” and asked, almost heretically, “What is so important about real estate in the space age?” He urged Kennedy to find a way toward a neutral coalition government.

Senator Mike Mansfield, who had spent years in Southeast Asia and who had been a friend and supporter of Diem, came to Palm Beach to visit with the vacationing President after a tour of Vietnam; he brought with him a warning that the United States could find itself drawn into “a truly massive commitment of American military . . . in short, going to war and the establishment of some form of neo-colonialist role in South Vietnam.” Kennedy was angry at Mansfield—“This isn’t what my people are telling me,” he countered—but his anger stemmed from frustration. All through his first term, he was balancing his impulse to find a way out of Vietnam with his conviction that it would be politically fatal to do so.

Maybe that’s why the President kept pushing back, sometimes almost single-handedly refusing to put combat troops in Vietnam, persistently pushing his advisors to consider the dangers of any involvement. As early as November of 1961, at a National Security Council meeting, the President “questioned the wisdom of involvement in Vietnam . . . [H]e suggested he could make a strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles away against 26,000 guerrillas with a native army of 200,000, where millions have been spent for years with no success.” And by the time he left for Texas two years later, his administration announced that 1,000 U.S. forces would be heading back home, and that most of the rest would likely be home by the end of 1965. There was, however, nothing firm about that date. “If things are going bad in Vietnam,” he’d said, “we’d look very foolish pulling those men out.”

It was just part of the growing Vietnam mess that he left behind as he headed for Texas on November 21, 1963, when he told Mike
Forrestal to organize a top-to-bottom review of “every option we’ve got, including how we get out of there.”

When he returned from Dallas, that mess was waiting for him.

•   •   •

That decision to return 1,000 men from Vietnam was based on a premise that the effort was succeeding; that the South Vietnamese would have the capacity and the will to fight off the guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. But now, after the coup, there was a military regime in power that lacked even the diminishing support Diem Nhu had achieved. Moreover, his advisors were deeply divided: Defense Secretary McNamara—quite possibly with the quiet encouragement of the President—was pushing for the withdrawal timetable with the blunt assertion that “we need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it.” Mac Bundy, his national security advisor, and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were saying that without a huge step-up in American involvement—including troops—South Vietnam’s government would fall to the Communists.