If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (18 page)

Kennedy himself pursued that line of thought in a conversation with Arthur Schlesinger on an early June evening in 1965 when he scoffed at the notion that great sweeping forces make history inevitable.

“Do any of your colleagues,” he asked, “really believe that if Zangara had killed Roosevelt in Miami that John Nance Garner would have led us out of the Depression? Or that if Halifax had
been chosen as prime minister instead of Churchill the British would have survived the Blitz? Or, not to compare myself with those giants—”

“Of course not, Mr. President—”

“—if that nut outside my home in Palm Beach had blown me up, do you think it might possibly have made a difference if Lyndon had been president during the missile crisis?”

“As long as you’re being morbid,” said Schlesinger, “if it had stopped raining in Dallas, and the bubble top wasn’t on your car, it
has
occurred to me to wonder where we’d be in Vietnam . . .”

But the rain hadn’t stopped; the bubble top had stayed on. And John Kennedy was still president, a figure with a force of personality that resonated far more than did his cautious politics. For example, if he was the symbol of the government, then there was something attractive, even cool, about signing up out of college for something more than immediate lifetime employment. It wasn’t as if anyone with a college education was going to find trouble getting a job—not in this economy, with steady growth, low unemployment, and no inflation. You could hardly walk across a campus without stumbling across a recruiter for GM or IBM or GE or U.S. Steel or any of the other corporate behemoths that were promising twenty-one-year-olds generous salaries, health care, and retirement benefits. Signing up for two years with the Peace Corps even came with a draft deferment—not that anyone was worried about the prospect of being drafted for a nonexistent war.

Now, after Kennedy survived an attempt on his life, the power of his image had grown far more powerful. Norman Mailer himself had captured the power of that survival in an
Esquire
essay, “Lazarus in the Oval Office,” when he wrote, “To the myth of the Outsider was now added the myth of the Invincible; Superman had come not to the supermarket, but to the streets of an inhospitable
city at high noon, and had returned to us whole. Led by a man with such powers, who would not follow?”

So when in early 1965 the Congress authorized AmeriCorps, Kennedy’s domestic version of the Peace Corps, the response was overwhelming. AmeriCorps recruiters saw lines at Columbia University snaking out of Low Library, doubling back over the length of College Walk. At the University of Wisconsin, a line of more than a thousand students stretched down the steps of the Memorial Union, down Langdon Street for three blocks; and at Berkeley, where a university ban on off-campus political activity on campus had led to an explosive confrontation a year earlier, another near riot ensued, this time when the AmeriCorps recruiters ran out of applications. SDS, while expressing “clearly warranted skepticism,” encouraged its members “to test the ability or willingness of a government agency to challenge the injustices.” In Newark, SDS cofounder Tom Hayden left the Community Union Project to sign on as the regional deputy director of AmeriCorps.

(Not everyone followed Hayden’s example. A twenty-seven-year-old Berkeley graduate student named Jerry Rubin left his studies to work as a high school organizer for Junior Achievement, which taught teenagers how to start a company, sell stock, and produce and sell a product. “I’ve found the New Frontier and its address is Wall Street,” said Rubin, who would go on to build a hugely successful penny-stock company before his youthful treasurer fled the country with his fortune. “I never should have trusted an accountant under thirty,” he said to the sentencing judge.)

Even as the youth culture was setting hands to wringing and stomachs to churning, even as young men’s hair began to grow longer and young women’s skirts began to grow shorter, even as the lyrics of the music grew racier, there was an absence of darkness, of rage. Elders might be dense, clueless, intolerant, but it wasn’t as if
there were a
war
raging; it wasn’t as if there were a chance that the young men pursuing lingerie or protesting racial discrimination might be plucked off a campus to face combat and possible death 10,000 miles away; it wasn’t as if their television screens were filled with pictures of carnage at the hands of their own countrymen.

In fact, the news seemed to be of a very different kind: from the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, to the 1964 JFK-Khrushchev Moscow Summit, to the negotiations on a coalition government in Vietnam, to the Harriman-Dobrynin Geneva negotiations on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, there was tangible evidence that the superpowers were slowly, steadily stepping away from the cold war precipice.

Even more newsworthy was what
wasn’t
being reported in the news. More and more, Kennedy was tapping the journalists he had turned to before as a way to opening channels that could not be tapped through regular sources. Former
Look
magazine editor William Attwood, now a special representative to the United Nations, was in regular contact with Cuban diplomats, probing for possible openings toward renewed diplomacy. (This had led to a rare, sharp argument between the President and his brother, who still looked for ways to topple Fidel Castro. “Give it up, Bobby,” the President finally said. “This isn’t some grudge match.”) Norman Cousins, the
Saturday Review
editor who had played a crucial role in the Test Ban Treaty negotiations, had left the magazine to devote himself and his considerable family fortune to lobbying work, hiring director John Frankenheimer to create a “Promise of Peace” series of television commercials.

Most remarkable was the role about to be played by one of the country’s best-known journalists.

Theodore H. White—“Teddy” to everyone who knew him—was the author of
The Making of the President 1960
, a groundbreaking look at the election that took readers behind the scenes, and
turned the Nixon-Kennedy contest into a romanticized battle, with Kennedy clearly wearing the white hat. Long before this success, Teddy White’s beat had been China. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a degree in Chinese studies; he’d spent years in the country and had written a book,
Thunder Out of China,
that noted the corruption of the Nationalist pro-American government led by Chiang Kai-shek, and chronicled the power and popularity of Mao’s Communist force. That viewpoint had forced White to leave the employ of
Time
owner Henry Luce, whose devotion to Chiang bordered on the messianic.

Kennedy and White had talked about China often, White chiding Kennedy for his “Who lost China?” demagoguery as a young congressman, Kennedy asking White early in his presidency whether he thought there’d be any point in pursuing a meeting with Mao in Asia.

Now, in July of 1965, Kennedy invited White up to Hyannis for a strictly off-the-record chat. “I think it’s time,” Kennedy said, “for Americans to get a long, inside look at China from someone who knows the country well. Someone like you.”

“Well,” White said, “there is that small matter of a travel ban on U.S. citizens traveling to the mainland. I’ve grown quite fond of my passport.”

“Travel regulations are not writ in stone,” the President said, and pressed the issue. “We’re talking about the most populous nation on earth, an atomic power. I read the speeches of some of their leaders, and they seem perfectly happy with a war that leaves three billion dead, as long as the survivors are Communists. You know those leaders; they’ll talk with you. And when they do, I want you to deliver a message from me. I want them to know we’re open to the idea of a different relationship with them.”

Teddy White chuckled.

“I’m missing the joke,” Kennedy said.

“I’m just imagining what Richard Nixon is going to say when he learns the President is interested in opening the door to Red China. I think he’s going to throw a fit . . . and then he’s going to see how much trouble he can cause you.”

Neither White nor the President could imagine it, but it wasn’t Richard Nixon who posed potentially fatal political trouble for President Kennedy. That would come from a few men who had occupied some of the most powerful positions in America’s public and private power centers. Two years before, they had seen Kennedy as a potential threat to the nation’s long-term security. Now, for a handful of them, the threat was no longer potential. It was clear and present. In 1964 they had stayed their hand for fear that the alternative, Senator Barry Goldwater, was too hot-tempered, too impetuous, to occupy the Oval Office. Now, in Vice President Stuart Symington, they saw a serious, levelheaded statesman with a commitment to a strong defense and a tough-minded approach to the Soviets.

And so, they decided, the time had come to render President Kennedy politically impotent, with the one weapon against which he had no real defense: himself.

M
istah Speak-ah . . . the President of the United States . . . and one
very
sexy brother-in-law!”

The sixteen guests gathered around the dining room table stood and applauded in a semi-serious salute as Ethel Kennedy sat down. The President raised his champagne glass and gestured to his younger brother, then began his toast by mocking his most famous speech.

“Let the word go forth, from this time and place, that the torch must soon be passed from an officially middle-aged, increasingly frail Secretary of Defense . . . a man who, to paraphrase my good friend and former adversary, has always believed that ruthlessness in defense of the President is no vice—and moderation in pursuit of our common enemies is no virtue. To my older younger brother: May your next forty be as tranquil, as peaceful, as trouble-free as your first forty. Happy birthday, Bobby.”

Bobby Kennedy stood and acknowledged the raucous cheers with a tongue-in-cheek response of his own.

“My thanks, Mr. President—for all you have given me over the period of the last two decades: every gray hair, every wrinkle in my forehead, as well as every terror that awakens me at three o’clock in
the morning. If there is anyone who seeks to know what torment an older brother can inflict on his helpless younger sibling,
let them come to Hickory Hill!
”

The men and women at the table on this late November evening in 1965 were among the closest of Kennedy confidants: Ben and Toni Bradlee, Red Fay, David Hackett, LeMoyne Billings, Charlie Bartlett. It is doubtful that any of them, no matter how close, fully grasped the truth behind Robert Kennedy’s remarks. They all knew that from the moment John Kennedy entered public life, Bobby’s life had been spent in the service of his brother. They all knew of the endless hours he’d spent organizing the campaigns, using the power of persuasion and threat to extract support. What none of them knew was just how much energy Bobby had spent in protecting his brother from mortal threats to his political life—none more dangerous than the threats that had emerged just before the President had gone to Texas exactly two years ago. As he concluded his brief thank-you and sat down, he was again struck by a thought he could not share with any of them: the bullet that had almost taken John Kennedy’s life may well have spared him from an end to his presidency.

•   •   •

Where did it stem from, this compulsive, careless, reckless pursuit of women, this apparent indifference to the risk to his political career, this behavior that had continued—even accelerated—
after
he’d won the White House?

Maybe it came from the example his father had set. Joe Sr. would bring his mistresses home, invite them to dinner with his wife and children; he’d enter the guest rooms where friends of his daughters were staying; his sons would warn their dates to be careful. His
children not only knew of Joe’s philandering, they would sometimes look for female companionship for him during his travels.

Maybe it came from his many brushes with early death, in hospital beds, on operating tables, and in the waters of the South Pacific, which taught him that his life would likely end early, and that pleasure was to be taken whenever and wherever he could find it.

Maybe it came from the medication he’d been taking since youth; the corticosteroids he’d been ingesting to deal with his many intestinal maladies were thought to spark the libido.

Maybe it came from a sense of entitlement as the handsome, charming son of one of the richest men in the United States. He’d never had to pay a bill, wait on line, or defer any desire, so why deny himself a woman he fancied? The fact of his marriage was of no matter; when he was escorting his youngest brother, Ted, down the aisle, he’d whispered, “Just because you’re getting married doesn’t mean you can’t have other women.” As for Jackie . . . of course he loved her, but that was another part of his life, far removed from the diversions of the moment.

And if he thought himself invulnerable to exposure—if it was true that he’d once said, “They can’t touch me while I’m alive, and when I’m dead, who cares?”—he had good reason for his confidence. The press culture of the time drew clear lines between a man’s public and private behavior, in part, no doubt, because of the people-who-live-in-glass-houses rule: How many reporters, editors, or news executives could survive scrutiny of
their
behavior? When there were hints that a story might surface, the power of the Kennedy family or its money could usually compel or purchase silence. Whatever the reasons, from the time he’d entered public life, his compulsive, reckless sexual behavior had never become a matter of public knowledge, save for the occasional rumor, even when there
was a determined effort to make his conduct a public scandal—even when there was proof of a sort . . . as Leonard and Florence Kater had learned.

One night in 1958, the Katers were awakened at 1:00 a.m. by the sound of someone throwing pebbles at the upstairs window of a room they had rented out to a young Senate aide named Pamela Turnure. It was her employer, Senator Kennedy, who was demanding—and got—entrance to her room. The Katers, straitlaced folks, were sufficiently outraged to rig up a tape recorder in the air vent that led to Turnure’s room and recorded what went on during Kennedy’s next visit.

The Katers threw Turnure out—but Florence Kater didn’t stop there.

“I was so outraged that this Irish Catholic senator, who pretended to be such a good family man, might run for president, that I decided to do something about it,” she said. That was an understatement; what she launched was something of a crusade. She and her husband staked out Turnure’s new residence and snapped a picture of Kennedy when he next visited her. They called his father. They drove to his Georgetown home and waited for him—provoking Kennedy to warn: “If you ever bother me or my father again, I’ll see to it that you never work in Washington as long as you live.” They picketed Kennedy’s campaign appearances with homemade signs, and inundated more than thirty reporters at newspapers and magazines. Only the
Washington Star
began looking into the story, then dropped it for unknown reasons. And the one source that
did
publish that photograph helped undermine the story. It was the
Thunderbolt
, a neo-Nazi white supremacist newsletter. (It wasn’t even that clear a picture—Kennedy had covered his face with a handkerchief, and besides, it could have been taken anywhere.)

So John Kennedy’s indifference to the dangers of his behavior
might be understandable, but Robert Kennedy knew it was badly misplaced. For one thing, the administration had been paying a heavy political price for silence almost from the beginning. For another, on the eve of his departure for Texas, some of the details about John Kennedy’s private life were in danger of public exposure.

The FBI’s files on John Kennedy’s liaisons reached back to the early 1940s, when he’d had an affair with a Danish-born expatriate named Inga Arvad, who was suspected of being a Nazi agent. They were as recent as his affair, while president, with Judith Exner, who was also the mistress of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. (Frank Sinatra had introduced her to both men, before Robert Kennedy forced his brother to cut off all ties with the singer out of concern for Sinatra’s gangland friendships.) More to the point, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was at pains to let the President and his brother know what he knew about the link between Exner, Giancana, and Kennedy; it was nothing less than a gold-standard job-security guarantee. (Hoover would turn the mandatory retirement age of seventy in 1965 and was determined to stay in the job he’d held for more than forty years.) There was a “mutually assured destruction” tinge to all this—given what the Kennedys knew about Hoover’s own private life, they had protection against Hoover spreading secrets—but Lyndon Johnson had been right, if inelegant, when he observed that “Hoover has Kennedy by the balls.”

It was bad enough for Bobby that he had to yield to Hoover’s imperious demands: signing off on the bugging of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel rooms and offices, enduring Hoover’s obsession with a virtually nonexistent U.S. Communist Party and his indifference to organized crime. But in October of 1963 he’d been forced to beg for Hoover’s help in containing a potential public scandal. It arose from the stories coming out of one of Capitol Hill’s most influential figures: Senate Democratic secretary Bobby Baker, the
thirty-four-year-old protégé of Lyndon Johnson. When Baker’s financial dealings became the focus of official and press inquiries—how did a young man on the government payroll accumulate a net worth of $2 million?—investigators learned that Baker was a source not only of limitless campaign cash but of women—“party girls” as they were called—courtesy of the Quorum Club, which he’d run out of a Capitol Hill hotel. The problem for Bobby was that one of the prostitutes, twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Rometsch, had been a frequent visitor to the White House. And because Rometsch had fled East Germany and now worked at the West German embassy, Hoover was convinced that she was a Communist spy.

Bobby Kennedy thought he’d contained the Rometsch problem back in July, when he’d had her summarily deported to West Germany in the company of her boyfriend—who happened to be one of Kennedy’s old investigators from his Senate Rackets Committee days. Now, however, with the Bobby Baker story exploding, her name had come to the attention of one of the most fearless investigative reporters in Washington: Clark Mollenhoff of the
Des Moines Register
. On October 26, Mollenhoff reported, “Evidence is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials” who Rometsch had partied with.

The story sent the White House into a frenzy of urgent telephone calls. And Bobby had been forced to turn for help to the man he most despised, begging Hoover to meet with Senate leaders from both parties, assure them that Ellen Rometsch was
not
a spy, that there was
no
evidence that she’d had sex with
any
White House official . . . but that the trail from Baker’s prostitutes to any number of
senators
was clear and crowded. (“Boy,” President Kennedy had said with no apparent irony to his friend Ben Bradlee, “the dirt [Hoover’s] got on those senators, you wouldn’t believe it.”)

That effort by Hoover did little to ease Bobby’s mind. What if
the press kept following the story of the President’s extracurricular behavior? Back in June, he’d had to confront two reporters from the
New York Journal-American
for publishing a story linking a British prostitute to a “high elected American official”—by which, they said, they meant the President. That kind of pressure was just not going to work with Mollenhoff, who’d had run-ins with Bobby Kennedy in the past and who was already driving the administration crazy with his investigations into a huge defense contract. What if Ellen Rometsch, furious at her deportation, went public? What if Mollenhoff put her in touch with Senator John Williams, the Delaware Republican who often acted as his own Sergeant Friday, and whose zeal in exposing corruption had put more than one official miscreant in prison? What if Williams brought her back from Germany? He wouldn’t be diverted by pleas from the leadership. And what of all those people privy to the President’s behavior—a rogue Secret Service agent, say, or one of the partygoers at those highly private social gatherings?

And then the President went to Texas . . .

No one—not Mollenhoff, not anyone—was going to write about the President’s sexual behavior while he lay in a hospital bed, fighting for his life, any more than they would have written about LBJ’s financial behavior had he succeeded to the White House if Kennedy had not survived his wounds. In a moment of national trauma, there was simply no appetite for such a story. Even the best-selling book in America, a highly critical, non-salacious account of the President called
JFK: The Man and the Myth
, disappeared from bookshelves within hours of his shooting. Mollenhoff put it bluntly in his diary a week after Dallas: “Any reporter who wrote about where the President might have been putting his penis would have been ridden out of town on a rail . . . if he was lucky.”

The expected revelations about Bobby Baker, the “party girls,”
and “high executive branch officials” never developed; in an ironic twist, it was Baker’s mentor, Lyndon Johnson, who was the victim when the stories about financial kickbacks and his rise to great wealth forced him from office. Even among those who knew of Kennedy’s behavior, there was a belief that he had changed—that the loss of his infant son and the shooting that had happened with his wife at his side had curbed his appetites—at least for now.

So by the time the President was raising his glass to celebrate Robert’s fortieth birthday, his brother could relax, more or less confident that John Kennedy’s private life would remain just that . . .

Unless, of course, there were powerful people with a powerful motive to make it public.

•   •   •

By late 1965, John Kennedy’s determination to move out of the cold war framework of the last two decades had become steadily more apparent. His long-held belief that nationalism was the dominant force in the developing world was now more or less official policy. Back in May, for example, he had refused the urgent requests of his military and hard-line elements in the State Department to send Marines into the Dominican Republic to prevent a leftist politician from assuming the presidency.

“If our boys set foot on that island,” his aide Dick Goodwin had argued, “it will give Fidel ten years’ worth of speeches denouncing ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ Juan Bosch may make some of our multinationals unhappy, but he’s certainly no threat to us.”

At the United Nations, special representative William Attwood was in the second year of intermittent conversations with Cuban diplomats, testing the possibilities of a thaw between Washington and Havana. Sometime over the summer, Cuban official Carlos Lechuda brought with him a gift for the President: a box of one
hundred of the finest Havanas. They were H. Upmanns, Hoyo de Monterreys, and two dozen Cohiba Robustos cigars that would not be formally introduced in Cuba until the next year, for the exclusive enjoyment of Fidel Castro and the inner circle of his government and the Communist Party.