If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (20 page)

On the first count, they had no doubt at all . . .

•   •   •

“So,” Clark Mollenhoff said to his dinner companion over brandy and cigars, “let me understand how I’m going to justify a fifty-dollar dinner expense to my editor.” They’d spent the last two hours at La Niçoise, one of the more fashionable Georgetown restaurants.

“Well, let me tell you a story,” the man across the table said. “You have a woman from a prominent family—blond, beautiful, brilliant—marries and divorces a high official in the Central Intelligence Agency. She’s related by marriage to a Washington player, and she’s a regular at White House dinners, on the presidential yacht . . . and maybe those weren’t the only times she was seeing the President.”

“You don’t need to brief me on Mary Pinchot Meyer,” Mollenhoff said. “Cord’s ex-wife, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law . . . She was murdered a year or two back. Is that what you’ve got on your mind?”

“No,” the man said. “Looks like the cops got the right guy and the jury got it wrong; probably a botched robbery or rape. It’s about who
else
she was seeing besides the President.”

“I think you may be confused with the
National Enquirer
stringer.”

“No, Clark, not ‘seeing’ that way. Look, when Mary divorced Cord, she went bohemian—took up painting, along with a painter or two. She also got it into her head that she and some of her women friends could change the world if they could change the mind-sets of the men who held the levers of power. And the way to that change, she thought, was . . . drugs.”

“I’m starting to think I’m going to be on the hook for this bill,” Mollenhoff said.

“Hold on, Clark. Mary Meyer spent a lot of time up at Harvard . . . and the professor she was seeing was Timothy Leary.”

“Huh,” Mollenhoff said, and leaned a little closer to his dinner guest. Leary had spent years at Harvard experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs before being fired in 1963. His enthusiasm for the drugs had made him a national figure; public figures like poet Allen Ginsberg and author Aldous Huxley had used it and celebrated the experience. “So what are you pitching here?” the reporter asked. “You telling me that Meyer turned on the President of the United States?”

There was a lengthy silence.

“I was skeptical too,” said the man, “until I heard the tapes.”

“Have another brandy,” Mollenhoff said. “Have two. I don’t think the expense account is going to be a problem.”

•   •   •

For James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief counterintelligence officer, conspiracies were everywhere. Every Soviet defector, he believed, was a double agent sent to throw U.S. intelligence off the scent; moles were at work at every level of the agency. In his office, he worked in semidarkness with blinds drawn, to insulate himself from his enemies. For Angleton, whose wife had been a close friend of Mary Meyer, the knowledge that the ex-wife of a high CIA official was a lover and confidant of the President, and an enthusiastic participant in the emerging drug culture, was more than enough for him to take defensive measures . . . by tapping her telephones and putting listening devices into Meyer’s town house. And when Kennedy began veering sharply away from the cold war consensus—when he began moving toward a kind of reconciliation with the Communist world—Angleton drew what was for him the obvious, unmistakable conclusion: Kennedy had listened to Mary Meyer, shared his closest thoughts with her. And now, Meyer was succeeding in the goal she had talked about with her closest friends:
through the use of sex and drugs, she had turned the President of the United States. This was beyond the reckless, notorious sexual behavior, beyond the dangers of a president using amphetamines to ease his chronic pain.
This
was a threat to everything Angleton and the intelligence community was sworn to protect, and it was a story that
had
to be told. In the America of the mid-1960s, the idea of a president surviving a public revelation of adultery was highly unlikely. (“What’s Kennedy going to do?” an Angleton colleague asked sarcastically. “Go on TV and ask for forgiveness?”) The idea of a president surviving a story of drug use—a tiny fraction of Americans had tried marijuana in 1965, and nine out of ten thought it should be treated as a crime—was out of the question.

In Clark Mollenhoff, Angleton and his colleagues knew they had reached out to the most determined, most fearless reporter in Washington. They knew he had been at odds with the Kennedys for years—triggered by some petty bullying by Bobby at a Hickory Hill party—and they knew he had come close to breaking the Ellen Rometsch story just before the President was shot in Dallas. He was apparently immune to persuasion or intimidation. So it was no surprise that, two weeks after that dinner at La Niçoise, word began circulating through Washington that “Clark is onto something big.” It was still below the radar: whispers at dinner parties, a casual question or two to press secretary Salinger, more pointed comments to the Kennedy brothers by loyalist friends in the press like Charlie Bartlett. For that handful of men, there was a powerful sense of anticipation: it was only a matter of time before the story went public, and John Kennedy would be finished.

Except . . . John and Robert Kennedy lived by one philosophy: when it came to their political fortunes, the ends justified the means . . .
any
means.

•   •   •

The President was as furious as anyone had ever seen him.

“We’ve been fucked,” he said. “They’ve kicked us in the balls.”

It was April 10, 1962, and the chairman of U.S. Steel, Roger Blough, had just left the Oval Office after informing Kennedy that the company was going to raise its prices in the face of an apparent labor industry agreement to hold down wages and prices. To the President, the price hike was more than an inflationary danger; it was a personal betrayal, one that would make him look weak, ineffectual. He was determined to force U.S. Steel and its competitors to roll back the price hike. In the days that followed, every weapon of the federal government was pressed into service, no matter how questionable its use.

The Defense Department began moving contracts away from the major steel companies to smaller competitors who had held the price line. The Justice Department began preparing antitrust suits; it seemed highly suspicious that the companies matched the price rise to the penny. Reporters were called and visited by the FBI in the middle of the night, to be grilled about conversations they might have had with steel executives. Attorney General Robert Kennedy made the stakes clear to his Justice Department aides.

“We’re going for broke,” he said. “Their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing . . . I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices . . . subpoenaed for their personal records . . . subpoenaed for their company records. We can’t lose this . . .”

No one was immune from the Kennedys’ fury. When the President saw a report on NBC’s
Nightly News
, he was incensed by what he perceived as anchorman Chet Huntley’s kindness to the steel industry. He called Newton Minow, chair of the Federal
Communications Commission, and snapped: “Did you see that goddamn thing on Huntley-Brinkley? I thought they were supposed to be our friends. I want you to do something about that—you do something about that.”

The President himself explained the deployment of another potential weapon—one of Washington’s best-placed lawyers.

“If any one person deserves the credit,” he said to his old friend Red Fay, after the steel companies backed down, “it’s that damned Clark Clifford [who represented some of the companies] . . . Can’t you just see Clifford outlining the possible courses of action the government could take . . . ? Do you know what you’re doing when you start bucking the power of the President of the United States? I don’t think U.S. Steel or any of the other major steel companies wants to have Internal Revenue agents checking the expense accounts of the top executives. Do you want the government to go back to hotel bills that time you were in Schenectady, to find out who was with you? Too many hotel bills and nightclub expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the country club.”

The Kennedys took some heat from the press for their abuse of power, but at a family dinner the President seemed unconcerned, joking about his conversation with a steel company president: “He asked me, ‘Why are all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country being scrutinized?’ And I told him the Attorney General would never do any such thing, and of course he was right!”

“They were mean to my brother!” Bobby interjected. “They can’t do that to my brother.”

The President left out of his jocular remarks another fact: Bobby Kennedy had ordered the FBI and the CIA to bug the phones and offices of steel executives as well.

And if that’s what the Kennedys did to win a policy dispute . . . what might they do if the presidency itself was at stake?

•   •   •

“John, we’ve got a problem—actually, we’ve got a
lot
of problems.”

From his office in downtown Minneapolis, John Cowles heard his Washington attorney with a sense of disbelief.

“Where?” he asked.

“Everywhere, it seems. Three days ago, we got a notice of inquiry from the FCC about our TV stations in Memphis and Daytona. Apparently something to do with record keeping. Yesterday, the IRS decided to order up an audit on
Look
. Then an hour ago we got
another
inquiry about our Des Moines station from the Justice Department’s antitrust division; they say they’re looking at ‘cross-ownership.’ Christ, we’ve had that station for a decade! I’m not a great believer in coincidences, so . . . what have you folks been doing that’s got the government so wound up?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” Cowles said. “Let me do some checking.”

The Cowles Media Company was hardly an enemy of the Kennedy administration. The family was Republican, but its ties were to the Progressive Republicans of Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, the
Des Moines Register
had backed Nixon in ’60, but they’d swung to Kennedy over Goldwater in ’64. So had the
Star Tribune
in Minneapolis. And
Look
magazine had run so many flattering photo spreads of the Kennedy family that some Republicans were suggesting it change its name to
Look at JFK.

It took three phone calls for Cowles to locate the all-but-certain source of the problem.

“We were about to call you, John,” said the chief of the
Register
’s Washington bureau. “We’re working on something that’s way above my pay grade. Whether we run it is going to be your call.”

An hour later Cowles and three executives were on their way to the airport. By early evening they were in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, meeting with Clark Mollenhoff. At 11:00 p.m., Mollenhoff stormed out of the suite, cabbed back to the bureau, and announced his immediate resignation.

“I didn’t see that we had any choice,” Cowles said later to a small group of executives. “The story looked solid, but you could just imagine the reaction. Clark said the tapes sure
sounded
like Kennedy but how many people can imitate that voice—hell, Vaughn Meader’s still making a living at it. Then there’s the question of how we got to hear the tape. Were we criminally liable for communicating the fruits of an illegal wiretap? We hear that heads have already started to roll at the CIA. And when you look at the potential cost to the company . . .” He shook his head.

“But I’ll tell you this,” he added. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before our papers have another good word to say about the Kennedys.”

•   •   •

The story didn’t disappear, not completely. It survived in that twilight region of rumors and urban legends, like the stories about John Kennedy’s first marriage and his fling with Marilyn Monroe. The
Realist
, an “underground” publication with a bent for dark satire, published a “celebration” of John Kennedy’s “Dionysian Appetites,” saluting his “buoyant departure from the Victorian strictures of earlier times,” under the title: “Hail to His Briefs.” A twenty-four-year-old playwright named Barbara Garson wrote a lengthy parody of the famous Lord Byron poem she called “Don John.”

“Ask not,” he said, “what I can do for you.”

For what he asked, no maiden could resist.

And when his trumpet summoned her again

’Twas not his trumpet she was pleased to kiss.

Among the more sophisticated news readers, the understanding grew that John Kennedy did not live by the traditional standards of morality. Given how radically those standards were under siege in the later half of the 1960s, this understanding did not prove politically fatal.

The real fallout, however, was within the journalistic community. The Kennedys’ view of the press had always been “instrumental”: there were friends, there were foes. There was money to be spent when necessary: the family had loaned the
Boston Post
owner $500,000 in 1952 as the price of a senatorial endorsement, and had put a muckraking New York journalist on the family payroll for $1,000 a week to buy his loyalty. There were sanctions for apostasy: Kennedy had angrily canceled White House subscriptions to the
New York Herald Tribune
for its critical coverage, and had exiled
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee from his inner circle for months.

Now, however, the press had seen another side of the Kennedys: a blunt use of political power directed not at some rogue corporations but at
them
. It would color their approach to the President for the rest of his term, arm them with the motivation to recast his record in more skeptical, critical terms. It was just what Kennedy did
not
need as he turned to the challenge of building his legacy.

W
elcome home, Mr. President.”

“Not my home for much longer, J.B.”

Chief usher J. B. West chuckled as he took the crutches from Kennedy and guided him toward the wheelchair. Over the course of his second term, the President’s steadily weakening back had all but collapsed. For his first years in the White House, a regimen of hot baths, exercise, and drugs had kept him reasonably mobile; only occasionally did the public get a glimpse of the crutches Kennedy used to maneuver, or the way he gingerly rose and sat. By the end of 1967, the years—and the corticosteroids he had taken for most of his life—had turned his lumbar region into what one physician called “a disaster area.” Now, on this early November morning in 1968, the wheelchair had become a commonplace sight in and around the White House, and Jerry Bruno’s advance team found itself spending most of its time staging events that would limit Kennedy to the shortest possible number of steps. More than once, Kennedy had found himself remembering what he’d said when he
was asked why he was going for the presidency back in 1960: “I just don’t know that I’ll be healthy enough in eight years.”

The last three days had been grueling for the President: he’d been in seven states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and then out to California and the overnight flight back across the country. The crowds were huge: 30,000 at Liberty Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background; 45,000 in Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium; a million lining State Street for Chicago’s traditional torchlight parade, led by Mayor Daley, the President, and the Democratic nominee. But crowds could be deceiving. (“There is no place,” Kennedy once said in Ohio after losing badly in 1960, “where I get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than this great state.”) This was, by every measure, going to be close, and not just because the polling showed a dead heat nationally and in a dozen key states.

“America has rarely witnessed an election,” wrote Johnny Apple of the
New York Times
, “where the two major candidates not only represent such utterly contrasting beliefs and policies, but represent utterly contrasting strengths and weaknesses. And rarely has a campaign hinged—possibly decisively—on how a deeply divided nation feels about its departing leader.”

As Kennedy wheeled himself to the East Wing elevator for a bath, breakfast, and a rest, J. B. West held up a finger.

“Mr. President, Mrs. Kennedy said she’d like a moment with you after your nap. Said to tell you it’s important.”

Curious,
he thought for a moment, then found his mind drifting back to the election, now only two days away. Apple was right,
he thought. This election was at heart a referendum on his stewardship. And however much he had succeeded by the traditional rules of politics, he knew better than almost anyone how much those rules had changed.

•   •   •

“I’ve got one question for you,” a frustrated Kenny O’Donnell had asked pollster Lou Harris shortly after the 1966 midterms, which saw Democrats lose twenty-eight seats in the House and two in the Senate. “Just what the hell is it about peace and prosperity that Americans don’t like?”

There was no question that the American economy was in fine shape. Seven years of uninterrupted, steady growth had helped drive the jobless rate under 5 percent. So had the aggressive jobs program that had begun in 1965 and had expanded every year since. “A rising tide lifts all the boats,” Kennedy had said in the early sixties as he pushed for his tax cuts—to which Pat Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, said, “With respect Mr. President, some of the boats have holes in the bottom.” For the last three years a welfare-to-work effort in big cities and rural communities had finally begun to move the once-intractable numbers in black neighborhoods and Appalachian hollows. Robert Kennedy, who had wandered the inner city streets of Washington as attorney general and visited ghettos in a dozen cities when he’d moved to Defense, said to his brother, “I remember going to a job fair in Oakland a few years ago, with ten thousand people waiting on line for seventy-five jobs. Last week I was in St. Louis, and there were two thousand people waiting for five hundred jobs. That’s something, but . . .”

“Bobby,” the President said, “just once before I leave this job, could you just say, ‘Jack, I have really good news!’?”

As for inflation, “It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night,” Walter Heller remarked as he was leaving the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for a tenured post at the University of Minnesota.

“Yes,” said Ken Galbraith. “Just absolutely remarkable what can
happen to the economy when you’re not fighting a war on the other side of the world . . . You don’t need to raise taxes . . . you don’t need to print money . . . you can even spend a little extra on frills like education and transportation. If the President can buy off those rural congressmen with a bigger farm subsidy, we may able to celebrate the Bicentennial with a high-speed rail system.”

Why, then, was the President’s job approval rating hovering at 50 percent? Why was the public telling pollsters by a significant margin that “America was on the wrong track”?

“It’s pretty fundamental,” pollster Harris had said to O’Donnell. “When the economy’s bad, people vote on the economy. When a war’s going badly, they vote on the war. And when there’s ‘peace and prosperity,’ they sometimes think about other things. And they’re not very happy about those ‘other things.’”

One of those “other things” had long been at the heart of Kennedy’s political concerns. In March of 1966, shortly after the Tet holidays, South Vietnam’s fragile coalition government collapsed in the face of an attack by National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, which raised the red flag with the yellow star over Saigon’s Independence Palace and proclaimed the birth of the unified “People’s Republic of Vietnam.” There were bipartisan denunciations of what Richard Nixon called “an inexcusable failure of will in the face of naked Communist aggression” and what Democratic senator Russell Long labeled a day of “retreat, defeat, surrender, and national dishonor.” In response, the President dispatched the Sixth Fleet to the South China Sea and staged hastily organized military exercises with the armed forces of Thailand and the Philippines. In a press conference, Kennedy read a statement warning that “no potential aggressor should misread the events in Saigon: the United States will honor every binding commitment it has anywhere those nations are threatened.” He also reminded the reporters of what he
had told CBS’s Walter Cronkite in the fall of 1963: “In the final analysis, it’s their war,” adding, “There is no clearer example of a country that could not be saved unless it had decided to save itself.”

The collapse of South Vietnam was a blow to the Kennedy administration, but in political terms it was a flesh wound. For more than two years American forces had been leaving the country. With American men no longer in harm’s way, major news organizations had also departed, shuttering bureaus, redeploying frontline correspondents. Because the United States had never made a serious military commitment to South Vietnam, even Kennedy’s most zealous opponents could not charge that “American boys died in vain.”

“Whatever prestige the United States may have lost,” wrote the
Washington Post
’s Stanley Karnow, “is nothing compared to what would have happened had the world’s mightiest nation committed its blood and treasure and
then
failed to prevail. No maimed veterans crowd our VA hospitals; no memorials on Washington’s mall or on small-town squares to remind us of who and what we would have lost.”

So the fall of Vietnam was not the fatal political blow that had haunted the President’s fears in his first term. What
did
afflict his second term were three other powerful forces. One was thoroughly predictable, so much so that its impact was mitigated; another was utterly unforeseen; a third came in the form of a once-friendly force that had turned hostile in the wake of the Kennedys’ desperate fight to save the presidency from scandal.

•   •   •

John Kennedy and his allies had approached the 1964 campaign with one central fear: that the tinderbox of race would rip apart the Democratic Party coalition formed more than three decades earlier. It could be found in the collapse of the once-solid Democratic
South and the flight of South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond to the ranks of the Republican Party when Barry Goldwater won that party’s presidential nomination. With Kennedy at the head of the ticket, without Texan Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, other Southerners defected to the Republicans, including Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson. “I made my decision,” he explained, “after an evening of prayerful contemplation guided by my son and spiritual guide, Pat, whose Christian Broadcasting Network is bringing His word to millions.”

The issue of war and peace had overwhelmed the race issue in 1964 and propelled Kennedy into a solid reelection triumph. Still, as his second term began, Kennedy had no illusions about the political dangers posed by racial conflict. It was why, just before his Dallas trip, he’d coupled his intention to move on the poverty front with an admonition to the liberal Walter Heller that “I also think it’s important to make clear that we’re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs.” It was why his 1964 campaign pledge to put jobs at the center of his domestic campaign theme had been linked to his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” His Voting Rights Act victory in 1965 was in large measure the product of Lyndon Johnson’s advice to frame the issue as a matter of patriotism, where white middle-class racial animus would be at a minimum.

None of that could seriously diminish the power of race in dozens of American cities, where the familiar ethnic clashes over political and economic power had taken on a toxic quality when intermingled with the visceral issues of black and white.
Who
would run the schools? Who would police the police? What
would be built, and where? Who would control the jobs?
Who would get the jobs? Where would public money be
spent, and on whom . . . and who would bear the burden
of paying for that money?
When confrontations between white police and black citizens ignited violence and looting in Newark and half a
dozen other cities in the summer of 1965, the traditional black working class‒white Democratic coalition had begun to crack wide open.

Indeed, by 1966, Teddy White’s warning that Kennedy had cited back in 1964 had proven prescient: Northern politicians had begun to tap into white resentments over black demands. New York Republican congressman Paul Fino took to the House floor, warning that Kennedy’s community development program was “a tool of black power . . . [D]raw the line and stand up to black power.” In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley was positioning himself as the protector of neighborhoods, in the face of Martin Luther King’s campaign for open housing. In Boston, School Committee chair Louise Day Hicks was leveraging her resistance to court-ordered busing of schoolchildren into a likely bid for mayor in two years. In Newark, another busing foe, an ex-Marine named Anthony Imperiale, was leading armed patrols to guide white residents through city streets and planning a run for city council. As for California, that state had provided an early warning back in 1964 when the same voters who gave Kennedy a million-vote margin over Goldwater had voted a ban on open-housing laws by a 2‒1 margin and sent former song-and-dance man George Murphy to the U.S. Senate over state controller Alan Cranston.

The President’s convictions and his unparalleled political instincts led him to a continuing search for insulation from the full force of racial backlash. When he traveled to big cities in 1965 and ’66, it was to visit job centers and the local development corporations that were channeling public and private money into housing repair and small businesses—and to remind audiences of the moral bankruptcy of welfare. He’d stop by police precincts to shake hands and be photographed in front of what the press corps was calling “the wall of blue”—rows of uniformed police—and argue that “crime is a civil rights issue no less than the right to equal treatment
at a coffee shop or hotel or public park. For what good is the right to a public accommodation if a citizen fears to walk the public streets that will take them there? The hard fact is that fear of random violence imprisons too many of our citizens as surely as does any Berlin Wall.” (The
New York Times
editorially scolded the President for “echoing the repressive rhetoric of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater.” By contrast, some black voices, like Claude Brown, who’d written an affecting memoir called
Manchild in the Promised Land
, praised the President. “Who do the editors of the
Times
, safe behind their doormen suburban enclaves, think are the principal victims of break-ins, muggings, shootings?” Brown wrote scornfully, “A significant drop in violent crime would be as big a boon to blacks in the North as the Voting Rights Act was to blacks in the South.”)

And unlikely as it seems, race was at the heart of his travels to the heart of white America. In the fall of 1965 he’d gone to Appalachia. He revisited West Virginia, where his primary victory in 1960 had provided crucial evidence to the Democratic power brokers that a Catholic could win an overwhelmingly Protestant state. He went back to the mines of Mullens, Beckley, Logan, and Welch, and then traveled to southeastern Kentucky, to Vortex, Barwick, Hazard. He spoke at the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg, where he announced a program to put the jobless miners of the region to work on the roads and bridges of the region, and where the theme of his speech was framed by a recent, celebrated book on the plight of Appalachia.

“Let this be heard loud and clear,” Kennedy said. “The long night of the Cumberlands is ending.”

The real message of the speech was clear only to the most politically sophisticated:
When you hear about poverty,
the President was saying,
do not think of race. Remember these white men who want and
need work, these white women who struggle to feed and clothe their white children.