If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (21 page)

For all the determination of Kennedy not to be trapped by rising racial conflicts and resentments, there was simply no way to avoid the political fallout. The busing of schoolchildren that was ordered by federal courts; the lawsuits to force craft unions to open their ranks to blacks; the crime rate that continued to rise year after year (and how could you prove it would have risen much faster without those jobs programs?); the struggle for control of city halls in a dozen cities—all drove white working and blacks further and further apart . . . and politicians from both parties knew it. Alabama’s George Wallace, barred from another term as governor, was installing his wife, Lurleen, as a figurehead chief executive while promising to enter presidential primaries across the country.

“Now that they’re sufferin’ just like we in the South have been, now that they’re seein’ their little children forced onto buses to take them into crime-ridden schools, now that they see their millionaire President drivin’ down their property values and their neighborhoods,” Wallace said on
Face the Nation
, “I think the folks up North are ready to stand up. Remember, the Tea Party didn’t happen in Mobile or Biloxi—it happened right in Kennedy’s backyard. Could be time for another one.”

Race, however, was only one reason why Kennedy’s job approval ratings had turned anemic. Another powerful force came not from the mean streets of the inner cities but from the pastoral groves of academe.

•   •   •

“Maybe you should count your blessings, Clark,” Kennedy said to the president of the University of California in the early spring of 1966. “The students in Hue just burned down our library and
cultural center. They’re throwing stones at the police in Barcelona. They’re using clubs in Yokosuka and Tokyo. Berkeley looks like a walk in the park.”

“It
is
a walk in the park, Mr. President,” Clark Kerr said. “A walk where a few hundred young men and women have left their clothes off, and what they’re smoking isn’t sold in any stores. As far as some of my regents are concerned, they might as well be setting fire to the library or . . . I don’t know, burning an American flag . . . and with respect, Mr. President, you do
not
need to remind me that I made the world’s worst prediction.”

It was at a 1959 conference about the coming generation of college students that Kerr had offered this prophecy: “The employers will love this generation, they are not going to press very many grievances, there won’t be much trouble, they are going to do their jobs, they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions. There aren’t going to be many strikes.”

Within a few years Clark’s prediction—actually an observation offered less as an endorsement than as an assessment—had been thoroughly undermined by a combination of forces. The sheer number of young men and women crowding college campuses, combined with the power of hormones, could spark chaos even when nothing of consequence was involved. In May of 1963, students at Princeton, Brown, and Yale went on a series of rampages in search of women’s underwear—so-called panty raids. It could be chalked up to harmless if offbeat fun . . . except that the raids turned violent, with police clubbing students and both sides throwing punches. Another was the example that had been set back in 1960, when Negro college students sat in at segregated lunch counters and boarded segregated buses in the South; it was, in fact, the decision of Berkeley officials to seal off its property from off-campus causes
that had led to the massive protests of late 1964. Moreover, the students who had traveled south in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 had come back to their campus armed with the skills to organize on a whole series of issues:

Why were women required to be in their dorms by 10:00 p.m. on a school night? For that matter, why was it any of the university’s business if young adults chose to have sex with each other, whether or not they were married?

Why were no students on the boards of trustees, which set policy for the universities and colleges?

Why was birth control not available at student health centers?

Why was marijuana a criminal offense while the government subsidized the tobacco that killed tens of thousands every year?

Why were men compelled to serve in the Reserve Officers Training Corps in order to graduate?

Why were so many college courses a series of lectures, to hundreds of students at a time, with little chance for face-to-face learning?

There was, above all, a sense of disaffection, or revolt, born less out of any specific grievance than a broader, more diffuse sense of estrangement. There were pieces of it in books that appeared before the 1960s really began, like Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
or Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd
or Sloan Wilson’s
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
.
It could be found in the mockery of television programs and commercials found in
MAD
magazine; in the political jabs of comedian Mort Sahl and the acerbic commentaries about race, drugs, and sex from Lenny Bruce. It could be found in the way the music they had grown up with, the three- and four-chord music of rock and roll, had grown more complex, with lyrics that spoke of sex and drugs—or seemed to. A Peter, Paul and Mary song, “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” about a little boy, was turned
into an anthem about marijuana, over the strong objections of its author; and college students heard blatant sexual images in the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” (An FBI agent, tasked with deciphering the song, reported that it was “incomprehensible at any speed.”)

As hair grew longer, as skirts got shorter, as the air grew more pungent, a T-shirt began appearing on campuses bearing the warning found on an IBM punch card: “I am a student. Do not fold, bend, or mutilate”; and at Berkeley, graduate students sang a mocking “anthem” to the melody of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:

Keep the students safe for knowledge

Keep them loyal, keep them clean,

This is why we have a college

Hail to the IBM machine!

Journalists and academics might spend hours debating the source of this behavior; there was no debate about its impact. Among the broad middle class, the specter of young men and women massing in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, getting high on illegal drugs, shedding their clothes, was appalling. And especially among those without the money to send their children to college, the idea of privileged children—on a track for a far more affluent life than their children would ever know—shutting down their campuses for the “right” to help run the place was somewhere between laughable and contemptible. And at least one increasingly visible California public figure expressed that emotion with perfect pitch—especially after Kerr crafted a compromise that kept protesting students from expulsion.

“Let me read to you what the star of
Bedtime for Bonzo
said about me—
and
you,” Kerr was saying to President Kennedy. “I’m quoting here.

“‘There is no better example of a failure of leadership than what has been perpetrated at Berkeley, when a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame on a great university,’ Ronald Reagan declared. ‘And the silence of Governor Brown—and, for that matter, the President—is deafening. Mr. Kennedy, it should not take a “profile in courage” to call to account those who break the law and defile fundamental moral standards.’”

“Actually,” Kennedy said, “I’m thinking it
is
time I said something about this. I know I spoke at Charter Day four years ago, but your commencement—”

“Consider yourself invited,” Kerr said.

•   •   •

“I am painfully aware,” Kennedy said to the tens of thousands gathered at Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, “that many of you regard the commencement speech as that endless interlude between celebrations where you are compelled to hear earnest advice that is as forgettable as it is well-intentioned. Yet, there
have
been events like this one when the words that were spoken had lasting impact. Winston Churchill proclaimed the descent of an ‘Iron Curtain’ at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri; George Marshall announced the postwar European recovery plan at Harvard; and there are those who trace the origins of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to a commencement speech I gave at American University. And at another campus, the University of Michigan”—here he waited for the good-natured boos aimed at Cal’s frequent Rose Bowl rival to subside—“I proposed an idea that became the Peace Corps and then AmeriCorps, which have seen tens of thousands of young people spend two years of their lives to make a better country and a better world.

“Only a few years ago, the competition for your time would have been the lure of affluence—well-paying, comfortable jobs at our major corporations and industries. Now there is another temptation: what we might call the temptation of Dionysus, the god of celebration, of excess.”

(There were knowing grins among the White House Press Corps at that line.)

“It is,” Kennedy said, “noteworthy that the troubadour of your generation, who once sang of changes that were ‘blowin’ in the wind,’ now beckons you to ‘dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free’ and to ‘forget about today until tomorrow.’ But it is also troublesome. Because we dare
not
forget about today until tomorrow. When the music stops, when the dancing ends, when tomorrow morning comes, the challenges of today remain. And to confront those challenges, the temptations of Dionysus are shallow diversions. What is needed, rather, is the challenge of Sisyphus, the king of Corinth condemned for his sins to roll a stone endlessly up a hill, only to see it roll down again . . . forever.

“There are times when the labors of justice seem endless; but the good news is, they are not. In your own short lifetimes, you have seen the evils of discrimination begin to end; you have seen the threat of nuclear catastrophe replaced by an era of negotiations, and the poison of radiation cleared from the skies. Now new tasks await: there are still the hungry to be fed, the homeless to be sheltered, the young to be taught, the old to be succored. There is work to fill a hundred lifetimes. Each of you has one. If you do not help in the work we have, who will? And if not now, when?”

The speech won praise from editorial pages, while
Time
magazine offered faint praise for the President’s “belated but well-earned verbal spanking he delivered to the bearded and bra-less brats of Berkeley.” From Ken Kesey, the author and psychedelic drug
champion, traveling with his Merry Pranksters across the southern United States, came the cryptic comment: “Since Mr. Kennedy is clearly off the bus, we invite him, and Jackie, if she is so inclined, to join us
on
the bus for further journeys.”

The President’s words, however, did little to lessen the consequences of the cultural upheaval, at least in California. The mix of disorder, dissent, and excesses at Berkeley and other campuses was a key reason why Ronald Reagan defeated Governor Pat Brown by more than 700,000 votes—and instantly became a potential presidential candidate. His victory in a state that was a microcosm of America was, in pollster Harris’s memo to the White House, “a clear warning that millions of Americans believe ‘the guard rails have come off,’ that their beliefs and values are under assault. Mr. President, your most urgent political task over the rest of your term is to convince the nation that you are the guardian of those beliefs and values.”

Unfortunately for Kennedy, he was learning that he could no longer count on one of his most reliable resources in carrying his message to the public.

•   •   •

“You can think of it as the ‘six-year itch,’” Arthur Schlesinger had warned the President as they sat with a clutch of advisors a few weeks after the midterms with the morning papers spread out on a coffee table in the Oval Office. “It’s not just the voters that punish every president in his sixth year; in fact, you got off relatively lightly. The press has seen and heard your act by now. You’ve been on their front pages and on their evening news just about every single day. You can count on them looking for the next chapter.”

Even if historically predictable, that change in the press’s affections would have unsettled the President. He and his family had
befriended the press, shared secrets, sometimes bought their assistance or loyalty or silence, sometimes enlisted them as allies, even as go-betweens, as when ABC’s John Scali carried significant messages to Soviet officials during the Cuban missile crisis. Newspapers, magazines, and television had celebrated the Kennedys’ tastes and glamour; what could have been an unflattering portrayal of wealth and privilege instead became a celebration of American royalty. And in his first White House years, John Kennedy could count on the discretion of the press to ignore the details of his private life.

When the story of what happened to Clark Mollenhoff and the
Des Moines Register
began to circulate—as it inevitably did—something changed. Now the use—or misuse—of official power was not being directed at greedy steel companies, or thuggish labor unions, or corrupt politicians, or the bosses of organized crime. Now that power had been used to threaten one of their own: a newspaper that was investigating a serious charge against the sitting president of the United States. Maybe the story wasn’t conclusive enough to print; maybe it was a mix of rumor and innuendo that wouldn’t stand up under scrutiny. But that wasn’t the point. The President had unleashed the full might of his office to threaten the newspaper’s parent company with financial ruin.

Maybe the press couldn’t follow up on that story; maybe it crossed the line into the personal at a time when no serious journalist would have argued that “the personal is political.” But there was nothing to keep America’s newspapers, magazines, and television networks from casting a much more jaundiced eye on the
public
record of the administration, to illustrate the kind of pressure that had been applied to one of their own.

And that’s what many of them began to do.