If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (22 page)

HOW JFK SILENCED HIS CRITICS, a
Wall Street Journal
headline read, introducing a story that detailed how the White
House and the Democratic Party funded sham “citizens’ groups” that filed complaints against right-wing radio broadcasters as the 1964 campaign began. With the FCC applying the “Fairness Doctrine” rule that required radio stations to broadcast contrasting viewpoints, dozens of the Kennedys’ severest critics simply left the airwaves. An accompanying story reported that Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, had urged the IRS to aggressively audit conservative organizations and individuals. (“If true,” Richard Nixon argued in a speech to Illinois auto dealers, “it is an unconscionable, indefensible, if not impeachable abuse of power. Just because a president does it does
not
mean it’s legal.”)

A month later another newspaper ran a three-part excerpt from a new book by Clark Mollenhoff. The title alone conveyed the thrust of the book:
The Imperial Presidency: John Kennedy and the Abuse of Power
. Even more eye-opening was the venue in which it appeared: the
Washington Post
, whose late publisher Phil Graham had been one of the President’s closest friends and supporters in the press. (“Publisher’s ink is thicker than water,” his widow, Katharine Graham, explained to friends. “What they did to John Cowles is simply unacceptable.”) The excerpts went back to the 1962 fight over the steel price hikes, and spelled out in detail the threats of income tax audits and expense account scrutiny, as well as the use of FBI agents to interrogate reporters. Mollenhoff also included a cryptic reference to “the summary deportation of a witness, an attractive ‘party girl’ named Ellen Rometsch, who may have had crucial information about financial and personal transgressions on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

There were even stories about White House “image making”—a relatively new term that was becoming familiar to news readers and viewers, as reporters tried to lift the curtain that once shielded manipulation from public view. An
Esquire
magazine reporter named
Tom Wolfe managed to ingratiate himself with a White House advance team long enough to write an eye-opening piece—“If There’s Room for Everybody, the Room’s Too Damn Small!”—detailing the search for a venue small enough to ensure that the President spoke before a full house. An essay by
New York
magazine’s Gloria Steinem explored the uncritical, even fawning profiles of Jacqueline Kennedy in women’s magazines.

“The distance from Eleanor Roosevelt’s crusade for the poor to Jacqueline Kennedy’s ‘crusade’ for designer gowns and White House furnishings is a long, disheartening one,” Steinem wrote. “One can hope that in the future, a First Lady will embody less of the feminine mystique and more of a feminist one—not to mention the hope that at some point, we might take seriously the concept of a woman occupying the West Wing of the White House.”

Standing alone, none of these afflictions—racial division, generational division, a less deferential press—would have been enough to seriously damage President Kennedy’s standing in the face of a buoyant economy and a more or less peaceful world. Together, they led to a polarized electorate, one that was almost evenly divided in its assessment of his presidency.

And by the time the 1968 campaign hit its final stage, the choice faced by the country fully reflected that wide and deep division.

•   •   •

If the 1968 campaign had been fought on the terrain of the previous three decades . . . had someone other than John Kennedy been occupying the White House . . . Richard Nixon would have been the all but inevitable candidate of the Republican Party.

Ever since FDR battled to a third term in the shadow of a second world war, events beyond America’s borders had dominated presidential campaigns: the United States was immersed in that war
in 1944; then came the cold war, communism, Korea, nuclear testing, the missile gap, peace in a nuclear age, all of which had been decisive issues in the campaigns that followed. For Nixon—who had come to prominence exposing the Soviet espionage of Alger Hiss; who had debated Nikita Khrushchev in the model kitchen of a U.S. cultural exhibit in Moscow; who had traveled the world since his narrow 1960 defeat—the international stage was his natural habitat. (That was why his 1962 run for governorship of California was so misbegotten, he realized after he’d lost: his vision was focused on the future of Asia, the relevance of NATO. Highway construction plans and school budgets put him to sleep.)

Nixon had spent his years in the wilderness wisely, endorsing Goldwater in 1964, speaking for every GOP nominee who’d have him in the 1966 midterms, challenging John Kennedy’s foreign policies in speeches and magazine articles. He’d stayed silent as his most formidable potential ally, Michigan governor George Romney, self-destructed in a single disastrous television interview. (When asked by WKBD’s Lou Gordon why the Republican Party had chosen Goldwater despite his unsettling views, Romney replied, “Because we had a convention of delegates who’d been brainwashed by the far right.” In a last-minute effort to recover, Governor Romney appeared on the debut episode of
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
, a new topical comedy show, repeatedly putting an oversize foot in his mouth, to no avail.) By the time 1968 began, only the potential entry of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller seemed to stand between Nixon and the nomination; and for the increasingly Southern and Western base of the party, Rockefeller embodied everything they’d been fighting against for almost thirty years.

Except . . . the country wasn’t thinking all that much about the outside world.

There were no American boys fighting and dying in a faraway
war, as there had been in 1952 when he’d run with Ike the first time. There was no dangerous standoff in Berlin, or a cold war that periodically threatened to turn hot, as there had been in 1960, when “Experience Counts” was his theme. The U.S. and China were opening embassies in each other’s capitals, and the Cuban embargo had been suspended since early 1967. Now America was turning inward. For the rank and file of the Republican Party, the concerns were
here
: crime on the city streets, outbursts of disorder and violence, a younger generation at war with traditional morals. Their fears may have been overwrought—writer Jimmy Breslin noted that “most of these Republicans live in places where the muggers couldn’t afford the bus fare to get to them”—but they were real enough as far as motivating their votes went.

It wasn’t that Nixon didn’t
understand
these impulses. Hell, he’d pretty much
invented
the “forgotten American” theme in his very first congressional campaign back in 1946 and saved his political life with it in his “Checkers” speech in 1952: the returning vet with the wife, kids, dog, mortgage; the man who lived a simple, unglamorous life; the man who promised to restore clean language to the White House. It was just that there was someone else who could speak to the disaffections of his party in a way that Richard Nixon couldn’t . . . and who could bring to a campaign something that John Kennedy had shown to be of enormous value: a candidate who was also a
star
.

•   •   •

It was very easy to underestimate Ronald Reagan. It was also proving politically fatal.

When he’d announced in 1966 that he was running for governor of California, the actor jokes began. (“Ronald Reagan for governor?”
studio chief Jack Warner supposedly said. “No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Reagan for Stewart’s best friend.”) When he had faced off against San Francisco mayor George Christopher in the Republican primary, all the smart money was on the moderate mayor. When Reagan won the primary by a 2‒1 margin, Governor Pat Brown’s staff all but threw a party. Their man had beaten Richard Nixon four years earlier, for God’s sake. This actor would be a pushover. When Reagan won with a 700,000-vote plurality, the joking was replaced by a blend of speculation and disbelief:
Could this guy actually try for the presidency?

By the time his first year in office was over, the answer to that question was:
Well, yeah.
Three weeks after taking office, he’d gotten the board of regents to fire Clark Kerr as university president; within six months he’d worked out a budget with his Democratic legislature and also signed the nation’s most liberal abortion bill. The only setback to Reagan’s presidential bid was a charge by columnist Drew Pearson that a “homosexual ring” existed inside the Governor’s inner staff. And by the spring, that issue had faded. Now the question was how openly to pursue a campaign, and it turned out that the current occupant of the White House was the key to their strategy.

“When we looked at the terrain,” Reagan advisor Lyn Nofziger recalled, “we saw that we were in the same place Kennedy was in back in ’60. We knew we’d take a big hit on ‘experience.’ Kennedy did, and he’d been in office for fourteen years, not one. But the big mountain he had to climb was to prove he could win. That’s what West Virginia was all about. For us, Nebraska and Oregon would be our West Virginias . . . and JFK in the White House was one of our best arguments: ‘
That’s
the kind of candidate we need!’”

Reagan never set foot in either state; he was on the ballots
because state officials could list candidates whether or not they’d declared for president. What voters in both states saw—over and over again—was a five-minute television film produced by a group called Republicans for Victory.

“Six years ago, in the nation’s second biggest state, a weak Democratic incumbent soundly defeated the nation’s best-known Republican,” the film began, with clips of a victorious Governor Brown and an embittered Richard Nixon announcing “my last press conference.”

“Four years ago,” the film continued, “a new voice arose in the West, a new champion for American values.” And there was a minute-long clip from Reagan’s 1964 TV speech for Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing,” including its most famous line:

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

“Two years ago,” the film went on, “that new voice—that new leader—won a landslide victory over that same Democratic governor.”

Then, over a split-screen image—a buoyant, smiling Reagan; a dour, defeated Nixon—the film concluded: “Now, as the campaign to take back the White House begins, ask yourself: Who embodies our values, shares our convictions, and can win in November?”

When Reagan won 41 percent of the Nebraska primary vote on May 14, finishing just six points behind Nixon, ABC’s Bill Laurence observed that “to paraphrase this network’s famous sports show, Mr. Reagan is enjoying the joy of a close defeat, while Mr. Nixon is suffering the agony of a Pyrrhic victory.” Two weeks later in Oregon, where liberal Republicans like Senator Mark Hatfield and Governor Tom McCall thrived, Reagan won 35 percent of the vote.

“There is now no doubt,” said NBC’s Sander Vanocur, “that Ronald Reagan is a viable contender. The question is: Will he formally enter the race? And if he does, can he overcome the formidable phalanx of supporters that Mr. Nixon has in his corner . . . and can he shake loose the delegates that have declared their allegiance to the former vice president?”

Five days later Reagan came close to answering the first question when he set out on a five-day, 7,000-mile “non-campaign” speaking tour that took him to New Orleans, Charlotte, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, Chicago, Columbus, and Cleveland. “Welfare cheats” and “lawbreakers” were his special targets. A week later, after he had won all of California’s delegates in the state’s uncontested primary, Governor Reagan answered the question directly. “Yes,” he said, “the voters have made this decision for me. I’m a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.”

“The timing was critical,” chief delegate hunter F. Clifton White said later. “Had he waited until the convention was about to open, Nixon’s big guns—Goldwater, Thurmond, John Tower—might have gotten commitments from enough delegates to win. Ron’s announcement kept just enough of them in play.”

As it turned out, what actually determined the Republican presidential nominee was . . . the flip of a coin.

•   •   •

The tactic had been suggested not by any of his aides but by the candidate himself in a meeting in his Fontainebleau hotel suite two days before the convention began.

“I don’t think I’m being cocky about this,” Reagan said, “but if I could get in front of these delegates and speak to them, I think we could pull enough of them away from Dick to stop a first-ballot nomination. And then . . .”

“And then you’d win it,” Stu Spencer said. “The question is how to do it. They’re not about to let you have that audience all to itself.”

Reagan grinned at Spencer and shook his head.

“Of course not, Stu,” he said. “But what if the delegates
demand
it?”

On Saturday, Nevada governor Paul Laxalt and two dozen conservative Republicans stood in front of a press conference and announced their intention to back a new convention rule: every candidate seeking the nomination would be invited to give a ten-minute speech to the delegates just before the balloting began.

“With debates now a permanent part of our political landscape,” Laxalt said, “it is a logical next step for the men and women choosing our nominee to hear them make their case before casting their ballots. We have seen,” he said in a clear reference to Nixon, “how critical it is for our nominee to be able to make our case in the public arena.”

The Nixon campaign pushed back hard. Speechwriter William Safire drafted a statement labeling the rule “a cheap cynical contrivance to turn the campaign into a carnival.” Their campaign, however, was caught in a whipsaw. Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s one slim chance at the nomination was the same as Reagan’s—to push the fight to a second ballot. His campaign chief, Leonard Hall, urged the Rockefeller delegates to support the rule. Across the ideological divide, dozens of conservative delegates had been prodded into supporting Nixon by party heavyweights like Strom Thurmond and John Tower—but their hearts were with Reagan.