If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (26 page)

All of the pre‒November 1963 comments by Kennedy, his advisors, and media voices are real.

THE CAMP DAVID MEETING:
Paul Kattenburg was the head of the State Department Working Group. He recounted his “emperor has no clothes” moment during a National Security Council ExComm meeting on August 31, 1963, in a 1981 interview with WGBH:

“I blurted out, perhaps it was imprudent for me to do it, but I blurted out that we consider the possibility of withdrawing with honor, that this was, in other words, a time to review our stake . . .” A few weeks later, Kattenburg was removed as head of the Vietnam Working Group.

KHRUSHCHEV AND VIETNAM:
The fictional “understanding” here parallels the diplomatic maneuvering that led to the neutralization in Laos in 1961.

RICHARD RUSSELL:
The phone call between Kennedy and Russell is a near-verbatim rendering of a call between Russell and President Johnson on May 27, 1964. The audio and the transcript are available from many sources, including the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program. The frustration of both men is apparent, as is the chilling sense of foreboding. Both seem to know disaster is coming; neither can figure out how to avoid it. My premise is that a president inclined to disengage would have seen the Russell conversation as a potential opening.

A DIFFERENT COUNTRY—BUT HOW DIFFERENT? THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT:
The idea of a deposed Vice President Johnson calling JFK to offer advice is a fantasy. What is true is that the Kennedy White House did not possess anything like the legislative shrewdness of Johnson; he had offered advice to Ted Sorensen in 1963 about the timing of civil rights legislation and the advice was ignored.

The biographies of the African-American participants at the imagined “Vets for the Vote” rally are all historically accurate.

LIBERAL OPTIMISM AND THE SIXTIES:
Would the protest movements of the 1960s been different had President Kennedy lived? An affirmative answer comes from both sides of the political spectrum. In interviews conducted in the spring of 2013, SDS founders Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin argue that—with one crucial caveat—the counterculture would have had a very different tone.

“I think you have a very different history if JFK lives,” Todd Gitlin says. “The whole left would have had a soft landing; you’d have
had cultural estrangement but not bitterness.” But Gitlin’s premise rests on the idea that Kennedy would not have escalated Vietnam.

“The Vietnam War is what drives the movement crazy,” he says. “Without Vietnam, there’s no way to get from anger to ‘Blow it up!’”

Tom Hayden, who described the early sixties SDS as “reformist . . . the model was peaceful transition,” says that the assassination drained a sense of optimism out of the movement.

“There was a sense that ‘if
this
could happen,
anything
can happen.’”

Author David Talbot argues that “if there’s no JFK death, and no Vietnam, there’s no Weather Underground, no bomb throwers, no ‘cops as pigs’ . . . [T]he assassination robbed us of the possibility of change.”

At least one view from the right shares some of this view. In his book
Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:
How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
(2007), James Piereson argues that the essentially optimistic, patriotic liberal outlook was fatally damaged by the failure to acknowledge that JFK had been killed by a deluded Marxist. Assigning blame on a “culture of hate” meant a much harsher, less benign view of the United States, which enabled conservatives to “capture the flag” as the champions of patriotic values. Two points here: First, if you believe that Kennedy was in fact killed by a right-wing conspiracy, this argument is fatally flawed. Second, it may not put enough emphasis on the way the Vietnam War darkened the assumptions of the protest movement. The speculative question I do
not
deal with is: If JFK had lived and escalated the war, would the darker, more violent aspects of the protest movement still have emerged?

TEDDY WHITE AND CHINA:
Richard Reeves’s book says JFK had a conversation with Theodore H. White in 1961 about the possible
benefit of a meeting in Asia with Mao Tse-tung. Dean Rusk is cited in several works as saying Kennedy intended to normalize relations with China in his second term.

THE THREAT: JFK’S PRIVATE LIFE:
The accounts of President Kennedy’s sexual behavior range from the cautious to the salacious; at one level or another, they are recounted in Reeves’s and Dallek’s books; in Sy Hersh’s
The Dark Side of Camelot
(1997); in
John F. Kennedy’s Women: The Story of a Sexual Obsession
(2011)
by Michael O’Brien; and in others too numerous to list. O’Brien’s book contains a detailed look at the efforts by the Katers to expose Kennedy’s affair with Pam Turnure. The most recent book,
Once Upon a Secret
by Mimi Alford (2012), tells the story of her affair with the President while working in the White House Press Office.

BOBBY KENNEDY AS PROTECTOR:
Evan Thomas’s
Robert Kennedy: His Life
(2000) provides specific details of Bobby Kennedy’s efforts at damage control, including his concessions to FBI director Hoover as the price of keeping John Kennedy’s behavior private.

TEDDY WHITE’S CHINA REPORTING AND THE FALLOUT:
The author-journalist did go to China, but not until February 1972, when he was part of the press entourage that followed President Nixon on his historic visit to the country. Some of Kennedy’s press conference remarks on diplomatic recognition are taken from a speech he delivered in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 26, 1963.

JFK, MARY PINCHOT MEYER, DRUGS, AND TAPES:
Here are the facts that underlie this leap into the speculative: Mary Pinchot Meyer was both a social intimate of the Kennedys and one of the President’s lovers. She had a close relationship with LSD proselytizer Timothy
Leary, and was convinced that the use of hallucinogenic drugs by powerful decision makers was the key to a peaceful, spiritual revolution. Her murder on October 12, 1964, officially labeled “unsolved,” is treated by some conspiracy theorists as evidence that she was killed to silence her. A book by Nina Burleigh,
A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer
(1998),
the fullest account of her story, suggests that the man acquitted of her murder was very probably the killer; most likely the murder was the result of a robbery or assault gone wrong. Burleigh’s book, and other writings, report that during one White House visit, Meyer and the President shared a small amount of marijuana.

Other, more sensational allegations come largely from James Jesus Angleton. He was for more than twenty years chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, more formally the associate deputy director of operations for counterintelligence. His wife, Cecily, was one of Meyer’s closest friends. The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction dimensions of Angleton’s CIA work, his conviction that enemies had penetrated every level of the agency, and his often contradictory allegations about moles and conspiracies are examined most thoroughly in David Martin’s book
A Wilderness of Mirrors:
Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents
(2003). It is in this context that Angleton’s assertions that Meyer and Kennedy may have experimented with LSD, or that Angleton tapped Mary Meyer’s phones and bugged her town house—allegations that can be found in David Talbot’s
Brothers—
have to be weighed. His widow told Sally Bedell Smith that he would have had no means of wiring her home. (You can read this in Smith’s 2004 book,
Grace and Power
:
The Private World of the Kennedy White House
.) It is, of course, reasonable to ask how the wife of a covert operations official would know the limits of her husband’s professional abilities.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY:
The use and abuse of official power during the fight over rising steel prices is reported in Thomas’s Robert Kennedy book and in Reeves’s book—which also asserts that the phones of congressmen, lobbyists, and journalists were tapped. The President’s jocular references to official overreach are taken verbatim from Reeves’s book.

END OF TERM: KENNEDY’S HEALTH:
While the regimen of exercise and hot baths had eased Kennedy’s discomfort in the months before his death, the lifelong litany of ills, and the likely effects of the corticosteroids he was taking, made the prospect of eventual decline a reality. Secret Service agents (Reeves reports) expressed fears that if Kennedy served eight years, he’d be in a wheelchair by the end of his presidency.

RACIAL POLITICS:
For the real-life racial tensions that arose between 1965 and 1968, see Rick Perlstein’s
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
(2009). The impact of these tensions on the Democratic Party is examined at length in Savage’s
JFK, LBJ and the Democratic Party
. White’s
The Making of the President 1968
has much on the subject, as do several hundred other books on the politics of the period.

CULTURAL BACKLASH:
Would the counterculture have produced a socially conservative backlash even without the flag burning and the rhetorical (and at times actual) violence of the antiwar movement? Perlstein’s
Nixonland
suggests that the rising crime and cultural upheaval at Berkeley and other California campuses was a huge asset to Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor in 1966; and the first major disruptions at Berkeley, in late 1964, occurred
before
the Vietnam escalation, and had nothing to do with the war at all. It’s
reasonable to assume that long hair, drug use, open sexuality, and other signs of the cultural apocalypse would have led to a strong reaction from those embracing more traditional social values.

John Kennedy’s Berkeley speech is a reworked version of a 1967 speech that Robert Kennedy delivered to Americans for Democratic Action, where he described the movement of many of the young “from SDS to LSD.”

THE GOP BATTLE FOR THE NOMINATION:
In 1968, Reagan did not officially announce his presidential candidacy until he arrived at the Miami convention. By then three conservative stalwarts—Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower—had lined up most of the Southern delegates behind Richard Nixon. An unpublished monograph by Glenn Moore (date unavailable) argues that if Reagan had made an earlier declaration of candidacy, he might well have won all the delegates from Florida and Mississippi—in both states,
all
the delegates voted for the majority’s choice—and denied Nixon a first-ballot nomination. In fact, Nixon won the nomination with a margin of only twenty-five votes to spare. The kind words Reagan speaks about Wallace were in fact spoken by Reagan during his Southern swing in May 1968. The convention speech Reagan gives is taken verbatim from a speech he actually gave at the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, when, just after his acceptance speech, President Ford, who had narrowly defeated him for the nomination, invited Reagan to address the delegates.

THE DEMOCRATIC BATTLE FOR THE NOMINATION:
To those who lived through the 1968 campaign, or who have absorbed its history, the idea of Hubert Humphrey as a peace candidate may seem absurd. Before he was Johnson’s vice president, however, he was an early proponent of disarmament; a key Senate supporter of the Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty; and an originator of the Food for Peace program. As vice president he sent a prescient memo to President Johnson in early 1965, warning of the political consequences of escalation. (This can be found in full in an appendix to Blight et al.,
Vietnam: If Kennedy Had Lived
.) For his troubles, Humphrey was exiled from White House deliberations for months, until he was permitted to return as a full-fledged supporter of escalation. It is easy to imagine Humphrey as a strong supporter of President Kennedy’s efforts to ease cold war tensions . . . because he was.

My conclusion that Robert Kennedy would not have been able to seek the presidential nomination in 1968 is based on . . . a surmise. As Lowenstein argues in this book, it would have defied historical precedent; moreover, the Robert Kennedy who would have served his brother for eight years would have been a very different Robert Kennedy than the one we know: the one who had spent five years in exile, who had felt firsthand what fate can do to assumptions and certainties, and who was a symbol for those voters hungry for a sense of restoration.

Howard Hughes’ fear of nuclear testing led him to offer a large cash contribution to Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.

THE END:
This is fictional speculation, pure and simple. Jacqueline Kennedy
did
have a private confidant, a Washington obstetrician named Frank Finnerty, with whom she felt a strong sense of empathy. At her request, he became a telephone “counselor” of sorts. According to Sally Bedell Smith’s
Grace and Power
,
which contains the first public account of Finnerty’s role, he discussed with her the most intimate details of her private life. Whether that included her post‒White House life is unknown.

Before dismissing the idea of separate lives, it should be remembered that the Kennedys spent long periods apart: months at a time.
A new book by Thurston Clarke,
JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
(2013), says that the two grew closer after the death of their infant son Patrick, in September 1963, and that John Kennedy may have put aside his sexual pursuits. His near death might well have drawn the two even closer. The question then would be: Given John Kennedy’s lifelong compulsions, could he have resisted those compulsions for five years?

A month or so into 2013, I sent Sterling Lord, my literary agent, a vague notion about an alternate history look at John Kennedy. “I think this is a book,” he said, and within ten days he had brought the idea to Putnam. If you want to know why he has been my agent for more than forty years, that’s one damn good answer.

At Putnam, I’ve had the great good fortune to have publisher and editor in chief Neil Nyren as my editor on my last three books. It was he who signed on to this book idea and who nurtured this project through the birthing process. His mix of firm direction and gentle demeanor—or is it gentle direction and firm demeanor?—is everything a writer could want in an editor.

As with my past excursions into alternate history, I was blessed with a platoon of creative, politically savvy friends and colleagues who were generous with their time and inventive with their suggestions. Many thanks to journalists Walter Shapiro and Meryl Gordon; to Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute; to Dick and Doris Goodwin, whose wisdom came in the course of a lengthy, celebratory evening in Concord, Massachusetts; and to
novelist and friend Richard North Patterson. I also had the benefit this time around of the assistance of historian Michael Beschloss, who went above and beyond the call of duty in providing counsel and encouragement.

Insight into the political and cultural currents of the 1960s was supplied by SDS founders Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin; by author David Talbot; and by social historian Fred Kaplan. Fred’s 2009 book
1959: The Year Everything Changed
is one of the best guides to the events that roiled the decade that followed.

A special thank-you to Dr. Howard R. Bromley, associate professor of anesthesiology, critical care, and pain management at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, for helping me describe the medical treatment that the doctors at Parkland Hospital would have provided to a wounded President Kennedy.

As with all my work, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to researcher Beth Goodman. She has worked with me for fifteen years, at two TV networks and through three books. There is simply no one better.

My thanks as well to Richard Hutton, executive director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Cristina Venegas, chair of UCSB’s Film Studies Department, for providing me office space for the last stages of my writing.

I cannot ignore the signal contribution of “The Palmeni Group”: a group of miscreants with whom I have been having lunch with on a regular basis for decades. Without the unending ridicule of Andrew Bergman, Jerry Della Femina, Dr. Gerald Imber, and Michael Kramer, I would never have found the motive to finish this book. And I know our late companion, Joel Siegel, would have been urging on me an “alternate alternate” history in which Kennedy finds his Jewish roots.

Finally: to my children, Casey and Dave; to my stepdaughter and son-in-law, Justine and Alan Yerushalmi; to my grandchildren, Rory Greenfield and Ella, Ava, and Rebecca Yerushalmi; and to my wife, Dena Sklar . . .

. . . my alternate history would be far less rich without your presence.