If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (3 page)

Whatever the motive, Joe Jr. signed up for a mission that war historians later described as “near suicidal”—even pulled rank to get the task. He was to pilot a stripped-down B-24 Liberator bomber loaded with high-level explosives toward the site of a Nazi rocket site in northern France, and parachute out of the plane as the robotically controlled Liberator and its 22,000 pounds of Torpex crashed into the site.

He never made it. Because of a miscommunication between the U.S. Navy and British radar installations, a radar beam triggered the explosives while Joe was at the stick. His remains were never found.

And if Joe had lived . . . ?

It would have been Joe who came home to an open House seat, made vacant when the sitting congressman, Boston legend James Michael Curley, vacated it to seek a return to the mayor’s office. (Somehow, Curley’s massive debts from past campaigns had suddenly, miraculously been paid off by a mystery benefactor.) It would have been Joe who took on Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in 1952, with limitless sums from his father’s treasury.

As for himself? John Kennedy’s own tastes had run to a more contemplative, more analytical life. His health battles had made books his constant companions, and his personality was far less outgoing than Joe’s. He’d been drawn to journalism, and thought at one point that a job as a foreign bureau chief of a major newspaper or magazine would be to his liking. He’d even turned his senior thesis about British fecklessness in the run-up to World War II into a book,
Why England Slept
, that became a best seller. (He’d had a small army of helpers, including
New York Times
columnist Arthur
Krock—one of the many benefits of being the son of a very wealthy, well-connected man.)

“I never thought at school or at college that I would ever run for office myself,” he said later. “One politician was enough in the family, and my brother Joe was obviously going to be that politician. I hadn’t considered myself a political type, and he filled all the requirements for political success.” Their father agreed: he described his second son as “shy, withdrawn, and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.”

But when Joe Jr. died, Jack was next in line, and for the patriarch, that was enough.

“It was like being drafted,” Jack said. “My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He
demanded
it. You know my father.”

So it was Jack who struggled through awkward meetings with voters and badly given speeches all through 1946, until he finally found his footing, and—with the limitless flood of his father’s money—won that House seat and began his fourteen-year journey to the office his father long ago had vowed a Kennedy would one day occupy . . . a journey that almost ended when one of his lifelong health afflictions struck.

HE WAS LUCKY TO BE ALIVE . . .

He had almost died in the war a year before Joe did, surviving a days-long ordeal in the Solomon Islands after the PT boat he was commanding was split in two by a Japanese destroyer. That much was well known to the country; his father and a brace of journalists had seen to that. The story of his heroism, his close brush with death,
had been spread across the front pages of newspapers, chronicled by John Hersey in the pages of the
New Yorker
and later
Reader’s Digest
. The tie clip in the shape of his PT boat was the calling card of his aides and allies.

That was the life-threatening story that was a key to his political rise. What was just as important was the succession of threats to his life that had begun almost from birth—and that he, his family, and his doctors worked so hard to conceal.

He’d been sick from infancy, not just with the normal ills of childhood. He’d come down with scarlet fever at age three, spending two months in a sanitarium in Maine. His prep school days were marked by constant visits to infirmaries and hospitals; his afflictions ranged from colitis to “flu-like symptoms” to a blood count so low his doctors feared he had leukemia. And all the medical care money could buy could not protect him from treatment that may well have posed the greatest threat to his health and life. He’d been prescribed “corticosteroids” for his colitis, in the form of pellets lodged just under his skin. But the drug in all likelihood severely weakened his backbone, and triggered a form of Addison’s disease—an adrenal insufficiency that left him prone to infections of every sort.

At every stage of his life, ill health stalked him. He spent weeks in infirmaries and hospitals all through his school years; became so sick coming back from Europe in 1947 that he was given the last rites of the Church on board the
Île de France
. But it was in 1954 that he faced the gravest threat to his future—political and otherwise. His doctors told him bluntly that without a spinal fusion operation, it was very likely that he’d be unable to walk in a year or two. But because of his susceptibility to infection, the operation could very well prove fatal.

Don’t do it,
his father had advised.
Look at Roosevelt: won four
terms from a wheelchair.
But Jack was adamant:
I’d rather die than live that way,
he’d said. And from a bluntly political view, it was hard to imagine how a prospective president whose root message was youth, energy, vigor, the future, could succeed campaigning from a wheelchair, or on crutches. So, on October 21, he underwent a three-hour operation, during which the surgical team embedded metal screws into his spine. As feared, he developed infections; once again he was given the last rites of the Church. It took nine months of further surgery and recovery before he was able to return to the Senate.

In the nine years since, with the help of a compliant series of doctors and a determination to dissemble, he’d been able to hide the truth of his ill health from the press and the public. His campaign team denied he had “classic” Addison’s disease (it was a variation). When he tapped the services of Dr. Max Jacobson, widely known as “Dr. Feelgood” for the amphetamines he supplied, the doctor was kept off his list of appointments. (“I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” he said to brother Bob, who expressed concern about the medication. “It works.”) And now, thanks to the insistence of Admiral George Burkley, the White House physician, a regimen of exercise and relaxation had provided a decent measure of relief, although he still spent literally every day in considerable pain.

But what if that 1954 operation hadn’t worked? Suppose he hadn’t survived, or had been forced into retirement? It wasn’t just his career that would have ended. Yes, his father would have looked to Bobby or Teddy to step in, but that would have been an impossibility: in the fall of 1954, Bobby would have been twenty-eight years old, and thus constitutionally ineligible for a Senate seat. (Teddy would have been twenty-two—not even old enough for a seat in the House.) And without a brother in the White House to smooth the way to political success, as he later did for Teddy in
1962, neither Bobby’s thin accomplishments nor his abrasive personality would have been enough—even with Dad’s money.

The operation had been a coin flip. Had it landed the other way, there would not only have been no President Kennedy; there would have been no Kennedy dynasty at all. And he would not have found himself, in October of 1960, in a fight for the White House he was by no means certain to win.

IT CAME DOWN TO TWO TELEPHONE CALLS

The path to the White House had brought him to the edge of a cliff, over and over again. More than once, a single misstep or even a different decision by one of his opponents would have sent him over that edge.

He’d had to prove to the skeptical kingmakers in his party that his youth and religion were not disabling liabilities. So he’d gone into West Virginia, where the Catholic population was 4 percent, and where suspicions about his faith ran strong. And with an eloquent appeal to tolerance, and the help of his father’s money (which, in the words of campaign worker Leo Racine “came in satchels—it just kept flooding in”), he won in a landslide. He’d braced himself for competition from the most powerful of Democrats, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, and the most beloved of Democrats, two-time nominee Adlai Stevenson, the representative of the liberal heart and soul base of the party. Had Adlai said yes, or had Johnson stepped into the race a few months or even a few weeks earlier, Kennedy would almost surely have been denied a first-ballot victory. And once the kingmakers retreated behind the doors of their hotel suites, the young Senator’s chances for the nomination would have all but disappeared.

Now, in the campaign’s final weeks, there was one central factor that could decide the campaign—a factor that had divided the United States, literally, from before there
was
a United States. It was race. And when it came to race, John Kennedy was walking a tightrope. The Democratic Party’s uneasy coalition of liberals in the North and Midwest and hard-shell segregationists and outright racists in the South had been coming apart for more than a decade. A segregationist presidential ticket headed by South Carolina governor J. Strom Thurmond had won four Southern states in 1948. A Democratic nominee without the lion’s share of the South’s 122 electoral votes faced an almost insurmountable path to the presidency.

But . . . too much attention to Southern sensibilities could pose a different political danger. The Republican Party was a serious contender for the Negro vote. Republicans were some of the strongest civil rights champions in the Congress, while Democratic powers like Russell of Georgia, Byrd of Virginia, and Eastland of Mississippi were the latest in a century-long line of Democrats determined to keep blacks in a state of near bondage and peonage. The Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, had so impressed Martin Luther King Jr. with his commitment to equality that most of King’s associates were betting that he’d endorse Nixon for president. In fact, Martin Luther King Sr., the young reverend’s father and one of the most influential black ministers in America, had signed a newspaper ad endorsing Nixon—out of fear of a Catholic in the White House.

“Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father!” Kennedy said to campaign aide Harris Wofford. Then, grinning, he added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

Then, on October 19, King was arrested at an Atlanta sit-in for trespassing, spending the night in jail for the first time in his life.
When he appeared a few days later before a militant segregationist judge, he found himself charged with a trumped-up parole violation and sentenced to six months in jail at the Georgia State Penitentiary at Reidsville, hundreds of miles from Atlanta; his wife feared he would never come out of there alive. She called Wofford, who in turn pressured Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who, after carefully making sure that none of the candidate’s top aides were within hearing range, persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King to express his concern.

The reaction within the campaign was explosive. Bobby was so furious that he phoned Shriver and tore into him with such vehemence that it opened a years-long rift. Summoning Wofford and Louis Martin, the top Negro in the campaign, he said: “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their state to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

What Bobby
didn’t
tell them was that, on the advice of the secretary of the Georgia Democratic Party,
he
had already called the judge who had thrown King in prison and urged him to release the minister on bond. Along with pressure from the Governor, the judge did exactly that, and that’s when King’s father stepped front and center.

He didn’t just officially endorse Kennedy; he did much more.

“I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

Almost immediately, Louis Martin began calling black
journalists around the country. (He scrupulously avoided the white press.) Papers like the
Pittsburgh Courier
and the
Washington Afro American
prominently featured the story. For its part, the campaign distributed some 2 million pamphlets under the name of the “Freedom Crusade Committee” with the headline
“
NO COMMENT” NIXON VERSUS A CANDIDATE WITH A HEART, SENATOR KENNEDY
.
(For Nixon, the frustration must have been palpable; he’d urged the Justice Department to intervene, only to be told that it was a matter for the state of Georgia to resolve.)

It was impossible to
prove
the impact of those phone calls, or Daddy King’s statement, or the massive distribution of that pamphlet in black neighborhoods across the country; the analytical tools of 1960 weren’t that sophisticated. But here’s what
was
known. In a black enclave in Philadelphia, where Stevenson had won about 75 percent of the vote, Kennedy won almost 85 percent. In a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where Stevenson had won two to one, Kennedy won four to one. In New York’s most heavily black neighborhoods, Stevenson had won two-thirds of the vote; Kennedy won three-fourths of the vote. In New Jersey, some 125,000 blacks had voted for JFK: he won the state by 30,000 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent. As for Illinois, where Kennedy won by 8,000 highly dubious votes, one aide noted, “Without the Negroes, it wouldn’t have been close enough to steal—not that I’m saying we stole it.” Even in the South, the black vote was critical; for all the talk of LBJ as the key to Texas, the black vote in Houston, which had given Stevenson 12,000 votes, gave Kennedy more than 22,300 votes. And the Negro vote in Louisiana and the Carolinas was crucial to Kennedy’s narrow victories there.

The link between those phone calls and his historically close victory was not obvious. But there were times when he allowed himself to think: if he had not called Coretta Scott King, if his brother
had not called the judge, if Daddy King had not expressed his gratitude so powerfully, if the black vote had not come out as enthusiastically as it did . . . then Richard Nixon would likely have won the White House.