If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (5 page)

“I think that’s going to do it,” one of the physicians said to Admiral Burkley. “But my God, the way his lumbar region looks, I’m surprised he can even walk.”

“Well, he can—and, thanks to you and your team, he will,” Burkley said. “And as I’m sure you realize, all of the records of the procedures here will come under the purview of the Secret Service. The details of the President’s health have national security implications that—”

“Understood,” the doctor said, “understood.”

A few minutes after Mac Kilduff’s briefing, after he had phoned in the details to Weinberg at the city desk, Jim Lehrer stepped outside the entrance to Parkland’s emergency room for a few breaths of fresh air. There, standing by the presidential limousine, was Dallas
Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels. They glanced at each other, and Sorrels, looking like a man just pulled back from the abyss, shook his head and pointed to the plexiglass shards of the bubble top.

“Thank God it rained, Jim; thank God it rained. If the sun had come out, he’d be a dead man.”

•   •   •

Robert Kennedy was eating a tuna fish sandwich on the patio of his home in suburban Virginia, chatting with some of his Justice Department colleagues, when he was told that J. Edgar Hoover was on the phone. The Attorney General and the FBI director despised each other; for Hoover to call Robert Kennedy at home was an instant sign of bad news. Maybe another rumor had surfaced about Jack; maybe he was asking for more surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have news for you,” Hoover said in a voice stripped of any trace of emotion. “The President’s been shot.”

“Yes,” he replied to Kennedy’s first, stunned question. “It appears to be serious. I’ll call when I know more.”

Robert Kennedy hung up the phone, then spoke as though he had been struck hard.

“Jack’s been shot . . . It’s serious.” Then, to Ed Guthman, one of his senior Justice Department aides: “There’s been so much hate . . . I thought they’d get one of us . . . I thought it would be me.”

His first thoughts about his brother were protective—in two senses. First, he called national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and had the locks changed on the President’s files.
If Lyndon Johnson is the president, there’s no way he’s going to get his hands on those files.

Second, even before he knew his brother’s fate, he began asking the same question to a dozen different people: “Who did this?”

He summoned CIA director John McCone to his Hickory Hill home and asked if his agency had done it. (No, said McCone, and invoked their shared Catholic faith to underscore his assertion.) He asked his contact in the Cuban exile community if the exiles’ anger over JFK’s “no invasion” pledge in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis had triggered the attack; he asked his top investigator, Walter Sheridan, whether Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, on trial for jury tampering, had done it. What about organized crime? There were plenty of tapes of Mafia bosses swearing bloody vengeance on Kennedy for his crusade. And what about Fidel, who had told an AP reporter just two months ago that “U.S. leaders should think if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe”? Bobby knew damn well that “U.S. leaders” were doing just that—because he was one of them.

It was forty-five minutes later when his wife, Ethel, beckoned him to the phone. It was Kenny O’Donnell from Dallas. O’Donnell had been with Jack since his first campaign for Congress in ’46, had helped put him in the Senate and then the White House, and Kenny was weeping and laughing and telling Bobby, “He’s in surgery—but it looks like he’s going to make it. It looks like he’s going to be okay. And Jackie’s fine; I mean, not fine, but—”

“Ed!” he said to Guthman as he hung up the phone. “Let’s go.”

Seven minutes later, Robert Kennedy was speeding down George Washington Memorial Parkway; fifteen more minutes and he was heading down Alabama Avenue, then waved through gates by the Air Force guards. Shortly after 3:30 p.m. eastern standard time, an eight-seat military transport jet was taxiing down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base.

Someone had tried to kill his brother. He was going to find out who he—or they—were . . . and why.

•   •   •

Shortly before 2:00 p.m. central standard time, the screen at the Texas Theatre on West Jefferson Boulevard in Dallas went black; the matinee showing of
War Is Hell
was shut off, the lights went on, and the handful of patrons looked up to see a dozen police officers, armed with shotguns, deployed throughout the theater. Officer M. N. McDonald began to walk down the left aisle, toward the front of the theater, searching patrons as he went.

Unlike the vast majority of Dallas police at that moment, they weren’t searching for the gunman who had shot President Kennedy. They were looking for the man who had shot Officer J. D. Tippit on Tenth Street—a shooting witnessed by several eyewitnesses (one of whom begged the police to leave him out of their investigation, as he had been visiting his lover for an afternoon fling). The gunman had fled down Jefferson Boulevard and stopped briefly in the foyer of Hardy’s Shoe Store, where manager Johnny Calvin Brewer, deciding that the man “looked suspicious,” followed him as he ducked into the Texas Theatre.

“Did that man who just ran in here buy a ticket?” Brewer asked clerk Julia Postal. When she realized the man had slipped inside, Postal—who had heard a radio flash about the Kennedy shooting—told him, “I don’t know if this is the man they want in there, but he is running from them for some reason.” Minutes later Brewer was onstage with police officers and was pointing a man out to Officer McDonald.

When he was ordered to stand, the man put up his hands, then yelled, “Well, it is all over now!” punched the policeman in the face, and pulled a pistol out of the waistband of his slacks.

And Officer McDonald, faced with the threat of imminent
death, pointed his service revolver at his assailant and fired two shots. The man clutched his stomach and collapsed.

When the ambulance arrived barely a minute later, the police carried the wounded man out of the theater, and Detective Paul Bentley pulled a wallet out of the man’s left hip pocket.

“Who is he?” asked Officer C. T. Walker.

“Well, this ID says he’s A. L. Hidell. But this one says he’s Lee Harvey Oswald. We may have to wait awhile to find out who he really is.”

“Or who he
was
,” Walker said.

•   •   •

For 100 million Americans, the shooting and the survival of John Kennedy became, in the words of the
Times
of London correspondent Louis Heren, “a collective national experience surely unprecedented anywhere in the world and anytime in history . . . [C]lustered around millions of television screens, most Americans were involved in the fate of Kennedy to a degree unimaginable before the age of electronic communications.” From the first scattered reports interrupting the early afternoon soap operas, to the countless clusters of passersby peering into the windows of appliance stores to follow the news, to the cautious optimism and then confident assertions of his survival, the now-dominant medium of television that might have become a repository of national mourning became instead a source of national relief and exhilaration.

That first afternoon and evening, viewers saw surgeons and physicians, holding enlarged images from anatomy textbooks, explaining where the President had been hit, how his subclavian artery had been repaired, where his rib had been cracked, along with highly incomplete accounts of John Kennedy’s medical history. They saw
footage from the day: the speech to a labor rally and the chamber of commerce in Fort Worth; the reception at Dallas’s Love Field, Jackie in her two-piece pink suit and pillbox hat, clutching a large bouquet of roses, still photos of the First Couple waving to the crowd; then a grainy image of the bubble top exploding and the President clutching his upper left chest. The networks carried the press briefings from Parkland—microwave relays had been hastily installed to permit live coverage—and viewers saw and heard Admiral Burkley assert that “the President has been in excellent health, which should help ensure his recovery,” and that there was “no reason” to fear any long-term injury.

They saw footage of Attorney General Robert Kennedy arriving at Parkland Hospital at 8:00 p.m., surrounded by a phalanx of Dallas police and Secret Service; heard reports from Washington that the plane carrying six cabinet officers and Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, on its way to Tokyo for a major economic conference, was safe. They heard historians talk of past attempts, successful and failed, to kill presidents, and heard one wonder aloud about whether the absence of more than half the cabinet had been timed to create maximum chaos.

“Remember,” he said, “the conspiracy to kill Lincoln—and it
was
a conspiracy—also involved an attempt to kill the Vice President and Secretary of State.”

And increasingly that first evening, the networks turned their attention to Lee Harvey Oswald, the twenty-four-year-old who had been pronounced dead on arrival at Methodist Dallas Medical Center after being shot in that Texas Theatre scuffle with Officer McDonald. He had worked at the Texas School Book Depository, from which a raft of witnesses said the shots had been fired; he’d been the head—and apparently the
only
member—of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization supporting the Cuban leader
and urging an end to embargoes and confrontations with the country. He’d served in the Marine Corps; defected to the Soviet Union, where he’d lived for three years; married a Russian woman; returned to the U.S. a year and a half ago. And if the eyewitnesses were right, he’d shot and killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit on a street in the Oak Cliff neighborhood after the officer, hearing a description of the alleged Kennedy assailant, had beckoned him over to his police car. The more that was learned about Oswald, the less he seemed to fit the narrative that had emerged in the first moments after the shooting: Dallas was a center of the white-hot radical right. That very morning a full-page ad in the
Dallas Morning News
had all but accused the President of treason. In the first moments after the shooting, the “climate of hate” in Dallas became something of a theme.

But Oswald? Neighbors and acquaintances—he didn’t seem to have many friends—were telling the press he was a self-taught Marxist. A search of his rooming house turned up copies of the
Militant
, a publication of the Socialist Workers Party. His wife, Marina, was telling the police that he had been trying to visit Cuba, perhaps return to the Soviet Union. It just didn’t seem to fit . . . unless Oswald wasn’t who he seemed to be.

The speculation about Oswald, and the mounting evidence of his guilt—he’d ordered the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano model 91/38 by mail under an assumed name; he’d posed in a photograph holding the rifle; his palm print had been found on the rifle—was intense. But it would soon be overwhelmed by the images that defined that “collective national experience.” The nature of television was that it conveyed national leaders in a personal, intimate way, almost as if these once distant Olympian figures were members of a family. And what America experienced in the following days was a family member’s narrow escape from death.

On Sunday, November 24, the front page of virtually every American newspaper carried a photograph of a smiling John Kennedy, in pajamas and bathrobe, standing next to his wife, Jacqueline. The photo, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, was powerful, compelling, and incomplete; it had been cropped to eliminate a nurse holding a bag connected to the President’s chest. But it set the tone for what followed: Sunday was just four days before Thanksgiving, and the timing guaranteed that in almost all of the 300,000 churches in the country, there were sermons and celebrations giving thanks that Kennedy had not died. In a hastily arranged nationally televised appearance at the University of Illinois basketball arena—site of the yearly InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana student missions conference—the Reverend Billy Graham told a crowd of 16,000 that “surely no one can doubt that it was the hand of Providence that saved the life of our President with that sheltering rain; indeed, God did ‘shed his grace’ on our blessed land.”

Over the next two weeks, the White House press office, with Pierre Salinger now a daily presence in the makeshift press briefing room, supplied a steady stream of news all built around one theme: President Kennedy was the functioning head of state. There were pictures of him on the phone with British prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, French president Charles de Gaulle, and Germany’s new chancellor, Ludwig Erhard. He accepted with thanks the public good wishes of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev (and a private, urgent message assuring him that the Soviet Union “had nothing to do at all with this dastardly crime” and promising the full cooperation of Moscow in “any investigation into the history of L. H. Oswald”). He talked by phone with his key aides: O’Donnell, who had remained in Dallas; Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and
advisor; and Larry O’Brien. He conferred at least half a dozen times a day with Robert Kennedy, who had returned to Washington after three very eventful days in Dallas; their conversations were not the subject of any White House press releases. He met once, for seven minutes, with Vice President Johnson, who was told, “You might want to go to the ranch. We’ll let you know if the President needs you here.”

Every day, he signed a piece of (routine) legislation, or issued a new (routine) executive order. On December 3, the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving holidays, Kennedy “met” with his cabinet, using a speakerphone, beginning by saying, “That’s the last time I let half my cabinet leave town at the same time.”

Without question, though, the moment that remained in everyone’s memory happened shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 11, on the White House lawn. The President left Parkland Hospital at 9:30 a.m.; photographers were allowed a brief moment to snap pictures of the President, standing and smiling, his wife by his side. When they left, Kennedy slowly, painfully maneuvered himself into the waiting limousine for the ride to Love Field. No one was permitted near Air Force One—“for security reasons,” the White House explained—so no one saw the President being carried up the stairs by four Secret Service agents.