If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (7 page)

M
is-tah Speak-ah . . . the President of the United States!”

He walked into the House chamber behind doorkeeper William “Fishbait” Miller, flanked by the ceremonial welcoming committee of congressional leaders—Mansfield, Dirksen, Albert, Halleck, and with them the junior senator from the state of Massachusetts, Edward Moore Kennedy—and at the moment Fishbait spoke the last words of his incantation, the chamber exploded into cheers that seemed to shake the galleries. Never in the history of Congress had they welcomed into their hall a president who had narrowly escaped assassination; all of them knew what this moment would mean to the country, which was why, for the first time, they had moved the State of the Union speech from midday to prime time. When the President walked in, still a little careful with his tread, their relief—their
exultation
—was overwhelming. They were all on their feet, of course, but that was protocol; when the President walked in, you stood. But the force of the clapping, the stomping of feet—this was something unseen and unheard before. There was Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, the man most likely to run against
him next fall (and who shared with Kennedy a mutual affection): the tears were streaming down his cheeks, and he was shouting, “Jack! Jack! Jack!” There was Georgia’s Richard Russell, the ardent segregationist whose mastery of Senate rules had tied the administration in knots on vote after vote, and the usually stoic Russell was trembling with emotion.

In the front row where the cabinet sat, the Attorney General of the United States stood, his hands clapping softly, his face almost expressionless. But then Jack walked by, on his way to the rostrum, and Bobby took his hand and gave a small nod of his head. Up in the First Lady’s box, Jacqueline Kennedy was standing, applauding, clad in a new black double-breasted mink coat over a gray Alaskine silk-and-wool day suit designed by Oleg Cassini; next to her was Caroline. There were others in the box, but none of the reporters recognized the faces; they were not the usual family friends and political allies who had claim to the prized seats.

“Members of the Congress,” Speaker McCormack intoned, “I have the high honor, and the distinct,
joyful
privilege, of introducing the President of the United States.” And the chamber rocked with cheers and applause again; reporters noted the break with tradition in McCormack’s introduction—“joyful” was not part of the litany—and it came from a fellow Massachusetts politician whose nephew had lost a nasty Senate primary a year earlier to the President’s youngest brother, Ted. None of that mattered, at least for now, and it was a long time before the cheers finally died down.

“Mr. Speaker,” Kennedy began, “it was our great wartime friend and ally Winston Churchill who once observed, ‘There is nothing as exhilarating in life as to be shot at without result.’ While I cannot claim to have enjoyed that precise experience, I can embrace his sentiment. As I did once before, twenty years ago, from the other side of the world, I have returned home . . . to the welcome of
colleagues, friends . . . yes, and adversaries . . . and most of all to my family.” The audience stood and cheered, as they would two dozen times before his speech was done.

“Let me say at the outset that I would not be standing here today were it not for the physicians, surgeons, nurses, and staff of Parkland Memorial Hospital. I have invited some of them here this evening, so that I might acknowledge them publicly.” And five men and women seated in the box section reserved for the First Lady and her guests stood and waved. (It was the first time a president had singled out members of the audience for recognition. In years to come, Kennedy and his successors would continue what became a tradition; the guests, often used to make a political point about an issue or a program, would become known as “Parklanders.”)

As the President spoke, one observer—one highly interested observer—found his thoughts drifting . . . to what he had learned in the first days after he heard the news . . .

•   •   •

From his seat in the House chamber, Robert Kennedy joined in the applause and the standing ovations, but his mind was back in Dallas, on what he’d learned as his brother recovered at Parkland Hospital. Someone—maybe more than one person—had almost killed his brother, and from the first moments he had learned of the attack while at his Hickory Hill home, he had compiled a mental list of plausible suspects. It was unimaginable to him that a single insignificant twerp of a man like Lee Harvey Oswald could have struck the most powerful figure in the world. But the more he and his team of investigators looked, the harder it was to fit any of the likely suspects into the facts.

There was little doubt that Oswald had fired the shot that had wounded Jack. The bullet had been traced to the
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked; the rifle had been bought by mail order under an assumed name Oswald frequently used. His wife, Marina, produced a photograph he had insisted she take, of Oswald posing with the rifle in his backyard. That same rifle, police discovered, had been used in an attempt on the life of retired general and right-winger Edwin Walker. Witnesses saw a man fitting Oswald’s description in the sixth-floor window of the Depository moments before and just after the shooting. And there was the undeniable fact that Oswald had shot and killed police officer J. D. Tippit and had tried to kill the police officer who had arrested him inside the Texas Theatre. But was Oswald the whole story? Could others, with an obvious motive to kill the President, be involved? Fidel Castro surely had a motive: the Kennedy administration, with Bobby the chief enthusiast, had tried for almost three years to remove Castro from power, with tactics that ranged from a (bungled) invasion to subverting Cuba’s economy to outright attempts at assassination. The very day Kennedy was shot, a CIA agent in Paris was awaiting delivery of a poison pen to be used by a Cuban military officer named Rolando Cubela, yet another would-be assassin. Hadn’t Fidel himself warned the United States that
their
leaders might find themselves facing the same kind of threats? Wasn’t Oswald the lone member of the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, who had sought to travel to Cuba two months ago, a vocal supporter of Castro?

Yes, but . . . Jean Daniel, the French journalist Kennedy had met with shortly before his Texas trip, had been with the Cuban leader in Havana when an aide burst in with the news that Kennedy had been shot. Castro’s distress was palpable; and when the aide returned with the news that he was apparently going to live, Castro exclaimed: “Then he’s reelected!”—and there was no doubt, Daniel
said, that his reaction was genuine. Fidel went on to express the hope for some kind of reconciliation with Washington.

What about
anti-
Castro Cubans? They’d never forgiven Kennedy for aborting the Bay of Pigs invasion, nor for giving Castro a no-invasion pledge as the price of resolving the missile crisis. Could Oswald have been a double agent, professing support for Castro while acting on behalf of his enemies? Well, Oswald’s only link to the exile community was a clumsy effort to infiltrate their ranks. Everything else about him—his defection to the Soviet Union, his subscriptions to Marxist newspapers and magazines, the strident positions he had taken in arguments with his few friends—suggested a (not very well) self-educated leftist with an inflated view of his political wisdom. And his attempted assassination of General Walker surely spoke volumes about his political leanings and his propensity for violence.

Organized crime? Yes, the Kennedys’ relentless pursuit of the Mafia and its allies, like the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, had brought no shortage of threats against John and Robert, plenty of declarations that “we’re going to take them out.” But when it came time to connect the dots between organized crime and Oswald . . . there were no dots. The same was true of the far right;
H. L. Hunt and company might take out full-page ads denouncing the President, might pass out leaflets along his motorcade route.
And all of these people might well have cheered the news that Jack had been shot,
Bobby thought,
might have raised glasses had he died, but a conspiracy to murder the President? That’s a reach.

Besides, there was the undeniable factor of . . . sheer happenstance. Oswald had applied for two other jobs before finding work at the Texas School Book Depository; either of those jobs would have placed him far from the motorcade. And that job in the Depository? It was his landlady, Ruth Paine, who had a contact in the
building, who’d gotten the job for Lee . . . a job he’d taken weeks before anyone knew the route of the motorcade.

It was the President, speaking from his Parkland Hospital bed, who had made the point to Bobby.

“If you’re looking for a conspiracy, try 1865,” he had said. “Booth and his friends were out to get Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Seward; they were out to decapitate the whole federal government. But the man who shot McKinley? Czolgosz? A self-taught anarchist. Zangara, who almost killed Roosevelt? Same thing. That nut who tried to blow me up in Palm Beach—Pavlick? Just a lunatic who hated the Church and Dad. I know you’ll keep looking, Bobby. And maybe you’ll find something. But I doubt it.”

In fact, Bobby had found something: not about who had tried to kill his brother, but what had been done—and not done—to try to stop it. What he found in Dallas was a level of carelessness, negligence, and ineptitude on the part of the CIA and the FBI that bordered on the criminal.

The CIA had been tracking Oswald ever since his return from the Soviet Union in 1959. They were aware of his pro-Castro activities and, more important, his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City just a few months before the shooting of the President. Yet, somehow they had lost track of Oswald when he returned to Dallas. As for the FBI, their Dallas agent, James Hosty Jr., had had a direct exchange of sorts with the suspected shooter. After Oswald learned that Hosty had been interviewing his landlady, he’d stormed into the Dallas bureau and left a note for the agent, threatening to blow up the FBI and Dallas police headquarters. None of that information reached the Secret Service, which might have been interested in knowing that this individual worked in a building right along the President’s motorcade route.

What
really
got Bobby’s attention was that, when he confronted
Hosty three days after the shooting, the agent admitted that he’d destroyed the threatening note Oswald had written on the direct order of J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby nodded, said nothing, but left with a grim sense of satisfaction. For three years he and Hoover had dealt with each other with mutual, intense, barely concealed contempt. To Hoover, Bobby was an arrogant, spoiled brat protecting his degenerate brother. To Bobby, Hoover was a blatant racist and “a psychopath” to boot. And both were at the mercy of the other. Hoover knew too many details of John Kennedy’s private life. The Kennedys knew one big secret about Hoover’s private life. Neither could strike at the other without imposing fatal damage to himself. If, however, word got out that Hoover’s own bureau had been flagrantly derelict, and that Hoover had tried to cover up the failures, then the press and the Congress might drop their fawning adulation of the FBI director; might even insist that he follow the mandatory retirement age he’d reach in 1965. At the least, Bobby would have a powerful club to hold over Hoover—and, for that matter, the apparatchiks in the CIA who thought nothing of launching dangerous operations without the permission, or even knowledge, of the President.

That might make a second term worthwhile in and of itself,
he thought, and stood with the rest of the cabinet for another standing ovation.

•   •   •

The drama of John Kennedy’s reappearance on the political stage overwhelmed the substance of his talk. It was dominated by two themes: an appeal to the Congress to pass his stalled legislative agenda (a tax cut, a civil rights bill, medical care for the elderly, federal aid to education), and a promise to pursue “peace through strength” by combining continued increases in defense spending with new agreements with the Soviet Union. In the eyes of his
audience and the press, though, there was no question about the real import of his speech: it was the opening round of his fight for a second term.

And it was a fight he was not at all sure he could win.

•   •   •

He had come to the presidency by the narrowest of margins: one-tenth of 1 percent of the popular vote, a difference of 112,827 out of 69 million votes cast. It was a fact that was never far from his thinking; he carried that number with him on a slip of paper, and when a
Time
magazine piece described his staff as “corsucatingly brilliant,” he noted: “A few thousand votes the other way, and we’d all be coruscatingly stupid.”

A week before he left Washington for Florida and Texas, on November 13, Kennedy convened the first meeting devoted to his 1964 campaign. Along with Bobby, Sorensen, O’Donnell, O’Brien, and brother-in-law and campaign manager Steve Smith, Kennedy brought in Richard Scammon, director of the U.S. Census Bureau and—more important—a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of voting demographics. What they confronted was a glass half full, half empty.

On his side, he had the twin pillars of any incumbent reelection strategy: peace and prosperity. The chill of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had been replaced by the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate had approved by a wide (80‒19) margin. Unemployment had been under 6 percent all year, and inflation was all but nonexistent—1.3 percent in the latest numbers.

That was the good news.

The trouble came when the view from 30,000 feet was replaced by the view on the ground.
America
didn’t elect a president; fifty
states
did. And the picture was gloomier on the ground. The South
and the border states held more than 120 electoral votes, and his popularity in the region was under 40 percent; even New York governor Rockefeller, with a commitment to civil rights clearer than his, was running ahead of him in the region. Washington columnist Roscoe Drummond had written of “a Republican iceberg of unknown force” threatening Democrats in the region they had dominated for almost a century. (A few months earlier, Kennedy had described his Southern dilemma more pungently when he said to Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence, “I can kiss the South good-bye next year.”) No wonder he was heading to Florida and Texas in late November: the thirty-nine electoral votes of those two states were critical. The West was also troubled turf: of the eighteen states west of the Mississippi River he’d won only New Mexico (barely) and Nevada in 1960; and in Arizona senator Barry Goldwater the West would have a native son with a message about the overbearing, intrusive federal government that had powerful regional resonance. So the forty electoral votes of California—a state he’d lost by less than 1 percent in 1960—would be critical. (At the end of the ’60 campaign, he’d said to Kenny O’Donnell, “Well, it’s all over. I wish I’d spent forty-eight hours more in California.”)