And South Vietnam? For almost three years, his advisors had been giving him such conflicting advice that he’d once asked two of them, “Are you sure you went to the same country?” Is the South Vietnamese army, with the help of 15,000 American advisors, making any headway against the Viet Cong guerrillas? Is the government of Ngo Dinh Diem “winning the hearts and minds of the people”? Diem and his brother had seemed more interested in suppressing the Buddhist majority than in dealing with the corruption and incompetence in their government; which is why, three weeks ago, a band of generals (with U.S. support) had overthrown the brothers in a coup—a coup that was supposed to leave Diem and Nhu unharmed. Instead, they’d been shot to death in the back of a truck.
And while his Joint Chiefs, and Rusk at State, and Bundy in the White House were telling him, “We can’t let South Vietnam fall; it will endanger all of Southeast Asia,” others—Ken Galbraith, his Indian ambassador; Senator Mike Mansfield, who knew the region; and General de Gaulle—were telling him, It’s a quagmire, if you go in with an army, you’ll never get out. His own George Ball had said flatly, that if the United States went in with ground troops, it would have 300,000 or more in a year or two. (That idea was nuts, of course—he’d told George that—but still . . .) As for his own instincts? Well, just yesterday in Washington, at the end of a meeting with a young State Department aide, Mike Forrestal, he’d beckoned him back into the Oval Office.
“Wait a minute,” he’d said. “After the first of the year, I want you to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top.”
But he was also a man of finely honed political instincts, and they told him he couldn’t cut his losses now, even if he wanted to—not with an election coming up, not with the prospect that the Republicans would yell “Who lost Vietnam?” just the way they—and a lot of Democrats—had yelled “Who lost China?” at Truman back in ’49 (hell, as a young congressman, he’d been one of them). That’s why he’d told O’Donnell, Mansfield, and everyone else that nothing was going to happen until after he was reelected. For God’s sake, all anyone had to do was look at the full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News, bordered in black, paid for by H. L. Hunt and a group of Dallas businessmen on the far right, more or less accusing him of treason.
“We’re heading into nut country today,” he’d said to Jackie, not mentioning to her that his UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, had been met with such a violent demonstration at a recent speech that Adlai had passed the word to the White House that it might be just as well for the President not to go to that city. But there was no way he was going to Texas without a stop in its second biggest city.
And as for that reelection? He knew what the polls were saying: that his job approval rating had dropped sharply, from 76 to 59 percent, most of it coming from the South’s response to civil rights. He knew that racial splits were opening up—over jobs, housing, crime—in the big cities of the North, dividing white working-class voters from blacks and thus cleaving the old Roosevelt-Truman coalition further. (Was Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace serious about running against him in Democratic primaries outside the South?)
And he also knew that he could not count on the Republicans to nominate Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative hero whose pronouncements about nuclear weapons were bound to paint him as a figure outside the mainstream. “If Barry’s the nominee,” he’d said a week ago to his political team, “I won’t have to leave Washington.” A candidate like New York’s Nelson Rockefeller or Michigan’s George Romney, though . . . that could be a problem.
But if he was concerned that his hold on the White House was not as firm as he might wish it to be, there was comfort, a kind of reassurance, in remembering how often pure, random chance had governed his life; so many times in the past, going back years—even decades—a small turn of fate would have ensured that he never made it to the White House at all.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE JOE
Joe was the firstborn son of one of the country’s wealthiest men, who had once pondered the presidency for himself before his ally turned nemesis Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term. No less than a nobleman of other times and realms, Joe Kennedy Sr. embraced primogeniture, and in his namesake son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., it seemed as if the gods had agreed. Tall, muscular, strikingly handsome, he projected assurance, confidence, command. At Choate, he’d been a leader in the classroom and on the field and earned the Harvard Cup, given to the student who embraced excellence in scholastics and athletics. At Harvard, he’d been a star in football, rugby, crew. And he made no secret of his intentions, telling one of his tutors—a young economist named John Kenneth Galbraith—“When I get to the White House, I’m taking you with me.”
His father’s counsel to him over the years had always been given with an eye on the main prize. He’d persuaded Joe to switch his major from philosophy to government. When Joe was at Harvard Law School, he wrote: “Get yourself signed up and possibly make some speeches in the fall in the campaign throughout Massachusetts. It would be a very interesting experience and you could work up two or three subjects you wanted to discuss throughout the state.” When Joe Sr.’s father-in-law, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald entered a primary battle for the U.S. Senate in 1942, father wrote son that Fitz’s primary opponent was facing “a lot of criticism by the Catholic women that [he’d] married a Protestant . . . I am thoroughly convinced that an Irish Catholic with a name like yours, and your record, married to an Irish Catholic girl, would be a pushover in this State for a political office.”
But there were complications. Joe Jr. was very much his father’s son, far more so than his younger brother; he embraced Joe Sr.’s anti-interventionist views, joining organizations closely allied with the America First movement, cautioning that the U.S. military was simply not ready for war. Privately, at least as a young man, he had reflected some of his father’s antipathy toward Jews. Writing Joe Sr. from Germany in the summer of 1934, he’d argued:
“The German people were scattered, despondent, and were divorced from hope. Hitler came in. He saw the need of a common enemy. Someone of whom to make the goat . . . It was too bad that it had to be done with the Jews, [but] this dislike of the Jews was well founded.”
So while any politically ambitious young man would have sought a military record once World War II broke out, it was even more crucial for Joe Jr. to separate himself from his father’s long record of appeasement, and to erase any questions about his own stands. He was drafted out of Harvard Law, signed up as a naval aviator, and by 1944 had flown more than twenty-five missions, surviving a number of dogfights with the Luftwaffe in the process. That was more than enough to entitle him to come home, but something was keeping him in combat—quite possibly the emergence of his younger brother Jack as an authentic war hero, celebrated in front-page newspaper stories after his PT boat was sunk in the Solomon Islands a year earlier. (Jack had mordantly noted once that “it would be good for Joe’s political career if he died for the grand old flag, but I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”)
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 see
k 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 segregati
onist 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.
If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History Page 2