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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  The motorcade proceeded down Houston Street through the canyon formed by the office buildings that lined the route. From the windows, people were waving and cheering (though when they passed the headquarters of H. L. Hunt, the billionaire who had helped pay for the full-page ad in the morning paper, Hunt and his subordinates watched in silence, then turned their backs on the procession). At street level, the crowds pushed against the police barricades, straining for a glimpse of the First Couple, compressing the route and forcing the motorcade to slow and slow again. As it reached the corner of Lamar and Main Streets, the procession was traveling at barely five miles an hour. In a moment they would pass under a triple overpass, onto Stemmons Freeway, and right to the Trade Center . . . and some relief from the increasingly uncomfortable heat of the Lincoln’s interior. When the bubble top was on, there was simply no way to avoid the disagreeable interior climate. That climate may have been the cause of Mrs. Kennedy’s discomfort, but for John Kennedy the discomfort was of a political nature. He knew what it meant when he could interact with the crowds face-to-face; he’d seen it in West Virginia in May of 1960; seen it in Paris, where a million turned out in 1961; seen it early this fall on the swing through eleven Western states. “Kennedy weather,” Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell called it; when the sun was bright and the skies were blue, the cheers seemed louder, the crowds more frenzied.

  Just not our day, he thought, and then the Governor’s wife, Nellie, pointed out the window, and said, “Well, Mr. President, rain and all, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you . . .”

  And then there was a loud crack, and hundreds of pieces of plexiglass exploded into the air; and the President grabbed the left side of his chest, slumped toward his wife, and shouted, “My God, I’m hit!”

  • • •

  Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent detailed to the President on the Dallas leg of the Texas trip, was sitting in the right front seat. As soon as the bubble top shattered, he knew what had happened.

  “I can’t honestly say what I might have thought or done if there’d been only the sound to go by,” Kellerman said many weeks later. “You don’t want to be in a position of overreacting to a firecracker, or the backfire of a car, or the snapping of a tree branch. It might have taken a few seconds, or even a second shot, God help me, to make it clear what was going on. But as soon as the plexiglass exploded all around us, there was no doubt that someone was shooting at the President.”

  His immediate instinct was to throw himself over the right front seat of the Lincoln and cover Kennedy with his body. But he couldn’t. The center partition of the SS-100, and the jump seats on which Governor and Nellie Connally were sitting, effectively blocked him from the President.

  What he did do was to yell to the driver, Agent William Greer, “Let’s get out of here! We’ve been hit! To the hospital, to the hospital!” while radioing the same urgent directive to the lead car. The Lincoln sharply accelerated, following close behind the lead car, an unmarked white Ford driven by Dallas police chief Jesse Curry, and carrying Dallas County sheriff Bill Decker and Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest Sorrels. By the time a second shot was fired, the Lincoln, powered by a hand-built 350-horsepower, 450-cubic-inch engine, was moving at close to forty miles an hour, hundreds of feet away from where the first shot had struck the bubble top; that second shot struck the right rear of the Lincoln just above the rear wheel housing.

  It took the Lincoln, now moving at eighty miles an hour, less than three minutes to travel the 3.7 miles from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Memorial Hospital, just off the Stemmons Freeway. On its heel, flanking it on both sides, were the four motorcyclists from the Dallas police force. Close behind was the “Queen Mary,” the armored vehicles carrying Secret Service agents, along with Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, and the convertible that held Vice President Johnson and Senator Yarborough. Part of the planning of any presidential trip was to locate the nearest, best-equipped hospitals at every stage of the trip; Parkland was just two miles from the Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to give his speech. They knew exactly where they were going.

  They had no idea of what they’d find when they got there: a wounded president of the United States—or a dead one.

  • • •

  At 1:45 p.m. central standard time, Malcolm Kilduff Jr., White House deputy press secretary, walked into Nurses’ Classroom 101–102 on the ground floor of Parkland Memorial Hospital. Dozens of reporters, cameramen, and officials were jammed into the room, bright with the glare of the camera lights, heavy with the dense clouds of cigarette smoke. Just outside the room, reporters clustered around a bank of pay phones, the only link between the hospital and the world outside. There was an elaborate press facility with open phone lines back to the city desks of major newspapers, TV networks, and wire services, along with microwave relays that could carry live television signals to local television stations and then, via telephone long lines, back to New York network headquarters—but that was all at the Dallas Trade Mart a mile away. As for the millions turning on their television sets as they heard the first hints of what had happened, they would witness the enormous power, and the stark limits, of mid-century information technology.

  The CBS soap opera As the World Turns had just begun its broadcast when the rotating globe was replaced by a slide reading: BULLETIN BULLETIN BULLETIN. The crisp voice of anchor Walter Cronkite intoned: “From Dallas, Texas, shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade as it rode through downtown streets. First reports say the President was apparently hit . . . more information now coming in . . . the bubble top that covered the President’s car was shattered into pieces, the President recoiled in apparent pain, and the limousine sped off as a second shot apparently struck the rear of the car. More details as soon as they become available.”

  And then viewers saw an elegantly produced commercial for “Nescafé . . . a new kind of coffee,” and several minutes of As the World Turns, until the network cut to a shirtsleeved Cronkite wearing thick black horn-rimmed eyeglasses in the middle of the CBS newsroom, reaching beyond camera range for the sheets of wire-service copy.

  On NBC, a trio of their most familiar faces—anchor Chet Huntley and correspondents Frank McGee and Bill Ryan—clustered around a single desk, clutching phones, trying to put the words of Robert MacNeil on the air from Dallas, grappling with an amplifier that did not work, finally listening to MacNeil and repeating his words phrase by phrase.

  From the Dallas Trade Mart came images of the guests who had come to lunch, some sitting, stunned, some wandering through the cavernous hall looking for information. KRLD’s Eddie Barker, who was at the Trade Mart to anchor the local station’s live coverage of Kennedy’s speech, noted, “It is ironic in a way that one of the traveling White House advance men just half an hour ago expressed his disappointment that the weather had not cleared off here as they had hoped. Earlier forecasts had called for the possibility of rain throughout the presidential visit. But it was only shortly prior to his jet touching down at Love Field that it became clear that the weather would not break through, which would have made it possible for the President to ride in an open convertible rather than the plexiglass top that was used.”

  There was only one question anyone really cared about, and it was a question no one in the press was in any position to answer. There was no live coverage of the motorcade, no way to transmit video from the scene of the shooting directly back to the networks, no videotape of the shooting. So the newsmen at their desks in New York and Washington read from wire-service copy, or recounted the fragmentary information from their reporters on the scene: “The President lurched forward . . .” “. . . Mrs. Kennedy reached for him . . .” “. . . Governor and Mrs. Connally leapt from their jump seats to the floor of the car . . .” “. . . witnesses at the hospital reported that the President was carried in on a stretcher . . .” “. . . two priests entered the hospital . . .”

  At the same t
ime, the first still photos of the President and Mrs. Kennedy, and of the limousine surrounded by pieces of the bubble top, arrived via wire, and desk assistants in the newsroom mounted them on cardboard and ran them over to the reporters, who held them up; but the newsroom cameras lacked the ability to zoom in, so viewers could barely make out the smiling, waving First Couple, or the nature of the wounds the President might have suffered.

  Then deputy press secretary Kilduff stepped onto a small platform in front of a blackboard in the nurses’ classroom. He drew a long breath, then flashed a quick, small smile.

  “At approximately 12:30 p.m. central standard time, President Kennedy sustained a bullet wound in his upper left back midway between his spinal cord and his shoulder. He is at this moment in surgery; his condition is critical but stable. Neither Mrs. Kennedy, Governor Connally, nor Mrs. Connally sustained any gunshot wounds; Mrs. Kennedy and Governor Connally did suffer minor cuts from the plexiglass bubble top, but none were deemed serious.

  “The President did receive the last rites of the Catholic Church”—there were clearly audible gasps and moans—“from the Very Reverend Oscar L. Huber, but I am assured that this was strictly a precautionary measure.” Kilduff paused, took another deep breath, and said, “While I will have no further information until the surgery is completed, I can say that as to the prospects of the President’s recovery, there is—and I am quoting the President’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley—‘every reason to be optimistic.’”

  That was, indeed, what Admiral Burkley had authorized Malcolm Kilduff to say. And it was true . . . as far as it went.

  But there were other facts that Admiral Burkley had no intention of sharing with Kilduff, or with the press, or with anyone else—ever.

  • • •

  Something very strange was going on at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  Dr. “Pepper” Jenkins was having lunch with members of his anesthesiology department when he heard a page: “Dr. Shires, stat.” The head of surgery is almost never paged, he recalled, and never with the injunction “stat.”

  Dr. Bill Midgett, an OB-GYN resident, was trying to take the history of an emergency room patient when he heard someone screaming for a gurney. As he ran outside pulling one end of a gurney, he saw the presidential limousine pulled up to the entrance to Parkland’s emergency room, surrounded by men with automatic weapons. Four Secret Service agents pulled Governor Connally out of the car and lifted the President out of the backseat, out of the arms of Jacqueline Kennedy, and onto a stretcher. The President had been semiconscious during the quick journey to Parkland, but as he was wheeled inside he lost consciousness, and his face took on a gray pallor. That told the half dozen doctors inside Trauma Room 1 that he had gone into shock, likely from internal bleeding . . . which meant that emergency surgery was required to find the source of the bleeding and stop it if they were going to save Patient 24740.

  They quickly cut and stripped off his clothes, removed the back brace and elastic bandages that covered his torso and thighs, checked him for vital signs: shallow breathing, a very weak pulse, a fever of 99.6. Dr. Charles Carrico put his hands under the President’s upper back and quickly located the bullet wound between the President’s left shoulder and chest. The surgical team had just begun inserting two intravenous lines for blood transfusions and fluids when someone walked quickly into the room.

  “I’m Admiral George Burkley, the President’s personal physician. You need to get him some steroids.”

  “Steroids? Why?” asked Dr. Charles Baxter.

  “Because he’s an Addisonian,” Admiral Burkley said.

  No physician could misunderstand. If President Kennedy had Addison’s disease, it meant a deficiency in his adrenal glands that left him acutely vulnerable to infections, to stress of all sorts; without steroids, an operation could kill him. If they had been followers of political campaigns—“junkies,” as they came to be called in later years—they might have remembered that, shortly before the Democratic convention in 1960, two of Lyndon Johnson’s campaign aides had accused Kennedy of hiding this condition from the public, a charge the Kennedy campaign had furiously denied.

  “Give him one big bolus,” Carrico ordered, and set 300 milligrams of Solu-Cortef, a cortisone-based steroid, into Kennedy’s arm intravenously. Within minutes the President was under heavy anesthetics and the team opened his chest, finding a cracked rib and, more seriously, a nick in his subclavian artery, causing the heavy internal bleeding. After a two-hour operation, the artery was repaired and a substantial piece of the bullet was removed. A KUB X-ray of his abdomen found another fragment lodged in Kennedy’s lower chest and that was removed, lessening the possibility of a postoperative infection.

  “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 b
e 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.