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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  And then the phones started ringing, all of them, every line at once.

  • • •

  In the moment and hours when John Kennedy’s survival was in doubt, the same thoughts had filled the minds of everyone in that Washington hearing room, and everyone in the executive offices of Life magazine.

  What if he’s about to become president? Don’t we have to give the guy a chance? What will it mean to the country if they hear that their new leader is a crook in the middle of a national crisis? Without question, the Washington investigators and the New York editors would have quietly stepped back and let the allegations settle for a while . . . a good, long while.

  But when it became clear that John Kennedy would live, a very different thought took hold: Lyndon Johnson is a heartbeat away from the White House. He came close, very close to becoming president. We’ve got to get the facts out on the table now.

  Life magazine, like every other major news publication, spent the next two weeks covering the attempted assassination of Kennedy—coverage that gained worldwide attention when the magazine published frames from a home movie shot by Abraham Zapruder, a fifty-eight-year-old women’s clothing manufacturer, that showed the plexiglass bubble top exploding, the President clutching at his upper chest, Jacqueline’s pink suit spattered with flecks of blood. But in its January 8 issue, which went on sale just after the holidays, Life hit the stands with a cover story: LYNDON JOHNSON’S MILLIONS—HOW DID A LIFELONG PUBLIC SERVANT GET SO RICH?

  The story created a press firestorm (no one was using the word “media” then). When word of the impending publication broke, the wire services, New York newspapers, and TV networks sent messengers up to the R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing plant in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to grab advance copies of the issue.

  (“What do you want me to do?” a Life editor yelled at a friend at the New York Times who pleaded for an early look. “Should I try to stuff the magazine into the phone so you can read it when it comes out the other end? It’s print, Arthur!”)

  The news from Washington was even worse for the Vice President. From the moment the Bobby Baker story emerged, it had drawn the attention of Delaware senator John Williams, who regarded government waste and corruption as among the deadliest of sins, and who had made himself into something of a one-man FBI. He’d exposed rampant corruption in the Wilmington branch of the IRS; forced one of Harry Truman’s top aides out of the White House for arranging for Mrs. Truman to receive a Deepfreeze from a government contractor; and driven Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, out of public life for accepting gifts from a wealthy financier. Now, armed with the canceled checks from Don Reynolds, and fueled by the Life magazine revelations, Williams took to the Senate floor on a daily basis, asking the same question every day: “What is the Vice President worth, and how did he earn it?”

  After weeks of obsession with John Kennedy’s health and the motives of the alleged shooter, the country was ready for a new story. The details of Lyndon Johnson’s fortune might be complex—FCC license allocation hearings, real estate transactions with straw purchasers and dummy corporations—but the core of the Life magazine story was easy to understand: a public servant had used his power to accumulate a vast private fortune. The Washington end of the story was even easier to grasp: that same public servant had used one of his closest aides to pry campaign cash and luxurious gifts for himself as the price of doing business with the government. It was so easy to grasp, in fact, that it leached into the popular culture.

  On January 10, NBC launched a new half-hour topical political comedy program, That Was the Week That Was, an American adaptation of a successful BBC broadcast. It was a sharp departure for American TV, whose most daring foray into politics came when Ed Sullivan had booked JFK impressionist Vaughn Meader and his feather-light jibes at the Kennedys.

  But in its debut broadcast, TWTWTW featured a sketch portraying Lyndon Johnson as Senator Midas King (“Every bill he touches turns to gold—for him!”) and ended with a pointed version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:

  He’s the richest politician

  That Texas ever saw,

  And he gets even richer,

  Every time he writes a law.

  How did he get so wealthy

  Working for the U.S.A.?

  It’s really very easy

  If your name is LBJ!

  Johnny Carson followed suit. The Tonight Show host rarely dealt in political humor, so it was telling that on January 11 he began his monologue by announcing, “We’ve just learned what Vice President Johnson will be having for dessert tonight at dinner—impeachment pie.”

  Faced with a mortal threat to his political survival, Lyndon Johnson became ill—a response utterly unsurprising to his lifelong aides and supporters. He’d been struck with an appendicitis attack two days before Election Day as a twenty-nine-year-old candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives; bad political news had hospitalized him with depression during his first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1941; he’d come down with a powerful case of kidney stones in his second Senate campaign in 1948 and almost pulled out of the race. Now, facing public embarrassment and a congressional investigation, convinced that his humiliation was being orchestrated by his mortal enemy who held the post of U.S. attorney general, he awoke in the middle of the night on January 15 sweating profusely and complaining of severe abdominal pains and an accelerated heart rate. The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recommended “extended bed rest”—but it was the recommendation of two lawyers that proved decisive.

  On the evening of January 16, two of the most significant inside players in Washington slipped quietly into the hospital and into the Vice President’s VIP suite. Abe Fortas, a onetime New Deal liberal crusader, had built one of the most politically powerful law firms in Washington. He’d been a friend and counsel to Lyndon Johnson for years, and saved his political life by persuading Supreme Court justice Hugo Black to leave Johnson’s name on the ballot for senator in ’48, despite powerful evidence of blatant voter fraud. Clark Clifford, the elegantly dressed, soft-spoken onetime Truman aide, was a master at exercising behind-the-scenes influence, doing more with a single phone call than most lawyers did with a hundred-page brief.

  They spoke in sympathy and in sorrow; agreed that Bobby Kennedy had embarked on a ruthless, unprincipled vendetta; acknowledged that old Joe Kennedy had consorted with gangsters and bought his boy the White House; sat mute as Johnson remembered telling Clare Boothe Luce why he’d taken the vice presidency (“One out of every four presidents has died in office; I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I’ve got”). But they were firm in their counsel.

  Which is why, when President Kennedy stepped to the rostrum in the House of Representatives on January 21 to deliver his delayed State of the Union speech, House speaker John McCormack and Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden were seated behind him. Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president, was home in Texas . . . where, two months before, he’d come within inches of becoming the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIGHT FOR FOR A SECOND TERM

  Mis-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 hi
s 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? S
ame 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.