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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  “No,” Sorensen said. “Too grandiose; it’s overreaching. It’d be fine for Hubert or Lyndon, but you need to remember,” he added, “the President doesn’t think the way you do or I do. In a sense, he’s a conservative—in the real meaning of the word.”

  So in place of “the New Frontier,” Kennedy called for “a New Patriotism.” It was designed as an answer to the patriotic themes of the Goldwater campaign—“a real-life, grown-up version of that old playground game, ‘Capture the Flag,’” as Washington Star reporter David Broder put it.

  “The New Patriotism of which I speak,” Kennedy said to the convention, “is clear-eyed, tough-minded, unafraid. It remembers that ‘America the Beautiful’ asks God not just to ‘shed His grace on thee’ but to ‘mend thine every flaw.’ It reveres our freedom so much that it seeks to ensure those freedoms to every one of our citizens, of every race and creed. It recognizes the patriots in uniform who stand on the watchtowers of freedom—and the patriots who are giving two years of their lives as Peace Corps volunteers, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, teaching the young, nurturing the old, on every continent of the globe. And next year we will be asking other patriots to join in that work in the inner cities and rural hollows of our own nation—when we launch AmeriCorps early in 1965.”

  He ended by reframing the most famous line from his 1961 inaugural.

  “Four years ago,” he said, “I asked Americans to ‘ask what you can do for your country.’ In that same spirit, I ask you tonight to consider not ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ but ‘Are we better off than we were four years ago? Is our land more just? Is the world at peace? Are we bringing hope to the hopeless?’ That is the measure by which I ask you to judge these past four years. If you once again give us your hand, your heart, your voice, and your vote, I will spend every day so that four years from now, all of us can answer: ‘Yes, we are better off than we were, because we have helped to build a world more peaceful, more just, more free.’”

  For the next eight weeks, Kennedy pursued that theme relentlessly as his campaign never stopped reminding voters of the peril a Goldwater presidency would mean. In what became the most controversial message of the entire election, a one-minute ad appeared on daytime television on CBS and NBC on September 7, 1964, in the middle of Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns: A four-year-old boy wanders into a kitchen as his mother turns away; he walks toward a stove where a pot sits, just coming to a boil; he reaches his hand out to it. As his mother lunges to save him, the film cuts to a massive nuclear explosion as an announcer’s voice intones, “Every mother knows . . . a moment’s miscalculation can mean disaster for her family. In a nuclear world, it can mean disaster for mankind. A steady course is our best hope to avoid that disaster. On November third, vote for President Kennedy. Stay the course.”

  The film—instantly known as the “Nuclear Kitchen” ad—only ran for one afternoon as a paid commercial. But it was seen by tens of millions on the evening newscasts as the Goldwater campaign charged that Kennedy was “engaged in a slanderous attack on Senator Goldwater.” A Kennedy campaign spokesman noted, “It’s curious that his campaign would identify their own candidate with the danger of miscalculation. The ad never mentioned Senator Goldwater at all.”

  • • •

  On Monday, October 5, at 9:00 p.m., President Kennedy and Senator Goldwater walked into Studio 3A of Chicago TV station WBBM and shook hands. Both were wearing dark-blue suits—Goldwater advisor Stephen Shadegg had showed the Senator photos of Richard Nixon at the first 1960 debate wearing a light-gray suit that all but disappeared into the background—and the challenger also wore a layer of makeup, much to his annoyance. (“I’m not going to turn myself into a goddamn circus clown!” he’d snapped, and Shadegg had to remind him again of Richard Nixon’s fate four years earlier. “All right, dammit,” Goldwater said, “but if I win, we’ll do the debates on radio in ’68.”)

  There was unhappiness among millions of American teenagers about the broadcast: it preempted a Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall broadcast that was to feature Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Even more unhappy were many of President Kennedy’s close aides: they hadn’t wanted this debate to happen at all.

  • • •

  “You’re thirteen points ahead,” pollster Lou Harris had said a month earlier as he sat with President Kennedy and a half dozen men around the pool of the family home on Ocean Avenue in Palm Beach. “A decisive share of the public simply does not see Goldwater as a credible president of the United States. The minute you let him on the same stage as you, you’re granting him that credibility.”

  “He’s going to push you into defending a civil rights bill you couldn’t pass and most of the country’s against,” said Florida senator George Smathers, one of the President’s oldest friends. “He’s going to push you into calling for open-housing laws, foreign aid to Communists like Tito, coddling rioters—that’s spelled N-E-G-R-O, in case it’s slipped your mind . . .”

  “It worries me,” Robert Kennedy said. “I go back to what Lou said. You step down from the presidency and you become just another politician grubbing for votes.”

  There was just one dissenter. Unfortunately for the group, it was the President.

  “I think you’re playing by old rules,” he said. “We’re the ones who decided to air my press conferences live. Remember what Scotty Reston wrote? He called it ‘the goofiest idea since the Hula- Hoop.’ Yes, people saw reporters asking some pretty impolite questions, saw me answering them on the fly. How do we think that worked out for us? They tell me there are college kids watching them like it’s a quiz show. Pierre, how many times have we waited until Mrs. Kennedy was traveling so we could sneak a photographer in to get pictures of me and the kids playing? Anybody here think that ‘demystified’ the office? As a matter of fact, Teddy Roosevelt got a hell of a lot of mileage when he let the press photograph him camping out in Rock Creek Park.

  “And one other point: Suppose we don’t agree to debate; what’s our explanation? That we’re afraid I’ll spill some damaging state secret? That doesn’t exactly play to our argument that I’m the one with the steady hand on the tiller, does it?”

  “Well,” Larry O’Brien said, “it’s up to the Congress to suspend the equal time rule so that you and he can debate without fifteen minor-party candidates. We could always blame them—”

  “Come on, Larry,” Kennedy said. “Is there anyone over the age of four who’s going to believe I couldn’t get Mansfield and McCormack to pass that bill in thirty seconds? Let’s not forget that we were the ones pushing for a debate last time. The only argument anyone will believe is: ‘It’s not in our political interest.’ And anyway”—he gave a small smile—“it’s probably a good thing for the country. I once asked Macmillan how he felt about having to drag himself into the House of Commons twice a week to get pounded by the opposition. ‘Keeps you on your toes,’ he said. If we do it, I don’t see how any future president will be able to say no.”

  “And Barry’s idea of flying together to ten different cities, Lincoln-Douglas debates—”

  “Ted, I have not taken complete leave of my senses,” Kennedy said to Sorensen. “First of all, Lincoln and Douglas had audiences—competing mobs, really—shouting, heckling. I can’t imagine anything more demeaning. Second, they talked for as long as ninety minutes at a stretch. I’m not interested in putting America to sleep. We’ll also want a panel of reporters. Let them break the shaft off in him; most of them think Goldwater’s half nuts, and I’m sure they’ll do their best to prove it—assuming they have any hope of a sit-down with me anytime in the next four years. And one or two debates will be plenty; we’re not going to throw our campaign schedule out of whack. We’ll fit it in, but you fellows can keep the negotiations going for as long as you need, like last time.” (In 1960 the Nixon campaign had pushed for a fifth, late debate; the Kennedy campaign never refused but kept ext
ending the negotiations until time ran out.)

  Between the delays in Congress and the extended negotiations about format, there was time for only one debate; something Goldwater pounced on in his opening remarks, addressing Kennedy directly:

  “I’m happy to be here with you, Mr. President. We’ve managed to maintain our friendship despite our differences. But I have to add a sense of disappointment that we’ll only be meeting this one time. Four years ago, you and Vice President Nixon met four times, and the country got a real sense of where you both stood. We’d often talked about a series of real, substantive debates, and I say tonight what I’ve said throughout the campaign: I will meet you anytime, at your convenience, in the last month of this election.

  “But I have to say,” Goldwater said with a smile, “after looking at the record of the last four years, I can understand why you might not want to have to defend that record face-to-face. If I’d presided over a government that has grown ever bigger, ever more costly . . . if I’d advocated a massive federal intrusion into the rights of homeowners and parents . . . if I’d been at the wheel when violent crime rose dramatically, and when violence and disorder swept through many of our biggest cities . . . if I’d watched international communism take the offensive from Latin America to Africa to Southeast Asia . . . if I’d gone to Moscow to toast the Soviet dictator who’s promised to ‘bury’ us and engaged in a slow-motion Munich appeasement strategy—I might not be all that eager to defend myself, either. I’d probably be spending my campaign trying to convince the American voter that my opponent couldn’t wait to get his finger on the button and set off World War III. Although I think I’d have a heck of a time trying to explain how such a ‘warmonger’ could have the enthusiastic support of President Eisenhower.”

  The President began on a lighthearted note.

  “Senator, I’m delighted to join you tonight. I realize this will be an exciting new experience for you, since just four months ago you declined an invitation to debate Governor Rockefeller, and just two months ago you refused every invitation to debate Governor Scranton, when he was your principal opponent for the nomination. I can tell you from personal experience it would have been a worthwhile endeavor for you . . . having debated Senator Humphrey in West Virginia, and the Senate majority leader at our last convention, and the sitting vice president of the United States four times last fall. And I’ve asked my campaign to meet with yours, to see if we can at this late date work out some mutually agreeable time for another debate.”

  (“Maybe sometime in December,” Salinger cracked from the Green Room backstage.)

  “Senator Goldwater has talked of ‘Munich,’” he continued. “I know those lessons well. They are the lessons of appeasement, of the failure to prepare. Those failures cost the lives of tens of millions in World War II. And mine was almost one of them.

  “My administration has taken that lesson to heart. Since 1960, we now have 50 percent more Polaris submarines; 75 percent more Minutemen; increased by 50 percent the portion of our strategic bombers on fifteen-minute alert forces; 60 percent more tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe.

  “But we also know that neither Europe nor any other continent relies on nuclear forces alone, whether they are strategic or tactical. We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces: increased by 45 percent the number of combat-ready Army divisions; increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment; increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons; and increased the strength of the Marines.

  “But history also teaches another lesson: the lesson of Sarajevo. Seventy years ago the world watched as a dispute between two nations exploded into the First World War—out of a series of miscalculations and false assumptions. Today we dare not let such miscalculations, such false assumptions, lead to a third world war in which hundreds of millions would die, and in which ‘the living would envy the dead.’

  “As for Senator Goldwater’s ideas about how to deal with our adversaries, and with the world . . . If we were to resign from the United Nations, break off with all countries of whom we disapprove, end foreign aid and assistance to those countries in an attempt to keep them free, call for the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, and turn our back on the rest of mankind, we would not only be abandoning America’s influence in the world, we would be inviting a Communist expansion which every Communist power would so greatly welcome. And all of the effort of so many Americans for eighteen years would be gone with the wind.”

  There was one moment from the debate that was the source of both puzzlement and amusement. It came when panelist Roger Mudd of CBS asked Goldwater just how far he would go in trimming back the size and scope of government.

  “For instance,” Mudd asked, “you’ve said you’d like to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority to a private utility. What else do you have in mind?”

  “I think some smart entrepreneur could give the post office a real run for its money,” he said, “which is, of course, the taxpayers’ money.”

  Two days later, a Herblock cartoon appeared in the Washington Post showing Goldwater as a used-car salesman in front of a post office advertising: “This Week Only—Try Our ‘Express Mail’— Just $5 Each!”

  • • •

  There was no second debate; Kennedy’s negotiators made sure of that. And in the closing days of the campaign, events from far away played directly to the President’s core argument. On October 14, Soviet premier Khrushchev, buoyed by the public support for his economic reforms and his arms talks with Kennedy, successfully turned back an attempt by Leonid Brezhnev and others to remove him from power. Two days later China exploded its first atomic weapon in the remote Central Asian province of Sinkiang.

  Wrote columnist Roscoe Drummond, “History may record that the President’s visit last spring to the Soviet Union may have been the first time that a state visit helped keep the world’s two most powerful men in their jobs.”

  “The polls have said for months,” added James Reston of the New York Times, “that America, having almost lost its president to a madman’s bullet, was not eager to lose him at the ballot box. Now whatever slim chance Senator Goldwater might have had to convince the American voter that they could risk a change in the Oval Office disappeared somewhere between the bowels of the Kremlin and the radioactive atmosphere over the Takla Makan Desert in China.”

  • • •

  By the time the polls in the East and Midwest closed, Larry O’Brien’s forecast had been confirmed. It was going to be an early night.

  Kennedy had taken all of once solidly Republican New England; only New Hampshire wound up in Goldwater’s column. (“Well, it’s the only state in the region with a right-wing Republican senator,” Kennedy said. “All the others—Smith, Aiken, Saltonstall—they’re farther away from Barry than I am.”) The Middle Atlantic states were all in the Democratic column, though Richard Scammon—moonlighting from his job as Census Bureau director to help the campaign analyze the vote—noted a measurable fall-off among the white ethnic city and inner-suburban votes. And Californians threw out the state’s open-housing law by a 2‒1 margin.

  “New York, Newark, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, California—it’s backlash, it’s widespread, and it’s something to worry about down the road.”

  “Tell it to Bobby or Teddy or Hubert or Stu,” Kennedy said. “Don’t bother this elder statesman with these grubby political matters. And speaking of worries: the South—”

  “Pretty much gone,” Scammon said. “Maybe for a generation.”

  The same Deep South states that had voted for Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party in 1948—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—had been joined by virtually every state in the old Confederacy, including Texas.

  “Lyndon’s revenge,” O’Donnell said, with a nod toward Bobby. “He always blamed you for
driving him off the ticket.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t take the credit,” Robert Kennedy said, “but I see the fine hand of Governor Connally in this.”

  “No,” the President said. “You wouldn’t see his fine hand—because he sat on them all fall. I hope he and his country club friends will be happy when we cut the oil depletion allowance to zero.”

  The one consolation from the South came from Florida, where an overwhelming Jewish vote, unsettled by some of Goldwater’s more militant right-wing supporters, and seniors, unnerved by Goldwater’s hostility toward Social Security and Kennedy’s Medicare proposal, delivered the state to Kennedy by a narrow margin.

  As it happened, the President would not need Florida’s votes to win a second term. In the industrial Midwest, four years of a Catholic president had eased the fears of Ohio Protestants, and the state he’d lost by a wide margin in 1960 turned Democratic; so did Wisconsin. In Illinois, there was no talk of Mayor Daley’s vote-counting skills; they weren’t needed this time. The state went to Kennedy by eight points. Senator Symington’s presence on the ticket was enough to win Missouri again. And with the Pacific Coast states in his column—Kennedy had spent the last two days of the election up and down the West Coast—the President wound up with 332 electoral votes and 54 percent of the popular vote. There’d be no repeat of the Did-he-steal-it? Does-he-have-a-mandate? arguments that clouded the post-campaign atmosphere in 1960.

  However, Kennedy’s reelection did not come with coattails. Democrats picked up five seats in the House and held their majority in the Senate, which meant that the coalition of Southern conservative Democrats and Republicans still had the power to stall much of Kennedy’s agenda. The one Democratic Senate loss was painful: with Governor Connally’s all-but-open help, Ralph Yarborough lost his Senate seat to a transplanted New Englander, George Herbert Walker Bush. By contrast, the one Senate pickup gave Kennedy a special sense of satisfaction. All during the run-up to the Cuban missile crisis, New York Republican senator Kenneth Keating had been warning of a Soviet missile buildup on the island; in ten speeches on the Senate floor, he urged the President to take action, and when the presence of the missiles was revealed, Keating’s warnings were a source of embarrassment to the White House. So when New York City mayor Robert Wagner Jr. won the Democratic nomination to oppose Keating, the Kennedy campaign funneled cash, campaign aides, and personal campaigning by the President across New York. On Election Night, Wagner defeated Keating by a 700,000-vote margin.