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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  “Give me five years,” Johnson said to a skeptical board of trustees, “and we’ll be the envy of the Longhorns.”

  “I never thought of you as the college president type,” Kennedy said to Johnson.

  “Well,” Johnson said, “I looked at what happened over in England when that cabinet man—Profumo?—had to quit because he’d been caught in that sex scandal. Brought down poor Macmillan. You know what he’s been doing? Cleaning toilets for a charity. Not exactly my style, but there’s other good work to be done and it’s better than eating and drinking and smoking myself to death.”

  “Admirable,” said the President, who had paid very close attention to the Profumo affair. “And I’m glad to talk with you. But I gather you have something specific on your mind.”

  “I do,” Johnson said. “I’ve been thinking about the fix you’re in on civil rights, with Selma and all . . . You know, two years ago I tried to explain to Sorensen about the timing . . . but that’s water over the dam. But you have just got to get that vote through the Congress this spring, or those bulls over there are going to be treating you like a cut dog. And I know you don’t need my advice”—Never did ask for it, he thought briefly—“but since you don’t really have a way around the Russells and the Byrds”—as I would have—“you’ve got to get your Republicans up there on board with you . . .”

  “Yes, we’re thinking that perhaps I should call a joint session of Congress and give a speech—”

  “You’ll pardon me, Mr. President, but I’d recommend against it. I’m not sure the ones you need will listen to you. You’re a Massachusetts liberal and they’re not gonna give your words all that much weight”—I could have talked to them as a Southerner—“and the Congress was never really your home.” It was mine. “But there is one weapon that might do the trick.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “Shame.”

  “You need to explain that,” Kennedy said.

  So Lyndon Johnson did.

  • • •

  They gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, where 200,000 had marched for “jobs and freedom” nineteen months before. The crowd was smaller this time, no more than 50,000, but it had a unique characteristic: almost all were dressed in the uniforms they had worn as members of the U.S. armed forces. They were middle-aged veterans of World War II, when troops were segregated by race; they were younger men (and a few women) from Korea, when official segregation ended but de facto discrimination was the reality. A few, some in wheelchairs, wore the olive drab garb—wool garrison cap, wool trousers, wool shirt, and wool four-button tunic—from their World War I days.

  Overhead, a series of overflights by reconditioned Bell P-39 Airacobras and Republic P-47 Thunderbolts brought cheers from the crowd, which recognized the planes of the 332nd Fighter Group—the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black military airmen in the U.S. military. The planes had been lent to the ex-Airmen by a special directive from Secretary of Defense Robert Kennedy.

  On the stage just below the statue of Lincoln were people unknown to most Americans but celebrated among blacks as iconic figures.

  There was First Lieutenant Vernon Baker, who had taken out a German machine-gun nest in Viareggio, Italy, in the Second World War, and who would have won the Congressional Medal of Honor had he been white. There were men from the Montford Point Marines, who had endured brutal hardships in a segregated facility at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. There was Lieutenant Colonel Harriet West Waddy, who had become one of the highest-ranking black officers in the Women’s Army Corps and had made radio broadcasts urging Negro women to join the ranks. Behind the stage stretched a red, white, and blue banner reading: VETS FOR THE VOTE.

  They listened to stories from men who had come home from combat with scars on their flesh and shrapnel in their bodies, and who had been met with contempt, economic reprisal, and violence when they tried to vote. They heard music carefully selected to strike patriotic chords, like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” sung by Odetta and Harry Belafonte. When the speeches and the singing were done, a balding, portly middle-aged Negro stepped to the microphones.

  “Good day,” he began. “My name is Carl Rowan, deputy assistant secretary of state. Twenty years ago, I was one of the first Negroes to serve as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy . . . at a time when racial segregation was the official policy of the United States government. I joined, as so many of us did, because I believed that the land of the free and the home of the brave was free enough to speak openly about its wrongs, and brave enough to right those wrongs. So now let us walk down Constitution Avenue and ask the men in the halls of Congress to redeem the promise of that Constitution.”

  Down the avenue they marched, singing “America the Beautiful” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” (A few struck up the racier versions of “Mademoiselle from Armentières” and “Colonel Bogey March,” before the parade marshals reminded them of the cameras and microphones.) At the Capitol, the marchers dispersed into the Senate Office Buildings to lobby the senators from their home states. For all but the die-hard segregationists, the visit of men and women dressed in the uniforms of the military was a photo opportunity not to be missed, especially when the visitors were accompanied by wire-service photographers.

  The reaction was precisely what Lyndon Johnson had counted on.

  “You take your housewife in Milwaukee, your steelworker in Pittsburgh,” he’d said to Kennedy. “Maybe they don’t want the coloreds in their neighborhoods, in their daughter’s school. But you show them a man with the scars of battle on his body who wants to vote, that’s not a threat to them, not a threat to their kids . . . There’s no backlash about standing next to a colored man in a voting booth, except in the states you couldn’t have won with Jesus doing your advance. And for the Republicans? You put those men in uniform and it’s not a ‘demonstration’—it’s Flag Day.”

  It was that stroke—making black veterans the symbol of the issue—that gave President Kennedy the strategic high ground. As the Senate debated whether to end debate, he remained offstage as much as possible. When aide Richard Goodwin drafted a speech that adopted familiar words from a civil rights anthem, Kennedy shook his head.

  “Give that speech to one of our Southern friends in the Senate: it will have a lot more clout coming from one of them.”

  So it was Tennessee’s Al Gore, freshly reelected, who stood on the Senate floor, with dozens of uniformed Negro veterans in the gallery, and proclaimed, “It isn’t just the Negro but all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” (From Tennessee and other Southern states came letters, phone calls, and telegrams denouncing him as a traitor. From newspapers across the country came editorials suggesting that a serious Southern contender for the 1968 presidency may have emerged.) And when Republican Senate leader Ev Dirksen rounded up twenty-three votes—standing on the Senate floor, urging his Republican colleagues to “stand with the men who stood watch on lonely nights, shivered in the cold, sweltered in the heat, heard the thunder of guns, saw the lightning of the bombs, and now ask for no special privilege but for the sacred right for which they risked their lives”— the debate ended. On August 6, Kennedy signed the Voting Rights Act into law at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

  “Two years ago,” Kennedy said, “Martin Luther King Jr. stood before two hundred thousand Americans of all races and creeds, and said: ‘We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.’ Today, that faith in our nation and its people has been redeemed.”

  • • •

  There was in that statement an implicit optimism about the way America worked. It was an unsurprising sentiment: America’s national leaders are supposed to be upbeat about the country they lead. What was notable is that the same sense of optim
ism infused much of the political engagement of the early 1960s, including the emergence of the “protest” movement: sit-ins to protest segregated lunch counters in the South; Freedom Rides to protest “white and colored” seating on bus lines; pickets outside the White House to protest nuclear testing. “Protests” they may have been, but they were, with few exceptions, devoid of anything that could remotely be called “radical” in philosophy or tactics. The students at the sit-ins wore coats and ties and studied their textbooks while white thugs threw ketchup and mustard at them. During the anti–nuclear testing demonstration in 1961, the White House invited some of the protesters in to talk to administration officials; during the 1962 demonstration, as a snowstorm fell on Washington, the White House sent out coffee. A folk singer like Phil Ochs could write protest songs about racial injustice and war (“I Ain’t Marching Any More”), but he could also write a song that called America “a land full of power and glory, beauty that words cannot recall.”

  When a new organization called Students for a Democratic Society issued its manifesto in 1962, there were no “demands,” nonnegotiable or otherwise. As cofounder Tom Hayden later said, “The model was peaceful transition, reformism; there was no thought of violence as a tactic.” During the 1964 campaign, SDS endorsed the President with the slogan “Part of the way with JFK” while chiding him for temporizing on civil rights and economic justice. Unlike their counterparts in other nations, where flags were burned and stones were thrown, these participants formed the core of what Washington Star reporter Mary McGrory called “a kinder, gentler dissent . . . the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the picketing, the rallies—reflect discontent, but do not reflect disillusion. Far from being ‘anti-American,’ they embrace the same faith that led Martin Luther King Jr. to begin his already classic March on Washington speech with a lengthy quotation from the Declaration of Independence.”

  What was emerging in the early years of the 1960s, then, was a movement rooted in an optimism that seemed justified by the recent past. In less than thirty years, the rights of labor had been written into federal law; Social Security had brought older Americans a sense of security; public power had brought electricity into millions of homes; the depredations of Wall Street predators had been brought under a measure of control; racial segregation in schools had been struck down; and it was only a matter of time before the next steps in the progressive agenda were reached: health care for the old, federal aid to education, Negro emancipation. While there was a growing sense of cultural disaffection among a segment of the young, its targets were the corporate mentality of men in gray flannel suits, the stifling conformism of the suburbs, the mendacity of TV commercials and crooked quiz shows—not the root premises of the American system. In that optimism, the politically engaged progressives were reflecting something of a national consensus: three-fourths of Americans, Gallup was reporting in 1964, trusted the government to do what was right all or most of the time.

  The real, wholesale distrust of government was found predominantly on the fringes of the political right, where voices from Father Coughlin to Joe McCarthy to John Birch Society founder Robert Welch taught that Jews held the levers of power; or that FDR had caused Pearl Harbor and sold out the cause of freedom to Stalin at Yalta; or that the government was infested with traitors, and that President Eisenhower himself was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; or that unseen forces were intent on putting fluoride into our drinking water to weaken our resistance to a Communist takeover. One distinguished historian, Richard Hofstadter, had a phrase for it: “the paranoid style in American politics.” (That kind of irrationality was what Kennedy had gone to Dallas to talk about at the Trade Mart on November 22, 1963.)

  The question for the rest of the 1960s, then, was as simple as it was crucial: How much of that optimism, how much of that implicit respect for boundaries, would hold? What few grasped at the time was how much the answer to that question rested on the fact that John Kennedy did not die on the streets of Dallas . . . and on the decisions he made once he returned to the White House.

  • • •

  When John Kennedy’s first term began, at the start of the decade, America was perched on a cusp. By mid-decade, a different culture had emerged, one that divided the country in a way it never had been before.

  And John Kennedy straddled that divide.

  You could see that divide in the country’s popular entertainment, where unsettling voices, sounds, and images had emerged in that grossly misnamed “silent decade” of the 1950s: James Dean’s time bomb of sullen alienation; Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed motorcycle rider who, when asked: “What are you rebelling against?” answered: “Whadda you got?” On the radio, the soothing melodies of Patti Page, the Four Lads, the Four Aces, Vic Damon, and company had given way by the mid-1950s to rock and roll, to Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis, Chuck Berry, music that was a pulsating, visceral incubator of teenage lust that dozens of communities had tried to ban, much as King Canute had sought to order back the tides. On bookshelves, after the courts effectively neutered censorship laws, grown-ups could buy Lady Chatterley’s Lover while their kids could pick up MAD magazine, which mercilessly mocked conventional pieties, on the candy store racks (Riverdale High School’s beloved Archie as a drug dealer?). Comedy had a new bite for adults as well, from Stan Freberg’s send-ups to Mort Sahl’s jabs at the Eisenhower administration to Lenny Bruce’s excursions into the further shores of race, drugs, and sex.

  Yet, clear boundaries were still in place. In most states, films still had to be licensed by censorship boards, and Hollywood’s Production Code still forbade nudity, obscenity, most profanity, and any portrayal of illicit sexuality that did not lead to retribution. Rock and roll’s bawdier lyrics were never heard on radio; so Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti good booty” became “Tutti Frutti au rutti” and Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me Annie (All Night Long)” became Georgia Gibbs’s “Dance with Me Henry.” On television, which by the mid-sixties was nestled in more than nine out of ten American homes, the culture was frozen in amber: free of profanity and premarital, extramarital, and even marital sex. On numberless TV shows, cheerful Negroes cooked and cleaned, and women labored in the home or in clearly defined and limited workplace roles.

  And in a sense, what Americans saw on their television screens was an accurate reflection of the dominant culture. The Supreme Court might be striking down segregation laws, Betty Friedan might have written a best-selling book about the social and legal limitations on women, but as John Kennedy began his second term, no Negro had ever sat in the Supreme Court, in the cabinet, or (save for Reconstruction) in the United States Senate; of the hundred senators, two were women. None had ever served on the High Court, nor in any of the key cabinet posts. If the major media institutions did not spend much time examining these facts, it may have been that they were themselves firmly anchored in traditional ways. No black or woman had ever anchored a network broadcast or served as a key editor at any major newspaper or magazine; at Time magazine, women could aspire to be researchers, not correspondents.

  As for mores: in 1960, the FDA had approved the sale of an oral contraceptive—the Pill—to women, uncoupling sex from pregnancy, raising the specter of unbridled coupling. At the same time, on a typical college campus, women were required to be in their dormitories by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. on weeknights; abortion was illegal everywhere; homosexuality (defined in some states as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature”) was a criminal offense, and so was adultery; divorce could derail a political career, as Nelson Rockefeller discovered in 1964.

  John Kennedy was, in many ways, solidly implanted in the older culture. While the Twist was danced at the White House on occasion, the President’s taste in music ran to show tunes: composer Frederick Loewe had performed on several occasions, playing songs from his hit shows My Fair Lady and Camelot. While Kennedy enjoyed the company of women (to put it mildly), there wa
s not a single woman in any position of influence in his administration; the only Negro he knew with any familiarity was George Thomas, his butler. His politics were characterized by a sense of caution, a suspicion of political passion, that seemed at odds with his bold rhetoric.

  “We stand today at the edge of a New Frontier,” he’d proclaimed in his 1960 acceptance speech. “We must climb the mountaintop,” he’d urged the readers of Life magazine. And then there was the image, the persona, of this strikingly young man with an even more strikingly young wife, constantly in motion, so different from his sedentary predecessors. When he governed, however, he seemed to follow one of his favorite pieces of political wisdom: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” In a much-discussed commencement speech at Yale in 1962, Kennedy seemed to shun the notion of a clear choice between right and wrong in one key arena.

  “What is at stake in our economic decisions today,” he said, “is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.”

  It was that caution, that careful calculation of political costs, that had fed doubts in the liberal community from his first days as a potential president. Columnist Karl E. Meyer had labeled Kennedy an emblematic politician for “the Age of the Smooth Deal”:

  “Too obsessed by the problems of his ‘image’ to explore the controversial issues of his time . . . too impressed by opinion polls and lacking in inner conviction . . . too prone to conceive of electoral survival as an end in itself; his nose is so implanted in the middle of the road that his eyes lose sight of the horizon.” That sense of artificiality inspired songwriter Malvina Reynolds to add an additional verse to her 1962 hit, “Little Boxes”: