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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  The last three days had been grueling for the President: he’d been in seven states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and then out to California and the overnight flight back across the country. The crowds were huge: 30,000 at Liberty Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background; 45,000 in Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium; a million lining State Street for Chicago’s traditional torchlight parade, led by Mayor Daley, the President, and the Democratic nominee. But crowds could be deceiving. (“There is no place,” Kennedy once said in Ohio after losing badly in 1960, “where I get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than this great state.”) This was, by every measure, going to be close, and not just because the polling showed a dead heat nationally and in a dozen key states.

  “America has rarely witnessed an election,” wrote Johnny Apple of the New York Times, “where the two major candidates not only represent such utterly contrasting beliefs and policies, but represent utterly contrasting strengths and weaknesses. And rarely has a campaign hinged—possibly decisively—on how a deeply divided nation feels about its departing leader.”

  As Kennedy wheeled himself to the East Wing elevator for a bath, breakfast, and a rest, J. B. West held up a finger.

  “Mr. President, Mrs. Kennedy said she’d like a moment with you after your nap. Said to tell you it’s important.”

  Curious, he thought for a moment, then found his mind drifting back to the election, now only two days away. Apple was right, he thought. This election was at heart a referendum on his stewardship. And however much he had succeeded by the traditional rules of politics, he knew better than almost anyone how much those rules had changed.

  • • •

  “I’ve got one question for you,” a frustrated Kenny O’Donnell had asked pollster Lou Harris shortly after the 1966 midterms, which saw Democrats lose twenty-eight seats in the House and two in the Senate. “Just what the hell is it about peace and prosperity that Americans don’t like?”

  There was no question that the American economy was in fine shape. Seven years of uninterrupted, steady growth had helped drive the jobless rate under 5 percent. So had the aggressive jobs program that had begun in 1965 and had expanded every year since. “A rising tide lifts all the boats,” Kennedy had said in the early sixties as he pushed for his tax cuts—to which Pat Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, said, “With respect Mr. President, some of the boats have holes in the bottom.” For the last three years a welfare-to-work effort in big cities and rural communities had finally begun to move the once-intractable numbers in black neighborhoods and Appalachian hollows. Robert Kennedy, who had wandered the inner city streets of Washington as attorney general and visited ghettos in a dozen cities when he’d moved to Defense, said to his brother, “I remember going to a job fair in Oakland a few years ago, with ten thousand people waiting on line for seventy-five jobs. Last week I was in St. Louis, and there were two thousand people waiting for five hundred jobs. That’s something, but . . .”

  “Bobby,” the President said, “just once before I leave this job, could you just say, ‘Jack, I have really good news!’?”

  As for inflation, “It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night,” Walter Heller remarked as he was leaving the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for a tenured post at the University of Minnesota.

  “Yes,” said Ken Galbraith. “Just absolutely remarkable what can happen to the economy when you’re not fighting a war on the other side of the world . . . You don’t need to raise taxes . . . you don’t need to print money . . . you can even spend a little extra on frills like education and transportation. If the President can buy off those rural congressmen with a bigger farm subsidy, we may able to celebrate the Bicentennial with a high-speed rail system.”

  Why, then, was the President’s job approval rating hovering at 50 percent? Why was the public telling pollsters by a significant margin that “America was on the wrong track”?

  “It’s pretty fundamental,” pollster Harris had said to O’Donnell. “When the economy’s bad, people vote on the economy. When a war’s going badly, they vote on the war. And when there’s ‘peace and prosperity,’ they sometimes think about other things. And they’re not very happy about those ‘other things.’”

  One of those “other things” had long been at the heart of Kennedy’s political concerns. In March of 1966, shortly after the Tet holidays, South Vietnam’s fragile coalition government collapsed in the face of an attack by National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces, which raised the red flag with the yellow star over Saigon’s Independence Palace and proclaimed the birth of the unified “People’s Republic of Vietnam.” There were bipartisan denunciations of what Richard Nixon called “an inexcusable failure of will in the face of naked Communist aggression” and what Democratic senator Russell Long labeled a day of “retreat, defeat, surrender, and national dishonor.” In response, the President dispatched the Sixth Fleet to the South China Sea and staged hastily organized military exercises with the armed forces of Thailand and the Philippines. In a press conference, Kennedy read a statement warning that “no potential aggressor should misread the events in Saigon: the United States will honor every binding commitment it has anywhere those nations are threatened.” He also reminded the reporters of what he had told CBS’s Walter Cronkite in the fall of 1963: “In the final analysis, it’s their war,” adding, “There is no clearer example of a country that could not be saved unless it had decided to save itself.”

  The collapse of South Vietnam was a blow to the Kennedy administration, but in political terms it was a flesh wound. For more than two years American forces had been leaving the country. With American men no longer in harm’s way, major news organizations had also departed, shuttering bureaus, redeploying frontline correspondents. Because the United States had never made a serious military commitment to South Vietnam, even Kennedy’s most zealous opponents could not charge that “American boys died in vain.”

  “Whatever prestige the United States may have lost,” wrote the Washington Post’s Stanley Karnow, “is nothing compared to what would have happened had the world’s mightiest nation committed its blood and treasure and then failed to prevail. No maimed veterans crowd our VA hospitals; no memorials on Washington’s mall or on small-town squares to remind us of who and what we would have lost.”

  So the fall of Vietnam was not the fatal political blow that had haunted the President’s fears in his first term. What did afflict his second term were three other powerful forces. One was thoroughly predictable, so much so that its impact was mitigated; another was utterly unforeseen; a third came in the form of a once-friendly force that had turned hostile in the wake of the Kennedys’ desperate fight to save the presidency from scandal.

  • • •

  John Kennedy and his allies had approached the 1964 campaign with one central fear: that the tinderbox of race would rip apart the Democratic Party coalition formed more than three decades earlier. It could be found in the collapse of the once-solid Democratic South and the flight of South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond to the ranks of the Republican Party when Barry Goldwater won that party’s presidential nomination. With Kennedy at the head of the ticket, without Texan Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, other Southerners defected to the Republicans, including Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson. “I made my decision,” he explained, “after an evening of prayerful contemplation guided by my son and spiritual guide, Pat, whose Christian Broadcasting Network is bringing His word to millions.”

  The issue of war and peace had overwhelmed the race issue in 1964 and propelled Kennedy into a solid reelection triumph. Still, as his second term began, Kennedy had no illusions about the political dangers posed by racial conflict. It was why, just before his Dallas trip, he’d coupled his intention to move on the poverty front with an admonition to the liberal Walter Heller that “I also think it’s important to make clear that we�
�re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs.” It was why his 1964 campaign pledge to put jobs at the center of his domestic campaign theme had been linked to his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” His Voting Rights Act victory in 1965 was in large measure the product of Lyndon Johnson’s advice to frame the issue as a matter of patriotism, where white middle-class racial animus would be at a minimum.

  None of that could seriously diminish the power of race in dozens of American cities, where the familiar ethnic clashes over political and economic power had taken on a toxic quality when intermingled with the visceral issues of black and white. Who would run the schools? Who would police the police? What would be built, and where? Who would control the jobs? Who would get the jobs? Where would public money be spent, and on whom . . . and who would bear the burden of paying for that money? When confrontations between white police and black citizens ignited violence and looting in Newark and half a dozen other cities in the summer of 1965, the traditional black working class‒white Democratic coalition had begun to crack wide open.

  Indeed, by 1966, Teddy White’s warning that Kennedy had cited back in 1964 had proven prescient: Northern politicians had begun to tap into white resentments over black demands. New York Republican congressman Paul Fino took to the House floor, warning that Kennedy’s community development program was “a tool of black power . . . [D]raw the line and stand up to black power.” In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley was positioning himself as the protector of neighborhoods, in the face of Martin Luther King’s campaign for open housing. In Boston, School Committee chair Louise Day Hicks was leveraging her resistance to court-ordered busing of schoolchildren into a likely bid for mayor in two years. In Newark, another busing foe, an ex-Marine named Anthony Imperiale, was leading armed patrols to guide white residents through city streets and planning a run for city council. As for California, that state had provided an early warning back in 1964 when the same voters who gave Kennedy a million-vote margin over Goldwater had voted a ban on open-housing laws by a 2‒1 margin and sent former song-and-dance man George Murphy to the U.S. Senate over state controller Alan Cranston.

  The President’s convictions and his unparalleled political instincts led him to a continuing search for insulation from the full force of racial backlash. When he traveled to big cities in 1965 and ’66, it was to visit job centers and the local development corporations that were channeling public and private money into housing repair and small businesses—and to remind audiences of the moral bankruptcy of welfare. He’d stop by police precincts to shake hands and be photographed in front of what the press corps was calling “the wall of blue”—rows of uniformed police—and argue that “crime is a civil rights issue no less than the right to equal treatment at a coffee shop or hotel or public park. For what good is the right to a public accommodation if a citizen fears to walk the public streets that will take them there? The hard fact is that fear of random violence imprisons too many of our citizens as surely as does any Berlin Wall.” (The New York Times editorially scolded the President for “echoing the repressive rhetoric of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater.” By contrast, some black voices, like Claude Brown, who’d written an affecting memoir called Manchild in the Promised Land, praised the President. “Who do the editors of the Times, safe behind their doormen suburban enclaves, think are the principal victims of break-ins, muggings, shootings?” Brown wrote scornfully, “A significant drop in violent crime would be as big a boon to blacks in the North as the Voting Rights Act was to blacks in the South.”)

  And unlikely as it seems, race was at the heart of his travels to the heart of white America. In the fall of 1965 he’d gone to Appalachia. He revisited West Virginia, where his primary victory in 1960 had provided crucial evidence to the Democratic power brokers that a Catholic could win an overwhelmingly Protestant state. He went back to the mines of Mullens, Beckley, Logan, and Welch, and then traveled to southeastern Kentucky, to Vortex, Barwick, Hazard. He spoke at the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg, where he announced a program to put the jobless miners of the region to work on the roads and bridges of the region, and where the theme of his speech was framed by a recent, celebrated book on the plight of Appalachia.

  “Let this be heard loud and clear,” Kennedy said. “The long night of the Cumberlands is ending.”

  The real message of the speech was clear only to the most politically sophisticated: When you hear about poverty, the President was saying, do not think of race. Remember these white men who want and need work, these white women who struggle to feed and clothe their white children.

  For all the determination of Kennedy not to be trapped by rising racial conflicts and resentments, there was simply no way to avoid the political fallout. The busing of schoolchildren that was ordered by federal courts; the lawsuits to force craft unions to open their ranks to blacks; the crime rate that continued to rise year after year (and how could you prove it would have risen much faster without those jobs programs?); the struggle for control of city halls in a dozen cities—all drove white working and blacks further and further apart . . . and politicians from both parties knew it. Alabama’s George Wallace, barred from another term as governor, was installing his wife, Lurleen, as a figurehead chief executive while promising to enter presidential primaries across the country.

  “Now that they’re sufferin’ just like we in the South have been, now that they’re seein’ their little children forced onto buses to take them into crime-ridden schools, now that they see their millionaire President drivin’ down their property values and their neighborhoods,” Wallace said on Face the Nation, “I think the folks up North are ready to stand up. Remember, the Tea Party didn’t happen in Mobile or Biloxi—it happened right in Kennedy’s backyard. Could be time for another one.”

  Race, however, was only one reason why Kennedy’s job approval ratings had turned anemic. Another powerful force came not from the mean streets of the inner cities but from the pastoral groves of academe.

  • • •

  “Maybe you should count your blessings, Clark,” Kennedy said to the president of the University of California in the early spring of 1966. “The students in Hue just burned down our library and cultural center. They’re throwing stones at the police in Barcelona. They’re using clubs in Yokosuka and Tokyo. Berkeley looks like a walk in the park.”

  “It is a walk in the park, Mr. President,” Clark Kerr said. “A walk where a few hundred young men and women have left their clothes off, and what they’re smoking isn’t sold in any stores. As far as some of my regents are concerned, they might as well be setting fire to the library or . . . I don’t know, burning an American flag . . . and with respect, Mr. President, you do not need to remind me that I made the world’s worst prediction.”

  It was at a 1959 conference about the coming generation of college students that Kerr had offered this prophecy: “The employers will love this generation, they are not going to press very many grievances, there won’t be much trouble, they are going to do their jobs, they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions. There aren’t going to be many strikes.”

  Within a few years Clark’s prediction—actually an observation offered less as an endorsement than as an assessment—had been thoroughly undermined by a combination of forces. The sheer number of young men and women crowding college campuses, combined with the power of hormones, could spark chaos even when nothing of consequence was involved. In May of 1963, students at Princeton, Brown, and Yale went on a series of rampages in search of women’s underwear—so-called panty raids. It could be chalked up to harmless if offbeat fun . . . except that the raids turned violent, with police clubbing students and both sides throwing punches. Another was the example that had been set back in 1960, when Negro college students sat in at segregated lunch counters and boarded segregated buses in the South; it was, in fact, the decision of Berkeley official
s to seal off its property from off-campus causes that had led to the massive protests of late 1964. Moreover, the students who had traveled south in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 had come back to their campus armed with the skills to organize on a whole series of issues:

  Why were women required to be in their dorms by 10:00 p.m. on a school night? For that matter, why was it any of the university’s business if young adults chose to have sex with each other, whether or not they were married?

  Why were no students on the boards of trustees, which set policy for the universities and colleges?

  Why was birth control not available at student health centers?

  Why was marijuana a criminal offense while the government subsidized the tobacco that killed tens of thousands every year?

  Why were men compelled to serve in the Reserve Officers Training Corps in order to graduate?

  Why were so many college courses a series of lectures, to hundreds of students at a time, with little chance for face-to-face learning?