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

by Greenfield, Jeff

  Reagan never set foot in either state; he was on the ballots because state officials could list candidates whether or not they’d declared for president. What voters in both states saw—over and over again—was a five-minute television film produced by a group called Republicans for Victory.

  “Six years ago, in the nation’s second biggest state, a weak Democratic incumbent soundly defeated the nation’s best-known Republican,” the film began, with clips of a victorious Governor Brown and an embittered Richard Nixon announcing “my last press conference.”

  “Four years ago,” the film continued, “a new voice arose in the West, a new champion for American values.” And there was a minute-long clip from Reagan’s 1964 TV speech for Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing,” including its most famous line:

  “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

  “Two years ago,” the film went on, “that new voice—that new leader—won a landslide victory over that same Democratic governor.”

  Then, over a split-screen image—a buoyant, smiling Reagan; a dour, defeated Nixon—the film concluded: “Now, as the campaign to take back the White House begins, ask yourself: Who embodies our values, shares our convictions, and can win in November?”

  When Reagan won 41 percent of the Nebraska primary vote on May 14, finishing just six points behind Nixon, ABC’s Bill Laurence observed that “to paraphrase this network’s famous sports show, Mr. Reagan is enjoying the joy of a close defeat, while Mr. Nixon is suffering the agony of a Pyrrhic victory.” Two weeks later in Oregon, where liberal Republicans like Senator Mark Hatfield and Governor Tom McCall thrived, Reagan won 35 percent of the vote.

  “There is now no doubt,” said NBC’s Sander Vanocur, “that Ronald Reagan is a viable contender. The question is: Will he formally enter the race? And if he does, can he overcome the formidable phalanx of supporters that Mr. Nixon has in his corner . . . and can he shake loose the delegates that have declared their allegiance to the former vice president?”

  Five days later Reagan came close to answering the first question when he set out on a five-day, 7,000-mile “non-campaign” speaking tour that took him to New Orleans, Charlotte, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, Chicago, Columbus, and Cleveland. “Welfare cheats” and “lawbreakers” were his special targets. A week later, after he had won all of California’s delegates in the state’s uncontested primary, Governor Reagan answered the question directly. “Yes,” he said, “the voters have made this decision for me. I’m a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.”

  “The timing was critical,” chief delegate hunter F. Clifton White said later. “Had he waited until the convention was about to open, Nixon’s big guns—Goldwater, Thurmond, John Tower—might have gotten commitments from enough delegates to win. Ron’s announcement kept just enough of them in play.”

  As it turned out, what actually determined the Republican presidential nominee was . . . the flip of a coin.

  • • •

  The tactic had been suggested not by any of his aides but by the candidate himself in a meeting in his Fontainebleau hotel suite two days before the convention began.

  “I don’t think I’m being cocky about this,” Reagan said, “but if I could get in front of these delegates and speak to them, I think we could pull enough of them away from Dick to stop a first-ballot nomination. And then . . .”

  “And then you’d win it,” Stu Spencer said. “The question is how to do it. They’re not about to let you have that audience all to itself.”

  Reagan grinned at Spencer and shook his head.

  “Of course not, Stu,” he said. “But what if the delegates demand it?”

  On Saturday, Nevada governor Paul Laxalt and two dozen conservative Republicans stood in front of a press conference and announced their intention to back a new convention rule: every candidate seeking the nomination would be invited to give a ten-minute speech to the delegates just before the balloting began.

  “With debates now a permanent part of our political landscape,” Laxalt said, “it is a logical next step for the men and women choosing our nominee to hear them make their case before casting their ballots. We have seen,” he said in a clear reference to Nixon, “how critical it is for our nominee to be able to make our case in the public arena.”

  The Nixon campaign pushed back hard. Speechwriter William Safire drafted a statement labeling the rule “a cheap cynical contrivance to turn the campaign into a carnival.” Their campaign, however, was caught in a whipsaw. Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s one slim chance at the nomination was the same as Reagan’s—to push the fight to a second ballot. His campaign chief, Leonard Hall, urged the Rockefeller delegates to support the rule. Across the ideological divide, dozens of conservative delegates had been prodded into supporting Nixon by party heavyweights like Strom Thurmond and John Tower—but their hearts were with Reagan.

  “Nixon has my vote on the first ballot,” a South Carolinian said to Thurmond, “but I’m voting to hear these men speak. If we learned anything from Kennedy, it’s that good ideas don’t matter much if you can’t communicate them.” With telephone calls and telegrams deluging the convention, with “Let them speak!” chants disrupting convention business for minutes at a time, the delegates adopted the rule change by a 100-vote margin. And when the flip of a coin determined that Reagan would speak last, “that’s when we knew we had it,” Nofziger said.

  The delegates listened in sullen silence to Rockefeller’s speech . . . those that showed up for it. They’d been urged by the convention chair not to repeat the 1964 moment when delegates booed and hissed Rockefeller’s remarks.

  They dutifully cheered Richard Nixon’s talk, which charged the Kennedy White House with “a systematic abuse of power directed at its political enemies and a systematic weakness in dealing with our Communist enemies abroad and the enemy of crime and disorder at home.”

  And then Reagan came to the rostrum. Speaking without a teleprompter, without a text, he spoke of a letter he had been asked to write for a time capsule, to be opened in a hundred years. He spoke of writing about “the erosion of freedom taking place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy.”

  And as he reached the climax of his speech, the hall grew still.

  “And suddenly it dawned on me: those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether we met our challenge . . . Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1968 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now a hundred years later free’? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

  “This is our challenge and this is why we’re here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to go out and communicate to the world that we carry the message they’re waiting for.”

  It took twenty minutes for the cheers to stop. From their glassed-in booths, the network anchors and analysts could see furious arguments breaking out in a dozen state delegations as individual delegates demanded permission to change their votes.

  Before the candidates spoke, Richard Nixon’s private count showed that he would have twenty-five votes more than he needed for the nomination. When the first ballot ended, he was seventy-five votes short, as his support in the South and mountain West had eroded. On the third ballot, Ronald Reagan won with a sixty-five vote margin.

  His choice of running mate was as unprecedented as his own victory.

  “Representative Gerald Ford was the right c
hoice four years ago,” Reagan said, “and four more years of experience makes him an even better choice today.”

  At a post-convention dinner, Governor Reagan interrupted the celebration to raise a champagne glass.

  “First, I propose a toast to the Soviet Union, for its exquisite sense of timing. If they’d invaded Czechoslovakia a month before our convention, instead of a month after, Dick Nixon would be doing the celebrating tonight; it would have played right to his strength. And I also propose a toast to the man without whom this would not have happened,” he said. “To the man who convinced our party to care about how we say what we say: to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  A few weeks later, the Democratic nominee would have reason to toast that same man.

  • • •

  It was eight o’clock in the evening in mid-October 1967 when Senator Hubert Humphrey sat down next to an intense, bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old man in the inner office of his suite on the second floor of the Beaux Arts Old Senate Office Building.

  “All right, Al,” he said. “Suppose you tell me why this conversation is so confidential it couldn’t be listed on my schedule and had to wait till my staff cleared out. When I told Gartner and Connell I was staying late, they decided I was having a very private meeting with that secretary on the Education Committee.”

  “I want to offer you your best chance to be president,” the man said. “It’s just that I want to offer it to you before all those tested pros around you start telling you that I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think anyone around me thinks you’re crazy, Al. Driven, obsessed, a royal pain in the backside, sure. But as far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned the right to a hearing.”

  Al Lowenstein was, by conventional measurements, a college teacher and administrator, a lawyer, a former congressional staffer—he’d worked for Humphrey a decade earlier as a foreign policy specialist—and an advocate for liberal causes, most specifically civil rights. To hundreds if not thousands of people, he was a force of nature, a Pied Piper, a man who could sweep through a city, gathering an eclectic mix of people to his side for hours-long meals, daylong conversations, all in the service of whatever cause Lowenstein was embracing. He’d sneaked into Southwest Africa in 1959, uncovering brutalities committed by the racist South African government administering that territory; he’d spent a year crusading to bring that story to public attention; he’d recruited foot soldiers for Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964, pushed to get the Freedom Democratic Party seated at the convention that year. When President Kennedy disengaged from Vietnam, he’d organized student government presidents and student newspaper editors to support Kennedy’s policy, and did the same when the President opened diplomatic relations with China and ended the Cuban trade embargo. There was something about his persistence, his earnestness, his apparent guilelessness, that endeared him to an astonishing breadth of people; he counted Eleanor Roosevelt and William F. Buckley Jr. as friends and admirers.

  “I’ll begin by conceding a point: if you run for president the conventional way, you have a perfectly decent chance for the nomination. You’ll have solid black support; the liberal reformers will be on your side; and you’ll have half of labor on your side, although it’ll likely be the much smaller half.”

  “No argument there,” Humphrey said. “Meany as much as told me he’d be going all in with Scoop. He pretty much called the President an appeaser the last time we spoke. ‘Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ George said. ‘Joe caved in to Hitler; Jack’s caving in to the Kremlin.’”

  “Which still leaves you Reuther’s auto workers, some of the other industrials—”

  “Except for all those folks who make the bombers, the fighter jets, the missiles . . . Scoop never met a weapon system he didn’t love.”

  “Understood,” Lowenstein said. “So what about the political leaders—the ‘bosses,’ as we Manhattan folks say.”

  Humphrey shrugged. “Daley, Lawrence, Unruh, Green—some of ’em think I’m too close to the blacks, some of them wish I spent a little less time on campuses . . . and all of them probably have the same question the press does, which is—”

  “Which is: ‘Can he win?’ Which is why I am here. The only way you’re going to win the nomination is to do what Kennedy did eight years ago: prove you can win by winning. And the way to do that, Senator, is to run as John Kennedy’s third term.”

  Humphrey smiled.

  “You may have noticed that there’s an ambitious young secretary of defense who I’m sure is thinking pretty much the same thing,” he said, “and Bobby would be a real third Kennedy term.”

  “Not a chance, and you know it,” Lowenstein said. “In the first place, you don’t get to run for president in your first election unless you’ve won a world war, like Ike did. Exceptions to the rule? Sure: William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. How’d they workout? Bobby has to start somewhere else, to get the rough edges off. Besides, it’s just too soon. You saw what that Texas senator said on Meet the Press, didn’t you? ‘This is America, not some foreign emirate: we don’t do dynasties.’ George Bush is right. It’s just not possible for Bobby, and Teddy’s not even thirty-six yet. So give me five, okay, ten minutes to tell you why and how you run and win as the rightful heir.”

  It took longer than that—no one ever said Al Lowenstein was concise—but the argument was clear. First, while the country was evenly divided about Kennedy’s record, Democrats were not; the President’s approval rating was at 64 percent within his party, and the number was artificially deflated because of his staggering unpopularity among Southerners, most of whom still called themselves Democrats.

  “Those folks will be solidly for Wallace, but there aren’t any Southern primaries; he did okay in Indiana in ’64, and he might get votes in Ohio and California if he decides to spend money and run there, but he won’t matter because those segregated Southern delegations will never be seated—not after the rule changes at the last convention. Who will be seated? Biracial delegations, with strong feelings about Kennedy.

  “Now look at the terrain on which you’ll be fighting,” Lowenstein continued. “Except for California, none of the major states have primaries—or if they do, they’re in name only. Some of those state organizations picked their convention delegates months ago. One of these days we’re going to have real primaries, where the people choose the delegates, but that’s not this year’s fight. As far as the Vice President is concerned, it’s still 1960—or 1940, or whatever year Symington is living in. He still thinks he can wait for the convention to settle on everybody’s second choice. So you might ask: Where are the real primaries? That’s not the real question,” Lowenstein said. “The real question is: Where are the first real primaries, where Humphrey victories can answer the Can-he-win? question before the spring arrives. New Hampshire and Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin is my backyard, Al—I was the Democrats’ ‘third senator’ before the party finally won a Senate seat there in ’62. But New Hampshire? They don’t like government, they don’t like ‘big spenders’—”

  “And they don’t like foreign wars, and they don’t have mandatory voting,” Lowenstein added. “The way to win—there and in Wisconsin—is with something that’s never been seen before . . . a guerrilla army.

  “You’ve got a whole slice of the younger generation that’s spent the last decade engaged in political work,” Lowenstein pointed out. “Not party politics, but politics in the broadest sense. Kennedy brought them into the Peace Corps; they’ve lived in villages in Asia and Africa, where they’ve organized food co-ops and schools. He pulled them into AmeriCorps projects from Watts to Harlan County. They’ve risked their lives to run voter registration drives in Lowndes County, and helped Cesar Chavez organize farmworkers in Delano. They may not all know it, but some of them—maybe a lot of them—believe they might have been drafted into a war in Vietnam or Cuba or God knows where, and the
y want a president who’ll keep the peace. If they could, they’d vote JFK in for a third term. You read the polls: Kennedy’s fifteen to twenty points higher with young people than with the general public. And they know what I know: there’s been no stronger fighter for peace than Hubert Humphrey. They’re smart, fearless, and they live off the land. We can put five hundred of them in New Hampshire for the cost of one full-page ad in the New York Times.”

  “Just what I need, Al: five hundred people with beards, beads, jeans, and tie-dyed shirts parading through those bucolic New England towns.”

  “Senator,” Lowenstein said with a broad smile, “I’m way ahead of you.”

  • • •

  On December 4, 1967, Hubert Humphrey announced his second run for the presidency in front of the Humphrey Drug Store in Huron, South Dakota, where he had once worked as a pharmacist for his father. He was joined by George McGovern, the state’s junior senator and a member with Humphrey of the informal Senate Peace Caucus, who endorsed him with the assertion that “no one in Washington has done more in the cause of a less dangerous world than this ‘Happy Warrior’ for peace.”

  On that same day, four dozen young men and women from colleges and universities across the country set up a “Youth for Humphrey” office on the second floor of a building on Elm and Granite Streets in Manchester, New Hampshire, just across from Veteran’s Memorial Park. The men wore button-down shirts and sport jackets; their hair was trimmed to fall above their ears. The women wore medium-length skirts and blouses with appropriate underclothing. (LOSE THE GREASE, WIN THE PEACE, read one banner stretched across the headquarters’ wall.)

  Not all the volunteers were of college age. AmeriCorps official Tom Hayden took a leave of absence from his post to relocate to New Hampshire, where he led workshops on how to approach voters—and answered scornful charges of “Co-option!” from his former SDS colleagues. From his faculty post at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, former White House aide Richard Goodwin signed up as an all-purpose speechwriter/media hand. His presence might have raised eyebrows among the political press—was the Kennedy White House taking sides?—had any political reporter bothered to look into the Youth for Humphrey movement. Their time was spent at the official Humphrey headquarters eight blocks away, or at the bar of the Sheraton-Wayfarer Hotel, where reporters and aides from every campaign traded gossip and old war stories.