Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - DECEMBER 11, 1960, 9:45 A.M.
AMBASSADOR HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 4, 1968, 11:45 P.M.
PALACE OF FINE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 6, 1976, 7:00 P.M.
Afterword
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY JEFF GREENFIELD
NONFICTION
The Advance Man (with Jerry Bruno)
A Populist Manifesto (with Jack Newfield)
No Peace, No Place: Excavations along the Generational Fault
The World’s Greatest Team
Television: The First Fifty Years
National Lampoon’s Book of Books
Playing to Win: An Insider’s Guide to Politics
The Real Campaign
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!
FICTION
The People’s Choice
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Jeff Greenfield
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenfield, Jeff.
Then everything changed : stunning alternate histories of American politics : JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan / Jeff Greenfield.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-48642-9
1. United States—Politics and government—1945-1989. 2. United States—Politics and government—1989-. 3. United States—History—1945-. 4. Politicians—United States—Biography. 5. Imaginary histories. I. Title.
E839.5.G
973.92—dc22
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To my children, Casey and Dave
Preface
A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE
On February 13, 1933, a man with a loaded pistol set out for Miami Beach’s Bayfront Park, where a public event was in progress. Because he arrived a few minutes later than he had planned, he found his access to the event blocked by a crowd of people. So he climbed on a chair and pulled out his weapon, catching the attention of a spectator, who jostled him as he prepared to fire. So Giuseppe Zangara did not kill President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, who went on to lead the United States through the Great Depression and World War II.
What would have happened if FDR had not been able to steer his country through some of its most dangerous times? The United States would have been led by John Nance Garner, a Texas conservative whose political inclinations make the idea of a New Deal all but impossible to imagine. Would Garner, and the President who would have followed him, have shared Roosevelt’s ardent internationalism, his determination to enlist the industrial might of the United States against Germany?
While we cannot know the way this near miss would have played out, we do know—from this and countless other examples—that history is as much a product of chance as of the broader forces at play. Geography, topography, ethnicity, ideology, climate, natural resources, the search for wealth, mass migrations, all set the framework; but the random roll of the dice is as potent a force as any. A missed meeting, a shift in the weather, a slightly different choice of words open up a literally limitless series of possibilities.
I have spent most of my working life in American politics, as a journalist, commentator, and analyst, and before that, a speechwriter, aide, and consultant, and I know that in my field, the near misses have happened with extraordinary frequency, and with extraordinary consequences. Just in recent times, for instance, four Presidential elections between 1960 and 2000 have come down to a relative handful of votes. A statistically insignificant shift would have given us Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976, and Al Gore in 2000. (John Kennedy bluntly noted this fact early in his Presidency when he saw a Time magazine piece that called one of his aides “coruscatingly brilliant.” Said Kennedy: “Fifty thousand votes the other way and we’d all be coruscatingly stupid.”)
So . . . what would have happened if small twists of fate had given us different leaders, with different beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses? I’ve tried here to answer that question by exploring, in dramatic narrative form, complete with characters, thoughts, and dialogue, a trio of contemporary alternate American histories, all flowing from events that came a mere hairsbreadth away from actually happening.
While these “histories” take us down radically different paths, I have tried to ground them in plausibility. The beliefs, actions, impulses, and core character traits of the major players are largely drawn from their own words, and from the judgments of the men and women who knew them well, as set down in memoirs, historical accounts, and oral histories. I have also conducted extensive new interviews with many key players and observers, including such distinguished men and women as Brent Scowcroft, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard Goodwin, Norman Ornstein, Joe Klein, top LBJ aide Harry McPherson, and many others. They are, of course, in no way responsible for the alternate histories recounted here.
We begin with a fact that has gone almost completely forgotten. On December 11, 1960, a seventy-three-year-old would-be suicide bomber named Richard Pavlick was parked outside the Palm Beach, Florida, home of President-elect John F. Kennedy, holding in his hand a switch connected to seven sticks of dynamite, enough to level a small mountain. His presence ignored by the Secret Service, Pavlick was, in the words of the agency’s chief, “seconds away” from murdering the incoming President of the United States. Only Pavlick’s reluctance to kill Kennedy in front of his wife and child, who had come to the door to see him off to church, stayed his hand. (He was arrested four days later in Florida by authorities after he sent threatening notes to the postmaster back home in Belmont, New Hampshire.) If Jacqueline Kennedy had slept in that Sunday morning, or was at breakfast, or was tending to Caroline or her infant son John Jr., Kennedy would have been killed before ever becoming President.
And then . . .?
The second “history” puts Robert Kennedy at the center, but now it is June 4, 1968, the night of the California primary. A series of insignifican
t, random decisions sent Robert Kennedy unprotected into the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. A change in any one of those decisions would have put Kennedy out of harm’s way—or would have put a protective barrier between Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan’s pistol. For more than forty years, historians, political journalists, and still-grieving admirers have asked, “Would he have won if he had lived, and what might have been different?”
Here’s an answer.
The third narrative illustrates the fact that many twists of fate do not involve matters of life and death. In 1976, President Gerald Ford was rapidly closing the gap between himself and Governor Jimmy Carter, when in the middle of the second Presidential debate, a critical gaffe suddenly swung momentum the other way. If Ford had taken advantage of a panelist’s offer to rephrase his clumsy answer, he would have avoided a week’s worth of battering by the press, and would have also avoided antagonizing a large voting bloc that was very much up for grabs. How crucial would that have been? It would have taken a shift of only 12,000 votes in two states to keep Gerald Ford in the White House after 1976. And then . . .? The history of this country might have been dramatically, and surprisingly, different.
These alternate histories I’ve designed are, of course, only possibilities. Someone else may offer up perfectly plausible scenarios in which the same accidents of fate I chronicle change everything in wholly different ways.
And that’s the point. History doesn’t turn on a dime; it turns on a plugged nickel. If I’m accused of playing with history, I plead guilty with an explanation. When we consider how our country, our fortunes, our lives might have been different . . .
If it had rained in Dallas on November 22, 1963, so that John Kennedy’s car was covered by a bubble top . . .
If security guard Frank Willis hadn’t found the tape on an office door at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972 . . .
If John Hinckley’s gun had been aimed an inch or two to Ronald Reagan’s right on March 31, 1981 . . .
If Bill Clinton had ordered an aide to banish from the White House that intern who was flashing her underwear at him . . .
If the Democrats in Duval County, Florida, had not inadvertently instructed first-time voters to mark their ballots in a way that invalidated thousands of votes for Al Gore . . .
. . . then playing with history is a small bit of payback for the way history has played with us.
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA
DECEMBER 11, 1960, 9:45 A.M.
He stepped out of the doorway of the house, nodded to the men guarding the entrance, offered a slight wave to the photographers across the street, and began walking to the black sedan parked on North Ocean Boulevard that would take him to St. Edward’s Church. He was not the most observant of Catholics, but a visit to church on Sunday, chronicled by the press, came with the territory. He put a hand into the side pocket of his lightweight tropical worsted suit, ran his other hand through his hair, and glanced up at the blue sky with an appreciative nod. A good day for a round of golf, a few hours by the pool working on the speech—Sorensen had sent a draft, a good one, but it was too long and a bit florid; he wanted this to be short, tough, with simple elegance—and later in the evening, some . . . diversion.
If he thought himself among the luckiest of men, he could be forgiven his presumption. He’d been born into wealth; his father had cashed out just before the Crash of ’29, leaving Joe Sr. flush enough for comforts like the eleven-bedroom Spanish revival home he’d bought at the depths of the Depression. As a young officer in World War II, he’d emerged a hero after his boat was sunk, and that heroism had helped him win a Congressional seat before his thirtieth birthday. He’d survived illnesses grave enough to have received the last rites of his church, and he’d managed to conceal the severity of his medical condition with the help of complaisant physicians and an incurious press. That incurious press had also kept his private life just that. That same good fortune had sustained him throughout his improbable political journey. Four years ago, he had sought his party’s Vice Presidential nomination after Stevenson had thrown the choice open to the convention, fought for it through two ballots on the convention floor. (His father had gone further earlier that year, offering Lyndon Johnson a huge sum of money if he’d run for the Presidency against Ike and agree to take Jack as his running mate; Lyndon declined.) He was within a hairsbreadth of the nomination when the convention chair, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, recognized states that threw their votes to Estes Kefauver, starting a stampede (Sam had no tolerance for the idea of a Catholic anywhere near the White House). And had he won that nomination, how many skeptical Democrats would have pointed to Adlai’s landslide loss and said, “See what happens when you put a Catholic on the ticket?”
When the 1960 campaign began, he and his political team wanted a big win in the Wisconsin primary—the first real test—big enough to force Senator Hubert Humphrey out of the race. But the victory there was not big enough for that, which meant they would compete again—this time in West Virginia, a state with almost no Catholics, where fears of the Pope of Rome ran strong. That was where he’d found his voice, assailing the government’s meager help to the impoverished, pleading for religious tolerance with words that spoke almost as eloquently as the avalanche of money that rained down on local sheriffs and court clerks. Without Humphrey in the race, there was no way his win in West Virginia would have persuaded the Richard Daleys and Bill Greens and Ed Flynns, the men who controlled the delegations of Illinois and Pennsylvania and New York, to stand with him.
And then there was Lyndon—my God, what a stroke of luck! The majority leader presided over the Senate like a puppet master; he had a preternatural ability to know every member’s strengths, weaknesses, vices, vulnerabilities, ambitions. He had ties to the South and West; enough links to oil and the financial world to have matched Jack’s father dollar for dollar. Yet Lyndon had dithered so long about even running—was it fear of failure, as some of his closest aides had thought?—that by the time he’d finally entered the race formally, just days before the convention, it was too late; the princes of the party whose support he might have won were no longer in play. Jack had heard from a mutual friend that one of Lyndon’s aides, George Reedy, had said, “In the morning he’d be for a campaign, and then by noon it would have worn off, and by the evening he would be against it but would have made so many commitments he couldn’t back out. It was a strange situation.”
But if Johnson’s fecklessness was a stroke of luck, then Lyndon’s place on the ticket was the winning of the Irish sweepstakes. He’d offered Lyndon the Vice Presidency because he had to, because a Southern or border state Democrat in second place had been a fixture of party tickets for decades. It was a way of mollifying a region that was all but barred from the Presidential slot by virtue of a long-ago civil war and the region’s noxious racial policies. More than that, though, it was a geographically and politically attractive pairing: bring together the two strongest rivals for the nomination, unite liberal and conservative Democrats, add the electoral votes of the South to the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states. But what about the downside, the reaction from liberals and labor leaders, who bore the scars of past battles with Johnson? He remembered that in the first hours after winning the nomination in Los Angeles, he’d realized that he and his team had never really thought this through. So he went down two floors to Johnson’s suite in the Biltmore to feel him out—and Lyndon had said yes before he was really offered the nomination! (“I didn’t really offer him the nomination,” he’d told a newspaper friend later. “I just held it out to here”—two or three inches from his pocket—and Johnson had taken it.)
Then came the chaos: furious denunciations from his own aides, from Pierre Salinger and Kenny O’Donnell, labor leaders and liberals threatening a floor fight, and finally, the disastrous decision to send Bobby down to Lyndon’s suite to try to talk him out of it, offering him the party’s national chair and the patronage that went with it—at the same time Jack was on t
he phone to Lyndon’s closest advisor telling him, yes, he did want LBJ on the ticket!
But for all the ill feeling—Lyndon and Bobby had cordially despised each other before this muck-up and God knows what it would be like between those two now—there was one inescapable fact: without Lyndon on the ticket, there was no way he’d be here in Palm Beach preparing for his Inaugural. Lyndon had had his moments on the campaign—the stories about the drinking and the violent outbursts hadn’t reached the press, but they’d made it back to the Kennedy campaign—but that didn’t change the fact that Johnson and his wife whistle-stopped 3,500 miles across eight Southern states, at a time when the “Solid South” had ceased being so solid for Democrats. They’d barely won South Carolina, held Georgia, and won Texas by 46,000 votes; without Texas, his electoral majority would have come down to those 8,000 suspect votes in Illinois, which might have given his electors in the South some ideas about withholding their votes in return for backing off on civil rights. And Texas was in real doubt until Lyndon and Lady Bird had been confronted by that violent, hysterical crowd in Dallas; it was almost as if Johnson and his wife had shamed the state into voting Democratic (and how could a mob of men and women behave that way, spitting on the wife of a senator? Maybe there was something in the water down in Dallas . . .).
So now the Presidency was his, albeit by the narrowest of margins. There was no mandate, but he was by nature a cautious, prudent political animal, with no burning hunger for radical change. The Cabinet he was putting together would reflect that. Rusk at State was a paper-pusher, but that was fine, he’d run his own foreign policy (he’d put Adlai at the UN; Stevenson would be unhappy, but it was more than he deserved after his temporizing at the convention). Dillon at Treasury was the Wall Street WASP the markets always trusted, and McNamara at Defense was a Republican. There was only one real pick sure to raise eyebrows: in a few days, he was going to name Bobby as Attorney General. Neither of the brothers was especially keen on the idea; Bobby had spent the last three years going after labor racketeers, and was tired, he’d said, of chasing bad men. But Dad was insisting on it. When he’d asked Clark Clifford, the ultimate Washington insider, to try to argue Joe out of it, his dad had said, “It’s the only thing I’m asking for and I want it.” So he’d name Bobby when he got back to Washington in a few days. Meanwhile, there was a new baby in the house, along with his wife and daughter. In fact, he thought they might be coming to the door to see him off to church. He began to turn back to the house. The last thing he would have noticed was an old Buick parked down the street. The last thing . . .
Then Everything Changed Page 1