Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  By eleven a.m., the dimensions of the disaster were apparent, and the return of the nation’s political leadership to Washington had begun—a process that was as much a logistical nightmare as a political and emotional one. A freak snowstorm had dumped more than a foot of snow on the Washington-Baltimore area, paralyzing air and road traffic. So throughout the day, government jets had ferried the men from Boston, Peoria, San Antonio, Helena, to outlying military airports, then choppered them into the Capitol; convoys of Secret Service men had taken them to their Washington homes, staged vigils as they hastily made their way to the Capitol. There was no way to know with certainty whether the killing of John Kennedy was part of an attempt to decapitate the leadership of the United States, but President Eisenhower was taking no chances.

  (“Get the Secret Service out there now with every man in the leadership!” he’d snapped. “We’ll worry about the legalities later. If the chief wants to argue about it, he can do it when he goes on trial for criminal negligence. For Christ’s sake, that lunatic was stalking Kennedy for weeks!”)

  They were among the most powerful of political figures, and they were as shell-shocked by what had happened as everyone else. “How could this have happened?” they had asked when they heard the news—a question that grew louder, angrier, when they learned that Pavlick had made no secret of his intentions. Indeed, the Belmont, New Hampshire, postmaster, Thomas Murphy, had warned the Secret Service about Pavlick. Yet somehow, even armed with the license plate of his car, they’d failed to spot him parked on the street near the Kennedy home. The nation was spared the most graphic of images, largely because the blast had killed all of the photographers and cameramen encamped outside Kennedy’s Palm Beach home, and because the Secret Service and Palm Beach police had thrown a protective cordon around the blast site. (Later a local police officer was caught trying to sell photos he’d surreptitiously snapped. He and a National Enquirer reporter were briefly jailed, and were released a day later with a variety of injuries to their face and ribs.) Still, the country had awakened on Sunday morning with a rock-solid set of assumptions about the way their world worked; a few hours later, Pavlick’s car bomb had blown those assumptions apart.

  All of which, for the eight men gathered in the Capitol this Sunday evening, was decidedly beside the point. They had not rushed back to Washington to mourn. They were confronting a Constitutional crisis of the first order.

  “Bryce,” Speaker Sam Rayburn said to the short, courtly man to his left, “before we jump into this thicket, do you have anything for us on arrangements, logistics?”

  Bryce Harlow looked at a page of handwritten notes. As President Eisenhower’s liaison to the Congress, and as the President’s closest aide, he’d forged a close partnership with Rayburn and Senate Leader Johnson.

  “The family’s in Palm Beach. Bobby flew down this afternoon . . . they’ve all been moved to a private home. The house took a pretty big hit. Mrs. Kennedy and the baby are okay physically. She’s in a state of shock. Caroline was out by the pool with her nanny and got cut up by some flying glass. She’s taken a number of stitches, but she’ll be okay. As for the funeral . . .” He paused for a moment.

  “Nothing left to bury, is there?” Rayburn said. Harlow shook his head.

  “Jesus Christ, how the hell could this have happened?” The House Majority Leader John McCormick, a gaunt, sepulchral figure who was in normal times a barely measurable presence in the Congress, pounded a gnarled fist on the table. “My office in Boston is already hearing stories that a postmaster up in Bellmore—no, Belmont, whatever that New Hampshire town is—had warned the Secret Service about that nut—gave them the guy’s license plate number, for Christ’s sake—and they let the guy park his car down the street?”

  “Yes, and there’ll be a full investigation, and a lot of heads are going to roll,” Harlow said. “Anyway, I think the family is leaning toward a mass in Boston in three days or so.”

  “We’ll have a memorial here, a Joint Session,” Rayburn said. “And then, Lyndon”—he looked down the table to the tall figure, slouched low in his seat, heavily lidded eyes half closed—“I think a speech to the Congress—which is why we have to sort this mess out.”

  Kennedy had been killed on December 11, five days before the Presidential electors were to meet in their state capitals to formalize Kennedy’s election. Only when those votes were counted and certified by Congress in early January would Kennedy be officially entitled to take the reins of the Presidency. None of this had ever mattered, at least not since the Hayes- Tilden election of 1876; it was all kind of a ceremonial pageantry from another century. But now, suddenly, it did matter. Could the electors vote for a dead man? Could the Congress legally count the votes of a dead candidate? The Congress had faced that question back in 1872 when Democrat Horace Greeley had died after the election, but he’d lost to Ulysses Grant in a landslide; now they were talking about the candidate who’d won.

  “And if you don’t count them,” the House parliamentarian had told the Speaker in an early afternoon phone call—even as they were counting the bodies in Palm Beach, the forty-five-year career civil servant who seemed to live in the catacombs of the Capitol was researching mold-covered books and monographs—“then you don’t have an electoral majority, and the House picks the President—one state, one vote.”

  “So there’s no problem,” Rayburn had said. “Democrats control, what is it, thirty-two state delegations? When it gets thrown into the House, they’ll just vote for Lyndon.”

  “The problem,” sighed the parliamentarian, “is that the House has to choose from among the top three finishers. Right now, that would leave the choice between Nixon and Harry Byrd—that’s who Mississippi and half of Alabama went for. There obviously weren’t any electoral votes for Lyndon for President—just for Vice President.”

  “So what we have to do,” Rayburn was saying now to the seven other men in the Capitol, “is to get some of the Kennedy electors to vote for Lyndon on Friday.”

  “Why not all of them?” McCormick asked. “That way we don’t have to drag it out.”

  “Well,” the Speaker began, “it’s very complicated. Legally, some of them are free agents; some of them are bound by law. And—”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Lyndon Johnson said. His voice was a low-pitched rumble, barely audible down the length of the table. “Some of those folks wouldn’t vote for me if Khrushchev were on the other side. Hell, some of’em probably would jump at the chance to vote for him. They see me, they listen when I open my mouth, and they think ‘Where’s the white robe? The burning cross . . . where’s the hood?’ And there’s another thing,” he said, his voice rising, the way it would when he’d start to hammer a senator for a vote, when his body and his voice would bend the man backward until his head was barely higher than his waist. “The Kennedys are gonna want that vote—it’s their due. I don’t think they’d stand for it if that vote on Friday as much as said he never even existed.” He took a deep drink from a glass of the Cutty Sark he kept stashed at the Speaker’s hideaway.

  “If I might say a word here . . .”

  Vice President Richard Nixon leaned forward, elbows on the table, thumbs propped under his chin. Without the glare of television lights, the shadow of a beard was less visible, the jowls and furrows under his eyes less pronounced. But his gestures and voice bespoke of solemnity, gravitas, age. Can he really be only four years older than Jack was? one of them thought. I’ll bet when he was nine he wanted a briefcase for Christmas.

  “I believe we can all agree that there are two issues before us,” Nixon said, holding two fingers aloft. “First,” he said, gesturing with his forefinger, “is reassurance. The public must know that their government is strong and functioning. Second,” he said, holding up two fingers, “is the issue of legitimacy. The people must believe that the process is fair, that they can fully trust that their will has been followed.”

  The shuffling of papers, tapping of fingers, flick
ing of cigarettes stopped.

  “And your point is?” the Speaker asked.

  “You know damn well what his point is,” Senator Everett Dirksen said. The Republican leader’s voice, a deep basso profundo, rumbled through the room. “Dick’s too polite to say it”—a snicker came from across the table—“but I’ve said it publicly and I’ll say it again. This election was stolen. I don’t know where that forty-six thousand vote plurality came from in Texas, but it’s mighty curious when Fannin County, with five thousand registered voters, casts more than six thousand votes. And as for that eight thousand vote spread in Chicago . . .” He turned to Nixon, who was vigorously shaking his head.

  “I know, Dick, I know,” said Dirksen. “You said you wouldn’t contest the Illinois vote, you got the Herald-Trib to kill Earl Mazo’s series on vote fraud. But now we’re talking about putting a man in the White House that nobody voted for, who ran on a ticket that may not even have been legitimately elected. Maybe the courts will have something to say about this.”

  Half a dozen voices were raised at once, and then Bryce Harlow got to his feet and held out a cautionary hand.

  “Ev—Dick—this is not a road we’re going down. The President has made it absolutely clear to me and everyone else in the White House that he would regard any attempt to turn this into a political conflict as something very close to treason—literally—giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And he would say so loudly, publicly, and repeatedly. Ev, I have no doubt there were some votes stolen in Chicago. Although,” he added with a faint smile, “I’ve heard some stories about Republican vote-counting in Peoria that may raise an eyebrow. But we’re talking about what this country looks like today to the rest of the world. What do you think the Russians are telling the Africans and the Asians about us? We’ve just had the next President of the United States blown to hell and gone by a lunatic. We’re not going to paralyze ourselves with a political fight. And as far as the courts are concerned, let’s be serious: there’s no way on earth the public would ever stand for a court deciding who is going to be the President.

  “Mr. Speaker,” Harlow said, “Lyndon—Mr. President, I guess I should say—the President wants you and your colleagues to resolve this as you wish. He will be completely and publicly supportive; and he’s prepared to fight any attempt by anyone of any party to obstruct you. And by the way, Ev, you might want to sharpen those vote-counting skills of yours. Sam and Lyndon have enough Democrats to count those electoral votes any way they choose; you’d do yourself and the party a lot of good if there weren’t a trace of partisanship here. I believe—and the President believes—that anything else would be political suicide.”

  And Ike will make damn sure of that, Nixon thought. Son of a bitch didn’t lift a finger for me, knew exactly what he was doing when he told that press conference it’d take him a week to think about any decision I’d helped him make.

  “Ev,” Nixon said, arranging his face into its Civic Moment expression, “Bryce is right. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I’m going to reach out to our Republican electors. If you need them to give Kennedy a majority, fine. If you need some of them to vote for Lyndon so he can be eligible for a vote in the House, fine.”

  “That’s very commendable, Dick,” said Mike Mansfield. The others turned to him with looks that varied between surprise and amazement. Next to the famously taciturn Montana senator, Calvin Coolidge was a loudmouth. “But this still leaves us with a problem: Who’s going to be Vice President? If the electors vote for Kennedy and Johnson, and the Congress counts those votes, then there’s a vacancy on January 20th and you fill it,” he said, pointing to Johnson. “But that means we go without a Vice President for four years. If Kennedy’s electors switch their votes for President to you—so you’re in the running if the House has to choose—then there’s no electoral majority for Vice President. That would leave it up to the Senate to choose between Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater—an elector from Oklahoma voted for him.” No one said anything for a long moment.

  “I remember they were talking about this when I got to the Senate in’49,” Johnson said. “Harry Truman had just gone through damn near a whole term with no V.P.—and if anything’d happened to him, you”—he pointed to House Minority Leader Joe Martin—“would have been President—from a different party. But Harry got himself elected and Alben Barkley was the veep and the whole thing just went away.” Johnson took another drink from a glass of the Cutty Sark, then took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “One thing,” he said. “I don’t think the country would sleep very well going four years with a President who damn near died of a heart attack five years ago, and still can’t give these damn things up and no one next in line, but—” He looked up at Speaker Rayburn. “I mean no offense, Mr. Sam,” Johnson said. “You’d make a damn fine President.”

  “I’d quit first,” Rayburn said. “A seventy-nine-year-old President with—how old is Hayden?”—referring to the Senate President pro tempore. “Eighty-two? Eighty-three—next in line? That’d reassure the country, wouldn’t it?”

  “There is another alternative,” Harlow said. “Lyndon, I’d say you have about twenty-four hours to make the first decision of your Presidency.”

  IF THERE WAS ANY saving grace to the catastrophe, it was that the identity and motive of the killer were never in doubt. Pavlick had posted his suicide note to Tom Murphy, and within a day, under the direct order of Eisenhower, the letter and his earlier threats had been publicly revealed. At a time when historians were still arguing over who was in on the plot to kill Lincoln a century earlier, there was no mystery, no suspicions beyond a tiny fringe. Kennedy had been killed outside his home by a lunatic whose intentions were as blatant as they were deranged. (“Imagine if he’d been killed in Texas,” Lyndon Johnson said to a confidant. “I’d be suspect number one.”) The appalling failure of the Secret Service was a case not of malicious indifference but classic bureaucratic sclerosis, somehow failing to take seriously enough the warnings of Postmaster Thomas Murphy that a local resident was making threats against the President’s life. “Three, four more days and we would have had him,” the now-suspended chief of the Service said. Had the identity of the killer been less clear, had there been unanswered questions about the manner of Kennedy’s death, it is entirely possible that a whole culture of conspiracy would have flourished in the years that followed.

  That was at best cold comfort. It is impossible to measure the impact of what did not happen, but there is no uncertainty about what did happen. The impending ascension of the youngest elected President, with an impossibly glamorous wife (thirty-one years old!) and two very young children, was testament to the country’s confidence in its future. It was of a piece with a broader sense that the country was living a life that had made the years of privation and sacrifice worth it. After a decade-long Depression and nearly four years of wartime sacrifice, America had become for most a land of plenty, where security and abundance were the natural order of things. There were twenty-eight million more Americans than there had been a decade earlier, and two-thirds of that growth had come in the suburbs, where for $65 down and $65 a month a family could own a patch of the American dream—and, thanks to tens of thousands of miles of federally funded highways, a man could go from home to work and back again in the privacy of his own automobile. And when he came home to his family, there were more and more possessions for him and his family to enjoy: 21-inch television sets, high-fidelity record players, home-movie cameras, barbecue grills, refrigerator-freezers, washer-dryers, dishwashers. Regular working-class, middle-class Americans could afford these things; the United States was the world’s one clear economic superpower; the economy was growing year by year, inflation was nonexistent, and the bank accounts and Christmas Club savings just kept growing, as steadily, as assuredly, as sunrises in the East. Another once-unattainable goal for most Americans—a college education—had now become real for millions of men who’d been pressed into military service: The GI Bill
of Rights put eight million of them on college campuses in the years after World War II.

  But it was more than just material prosperity. America in 1960 was a country where restraint and boundaries were the natural conditions in all arenas. People married younger and stayed married; even with those added twenty-eight million, there were fewer divorces in 1960 than there had been a decade earlier. People did not have children unless they were married—only 2.5 percent of children were born out of wedlock, though the number in black households was disturbingly high—some 20 percent. People did not have sex unless they were married, at least as far as the entertainment and news they read and heard and watched were concerned. Violent crime was lower than it had been twenty years earlier, despite the hand-wringing over juvenile delinquency. And while politicians pointed with alarm at the violence in comic books and on television, the fact is that when people were killed, they died bloodlessly; carnage, like graphic sex, was confined to the pages of pulp magazines sold furtively in stores at the edge of respectability. And America was not a country whose leaders were killed in broad daylight—it had not happened since William McKinley was shot at the very beginning of the twentieth century—much less blown up in so violent a manner. No wonder one prominent commentator of his time wrote that in the days and weeks after the murder, America “was on the verge of a national nervous breakdown.”