Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  “Bill! You’re never going to believe what just happened!” yelled Deputy Chief of Staff Hillary Rodham.

  “Try me,” said Governor Bill Clinton.

  Afterword

  HOW REALITY SHAPES SPECULATION

  The alternate histories in this book represent events that might have happened. They all begin with events that almost did happen, but in other hands, these triggering episodes could well have led to drastically different results. Maybe Richard Pavlick’s jerry-rigged bomb would have failed to detonate, or maybe Soviet Premier Khrushchev would have been sufficiently wary of Lyndon Johnson’s approach to foreign policy to have abandoned any idea of placing nuclear weapons in Cuba. Perhaps Steve Smith would not have saved Robert Kennedy that night in June; perhaps either Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon would have bested him in their contests. Maybe Gerald Ford would have lost to Jimmy Carter even if he had given a sharper answer on the question of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Maybe Gary Hart’s impulse toward self-immolation, on display when he actually did run in 1984 and—famously—in 1988, would have undermined a 1980 campaign.

  My goal here has been plausibility. Many of the words, thoughts, and deeds described here are taken from the real-life record. Many of the words spoken by the principals were actually spoken by them, in different settings, of course. The political terrain on which these stories played tracks as closely as possible to reality; and where I have turned an “almost happened” event into reality, I’ve tried to shape an altered political atmosphere based on history. For instance, if we want to imagine the political impact of Robert Kennedy surviving an attempt on his life, we don’t need to rely on our imagination alone; we can see what happened after Ronald Reagan narrowly survived the attempt on his life in March of 1981.

  What follows is in no sense a “bibliography,” since the books that track the last half century of American politics number in the tens of thousands. It’s simply my effort at saying that if you think what I’ve written is too weird for you to suspend disbelief, take a look at where these speculations came from.

  You may be surprised. I know I was.

  Palm Beach, Florida, December 11, 1960, 9:45 a.m.

  PAVLICK’S ATTACK: Richard Pavlick’s attempt on the life of John Kennedy is one of the most forgotten events of our time. The estimable historian Richard Dallek, who wrote a book on JFK titled An Unfinished Life, had no knowledge of the event until a newspaper reporter called him about it back in 2003.

  That reporter, Robin Erb of the Toledo Blade, provided the most complete account of the incident in a November 21, 2003, article. It is described in a brief account by U.E. Baughman in his memoir Secret Service Chief.

  “The closeness of the call was appalling,” Mr. Baughman wrote. “Hardly anybody realized just how near we came one bright December morning to losing our President-elect to a madman.”

  It is also mentioned in passing in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days.

  LYNDON JOHNSON’S 1960 MOOD : In his oral history on file at the LBJ Library, Johnson’s former press secretary George Reedy says of LBJ in 1960: “He’d reached the stage where he wanted to go into some sort of a skidding reverse. He at times talked about it. He talked about it quite often, really . . . dumping politics altogether, usually in very short monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words. I think that he was more or less dissatisfied with his whole life. Very frankly, that’s where he began expressing dissatisfaction with his family, with his friends, with almost everything. He was on the verge of a second childhood syndrome.” Reedy is only one of the many Johnson aides who have described his behavior on the Vice Presidential campaign trial, complete with drinking bouts and abuse of the staff.

  All of the words spoken by Johnson, and the incidents described in this first section, come from biographies, including Randall Woods’s LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. Robert Caro’s three volumes only take us up to his work as Majority Leader, but in a coda Caro describes the rebuff suffered by Johnson when he sought to retain control of the Democratic caucus.

  His comment on Clare Boothe Luce—“I’m a gamblin’ man . . .”—was actually spoken to Luce, on the night of the 1961 Inaugural, according to Randall Woods’s book.

  THE AFTERMATH: Speaker Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and other Congressional leaders regularly met in Rayburn’s “Board of Education,” the room described in many books and articles about Rayburn, including Sam Rayburn—A Biography by Alfred Steinberg. The design and look of the room—H-128—comes from a monograph prepared by the architect of the Capitol. And Johnson did keep a bottle of Cutty Sark in the hideaway.

  Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, along with Republican national chair Thruston Morton, senator from Kentucky, were among those most convinced that Richard Daley’s Chicago machine had stolen the electoral votes of Illinois, as well as the votes from Texas. Earl Mazo, the New York Herald Tribune’s national political correspondent, came away from his reporting convinced that fraud determined the outcome in both states. Richard Nixon publicly accepted the outcome of the 1960 election, and waved off efforts by Republicans to challenge the outcome. In the wake of the trauma of a Kennedy assassination, the impulse toward national unity and the avoidance of a Constitutional crisis would have been immensely greater.

  THE HUMPHREY CHOICE, THE ELECTORAL FIX, AND JOHNSON’S EARLY STEPS: Johnson’s relationship with Humphrey is described in detail in Caro and Woods, and other biographies of LBJ, and the events in this alternate history closely follow reality. Johnson was well aware of the suspicion in which he was held by liberals—they had staged a near revolt at the convention when JFK chose him—and Humphrey would have been the likeliest candidate to ease their fears. When President Johnson was weighing his choice for a running mate in 1964, Senator Richard Russell, whom Johnson described as a “father” figure, advised him that “you couldn’t make a better move” than Humphrey, according to a telephone conversation between the two men, found in Johnson’s White House tapes.

  Because the Electoral College was scheduled to convene on December 16, 1960, Kennedy was not yet the “President-elect” on December 11. I have dealt at book length with the dilemma of a winning Presidential candidate dying before the Electoral College meets (The People’s Choice, 1995), and, in this case, I am working on the (reasonable) assumption that in the less polarized world of 1960, there would be a rapid acceptance of a resolution.

  Johnson’s outreach—to liberals, Jews, and fellow Southerners—closely follows the steps he did in fact take after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, with a fair amount of the dialogue taken from transcripts of recorded telephone calls. In his call to Martin Luther King, Jr., the words he reminds King of are from a speech given by the civil rights leader at an early March on Washington in 1959. The line written by Ted Sorensen—“Though I cannot fill his shoes, I must occupy his desk”—comes from a draft Sorensen offered for Johnson’s speech to the joint session of Congress on November 25, 1963. LBJ did not use the line.

  The line that Dick Goodwin uses from T. E. Lawrence achieved wide circulation among young aides who worked on Capitol Hill in 1967—of whom I was one—and who found themselves working in one way or another for a peace candidate in 1968.

  THE MELANCHOLY: Camelot opened on Broadway on December 3, 1960. Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and Ferlin Husky’s “On the Wings of a Dove” were both among the top songs receiving radio airplay at that time. The Kingston’ Trio’s “New Frontier” was released in the spring of 1961.

  Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, a well-known Irish lament of the horrors inflicted on a soldier, was the title of a memoir of JFK by Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, published in 1972.

  The James Bond boom was triggered by an interview President Kennedy gave to Life magazine, published on March 17, 1961, in which JFK revealed that From Russia with Love was one of his five favorite books. In the alternate history, there would have been no such interview (it’s also an open question whether Kennedy’s enthu
siasm for James Bond inspired his enthusiasm for the Green Berets and Special Forces, and whether that approach to unconventional warfare would have been embraced by a President Johnson in 1961).

  FULBRIGHT TO STATE: In an oral history interview, and in an interview with me, Harry McPherson notes Johnson’s close friendship with Fulbright, and his strong recommendation to Kennedy that he choose the Arkansas Democrat as his Secretary of State. It was Fulbright’s civil rights record that stayed JFK’s hand, and it would have been in keeping with Johnson’s political instincts to pair Fulbright’s nomination with the designation of the first black member of the Cabinet.

  RFK TAKES JACK’S SENATE SEAT: The antipathy between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson was by all accounts chemical, beginning when RFK served in the Senate as counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, then as counsel to the Democratic minority on the government operations committee, then as chief counsel to the Rackets Committee that investigated corruption in the Teamsters Union. It was fed by LBJ’s patronizing of Robert at his ranch on the Pedernales River, and flourished into full-fledged mutual contempt at the Democratic Convention in 1960, when LBJ was convinced Bobby had tried to get him off the ticket. The most complete account of this long-term mutual contempt is found in Jeff Shesol’s book titled—appropriately enough—Mutual Contempt. Even without much antipathy, the Kennedy family’s sense of filial responsibility would almost surely have put Robert in Jack’s Senate seat—in 1960, Ted Kennedy would have been twenty-eight, and thus constitutionally ineligible.

  JOHNSON’S SELF-APPRAISAL: According to those who worked with him, both in the Senate and the White House, Johnson was acutely aware of his weakness when it came to direct communication with the electorate. He was both fearful of the press and clueless about how to deal with it (according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, he offended some in the White House press corps in the first days as President when he said to them: “I’ll make big men out of you if you play ball”). Goodwin also recounts that, whether in the White House or even as he was writing his memoirs, he felt the press and the better educated—the “Harvards,” as he called them—would scorn him if he showed his character and personality “for real.” In his efforts to seem more “Presidential,” she concludes, he came off as pompous, stiff, insincere. Goodwin assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs, but, she reports, he would refuse to let her include any revealing, candid stories about his past, fearing they would appear undignified. The result, The Vantage Point, is a thoroughly unreadable, eye-glazing book.

  In this imagined TV interview, all of the words Johnson speaks are words he actually uttered at one point or another in his career, or in conversations recalled by aides and confidants.

  JOHNSON’S CIVIL RIGHTS STRATEGY: The words he spoke to Hubert Humphrey about the centrality of the right to vote come from Woods’s LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. His request to Whitney Young to “come to Washington and start ‘civil righting’ ” were spoken to NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins on January 6, 1964, in a phone call whose transcript can be found in Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, edited by Michael Beschloss. (In this regard, Johnson was following the path of his hero, FDR, who would often encourage his allies to start criticizing him, so that he could be seen to be moving in response to political pressure.) His understanding of the roots of Southern bigotry is a major theme of every Johnson biography. CBS’s Frank Stanton was in fact a confidant of LBJ during his White House years.

  The conversations with senators are a blend of my imagination and of conversations as recorded on White House tapes—for instance, his promise to “run right over” Senator Richard Russell, and Russell’s warning that it will cost him the South and the election (in fact, his civil rights stand cost him five Southern states in 1964, and helped turn the South Republican in Presidential elections from 1964 on, with the single exception of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign—the first time a Southerner was directly elected to the White House).

  His persistent flattery of Republican leader Dirksen is taken virtually verbatim from White House tapes, and is covered extensively in Woods’s book. He also told Robert Kennedy, still serving as Attorney General, that he saw the 1964 civil rights act as a memorial to JFK.

  The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham actually took place on September 15, 1963, during John Kennedy’s Presidency. LBJ’s speech to the Congress is imagined; the speech he did give to Congress, on March 15, 1965, drafted by Richard Goodwin, the “We Shall Overcome” speech, remains the most eloquent and powerful Presidential address of the twentieth century.

  JOHNSON’S FOREIGN POLICY: The judgments of Reedy and McPherson are taken directly from their own words, as are Johnson’s comments on the nature of Soviet aggression, and his conviction that the President ought to be given wide latitude in the conduct of foreign policy. Kennedy’s ingrained skepticism about the military, born in his days in the Pacific, is embedded in the letters he wrote home; and the campaign speech about America’s lack of omniscience or omnipotence is quoted verbatim. The account here of Johnson’s reluctance to intervene for France in Indochina in 1954 closely tracks reality.

  CUBA: The plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to depose Fidel Castro have been public matters for decades—see, for example, David Talbot’s book Brothers. While there is no direct reporting of Lyndon Johnson talking with Richard Bissell while seated on the toilet, he was in the habit of conducting such conversations with, among others, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, according to a source who worked in the White House at that time.

  For a detailed accounting of how the Bay of Pigs turned into a disaster, see—among countless sources—Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba, edited by Peter Kornbluth. The success of the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan leftist Jacob Arbenz gave the Agency unwarranted confidence that it could replicate this success in Cuba.

  The stormy meeting on the night of the White House Congressional reception took place on April 18, 1961, with President Kennedy confronting a frustrated group of the highest-ranking military officials.

  Had Robert Kennedy taken over JFK’s Massachusetts Senate seat, he would have done so as a relatively conventional Cold War thinker, whose anti-Communism was deeply rooted (see, for example, Evan Thomas’s account in his biography, Robert Kennedy, of his refusal to be treated by a “Communist” doctor when he fell ill on a trip to the Soviet Union with Justice William Douglas). The distance between Robert Kennedy’s outlook in 1961 and his outlook when he became a senator in 1965 is best measured in light-years.

  As for how a President Johnson would have regarded the Bay of Pigs failure, Norm Ornstein, who has been observing Washington for decades, said in an interview, “Clearly, he trusted generals and top military people way more than JFK did.”

  THE VIENNA SUMMIT: The setting, logistics, and substance of the Vienna Summit is drawn from Michael Beschloss’s book The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963. The advice given to LBJ from “Tommy” Thompson and Averell Harriman is the same advice the two gave to JFK before he sat down with Khrushchev in Vienna, as described by Beschloss.

  Johnson’s pungent advice to Khrushchev—“never shit a shitter”—was never said by LBJ to Khrushchev, since the two never met. That sentiment was uttered by Senator Joe Biden to a surprised Soviet official during a Congressional visit to Moscow, according to a fellow U.S. senator who was in the meeting.

  The Soviet Union’s greatest fear in the early 1960s was that the United States would seek to use its clear superiority in the nuclear weapons arena to launch a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union. When President Kennedy described the forces of the two superpowers as being “more or less in balance,” Khrushchev was pleased, because, Beschloss says, he knew that in fact the United States held clear superiority.

  On September 13, 1961, U.S. officials learned from a briefing by Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, that the Soviet Union’s nuclear force was something of a Potemkin village, that it had only ten to twenty-five missiles on launchers capable of hitting the United States. And on October 21, the U.S. in effect made that fact public knowledge, in a speech to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia, by Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, in which he said that the United States “has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part” and possessed “a second strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first.” The speech was widely—and correctly—interpreted as a declaration of superiority by the U.S. in the nuclear weapons arena, although its purpose appears to have been an effort to damp down war fears in the U.S.—fears fed by John Kennedy’s charge in his Presidential campaign that America suffered from a “missile gap.”

  KHRUSHCHEV AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: Beschloss’s book has an extensive account of the Soviet leader’s decision to put offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. Khrushchev described his plans for Cuba by saying “it is time to put a hedgehog in Uncle Sam’s pants.” Because President Kennedy used a taping system during many of the most critical meetings of “ExComm,” the words and thoughts of many of the participants can be seen in a 1997 book by Philip D. Zelikow with Ernest R. May, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, since President Kennedy did not tape every meeting or every White House conversation, this cannot be seen as a complete picture of the deliberations.