Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  On the other hand, the widely circulated story that Hoover dressed as a woman stems from one thoroughly unconfirmed rumor. Some who knew Hoover well suggest that the relationship between the two was simply a very close friendship, with no sexual overtones.

  BILLY GRAHAM: The visit by Reverend Billy Graham to President Johnson on September 15, and the message he conveyed to the President from Nixon, occurred just as described (see Woods’s LBJ—Architect of American Power and Dallek’s Flawed Giant).

  NEW YORK CITY SCHOOL STRIKE: Not one but a series of school strikes shut down the New York City public schools in the fall of 1968. For a detailed account of the strikes, in a book essentially highly critical of John Lindsay, see Vincent Cannato’s The Ungovernable City.

  THE FALL TELEVISION CAMPAIGN: Some of the ads described in this section were aired during the primaries, but were for obvious reasons never seen nationally. A few of them are available on YouTube, including the ads broadcast during the Nebraska primary, in which Kennedy (and, on occasion, his mother) spoke to an audience of Midwestern clubwomen. Richard Nixon’s TV campaign, orchestrated by Roger Ailes, was the subject of The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss, which became a number one best seller. The ads described in this book hew closely to the style of the ads used by the Nixon campaign.

  CLARK CLIFFORD: In his memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford describes with great candor his steadily growing conviction that the war in Vietnam had to be ended rapidly and thoroughly, and his growing conviction that Lyndon Johnson preferred Richard Nixon to Hubert Humphrey, and cites LBJ saying that on Vietnam, “Nixon is closer to me than Hubert.” Clifford notes that Charley Murphy, the liaison to the Humphrey campaign, told him that “if Humphrey did not stand firm on Vietnam a Nixon victory would be better for the country.” With Robert Kennedy as the nominee, that sentiment would have been multiplied geometrically. On a visit to Washington for a funeral, Averell Harriman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the Paris peace talks, told Clifford that if he concluded Johnson was trying to assist Nixon’s election chances, he would resign.

  In late October, President Johnson held a conference call with the three major Presidential candidates—Humphrey, Nixon, and George Wallace—to reveal plans for a total halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

  Clifford also writes about the discovery that the Nixon campaign, through Anna Chennault, was covertly encouraging the South Vietnamese government to reject the Johnson administration’s proposals to enable the National Liberation front (the Vietcong) and the South Vietnamese government to join the Paris peace talks. He discusses this as well in his oral history, available online from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. There are several explanations for the failure to make this information public: it was obtained through surreptitious wiretaps on Anna Chenault; it would have created a crisis on the eve of a Presidential election. For his part, Clifford argued at the time, and in his memoirs, that the information should have been made public.

  THE ELECTION: In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won the popular vote over Hubert Humphrey by a margin of one half of 1 percent. While Nixon won 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191—with Wallace winning the remaining 46—the electoral vote contest was far closer than the totals suggest. Nixon won Illinois by a margin of less than 3 percent. He won New Jersey by 2.3 percent. He won Ohio by 2.28 percent. He won California by a shade over 3 percent. Humphrey’s closest big state margin was in Texas, which he won with a 2.27 percent margin.

  Given these actual results, it is hardly a major leap of faith to imagine how Robert Kennedy could have beaten Richard Nixon in November. Assume that New Jersey remained in Nixon’s column, and assume that the hostility of Johnson, Connally, and company would have cost Kennedy Texas. If we also assume that Kennedy would have had a greater appeal to Wallace voters than Humphrey, that appeal by itself would have made a major difference in major states. For example, if Kennedy had managed to win one in five Wallace voters in Ohio, that would have been enough for him to win the state, even if he did not win a single additional vote. It is reasonable to believe that in states like Ohio, Illinois, and especially California, minority turnout would have been significantly higher, with almost all of those additional votes winding up in Kennedy’s column.

  THE WAR ENDS: In his campaign, Kennedy had sent clear signals that he was not prepared simply to walk away from Vietnam; as he said in his San Francisco debate with McCarthy, “We can’t just run up the white flag.” It is pure conjecture to imagine a back channel from Kennedy to Hanoi through Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin. On the other hand, Robert Kennedy was very much given to establishing back channels to Moscow; he had done it while Attorney General, most notably with Georgi Bolshakov, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. Thomas’s biography Robert Kennedy has full details on these dealings.

  Daniel Ellsberg was in frequent contact with members of Robert Kennedy’s Senate staff. And in breaking with President Johnson on the Vietnam War, Kennedy was careful to point a finger of responsibility at himself, and did so throughout his Presidential campaign. For instance, just after announcing his candidacy, he said at Kansas State University:

  “I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path . . . I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, before history and before my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”

  Ieng Sary was one of the highest-ranking leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose leaders declared 1975 “Year Zero” when they took power and commenced a campaign to eliminate every trace of “bourgeois” influence—a campaign that may have taken as many as two million lives.

  Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H was released in 1970, as the Vietnam War was in its sixth year of full-fledged combat, and went on to earn more than $80 million at the box office. The TV spin-off, starring Alan Alda, ran on CBS for more than a decade; its finale, broadcast in February 1983, was watched by more than a hundred million people.

  Robert Kennedy’s comment about his “influence over the federal prison system” was made to me, in a conversation in his Senate office.

  CHAPPAQUIDDICK: Secret Service protection extended to the families of Presidents, and the members of the Kennedy clan were in frequent attendance at the Edgartown Yacht Club regatta.

  CHINA: Ted Sorenson relates David Ben-Gurion’s comments about a possible Robert Kennedy visit to China in his book The Kennedy Legacy. Richard Nixon’s essay “Asia After Vietnam” was published in Foreign Affairs magazine in October 1967, providing what in retrospect appeared to be a hint that he intended to reach out to the Communist nation he had spent a political lifetime opposing.

  ROBERT KENNEDY’S CONTRADICTIONS: The public policy positions described in this section can be found in detail in his speeches and statements, particularly those from his years in the Senate, when his legislative assistants, Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman, helped turn RFK’s instincts into specific programs, such as the Community Development Corporation and the Police Corps. Kennedy once described Che Guevara as “a revolutionary hero,” according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times. And, according to Evan Thomas’s biography, he told guests at a Georgetown dinner party that if he had it to do over again, he’d be “a paratrooper.”

  PAUL CORBIN: The relationship between Corbin and Robert Kennedy, which puzzled (and disturbed) many in Kennedy’s circle, is sketched out in Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy. It is described most fully in Craig Shirley’s book on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, Rendezvous with Destiny. In an oral history at the JFK Library, Corbin tells the story of his participation in John Kennedy’s Wisconsin primary campaign in 1960, where he met Robert Kennedy. It was Corbin’s (apparently) self-propelled efforts to get Kennedy nominated for Vice President in 1964 that triggered the blowup between Kennedy and President Johnson described in many books. Evan Thomas recounts his plan t
o disguise Kennedy supporters as freakishly dressed backers of Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 campaign.

  Corbin’s last appearance on the public stage—and the reason why he appears at such length in a book about Reagan’s 1980 campaign—was in 1983, when a book by journalist Laurence Barrett, Gambling with History, disclosed that a briefing book prepared for use by President Carter in his debate with Reagan somehow found its way into the hands of the Reagan campaign. A Congressional investigation chaired by Michigan’s Donald Albosta laid out an intriguing, though not conclusive, trail that linked Corbin, former Wisconsin governor Pat Lucey (who wound up in 1980 as independent candidate John Anderson’s running mate), and a onetime Lucey aide who was working in the scheduling department of President Carter’s White House. Investigations revealed that Corbin had visited Reagan headquarters on several occasions in 1980, had met with top campaign aides William Casey and James Baker, and had received a check for $1,500.

  In his book, Shirley writes: “At the height of the Albosta investigation, Baker received a call from Congressman Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.). Cheney told Baker that a member of his staff who had long known Corbin, Tim Wyngaard, confided that Corbin had privately acknowledged orchestrating the theft of the Carter briefing books and giving them to Casey. Wyngaard, the executive director of the House Republican Policy Committee, confirmed to Albosta committee investigators and to the New York Times that Corbin had claimed credit for lifting the briefing books.”

  Baker himself, who had been handed the briefing book by Bill Casey, was cleared of any wrongdoing by the investigation. However, in his 2006 memoir, Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!, he notes: “I wasn’t responsible for obtaining the briefing book, and I told the truth. But should I have asked Casey where he got the book? Should I have refused to pass the material on to those preparing Reagan? These are legitimate questions. In hindsight, my answer to both questions is yes.”

  The character Kevin McKiernan is fictional.

  For a radically different, far more ambitious view of what would have happened had Robert Kennedy lived, see A Disturbance of Fate, a nearly seven-hundred-page book by Mitchell Freedman published in 2003 by Seven Locks Press. It deals with every Cabinet post, every White House staff position, every domestic and foreign issue, and twenty-plus years of alternate American history following Robert Kennedy’s election in 1968.

  Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California, October 6, 1976, 7:00 p.m.

  THE POLITICAL TERRAIN: The events in this section that lead up to the second debate are given a full account in Jules Witcover’s Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976, and a more interpretive account in Theodore H. White’s valedictory America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980.

  The exchange between Malcolm MacDougall and Bob Teeter about the importance of the Catholic vote—to Ford and Carter—is discussed in MacDougall’s book on the campaign, We Almost Made It.

  “NO SOVIET DOMINATION . . .”: According to Witcover’s Marathon, Ford “was convinced he’d get questions on the Helsinki Agreement and its relationship to Eastern Europe and Soviet domination . . .” It was one of those issues Reagan had used throughout the primary campaign to criticize “Dr. Kissinger and Mr. Ford.” Stu Spencer told Witcover that, after hearing Ford’s first answer on Soviet domination, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft “turned white.” In the wake of the debate, President Ford called Aloysisus Mazeski, President of the Polish-American Federation, to apologize.

  Doug Bailey’s observation about what a failure to correct Ford’s answer might have done is a reworking of his view of what that failure did in fact do: that it cost the campaign a week of lost momentum just at the point when the gap between Ford and Carter had been closing rapidly. Ford pollster Bob Teeter told Witcover: “His surveys showed the loss was not in any segment of the electorate so much as in momentum and time. The controversy used up valuable campaign days when there were all too few left, and the campaign leveled off when a steady climb had to be sustained.”

  JIMMY CARTER’S TROUBLES: Jimmy Carter described the political cost of campaigning with traditional Democrats, and the damage it inflicted on his image, in a post-election interview with Jules Witcover for Marathon. The critical comments by more traditional Democrats are also found there.

  THE ELECTION RESULTS: It’s a recurring theme in American political analysis that once a Presidential election ends, the results are often seen as part of a sweeping historical pattern, rather than as a result that, in many cases, could just as easily have had a different outcome. The 1976 election is a classic example.

  The Carter-Mondale ticket won a popular plurality of slightly less than 1.7 million votes out of about 81.5 million votes cast and beat the Ford- Dole ticket by a 50-48 percent margin. In the Electoral College, Carter won 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. But a look at the key competitive states shows that Carter’s real margin was almost infinitesimal.

  In Ohio, Carter won by 11,100 votes out of more than four million cast—a margin of less than three-tenths of 1 percent. Put another way, if 6,000 Ohio voters had decided to switch from Ford to Carter because of Ford’s clumsy “Soviet domination” answer, that by itself would have switched Ohio’s 25 electoral votes.

  The same story is true in several other states. Mississippi went for Carter by a margin of 15,000 votes, a spread of less than 2 percent. Wisconsin, with its considerable population of Poles and other Eastern Europeans, broke for Carter by a 1.7 percent margin. Hawaii wound up in Carter’s column with a 7,000-vote plurality. Less than three percentage points separated Carter from Ford in Pennsylvania. Even New York State gave Carter a relatively narrow four-point victory.

  Given the closeness of this race, it is hardly a reach to suggest that the impact of Ford’s “walkabout” on the Soviet domination question—the weeklong confusion, the loss of momentum, the self-inflicted wound in an area where an incumbent President is presumed to be strong—was more than enough to cost Gerald Ford the White House.

  FORD’S SECOND TERM: For the record, Henry Kissinger did not seek to hold two Cabinet positions simultaneously while serving Presidents Nixon and Ford. He did serve both as Secretary of State and as National Security Advisor until Ford put Scowcroft in the latter position. Volumes (literally) have been written by and about Kissinger. For an overall view of Kissinger’s behavior, character, competence, and turf protection, drawn almost exclusively from the public record, see Richard Reeves’s book President Nixon.

  THE SHAH, THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, AND THE MIDDLE EAST: For a shorthand look at the background to the Shah, Iran in the late 1970s, and his complicated relationship with the United States, see (to mention a few from a library full of references) a Washington Post obituary when the Shah died, published on July 28, 1980, and another Post piece, this one by Scott Armstrong, published on October 26, 1980. For a critical look at how the Carter administration handled the upheaval, see Don Oberdorfer’s Post piece of September 7, 1980, and Betty Glad’s book-length look at Carter’s foreign policy, An Outsider in the White House.

  For a detailed examination of how Saudi Arabia undercut the Shah’s efforts to keep oil prices high at the end of the Ford administration, see Andrew Scott Cooper’s “Showdown at Doha—The Secret Oil Deal That Helped Sink the Shah of Iran,” published in Middle East Journal, August 2008. It includes an account of the rifts within the Ford administration between Kissinger, on the one hand, and Rumsfeld and Simon on the other.

  Brent Scowcroft’s observation that “Carter had Vietnam angst,” and that a Ford administration would have worked to help nip the Iran insurgency in the bud, comes from an interview I conducted with him in Washington on March 24, 2010.

  The rise of Islamic fundamentalism is the subject of Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. One of its major subjects is Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became the operational head of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. He was arrested in the wake of the 1981 assassinati
on of Egyptian President Sadat, and spent three years in prison, undergoing treatment that, Wright’s book suggests, turned him into even more of a militant. While it’s beyond the scope of this book, it’s fascinating to speculate whether the lack of a deal between Egypt and Israel would have prevented the assassination of Sadat. Without the years of torture he underwent, would al-Zawahiri’s radicalism have turned quite so remorseless and violent?

  FORD’S “DOOMED” SECOND TERM: Doug Bailey’s observations about Ford’s lack of “vision” come from an interview I conducted with him in Washington on June 29, 2010.

  John Hersey spent a week with President Ford in 1975 for the New York Times Magazine. His essay is included in his book Aspects of the Presidency, published in 1980.

  The growth of inflation as the dominant economic fact of American life in the late 1970s is recounted in chapter five of Theodore H. White’s book America in Search of Itself. For another account, see The Seventies by Bruce J. Schulman.

  The line in Ford’s imagined 1977 Inaugural (“‘American’ ends in I-CAN”) was delivered by Michigan Congressman Guy VanderJagt during his keynote address at the 1980 Republican Convention.