If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (4 page)

And what would a President Nixon have done if he had been confronted with Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba? It had taken every ounce of presidential insistence to keep Kennedy’s advisors—military
and
civilian—from launching an air strike with God knows what consequences. With a Nixon in the White House . . . ? Incredible that Kennedy’s presidency, and the fate of the world, might have hinged on a couple of telephone calls. Then again, it might also have hinged on how his wife had been feeling on a Sunday morning almost three years ago . . .

SHE CAME TO THE DOOR TO SEE HIM OFF . . .

It was Sunday morning, December 11, 1960, and he was at the family’s oceanfront Palm Beach home on Ocean Avenue. He was working on his tan and—more important—his inaugural address, after surviving one of the closest elections in American history. Now he was getting ready to head to St. Edward Church, a gesture politically necessary even for a Catholic as secular as he was. He headed for the front door, where the Secret Service would be waiting to drive him the short distance.

Parked just down Ocean Avenue was a 1950 Buick in which Richard Pavlick, a seventy-three-year-old retired postal worker, sat behind the wheel, holding a switch wired to seven sticks of dynamite.

He had been stalking Kennedy across the country, driven by hatred of the Catholic Church and the conviction that Joe Kennedy
had stolen the presidency for his son. He’d been sending threatening postcards back to his hometown of Belmont, New Hampshire, promising that they’d soon be hearing from him “in a big way.” Now, to save the country from papist tyranny, he was preparing to ram his car into the back of Kennedy’s automobile and detonate his explosives.

And the Secret Service was, inexplicably, completely indifferent to his presence. Pavlick had a clear, unimpeded path to Kennedy’s car—and, in the words of a shaken Secret Service chief, “enough dynamite to level a mountain.”

And then, as Kennedy was leaving, Jacqueline Kennedy came to the door with their three-year-old daughter, Caroline, to see him off.

It was the most casual, insignificant of gestures. On another morning she might have stayed in bed; it was, after all, little less than a month since the difficult birth of John Kennedy Jr. She might have been reading the Sunday papers or been chatting on the phone with a friend or relative.

But she came to the door. And Richard Pavlick . . . did nothing. He was a man of firm if twisted conviction—he spent endless hours protesting the mishandling of the American flags that flew around his hometown—and the idea of killing a man, even a Kennedy, in front of his wife and small child was simply unthinkable. He would wait for another time, perhaps next Sunday. He was arrested four days later when a postmaster from Belmont alerted Florida authorities to the threats he’d been mailing back home. The story barely merited more than a brief mention in the press.

And if Jackie had not come to the door? We were, the Secret Service chief said to his shaken staff, “seconds away” from the first-ever murder of a president-elect—and a full-fledged constitutional
crisis. John Kennedy in fact was
not yet
the president-elect, not officially. That designation wouldn’t apply until after 270 electors had cast their ballots for him at the fifty state capitols a week from Tuesday. If Kennedy had died, what were his electors supposed to do? What were they allowed to do? What if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives? What if Southern congressmen voted for Senator Harry Byrd or Senator Richard Russell and said they’d tie the system up in knots unless Johnson—or Hubert Humphrey or whomever the Democratic insiders chose—agreed to back off civil rights?

And suppose the country had wound up with Lyndon Johnson in the White House? He’d seen Johnson during the missile crisis—seen him reflexively follow the lead of the military men and the more hawkish of his advisors. If there was one thing Kennedy’s years in the White House had reaffirmed, it was his instinct to put himself in the other fellow’s shoes; back during those thirteen days, he was always looking to give Khrushchev a path out of the crisis, always looking as well to avoid his biggest fear: miscalculation. For Johnson, everything was personal; the fights were about his need to dominate, his need to avoid humiliation, his need to crush the spirit of the other guy. If Johnson had been president then . . .

Damn good thing Jackie came to the door . . .

•   •   •

He went back to the master bedroom and began to dress, beginning with the back brace and the elastic bandage that he wound around his waist and thighs. It was awkward, but it was better than the intense, chronic pain that would otherwise strike him throughout the long day of speeches, rallies, and motorcades. After he’d put on the crisp white shirt with the short straight collar, the red tie, the dark
blue Paul Winston two-button suit, he looked down across the street, where he’d be speaking in a few moments.

Just this morning, right after he’d told Jackie, “We’re heading to nut country,” he’d added, “but if someone wants to shoot me with a rifle through an open window, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so we might as well not worry about it.” He’d said almost exactly the same thing to Kenny O’Donnell as he pointed out the window to the stage where the labor rally would take place.

“Look at that platform. With all those buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”

•   •   •

He went downstairs and walked across the street through a light drizzle to a labor rally where 5,000 supporters had gathered in the early morning damp. When some in the crowd began yelling for Jackie, he offered a mock apology.

“Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but of course she looks better than we do when she does it.”

He was grateful for her willingness to make this trip, especially just a few months after the death of their infant son, Patrick Bouvier. He was grateful to her for other reasons as well: had his compulsive, sometimes reckless behavior driven her from the marriage, his political career would have stalled if not ended. Maybe it was because her own mother had ended her marriage because of the philandering of her father; maybe Jackie had looked at her father, and Jack’s father, and decided that it was just the way men are. What was clear was that, without her forbearance, he would never have become president.

Then, after a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, they had driven to the Fort Worth Airport for the ten-minute flight to Dallas. He climbed up the stairs to Air Force One,
angling slightly to ease the pain of his back. There’d be no time to rest on the short flight to Dallas, but there would be time for a quick, blunt chat with Governor Connally. As soon as the plane took off, he summoned the Governor into his cabin, and after a three-minute conversation the Governor agreed to put Senator Yarborough at the head table for the Austin fund-raiser and invite him to the post-dinner reception at the governor’s mansion. Sure, it would just paper over their blood feud, but at least the headlines on Saturday wouldn’t trumpet that feud.

OF COURSE HE WAS GOING TO DALLAS

There was uneasiness about visiting the city from some of his staff and political allies. It was ground zero for the far right in Texas; the John Birch Society, whose founder Robert Welch had gained fame (or infamy) by branding President Eisenhower “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” had a highly visible presence, and a celebrity supporter in the form of retired major general Edwin Walker. (A few months ago, some unknown assailant had taken a shot at Walker through the window of his home with a high-powered rifle; the shooter, whoever he was, had escaped, and the trail had long grown cold.) On a visit to Dallas on October 23, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been jostled and spat on by a crowd of demonstrators.

But Dallas was the second-biggest city in the state, home to some of the most powerful corporate and business interests anywhere in the region. If he had any hopes of winning Texas in ’64, he needed the support, not just from the liberals and the labor folks in the state, but from Governor John Connally’s conservative wing as well.

So, yes, he was going to Dallas, but that didn’t mean the visit would be free of the bitter intraparty split. Hell, even the location for the President’s luncheon speech was a source of endless contention.

For Connally and his allies, the only place for the luncheon was the Dallas Trade Mart, a five-year-old, $12.6 million, 980,000-square-foot architectural gem located on North Stemmons Freeway just north of the city’s downtown center, in the Dallas Market Center. It was a magnet for Dallas’ establishment—at least for those not convinced that John Kennedy was a dangerous leftist eager to sell America out to the Russians.

Kennedy’s own team preferred another site: the Women’s Building, located on the site of the state fairgrounds, southwest of the downtown center. Because it could hold 4,000 people—twice the capacity of the Trade Mart—it could easily accommodate the Kennedy supporters from the liberal-labor-minority wing of the Texas Democratic Party. That was precisely what Governor Connally and his allies in the State Democratic Party did not want. On November 18, Kennedy’s top political aide, Kenny O’Donnell, called advance man Jerry Bruno and told him, “We’re going to let Dallas go. We’re going to let Connally have the Trade Mart site.”

So the Trade Mart was selected as the luncheon site; invitations went out on behalf of the Dallas Citizens Council, the very embodiment of the conservative white establishment.

And there was one more consequence of that site selection. Had the Women’s Building been chosen, the route from Love Field to the site would have taken the motorcade east through downtown Dallas—on a more southerly route hundreds of feet farther away from the Texas School Book Depository on the corner of Houston and Elm Streets. And because the President always sat in the
right rear of the presidential limousine, anyone looking at the motorcade—say, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository—would have found Mrs. Kennedy between him and the President.

•   •   •

Just after 11:00 a.m. central standard time, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter for the
Dallas Times Herald
walked to a fence at Dallas’ Love Field and picked up a telephone linked by an open line to the paper’s downtown office. Normally, Jim Lehrer covered the “federal beat”—the FBI, IRS, courts, that sort of thing—but with the President coming to Dallas, and with the tight deadlines of an afternoon paper, all hands were deployed for the visit. Lehrer was to follow the motorcade through downtown to the Trade Mart, cover Kennedy’s speech, and follow the motorcade back to Love Field, where Air Force One would depart for Austin and the big fund-raising dinner.

On the other end of the phone was Stan Weinberg, the rewrite man who would turn Lehrer’s observations and notes into the finished story.

“Look,” Weinberg said, “I’m going to be writing this story under a lot of pressure later. Do they have the bubble top on the President’s car?” The rain that had been falling all morning in the Dallas‒Fort Worth area was on the minds of more than just the President.

“Well, I don’t know,” Lehrer replied. “I can’t see his car. Let me go look and see.”

He walked down the ramp where the President’s limo, a highly modified deep-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental SS-100-X, was parked, and where Forrest Sorrels, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Dallas bureau, was standing. The bubble top was still on the car.

Lehrer and Sorrels were familiar to each other, so the reporter
approached the agent, saying: “Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top’s going to be on or not.”

“Don’t know,” said Sorrels, and called out to a subordinate. “Why don’t you check downtown, see if it’s still raining.”

It was a matter of the purest chance. On another day, a small, insignificant shift in pressure of wind would have moved the bad weather out, and sunshine would have broken out over Dallas. “Take off the bubble top,” Sorrels would have told his men, and the President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally would have been driving through downtown Dallas at high noon in an open car, waving to the cheering crowds that lined the streets, crowds pressing in, slowing the motorcade down, the open convertible giving everyone in the crowd—anyone looking out a building window—a clear, unobstructed view.

But on this day the weather did
not
change. On
this
day the answer that came from downtown was: “Still raining here, and no sign of clearing. Better leave it on.”

“All right,” said the chief. “It stays on.”

And Jim Lehrer walked back up the ramp, went over to the fence, picked up the open line, and told Stan Weinberg what he’d learned.

“The bubble top’s staying on.”

No one—not Weinberg, not Lehrer, not Sorrels, not one of them—gave it a second thought . . . for another hour and eight minutes.

T
hey were in downtown Dallas now, and the thin crowds that had clustered along the motorcade route in the industrial suburban streets were gone; in their place were big crowds cheering as the midnight-blue Lincoln drove by. The steady, light rain hadn’t kept them away, and while the umbrellas blocked the view of those behind the first rows of spectators, the enthusiasm of the crowds was unmistakable. This was why the motorcade was driving through downtown Dallas, after all: it would have been much quicker to take Lemmon Avenue to the North Dallas Tollway to Stemmons Freeway; but, as the Secret Service had come to understand with the Kennedy White House, “politics trumps protection.” In 1964, Governor Connally would be running for reelection on the same ticket as Kennedy; it was crucial that he saw the President as an asset, not a liability, and the bigger the crowds, the louder the cheering, the more likely that outcome was, and the more likely that the
wealthy Texas Democrats would start opening their wallets for the President’s reelection campaign.

The President and Governor Connally were waving to the crowds; Jacqueline was clutching a dozen red roses she had been given at Love Field. The bouquet was visible even through the mist and the bubble-top canopy.

The motorcade proceeded down Houston Street through the canyon formed by the office buildings that lined the route. From the windows, people were waving and cheering (though when they passed the headquarters of H. L. Hunt, the billionaire who had helped pay for the full-page ad in the morning paper, Hunt and his subordinates watched in silence, then turned their backs on the procession). At street level, the crowds pushed against the police barricades, straining for a glimpse of the First Couple, compressing the route and forcing the motorcade to slow and slow again. As it reached the corner of Lamar and Main Streets, the procession was traveling at barely five miles an hour. In a moment they would pass under a triple overpass, onto Stemmons Freeway, and right to the Trade Center . . . and some relief from the increasingly uncomfortable heat of the Lincoln’s interior. When the bubble top was on, there was simply no way to avoid the disagreeable interior climate. That climate may have been the cause of Mrs. Kennedy’s discomfort, but for John Kennedy the discomfort was of a political nature. He knew what it meant when he could interact with the crowds face-to-face; he’d seen it in West Virginia in May of 1960; seen it in Paris, where a million turned out in 1961; seen it early this fall on the swing through eleven Western states. “Kennedy weather,” Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell called it; when the sun was bright and the skies were blue, the cheers seemed louder, the crowds more frenzied.

Just not our day,
he thought, and then the Governor’s wife,
Nellie, pointed out the window, and said, “Well, Mr. President, rain and all, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you . . .”

And then there was a loud crack, and hundreds of pieces of plexiglass exploded into the air; and the President grabbed the left side of his chest, slumped toward his wife, and shouted, “My God, I’m hit!”

•   •   •

Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent detailed to the President on the Dallas leg of the Texas trip, was sitting in the right front seat. As soon as the bubble top shattered, he knew what had happened.

“I can’t honestly say what I might have thought or done if there’d been only the sound to go by,” Kellerman said many weeks later. “You don’t want to be in a position of overreacting to a firecracker, or the backfire of a car, or the snapping of a tree branch. It might have taken a few seconds, or even a second shot, God help me, to make it clear what was going on. But as soon as the plexiglass exploded all around us, there was no doubt that someone was shooting at the President.”

His immediate instinct was to throw himself over the right front seat of the Lincoln and cover Kennedy with his body. But he couldn’t. The center partition of the SS-100, and the jump seats on which Governor and Nellie Connally were sitting, effectively blocked him from the President.

What he did do was to yell to the driver, Agent William Greer, “Let’s get out of here! We’ve been hit! To the hospital, to the hospital!” while radioing the same urgent directive to the lead car. The Lincoln sharply accelerated, following close behind the lead car, an unmarked white Ford driven by Dallas police chief Jesse Curry, and carrying Dallas County sheriff Bill Decker and Dallas Secret
Service chief Forrest Sorrels. By the time a second shot was fired, the Lincoln, powered by a hand-built 350-horsepower, 450-cubic-inch engine, was moving at close to forty miles an hour, hundreds of feet away from where the first shot had struck the bubble top; that second shot struck the right rear of the Lincoln just above the rear wheel housing.

It took the Lincoln, now moving at eighty miles an hour, less than three minutes to travel the 3.7 miles from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Memorial Hospital, just off the Stemmons Freeway. On its heel, flanking it on both sides, were the four motorcyclists from the Dallas police force. Close behind was the
“Queen Mary,”
the armored vehicles carrying Secret Service agents, along with Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, and the convertible that held Vice President Johnson and Senator Yarborough. Part of the planning of any presidential trip was to locate the nearest, best-equipped hospitals at every stage of the trip; Parkland was just two miles from the Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to give his speech. They knew exactly where they were going.

They had no idea of what they’d find when they got there: a wounded president of the United States—or a dead one.

•   •   •

At 1:45 p.m. central standard time, Malcolm Kilduff Jr., White House deputy press secretary, walked into Nurses’ Classroom 101–102 on the ground floor of Parkland Memorial Hospital. Dozens of reporters, cameramen, and officials were jammed into the room, bright with the glare of the camera lights, heavy with the dense clouds of cigarette smoke. Just outside the room, reporters clustered around a bank of pay phones, the only link between the hospital and the world outside. There was an elaborate press facility with open phone lines back to the city desks of major newspapers, TV
networks, and wire services, along with microwave relays that could carry live television signals to local television stations and then, via telephone long lines, back to New York network headquarters—but that was all at the Dallas Trade Mart a mile away. As for the millions turning on their television sets as they heard the first hints of what had happened, they would witness the enormous power, and the stark limits, of mid-century information technology.

The CBS soap opera
As the World Turns
had just begun its broadcast when the rotating globe was replaced by a slide reading: BULLETIN BULLETIN BULLETIN. The crisp voice of anchor Walter Cronkite intoned: “From Dallas, Texas, shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade as it rode through downtown streets. First reports say the President was apparently hit . . . more information now coming in . . . the bubble top that covered the President’s car was shattered into pieces, the President recoiled in apparent pain, and the limousine sped off as a second shot apparently struck the rear of the car. More details as soon as they become available.”

And then viewers saw an elegantly produced commercial for “Nescafé . . . a
new
kind of coffee,” and several minutes of
As the World Turns
, until the network cut to a shirtsleeved Cronkite wearing thick black horn-rimmed eyeglasses in the middle of the CBS newsroom, reaching beyond camera range for the sheets of wire-service copy.

On NBC, a trio of their most familiar faces—anchor Chet Huntley and correspondents Frank McGee and Bill Ryan—clustered around a single desk, clutching phones, trying to put the words of Robert MacNeil on the air from Dallas, grappling with an amplifier that did not work, finally listening to MacNeil and repeating his words phrase by phrase.

From the Dallas Trade Mart came images of the guests who had
come to lunch, some sitting, stunned, some wandering through the cavernous hall looking for information. KRLD’s Eddie Barker, who was at the Trade Mart to anchor the local station’s live coverage of Kennedy’s speech, noted, “It is ironic in a way that one of the traveling White House advance men just half an hour ago expressed his disappointment that the weather had not cleared off here as they had hoped. Earlier forecasts had called for the possibility of rain throughout the presidential visit. But it was only shortly prior to his jet touching down at Love Field that it became clear that the weather would not break through, which would have made it possible for the President to ride in an open convertible rather than the plexiglass top that was used.”

There was only one question anyone really cared about, and it was a question no one in the press was in any position to answer. There was no live coverage of the motorcade, no way to transmit video from the scene of the shooting directly back to the networks, no videotape of the shooting. So the newsmen at their desks in New York and Washington read from wire-service copy, or recounted the fragmentary information from their reporters on the scene: “The President lurched forward . . .” “. . . Mrs. Kennedy reached for him . . .” “. . . Governor and Mrs. Connally leapt from their jump seats to the floor of the car . . .” “. . . witnesses at the hospital reported that the President was carried in on a stretcher . . .” “. . . two priests entered the hospital . . .”

At the same time, the first still photos of the President and Mrs. Kennedy, and of the limousine surrounded by pieces of the bubble top, arrived via wire, and desk assistants in the newsroom mounted them on cardboard and ran them over to the reporters, who held them up; but the newsroom cameras lacked the ability to zoom in, so viewers could barely make out the smiling, waving
First Couple, or the nature of the wounds the President might have suffered.

Then deputy press secretary Kilduff stepped onto a small platform in front of a blackboard in the nurses’ classroom. He drew a long breath, then flashed a quick, small smile.

“At approximately 12:30 p.m. central standard time, President Kennedy sustained a bullet wound in his upper left back midway between his spinal cord and his shoulder. He is at this moment in surgery; his condition is critical but stable. Neither Mrs. Kennedy, Governor Connally, nor Mrs. Connally sustained any gunshot wounds; Mrs. Kennedy and Governor Connally did suffer minor cuts from the plexiglass bubble top, but none were deemed serious.

“The President did receive the last rites of the Catholic Church”—there were clearly audible gasps and moans—“from the Very Reverend Oscar L. Huber, but I am assured that this was strictly a precautionary measure.” Kilduff paused, took another deep breath, and said, “While I will have no further information until the surgery is completed, I
can
say that as to the prospects of the President’s recovery, there is—and I am quoting the President’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley—‘every reason to be optimistic.’”

That was, indeed, what Admiral Burkley had authorized Malcolm Kilduff to say. And it was true . . . as far as it went.

But there were other facts that Admiral Burkley had no intention of sharing with Kilduff, or with the press, or with anyone else—ever.

•   •   •

Something very strange was going on at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Dr. “Pepper” Jenkins was having lunch with members of his anesthesiology department when he heard a page: “Dr. Shires, stat.” The head of surgery is almost never paged, he recalled, and never with the injunction “stat.”

Dr. Bill Midgett, an OB-GYN resident, was trying to take the history of an emergency room patient when he heard someone screaming for a gurney. As he ran outside pulling one end of a gurney, he saw the presidential limousine pulled up to the entrance to Parkland’s emergency room, surrounded by men with automatic weapons. Four Secret Service agents pulled Governor Connally out of the car and lifted the President out of the backseat, out of the arms of Jacqueline Kennedy, and onto a stretcher. The President had been semiconscious during the quick journey to Parkland, but as he was wheeled inside he lost consciousness, and his face took on a gray pallor. That told the half dozen doctors inside Trauma Room 1 that he had gone into shock, likely from internal bleeding . . . which meant that emergency surgery was required to find the source of the bleeding and stop it if they were going to save Patient 24740.

They quickly cut and stripped off his clothes, removed the back brace and elastic bandages that covered his torso and thighs, checked him for vital signs: shallow breathing, a very weak pulse, a fever of 99.6. Dr. Charles Carrico put his hands under the President’s upper back and quickly located the bullet wound between the President’s left shoulder and chest. The surgical team had just begun inserting two intravenous lines for blood transfusions and fluids when someone walked quickly into the room.

“I’m Admiral George Burkley, the President’s personal physician. You need to get him some steroids.”

“Steroids? Why?” asked Dr. Charles Baxter.

“Because he’s an Addisonian,” Admiral Burkley said.

No physician could misunderstand. If President Kennedy had
Addison’s disease, it meant a deficiency in his adrenal glands that left him acutely vulnerable to infections, to stress of all sorts; without steroids, an operation could kill him. If they had been followers of political campaigns—“junkies,” as they came to be called in later years—they might have remembered that, shortly before the Democratic convention in 1960, two of Lyndon Johnson’s campaign aides had accused Kennedy of hiding this condition from the public, a charge the Kennedy campaign had furiously denied.

“Give him one big bolus,” Carrico ordered, and set 300 milligrams of Solu-Cortef, a cortisone-based steroid, into Kennedy’s arm intravenously. Within minutes the President was under heavy anesthetics and the team opened his chest, finding a cracked rib and, more seriously, a nick in his subclavian artery, causing the heavy internal bleeding. After a two-hour operation, the artery was repaired and a substantial piece of the bullet was removed. A KUB X-ray of his abdomen found another fragment lodged in Kennedy’s lower chest and that was removed, lessening the possibility of a postoperative infection.