If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (6 page)

Four hours later, at 4:00 p.m. eastern standard time, Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and fifteen minutes later, the Marine One helicopter touched down on the White House lawn. There, six-year-old Caroline and three-year-old John Jr. were waiting. And as the President stepped down from the helicopter, John stood at rigid attention and offered his father a crisp military salute before running with his sister across the lawn and into his arms.

“I think of myself as a pretty composed reporter,” Walter
Cronkite said later. “But I’m very grateful the camera wasn’t on me just then. My heavens, if you didn’t have tears in your eyes at that moment, what kind of human being are you?”

That night, from the Oval Office, John Kennedy gave his first public remarks since the shooting. It was, as Ted Sorensen said later, “vital that the President reject the notion that the shooting was somehow evidence of a national sickness, that there was any kind of collective guilt for what had happened.”

So he began by expressing his thanks “to the doctors, nurses, and staff at Parkland Hospital, and to the people of Dallas and all of Texas for their warmth and good wishes. The actions of a single deranged individual cannot be permitted to define that city or that state. So it is my firm pledge to return to Texas at the earliest possible time, to convey my thanks in person.

“Nor can we permit this single act to define us as a nation. There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

“But those strident voices cannot be allowed to drown out that great silent majority that understands that we are a strong
and
peaceful people who indeed seek ‘liberty and justice for all.’ May God grant us success in that effort.”

By the end of 1963, the shock of what had happened—and what had almost happened—on November 22 had begun to ease. But for some, what America had escaped was very much on their minds. One of them, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, found himself musing about what it might have meant had John Kennedy not survived that morning in Dallas.

“It would not have been bewilderment at the loss of a great and
tried leader, as with FDR, because JFK was not that,” Acheson wrote to a British friend. “What his death would have evoked was . . . fear from the utter collapse of all sense of security which lay at the bottom of the emotion . . . If a leader is old and should die of a heart attack, as Ike might have done, we would be upset. But if this young and vibrant man had become a corpse within an hour, the vast factor of chance and insecurity in all our separate lives as well as in our collective life would have become oppressive and paralyzingly terrifying. In this sense, President Kennedy’s survival spared us, not a constitutional crisis, but a profound wound to the spirit. Thank God we will not have to learn at what cost.”

T
he Vice President of the United States was not having a good day when November 22 began.

But then, he had not been having many good days lately.

As he rode through the streets of Dallas, he was seventy-five feet behind the President and Governor Connally, the distance prescribed by the Secret Service. Really, though, he was much, much farther away from the President.

The morning papers were filled with stories of The Snub—Senator Yarborough’s adamant and repeated refusal to ride in the same car as Johnson. It was a deliberate, calculated, and successful exercise in humiliation, and humiliation was what Lyndon Johnson had feared all his life, back to his childhood days when his neighbors would look pitifully on his once-prosperous and successful father, who had been reduced to menial labor. He still bore the sting of last night’s tongue-lashing from John Kennedy in the President’s Fort Worth hotel suite. The Secret Service agents guarding the suite said Johnson had bolted from the room, face flushed with fury or embarrassment or both. It was the latest, full-frontal example of what he had endured for almost three years: the scorn and the mockery of the well-born, well-educated Kennedy clan (“Rufus
Cornpone,” they called him behind his back); the exclusion from any hint of power or responsibility; the refusal to listen to his advice on how to work the Congress that he knew so well and had mastered for so long.

It wasn’t Jack Kennedy who was doing this, he was sure; it was that snot-nosed runt Bobby, the man who had tried to throw him off the ticket after Jack picked him, the man who’d humiliated him time after time at meetings of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the man who’d reduced him to the stature, as he put it to friends, of “a cut dog.” Well, maybe he’d had enough. More than once he thought about chucking it, going back to Texas, maybe running his old alma mater, Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He’d even told an old friend that this Friday evening he was going to tell Jack that he wasn’t going to run again in ’64. (Then again, threatening to quit was something he’d said at one time or another in just about every campaign he’d ever run.)

Now Senator Yarborough was sitting beside him—the President had more or less ordered him to do so on pain of political isolation—but he refused to say so much as a word with Lyndon, or with Lady Bird. For her part, Lady Bird was obsessing over the impending visit of the Kennedys later that evening to the LBJ Ranch after the Austin fund-raiser. Would they have the right food, the right liquor, the right wine, the right bath soap? Would the entertainment be welcomed, or scorned as the stuff of rubes, hicks?

Nor was Johnson in any mood to exchange pleasantries. His thoughts were back in Washington, where a threat to his political future was growing more serious by the day. His longtime Senate protégé, Bobby Baker, a young man he’d installed as secretary of the Senate, his vote counter, his dispenser of campaign cash and favors of every sort, had become caught up in a firestorm. A small legal dispute over a vending machine contract—Baker owned a piece of
the company—had exploded into charges of influence peddling, pay-to-government contracts. The press began asking how a man with a net worth of $11,000 in 1954 could have a net worth of nearly $1.8 million nine years later while serving full-time on the government payroll. And then sex had been added to the combustible mix: Baker owned the Carroll Arms Hotel, close by Capitol Hill, where, the stories went, important government officials and prostitutes found common ground.

From the moment the Baker story surfaced, Johnson had panicked; he’d cut short an official visit to Europe and used his clout in Texas to make sure none of the state’s papers published a story by a Washington journalistic gadfly named Sarah McClendon (the story appeared in an obscure wire service, but that was enough to put the tale in circulation). Johnson then tried to distance himself from Baker; he claimed he barely knew the man, that his fellow Democrats had chosen Baker as secretary of the Senate, but the idea was laughable on its face (Baker’s nickname on the Hill was “Little Lyndon”), and when
Life
magazine published a cover story on the scandal—THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL: CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES—the piece made prominent mention of the close ties between Baker and Johnson.

So on this late morning of November 22, riding through the light rain in downtown Dallas, the Vice President of the United States was not having a good day.

What he did not know was that he was having a much, much worse day than he could have imagined.

•   •   •

In Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, a Maryland insurance executive named Don Reynolds was being questioned by the
Democratic and Republican staff lawyers of the Senate Rules Committee. Reynolds claimed that in return for selling Johnson a $100,000 insurance policy on his life—a policy difficult to get for a man who’d had a near-fatal heart attack a few years earlier—Reynolds had been compelled to buy advertising time on the Johnson-owned Austin TV station and had been forced by Baker to buy Johnson a high-end stereo set. What had begun as an investigation into a staff aide was now directly implicating the former Senate majority leader and current vice president.

And as the lunch hour grew near, Reynolds produced two checks; one to KTBC for the advertising time, one to the Magnavox Company for a stereo, to be delivered to the Johnson home.

And then a secretary burst into the room, sobbing hysterically, barely able to get the words out . . .

Two hundred miles to the north, on the ninth floor of the Time
&
Life Building on Manhattan’s Fifty-First Street, a dozen reporters and editors were meeting in the office of managing editor George Hunt.
Life
magazine’s look into the finances of Bobby Baker had yielded a much richer vein of inquiry: if it was a mystery how Baker had accumulated a net worth of nearly $2 million, it was an even deeper mystery how Lyndon Johnson, who had been on the public payroll all his adult life, had managed to accumulate a network many times greater—an estimated $14 million worth. How had he managed to win a license for the only radio station in Austin, Texas, back in 1943 (his wife, Lady Bird, was the nominal owner, but everybody knew who really ran it), and how was it that the Johnsons now owned the only commercial TV station in the town? How had the company managed to build such significant holdings in other radio and TV stations, in banks, in real estate?

And then the phones started ringing, all of them, every line at once.

•   •   •

In the moment and hours when John Kennedy’s survival was in doubt, the same thoughts had filled the minds of everyone in that Washington hearing room, and everyone in the executive offices of
Life
magazine.

What if he’s about to become president? Don’t we have to give the guy a chance? What will it mean to the country if they hear that their new leader is a crook in the middle of a national crisis?
Without question, the Washington investigators and the New York editors would have quietly stepped back and let the allegations settle for a while . . . a good, long while.

But when it became clear that John Kennedy would live, a very different thought took hold:
Lyndon Johnson is a heartbeat away from the White House. He came close, very close to becoming president. We’ve got to get the facts out on the table now.

Life
magazine, like every other major news publication, spent the next two weeks covering the attempted assassination of Kennedy—coverage that gained worldwide attention when the magazine published frames from a home movie shot by Abraham Zapruder, a fifty-eight-year-old women’s clothing manufacturer, that showed the plexiglass bubble top exploding, the President clutching at his upper chest, Jacqueline’s pink suit spattered with flecks of blood. But in its January 8 issue, which went on sale just after the holidays,
Life
hit the stands with a cover story: LYNDON JOHNSON’S MILLIONS—HOW DID A LIFELONG PUBLIC SERVANT GET SO RICH?

The story created a press firestorm (no one was using the word
“media” then). When word of the impending publication broke, the wire services, New York newspapers, and TV networks sent messengers up to the R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing plant in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to grab advance copies of the issue.

(“What do you want me to do?” a
Life
editor yelled at a friend at the
New York Times
who pleaded for an early look. “Should I try to stuff the magazine into the phone so you can read it when it comes out the other end? It’s
print
, Arthur!”)

The news from Washington was even worse for the Vice President. From the moment the Bobby Baker story emerged, it had drawn the attention of Delaware senator John Williams, who regarded government waste and corruption as among the deadliest of sins, and who had made himself into something of a one-man FBI. He’d exposed rampant corruption in the Wilmington branch of the IRS; forced one of Harry Truman’s top aides out of the White House for arranging for Mrs. Truman to receive a Deepfreeze from a government contractor; and driven Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, out of public life for accepting gifts from a wealthy financier. Now, armed with the canceled checks from Don Reynolds, and fueled by the
Life
magazine revelations, Williams took to the Senate floor on a daily basis, asking the same question every day: “What is the Vice President worth, and how did he earn it?”

After weeks of obsession with John Kennedy’s health and the motives of the alleged shooter, the country was ready for a new story. The details of Lyndon Johnson’s fortune might be complex—FCC license allocation hearings, real estate transactions with straw purchasers and dummy corporations—but the core of the
Life
magazine story was easy to understand: a public servant had used his power to accumulate a vast private fortune. The Washington end of the story was even easier to grasp: that same public servant had used one of his closest aides to pry campaign cash and luxurious gifts for
himself as the price of doing business with the government. It was so easy to grasp, in fact, that it leached into the popular culture.

On January 10, NBC launched a new half-hour topical political comedy program,
That Was the Week That Was
, an American adaptation of a successful BBC broadcast. It was a sharp departure for American TV, whose most daring foray into politics came when Ed Sullivan had booked JFK impressionist Vaughn Meader and his feather-light jibes at the Kennedys.

But in its debut broadcast,
TWTWTW
featured a sketch portraying Lyndon Johnson as Senator Midas King (“Every bill he touches turns to gold—for him!”) and ended with a pointed version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:

He’s the richest politician

That Texas ever saw,

And he gets even richer,

Every time he writes a law.

How did he get so wealthy

Working for the U.S.A.?

It’s really very easy

If your name is LBJ!

Johnny Carson followed suit. The
Tonight Show
host rarely dealt in political humor, so it was telling that on January 11 he began his monologue by announcing, “We’ve just learned what Vice President Johnson will be having for dessert tonight at dinner—
impeachment
pie.”

Faced with a mortal threat to his political survival, Lyndon Johnson became ill—a response utterly unsurprising to his lifelong aides and supporters. He’d been struck with an appendicitis attack two days before Election Day as a twenty-nine-year-old candidate
for the U.S. House of Representatives; bad political news had hospitalized him with depression during his first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1941; he’d come down with a powerful case of kidney stones in his second Senate campaign in 1948 and almost pulled out of the race. Now, facing public embarrassment and a congressional investigation, convinced that his humiliation was being orchestrated by his mortal enemy who held the post of U.S. attorney general, he awoke in the middle of the night on January 15 sweating profusely and complaining of severe abdominal pains and an accelerated heart rate. The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recommended “extended bed rest”—but it was the recommendation of two lawyers that proved decisive.

On the evening of January 16, two of the most significant inside players in Washington slipped quietly into the hospital and into the Vice President’s VIP suite. Abe Fortas, a onetime New Deal liberal crusader, had built one of the most politically powerful law firms in Washington. He’d been a friend and counsel to Lyndon Johnson for years, and saved his political life by persuading Supreme Court justice Hugo Black to leave Johnson’s name on the ballot for senator in ’48, despite powerful evidence of blatant voter fraud. Clark Clifford, the elegantly dressed, soft-spoken onetime Truman aide, was a master at exercising behind-the-scenes influence, doing more with a single phone call than most lawyers did with a hundred-page brief.

They spoke in sympathy and in sorrow; agreed that Bobby Kennedy had embarked on a ruthless, unprincipled vendetta; acknowledged that old Joe Kennedy had consorted with gangsters and bought his boy the White House; sat mute as Johnson remembered telling Clare Boothe Luce why he’d taken the vice presidency (“One out of every four presidents has died in office; I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I’ve got”). But they were firm in their counsel.

Which is why, when President Kennedy stepped to the rostrum in the House of Representatives on January 21 to deliver his delayed State of the Union speech, House speaker John McCormack and Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden were seated behind him. Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president, was home in Texas . . . where, two months before, he’d come within inches of becoming the thirty-sixth president of the United States.