If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History (17 page)

“Two years ago,” Kennedy said, “Martin Luther King Jr. stood before two hundred thousand Americans of all races and creeds, and said: ‘We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great
vaults of opportunity of this nation.’ Today, that faith in our nation and its people has been redeemed.”

•   •   •

There was in that statement an implicit optimism about the way America worked. It was an unsurprising sentiment: America’s national leaders are
supposed
to be upbeat about the country they lead. What was notable is that the same sense of optimism infused much of the political engagement of the early 1960s, including the emergence of the “protest” movement: sit-ins to protest segregated lunch counters in the South; Freedom Rides to protest “white and colored” seating on bus lines; pickets outside the White House to protest nuclear testing. “Protests” they may have been, but they were, with few exceptions, devoid of anything that could remotely be called “radical” in philosophy or tactics. The students at the sit-ins wore coats and ties and studied their textbooks while white thugs threw ketchup and mustard at them. During the anti–nuclear testing demonstration in 1961, the White House invited some of the protesters in to talk to administration officials; during the 1962 demonstration, as a snowstorm fell on Washington, the White House sent out coffee. A folk singer like Phil Ochs could write protest songs about racial injustice and war (“I Ain’t Marching Any More”), but he could also write a song that called America “a land full of power and glory, beauty that words cannot recall.”

When a new organization called Students for a Democratic Society issued its manifesto in 1962, there were no “demands,” nonnegotiable or otherwise. As cofounder Tom Hayden later said, “The model was peaceful transition, reformism; there was no thought of violence as a tactic.” During the 1964 campaign, SDS endorsed the President with the slogan “Part of the way with JFK” while chiding him for temporizing on civil rights and economic justice. Unlike
their counterparts in other nations, where flags were burned and stones were thrown, these participants formed the core of what
Washington Star
reporter Mary McGrory called “a kinder, gentler dissent . . . the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the picketing, the rallies—reflect discontent, but do
not
reflect disillusion. Far from being ‘anti-American,’ they embrace the same faith that led Martin Luther King Jr. to begin his already classic March on Washington speech with a lengthy quotation from the Declaration of Independence.”

What was emerging in the early years of the 1960s, then, was a movement rooted in an optimism that seemed justified by the recent past. In less than thirty years, the rights of labor had been written into federal law; Social Security had brought older Americans a sense of security; public power had brought electricity into millions of homes; the depredations of Wall Street predators had been brought under a measure of control; racial segregation in schools had been struck down; and it was only a matter of time before the next steps in the progressive agenda were reached: health care for the old, federal aid to education, Negro emancipation. While there was a growing sense of
cultural
disaffection among a segment of the young, its targets were the corporate mentality of men in gray flannel suits, the stifling conformism of the suburbs, the mendacity of TV commercials and crooked quiz shows—not the root premises of the American system. In that optimism, the politically engaged progressives were reflecting something of a national consensus: three-fourths of Americans, Gallup was reporting in 1964, trusted the government to do what was right all or most of the time.

The real, wholesale distrust of government was found predominantly on the fringes of the political right, where voices from Father Coughlin to Joe McCarthy to John Birch Society founder Robert Welch taught that Jews held the levers of power; or that FDR had caused Pearl Harbor and sold out the cause of freedom to Stalin at
Yalta; or that the government was infested with traitors, and that President Eisenhower himself was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; or that unseen forces were intent on putting fluoride into our drinking water to weaken our resistance to a Communist takeover. One distinguished historian, Richard Hofstadter, had a phrase for it: “the paranoid style in American politics.” (That kind of irrationality was what Kennedy had gone to Dallas to talk about at the Trade Mart on November 22, 1963.)

The question for the rest of the 1960s, then, was as simple as it was crucial: How much of that optimism, how much of that implicit respect for boundaries, would hold? What few grasped at the time was how much the answer to that question rested on the fact that John Kennedy did not die on the streets of Dallas . . . and on the decisions he made once he returned to the White House.

•   •   •

When John Kennedy’s first term began, at the start of the decade, America was perched on a cusp. By mid-decade, a different culture had emerged, one that divided the country in a way it never had been before.

And John Kennedy straddled that divide.

You could see that divide in the country’s popular entertainment, where unsettling voices, sounds, and images had emerged in that grossly misnamed “silent decade” of the 1950s: James Dean’s time bomb of sullen alienation; Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed motorcycle rider who, when asked: “What are you rebelling against?” answered: “Whadda you got?” On the radio, the soothing melodies of Patti Page, the Four Lads, the Four Aces, Vic Damon, and company had given way by the mid-1950s to rock and roll, to Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis, Chuck Berry, music that was a pulsating, visceral incubator of teenage lust that dozens of communities had tried
to ban, much as King Canute had sought to order back the tides. On bookshelves, after the courts effectively neutered censorship laws, grown-ups could buy
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover
while their kids could pick up
MAD
magazine, which mercilessly mocked conventional pieties, on the candy store racks (Riverdale High School’s beloved Archie as a drug dealer?). Comedy had a new bite for adults as well, from Stan Freberg’s send-ups to Mort Sahl’s jabs at the Eisenhower administration to Lenny Bruce’s excursions into the further shores of race, drugs, and sex.

Yet, clear boundaries were still in place. In most states, films still had to be licensed by censorship boards, and Hollywood’s Production Code still forbade nudity, obscenity, most profanity, and any portrayal of illicit sexuality that did not lead to retribution. Rock and roll’s bawdier lyrics were never heard on radio; so Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti good booty” became “Tutti Frutti au rutti” and Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me Annie (All Night Long)” became Georgia Gibbs’s “Dance with Me Henry.” On television, which by the mid-sixties was nestled in more than nine out of ten American homes, the culture was frozen in amber: free of profanity and premarital, extramarital, and even marital sex. On numberless TV shows, cheerful Negroes cooked and cleaned, and women labored in the home or in clearly defined and limited workplace roles.

And in a sense, what Americans saw on their television screens was an accurate reflection of the dominant culture. The Supreme Court might be striking down segregation laws, Betty Friedan might have written a best-selling book about the social and legal limitations on women, but as John Kennedy began his second term, no Negro had ever sat in the Supreme Court, in the cabinet, or (save for Reconstruction) in the United States Senate; of the hundred senators, two were women. None had ever served on the High Court, nor in any of the key cabinet posts. If the major media
institutions did not spend much time examining these facts, it may have been that they were themselves firmly anchored in traditional ways. No black or woman had ever anchored a network broadcast or served as a key editor at any major newspaper or magazine; at
Time
magazine, women could aspire to be researchers, not correspondents.

As for mores: in 1960, the FDA had approved the sale of an oral contraceptive—the Pill—to women, uncoupling sex from pregnancy, raising the specter of unbridled coupling. At the same time, on a typical college campus, women were required to be in their dormitories by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. on weeknights; abortion was illegal everywhere; homosexuality (defined in some states as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature”) was a criminal offense, and so was adultery; divorce could derail a political career, as Nelson Rockefeller discovered in 1964.

John Kennedy was, in many ways, solidly implanted in the older culture. While the Twist was danced at the White House on occasion, the President’s taste in music ran to show tunes: composer Frederick Loewe had performed on several occasions, playing songs from his hit shows
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
. While Kennedy enjoyed the company of women (to put it mildly), there was not a single woman in any position of influence in his administration; the only Negro he knew with any familiarity was George Thomas, his butler. His politics were characterized by a sense of caution, a suspicion of political passion, that seemed at odds with his bold rhetoric.

“We stand today at the edge of a New Frontier,” he’d proclaimed in his 1960 acceptance speech. “We must climb the mountaintop,” he’d urged the readers of
Life
magazine. And then there was the image, the persona, of this strikingly young man with an even more strikingly young wife, constantly in motion, so different from his sedentary predecessors. When he governed, however, he seemed to
follow one of his favorite pieces of political wisdom: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” In a much-discussed commencement speech at Yale in 1962, Kennedy seemed to shun the notion of a clear choice between right and wrong in one key arena.

“What is at stake in our economic decisions today,” he said, “is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.”

It was that caution, that careful calculation of political costs, that had fed doubts in the liberal community from his first days as a potential president. Columnist Karl E. Meyer had labeled Kennedy an emblematic politician for “the Age of the Smooth Deal”:

“Too obsessed by the problems of his ‘image’ to explore the controversial issues of his time . . . too impressed by opinion polls and lacking in inner conviction . . . too prone to conceive of electoral survival as an end in itself; his nose is so implanted in the middle of the road that his eyes lose sight of the horizon.” That sense of artificiality inspired songwriter Malvina Reynolds to add an additional verse to her 1962 hit, “Little Boxes”:

There’s a white house in the capital

And inside are the Kennedys,

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all sound just the same.

There’s Bobby, and Teddy,

And Jacqueline and the President,

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all sound just the same.

•   •   •

What that dismissive view missed was how Kennedy’s
political
caution was offset by a
stylistic
boldness. In his youth, his good looks, his use of language, in the frank embrace of the arts, high fashion, and physical exertion, Kennedy was demonstrating a presidential energy not seen since the days of Theodore Roosevelt; in an age of mass media, that energy was reaching millions. Back in 1960, novelist Norman Mailer had written about the potential impact of a Kennedy presidency this way:

“If one had a profound criticism of Kennedy, it was that his public mind was too conventional, but that seemed to matter less than the fact of such a man in office because the law of political life had become so dreary that only a conventional mind could win an election. Indeed there could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable. It was the changes that might come afterward on which one could put one’s hope. With such a man in office the myth of the nation would again be engaged . . .”

Kennedy’s aide Richard Goodwin put it this way: “He seemed to embody the idea of America . . . [I]t had to be constantly renewed, always contemporary . . . JFK expressed, in words, in action, in manners, his own belief in America’s possibilities; that we were a nation with a large purpose, a mission.”

Five years later, that myth had taken hold, especially among younger Americans. Even before Dallas, there was something attractive, even cool, about the idea of their country being governed by a young, handsome, apparently physically robust man with a younger, undeniably hot wife. When a photo of a grinning, dripping-wet President on a public beach in Los Angeles surrounded by admiring
onlookers appeared, one editor said, “Can you
imagine
seeing Ike or Harry Truman like that? And would you want to?”

And it wasn’t even that surprising when, in February of 1964, four young men from Britain found themselves invited to the White House after their concert at the Washington Coliseum. In a surprise event, kept off the public schedule, Kennedy introduced them to an audience of 200 at the White House East Room with a mocking complaint.

“Not since the British burned the White House in 1812,” Kennedy said, “has a foreign invader conquered our land as swiftly and thoroughly as have John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And not since the Volkswagen,” he added, “has there been a greater threat to the U.S. trade balance than the emergence of the Beatles.” In the days that followed their brief performance, newspapers and magazines had a field day with composite photos showing what Kennedy’s hair would look like on the foursome—and what JFK would look like with a moptop.

It was, of course, impossible to measure what the impact on the national mood would have been had that all been lost in Dallas. Dean Acheson had tried to capture it when he wrote to a British friend, observing that “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.”