Historical Myths Kennedys Edition Part 5: The Assassination Attempt You Never Heard About And What Might Have Happened if Nothing Had In Dallas

 

 

It was not my intention to a piece of November 22, 1963. I have my opinion on what actually happened that day and I don’t think my opinion will change anyone else’s. I did intend to just move on to Robert Kennedy and his 1968 campaign.

Then something occurred to me before I began to right. So much of the Kennedy legacy is bound up in what happened in Dallas that it has inspired huge tomes, fictional and non-fiction and film after film. JFK’s legacy, as I mentioned, is essentially higher in history because of what happened on November 22, 1963. But rather than discuss all of that because I do have nothing to add, I think its worth two separate items involving Kennedy, a historical fact that  I’m relatively sure that even the most devoted fans of Kennedy are unaware of; the other an example of speculation as to what might have happened had Dallas just been another 1964 campaign stop.

Let’s start with what almost actually happened. On December 11, 1960 president-elect John F. Kennedy was about to make a trip to church. He did not notice an old Buick parked down the street.

Behind the wheel was a seventy-three year old former post office employee named Richard Pavlick. Pavlick was delusional in many ways, but he was obsessed with Kennedy because he believed that his election meant that the Pope had used him as a straw man to take over America for the Vatican. He had been trailing Kennedy for months at St. Louis, and San Diego and had come within ten feet of Kennedy at the compound in Hyannisport. He had followed the President-elect to Palm Beach, gotten through their security, had bought ten sticks of dynamite, wired seven of them to his car with every indication of killing Kennedy that day. As JFK walked towards the car, he was joined by Jackie and his two young children. That caused Pawlick to abort his mission, for all his delusions he refused to kill a man in front of his wife and children. He aborted the mission. Four days later, after a postmaster in Belmont, N.H., his hometown notified authorities after receiving postcards, Pavlick was finally arrested.

I have studied American history and politics almost my entire adult life. I’ve read about the Kennedys and almost everything major assassination attempt in history. It wasn’t until 2011, when Jeff Greenfield, a political journalist published the alternative history book of speculative fiction called Then Everything Changed that I learned about this attempt and just how close it came to succeeding. This near assassination came as close to changing history as Giuseppe Zangara’s attempt to kill President Elect Franklin Roosevelt did in 1932, and I imagine fewer people know about this one. Oliver Stone certainly never mentioned in any of the movies or documentaries he has done about Kennedy.

I am not the kind of person who is inclined to believe in conspiracies or cover-ups. But when a fact this vital about the most mythologized and documented president of the modern era is omitted from almost every major book written about him, by the men who knew who him and later historians, it is hard not to think that there is some kind of deeper meaning in effect. It’s still not talking about in many of the more recent books about the Kennedy family. Why not?

The obvious explanation, of course, is that the events in Dallas nearly three years afterwards essentially rendered this attempt moot. Who cares about a failed assassination attempt that could have shattered the country when a successful one did? That being said, there may be a larger reason.

Pavlick was beyond delusional. It was clear to anyone who talked to him well before that. He made it perfectly clear he was acting alone. And yet Secret Service and the FBI were just as lax as they have been accused of being in Dallas. He’d gotten within a few square feet of the President and it was only blind luck he didn’t succeed at his mission. More to the point, the fact that there was a man determined to kill JFK well before he had become President, takes away much of the aura that surrounded him because of his being killed in Dallas in November of 1963. One assassin succeeds under these circumstances and it looks like the government tried to kill him. Two assassins basically come as close for the same reason – and its not a conspiracy, it’s just gross incompetence on the part of the Secret Service and local law enforcement.

Without this knowledge, it’s lot easier to believe Oswald didn’t act alone. With this knowledge, a lot of the fodder for the conspiracy theory goes out the window. JFK would still be a tragic figure, no question, but we might not think as quickly that the government wanted to kill him because of the way he was approaching policy. That’s probably why Oliver Stone never mentions Pavlick’s attempt on Kennedy. The house of cards he’s trying to build on the CIA wanting him dead is shaky enough. The idea that a crazy man tried to kill him before he became President, it would probably cause it to completely collapse. You can’t make the same argument twice, particularly in Pawlick’s case. Why would the government try to kill Kennedy before he even took office, particularly considering he ran to the right of Nixon in 1960? Hell, if they really thought he was dangerous why not let Pavlick act, which would fit in better with many of the arguments Stone makes about the CIA assassinated other political leaders?

By contrast, Pawlick’s attempted buttresses the idea that Oswald did act alone, that everything that happened in Dallas leading up to the shooting was merely gross incompetence and just bad luck. And honestly, the idea of a lone gunman trying to kill any President fits it far better with how every Presidential assassination after Lincoln’s has been basically the add of someone psychotic delusional. Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Gerald Ford within a few weeks of each other; as far as I know, no one’s ever tried to argue that the CIA was using them to take out Ford because he was dangerous to American interests.

No the reason we have to believe JFK’s assassination was part of a larger conspiracy was because if he had lived, Kennedy would have easily won reelection in 1964 and the Vietnam War – and by extension most of the horrors of the 1960s would never have happened.

But would he have easily been re-elected?

I have always admired alternative history both in fiction and non-fiction and have often wanted to write a bit myself. And considering how much I know about 1960s politics; I think I’m more than qualified to write about. So let’s assume that Lee Harvey Oswald is apprehended by the Dallas Police on November 21, 1963 and that Kennedy begins his reelection campaign not long after. How would it have gone?

Well, let’s start with what was going on with the GOP. Even before that November, it was apparent that Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were on a collision course for the 1964 Republican Nomination. Everyone connected in the higher ups knew this was going to be disastrous for their future in November of that year.  Everybody was hoping that Eisenhower, still the most popular Republican in the country, could make a decision for an alternative that the elders could rally behind to head off this disaster. Scheduled to accept an award at Columbia University on November 21^st, the Eastern Establishment which had gotten Eisenhower the nomination in 1952 had scheduled a meeting that weekend to try and talk him into endorsing a candidate that could head that off. With the assassination, the meeting never took place and no candidate ever got Eisenhower’s approval.

I doubt it would have changed much had nothing happened in Dallas; by that point, men like Eisenhower and the rest were losing their grip on the party. If anything, it would have solidified Goldwater’s intention to run for President. He had no illusions of victory even against Kennedy. What he hoped to do was lead a model for the conservative branch of the party. He told Clifton White that he could come within five percent of beating Kennedy in an election, then he would make the run. They were already close to doing so when the assassination happened. Goldwater, a realist, knew no Republican would have a realistic chance of beating LBJ that fall: the country would never be able to handle three different Presidents in the course of little more than a year. His run for the nomination was made more out of obligation and pressure than any real hope of getting it.

Rockefeller, by contrast, was galvanized to make the run because of the assassination. His reputation about the rank and file of the GOP was already bad, and his divorce and remarriage to a socialite named Happy in July of 1963 diminished it more. No doubt he still would have tried, though its hard to know how things would have gone.

Still, it’s likely the GOP would have hoped for an alternative as the primary season unfolded in a hypothetical 1964  campaign began. And its not like there weren’t alternatives. Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador to the UN, had certain qualities that people admired. Lodge actually won three primaries in 1964, essentially on a write-in New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. William Scranton, who essentially became the last ditch effort, might well have consolidated efforts – he managed to win the Pennsylvania primary that year. But the most interesting possibility came with a man who wasn’t running in 1964.

Richard Nixon wasn’t a declared candidate for anything in the actual 1964 Republican Primaries. It did not stop voters from wanting him to run anyway. In the Nebraska primary, he had received 31.5 percent of the vote. One could have seen a scenario, in a hypothetical Goldwater-Rockefeller standoff at the Cow Palace, where the party might have turned to Richard Nixon on the second or third ballot against Kennedy. The fact that he had lost the last time out would not have counted against him as heavily as it did in that era; in 1956 Adlai Stevenson had taken the Democratic nomination four years after having been trounced by Eisenhower (and many people wanted him to run again in 1960 anyway). And Thomas Dewey had taken the Republican nomination in 1948 after having lost to FDR in 1944. (I will write about him and his effect on politics later on.) So Nixon could have been a compromise candidate.

All that said, I still think even if Kennedy had lived Goldwater would still have gotten the Republican nomination. Men like White had spent years behind the scenes working for it, and I can imagine Goldwater would have a better candidate if he’d thought he might have a chance. What might have been fundamentally different is that I think that there’s a better chance that, had Kennedy lived, the Eastern Establishment would have been more willing to unite behind him then the fight they waged against him before the convention. Much of the reason so many Republicans deserted Goldwater after that convention was because they saw nothing but disaster ahead of them and they didn’t want to be steamrollered as a result. The possibility of victory does lead to unity.

And make no mistake, going into a hypothetical reelection campaign, JFK would have been vulnerable. Leaving aside the issues of his adulterous affairs and the condition of his health, there would have been more obvious problems ahead, some that would have no doubt played out had Kennedy lived.

1. LBJ was about to become a liability. This was part of Kennedy’s own doings. Robert Kennedy (whose hatred of Johnson I will discuss in the next article) had begun to leak damaging information about Johnson’s protégé Bobby Baker to Senate Republicans. One of those inquiries was scheduled for November 22. Life Magazine was about to publish a similar article about Johnson’s ethical problems that was scheduled to hit newsstands in December. (When the assassination took place, both of them were pushed the sidelines.) The fact that LBJ had basically helped JFK win in 1960 made no difference to the Kennedy clan who had loyalties only to each other. The fact that removing him would probably bring the South in the Republican corner would not have mattered much either.

2. The segregationists were pushing against him. As I will write in another article, as a reaction to the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, George Wallace would run a protest campaign against Johnson in the Democratic primaries. Whether he would have done the same against JFK will never be known, but Wallace was ambitious and probably not happy considering the result of what had happened that summer, and he was already beginning to have Presidential ambitions anyway.

3. The South and the Black Vote. Goldwater’s campaigners thought that there had been a good chance that they could have carried the South for Goldwater that year anyway, that in the actual 1964 campaign Goldwater did the best there, it’s likely he would have been just at formidable. As for the African-American vote, this comes to something much more critical.

LBJ used every ounce of JFK’s legacy to get the most sweeping Civil Rights bill in history through Congress by the summer of 1964. I have already argued in my previous article that the Kennedys would never have done something that sweeping and certainly not this close to reelection. It is conceivable they would have put forth some form of legislation forward for the sole purpose of trying to force Goldwater to vote against it (as he did the actual one). That said, it’s hard to say just how much that would have actually help Kennedy in that election cycle as it would have painfully clear (and the Republicans would have jumped on it) just how much opposition the ‘Dixiecrats’ (as the Southern Democrats were known) had towards Civil Rights to begin with.

 

As some of you are no doubt aware, the splitting of the two parties essentially began after the 1964 election when African-Americans abandoned the GOP in droves after Goldwater refused to vote for a bill that so many of his fellow Republicans were willing to vote for. If that bill had not been a campaign issue in 1964, it is possible the polarization might have been postponed for a few election cycles. The Republicans had managed to make gains in the South under Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and had still managed to carry a significant portion of the African-American vote. If Kennedy had lived, the likelihood of a bill that sweeping would not have been an issue of division, and Goldwater might very well have been able to more of the African-American vote than the seven percent he ended up getting. Perhaps he could have managed as much as the thirty percent Richard Nixon did in the previous election cycle, though that may be pure speculation on my part.

It's also pretty clear that while Goldwater was a horrible campaigner because he ‘shot from the lip’ that the 1964 campaign probably wouldn’t have been nearly as ugly as it ended up being. I’m not saying that the Kennedys weren’t dirty campaigners (I’ve argued to the contrary quite a bit) or that we wouldn’t have received somewhat subtler versions of the controversial TV campaign ads that LBJ ran. That said, Goldwater did respect JFK infinitely more than he hated Johnson, and the two got along amicably in the Senate and even during Kennedy’s presidency. Who knows? The Presidential debates, which Johnson refused to engage in during 1964, might have actually become part of the discussion that cycle.

 

 

With all that being said, I’m still not convinced even in this hypothetical campaign that Goldwater could have won. What I do believe is that a Kennedy-Goldwater race would have been far closer than the LBJ landslide. I think there is a likelihood that Goldwater would have managed to carry the South and indeed much of the West. (Nixon had managed to take basically all of that region in 1960.) I think the electoral results would not have been much different than they were in the Nixon-Kennedy race: Kennedy would have gotten between 300 and 320 electoral votes to roughly 200-230 for Goldwater. I don’t believe the popular vote would have been as close, but it wouldn’t be much more than the five to seven percent margin that Goldwater thought possible.

As to Kennedy’s coattails, they wouldn’t have gotten much bigger with that margin. He might have been able to gain ten or fifteen seats to the Democratic majority, but certainly nowhere near the forty LBJ managed in his landslide. As to the Senate, in 1964 the Democrats only managed two Senate wins and one was Bobby Kennedy’s victory in New York, which was a nail-biter. It’s hard to imagine Kennedy doing better than that, and it’s far more likely that there would have been a net loss of two or three for the Democrats regardless, perhaps in Nevada, Wisconsin or even Texas where Republicans in the actual 1964 did better than expected.

I won’t dare speculate on what a possible second term by Kennedy would have been like, legislatively or on any other level. One thing I’m pretty sure would have happened is if JFK had won reelection, the Kennedy dynasty probably would have ended with him. It would have been a lot harder for Bobby to try and run for President in 1968 and probably not for two or three election cycles to come. One wonders if he could even have run for Senate. Ted’s legacy would have harder to imagine, and that’s before you consider what would end up defining his career (we’ll get to that in the last article in the series) In either case, it’s really hard to imagine the luster of the Kennedys having anywhere near the feel it did at JFK’s presidency ended in either electoral defeat or even two full terms. The Kennedys would have just been another political family, which honestly might have been better for them as human beings not politicians.

Next time, yes I shall deal with Bobby and everything that led up to the 1968 campaign.