79
HISTORY MAKES A WRONG TURN IN DALLAS
By Douglas Niles
A lot of bad luck made this mistake worse, no matter how many shooters.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is arguably the greatest national trauma modern Americans have suffered. All Americans who were at least of grade-school age when it happened still remember where they were and what they were doing when they learned the news.
That trauma differed substantially from the two other events of modern US history that might also merit this dubious distinction: the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. These latter left the nation roused and angry, ready to seek vengeance against an identifiable and almost universally hated foe. In both cases, the nation united under the incumbent president in a shared desire for retribution.
The perpetrator of the trauma in Dallas, however, was a miserable loser, a man so abject that his attempts to defect to the Communist world had been rebuffed by both the Soviet Union and Cuba. He was dead two days after he committed his monstrous crime, so there was no opportunity for explanation or closure. Tragically, about the only positive thing that could be said about Lee Harvey Oswald is that he was a reasonably competent marksman with a cheap rifle. Also, perhaps, that he was lucky.
Many of the mistakes of history, including most of those discussed in this book, involve a powerful person making a foolish decision that has dramatic and far-reaching effects. Some of the world’s greatest “mistakes,” however, resulted only from bad luck. There was nothing foolish or rash about President Kennedy’s decision to include Dallas on his trip to Texas. Nor was it the least bit unprecedented for him to ride in an open car, along a route that had been made public in advance. But the decisions that led him to sit in an open car as it crossed Dealey Plaza that November day would turn out to be the worst, and the last, of John Kennedy’s life.
It is maddening to imagine all the alternate scenarios. What if the date of the trip had been changed? There had, in fact, been a warning sent to the White House by a leader of the Democratic Party in Texas, pointing out that a notorious right-wing firebrand, disgraced and retired General Edwin Walker of Dallas, had labeled the president a “liability to the free world.” The warning was disregarded, not even shown to JFK, because a presidential adviser believed Kennedy never would have taken it seriously.
Fate played an even more whimsical role in this tragedy: the perpetual loser and chronically unemployed Lee Harvey Oswald happened to get a job in mid-October 1963 sorting deliveries at the Texas School Book Depository; and less than six weeks later, the president’s motorcade would take him past that very building! Even if JFK was determined to visit Dallas, what if a minor change in route had taken him down a different street? Oswald would not even have had the chance to take his shot.
Before 1963, three United States presidents—Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901)—had been killed by gunshots during a bloody thirty-six-year stretch in American history. After McKinley’s death, the Secret Service, which had been created to protect against counterfeiting, was assigned the important task of protecting the nation’s chief executive. Since then, though would-be assassins had targeted Presidents Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman, none succeeded. Only one chief executive was wounded: Teddy Roosevelt, out of office for several years and campaigning to return to the presidency, famously survived because a pistol bullet was slowed by the many folded pages of a speech, as well as a metal glasses case. (He went on to finish his speech with the slug embedded in his chest.)
In any event, Fate played her cruel joke in Dallas, and the nation’s young, vibrant leader was cut down only thirty-four months—less than three years!—into his first term. But how might history have unfolded if Kennedy had lived? How much of the fractious sixties would have been altered, even improved? It is one of the great questions of speculative history in the modern age. Would JFK have gone on to become one of our greatest presidents?
Of course, there are a few scenarios besides untimely death that could have damaged Kennedy’s legacy. If his serial philandering had been brought to light, there is little doubt that public opinion would have turned against him. But the media in the 1960s was not inclined to report such matters, and even if a political opponent uncovered enough dirt to make charges, it was no sure thing that such an attack would have gained traction. Perhaps even more serious, of course, is the question of JFK’s health. Despite the president’s projecting an image of youth and vigor, his body was a wreck. Any one of his laundry list of physical ailments could have landed him in a wheelchair, or rendered him incapable of governing in his familiar, strong style.
Yet, if those dangerous waters could have been navigated—as he had navigated them, very successfully, so far—there is little doubt that Kennedy would have been elected to a second term in 1964. After all, his much-less-charismatic successor, Lyndon Johnson, beat Republican Barry Goldwater in a historic landslide during that election, which also delivered solid Democratic majorities to both houses of Congress.
And how might JFK’s second term have proceeded? His proposed initiatives included tax cuts and increased federal support for education and medical coverage for the poor and elderly. These programs would almost certainly have been enacted. Would America’s mood of confidence and optimism have maintained itself, instead of dissolving into the chaotic polarization of the historical sixties?
Of course the two biggest questions need to be asked: What would JFK have done about the American involvement in Vietnam, and how would he have dealt with the fractious and increasingly violent civil rights movement?
Jack Kennedy did, in fact, send the first American troops to Vietnam—special forces soldiers with a mission to train the South Vietnamese Army. Would he, like Johnson, have responded to the Communist insurgency by committing massive numbers of American soldiers and marines? Quite possibly, he would have. There is evidence from his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis that JFK had the moral fiber to stand up to a whole array of advisers who were encouraging him to take military action. Perhaps, emboldened by the security provided a president by a second term, he might have refused to commence the American buildup that began in 1965.
It is even more challenging to consider JFK’s role in the civil rights movement. It was not an issue that was as near and dear to his heart as it was to LBJ’s, and, as a Northerner, Kennedy would have had a harder time rallying the support of those Southern Democrats who begrudgingly lent their support to the Texan. Yet Kennedy was also a man with a sense of justice, and it may well have turned out that he would have decided to come down on the right side of history.
Sadly, even tragically, we never had the chance to find out.