If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History Read Online Free PDF Page A

conviction that Joe Kennedyhad 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 constitutionalcrisis. 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 darkblue 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