David Kaiser’s 2008 book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the first serious attempts to thread reams of newly declassified government documents into an objective, coherent narrative of the events leading up to November 1963. One of the most compelling passages in a book quite full of them arrives, though, when Kaiser rehearses the course of history after JFK died, and all that may have differed had he not. That passage, which closes Kaiser’s The Road to Dallas, is excerpted below.
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Few events in American history have had more extraordinary short, medium, or long-term consequences than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For the next eighteen months or so the assassination seemed to have cemented the liberal Democratic ascendancy in postwar America. President Johnson promptly seized the moment of national grief to break a legislative logjam, and by the middle of 1964 he had secured passage of the first major postwar tax cut, the omnibus Civil Rights Act, and his own proposals for a War on Poverty. And in November 1964 he defeated Barry Goldwater far more decisively than Kennedy probably would have, and substantially increased Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. That in turn enabled him to pass Medicare, a big education bill, the Voting Rights Act, and a great deal more during 1965. Not all this legislation would have passed under Kennedy. At the same time, since Kennedy had no intention of pushing for a “Great Society,” he would not in all probability have provoked quite as much backlash as Johnson did.
In foreign affairs, the impact of Kennedy’s death was even greater because of President Johnson’s almost immediate decision to undertake the Vietnam War, making it impossible to pursue the détente that Kennedy had just begun with the Soviets. JFK had repeatedly refused to fight a war in Southeast Asia. In retrospect, however, the combination of a large draftee army, a never-ending series of Cold War trouble spots around the world, and the American political process would very likely have led to some similar war sooner or later. More important, with the coming of age of a new generation, the postwar consensus was doomed in any event. The Boom generation’s rebellion was especially intense because of the Vietnam War, but it would have happened in any case because it reflected a deeper historical dynamic.
During the last forty years Boomers have undone their parents’ work in one area of life after another, from the movies, television, and sports to academia, the corporate and financial world, and—beginning in the 1990s and continuing until today—politics, government, and foreign policy. The death of the most outstanding politician of the GI generation and the disastrous war that his successors waged accelerated this process, but they did not cause it. Perhaps because the established order was liberal and Democratic, the most powerful rebellion against it has been conservative and Republican, and this movement has destroyed much of the spirit and many of the institutions built up from the 1930s through the early 1960s. The assassination of a popular president with the help of a mail-order rifle started a gun control movement, but the backlash among gun owners has, ironically, been much more powerful. It played a significant role in the increasing Republican ascendancy from 1980 through 2004.
The Republican resurgence drew critical support from the Cuban-American community, much (though not all) of which has never forgiven the Democratic Party in general and John F.Kennedy in particular for failing to overthrow Fidel Castro. Indeed, in 1971 it was not difficult for E. Howard Hunt, by then retired from the CIA, to recruit several long-standing anti-Castro activists, including Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, and Eugenio Martinez, to work in the White House plumbers unit and to break into Democratic National Headquarters, partly, according to some of them, to investigate rumors that Castro was contributing to the Democratic Party.
Florida’s population and electoral clout have grown dramatically in the last forty years, and Florida made the difference in the election and re-election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Certainly the Cuban-American community was decisive in at least the first of those momentous outcomes. The Bush family cemented its alliance with that community’s conservative leadership in 1990 when President George H. W. Bush pardoned Orlando Bosch Avila, who had worked with the CIA in 1961–62 and continued his activities independently as head of the MIRR. Bosch had been convicted of a terrorist action against a Polish freighter in 1968. After his release he had planned a successful bombing of a Cuban Airlines plane in Venezuela in October 1976, which killed 73 people. After being held without trial in Venezuela for ten years, Bosch was released in 1988 with the help of Cuban-American ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich, a power in the Republican Party. After Bosch came to the United States, Bush pardoned him of all American charges at the request of a Republican congressional candidate, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and her campaign manager, the President’s own son and future Florida governor, Jeb Bush. In the long run, the Kennedy administration’s attempt to promote liberal leadership among the exiles has been a failure.
Among the American left, especially within the younger generations, the Kennedy assassination gradually combined with Vietnam as evidence of vast, evil conspiracies within the government, or of immutable, corrupt tendencies in American society. Such beliefs peaked during the 1970s, partly with the help of the Church Committee investigation, which led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976. The executive branch of the federal government has refused to take conspiracy theories seriously since 1964, however, and when that committee concluded in 1979 that President Kennedy had probably been assassinated by a conspiracy involving organized crime figures, the FBI quickly found an excuse not to reopen the investigation. Conspiracy theories had a renaissance in the early 1990s after the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. That film undoubtedly set back the public’s understanding of the assassination for at least a decade, but it also led to the passage of the Kennedy Assassination Records Act and the vast releases of documentation that made The Road to Dallas possible. Too much time has now passed for any new legal proceedings.
Very few of the characters in this story remain alive today. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 by a Jordanian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan. Sam Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, and Johnny Roselli were murdered in 1975–76. John Martino died in 1975 of natural causes, and Loran Hall died in California during the 1990s. Of the critical figures, the last to die were Santo Trafficante (in 1987) and Carlos Marcello (in 1993). Fidel Castro Ruz, whose 1959 revolution did so much to set these many events in motion, has now held power for forty-nine years, longer than any other political leader of the twentieth century. He has survived a strict U.S. economic embargo, hundreds of assassination plots, nine U.S. presidents, the fall of his Soviet Communist patrons, and, most recently, a serious intestinal ailment that required surgery in the summer of 2006 and forced him into at least temporary retirement. Largely because of American sanctions, Cuba remains a poor country, although its health care and educational achievements are much closer to first than to third world standards. The people enjoy relatively little freedom of expression and the Communist Party continues to rule, but Cuba’s hemispheric isolation is easing. In recent years Latin American politics have swung to the left, and Venezuela has become a new and important Cuban ally.
During the twentieth century few countries had more closely intertwined destinies than Cuba and the United States. In 1898 the United States helped win Cuba’s independence in a brief war with Spain, but promptly made that independence conditional. For sixty years no Cuban government was fully independent, and American business interests controlled much of the island’s human and material resources. Castro’s revolution reclaimed those assets and turned opposition to the influence of the United States into the organizing principle of Cuban political life. It is not only the fault of the United States that relations have never been re-established since 1960. On more than one occasion, Castro himself has spoiled a chance for improvement with some new initiative that was bound to anger his northern neighbor.
Like members of the same family, Cuba and the United States have left their imprint too deeply upon one another to ever live in complete isolation. To Americans, Cuba means not only the nineteenth-century war that made the United States a world power but also Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Guys and Dolls, Desi Arnaz, the Buena Vista Social Club, Minnie Minoso, Camilo Pascual, Tony Perez, Orlando Hernandez, and an ethnic minority that changed the face of the Southeast and wields considerable political clout. For Cubans, the United States means not only independence—first with North American help, and then in opposition to the region’s strongest power—but also the source of Cuba’s own national game, and the home of a huge expatriate community. Yet the chasm that has cost the two nations so dearly still divides them. I look forward to the day when Cubans and Americans will vacation freely in each other’s land, when Cuban families are reunited, and when a major league baseball team makes Havana its home. But all this still seems far off as 2007 draws to a close, and unlikely to happen at once, even after Fidel Castro, too, has finally left the scene.
