The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy | Bryce Zabel & Harry Turtledove | WGAw #1119082

A Novel of Alternative History

LOG-LINE:  After John Kennedy survives the attack at Dealey Plaza unharmed, the resulting investigation sets events in motion that tear apart his administration.

WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: The Impeachment & Trial of John F. Kennedy
Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel

What if John Kennedy survived Dallas?

Historians love to speculate on this “what-if” scenario, wondering if magically the nation would have been spared the pain of Vietnam and even Watergate.  They have missed the point. 

If he’d gotten out of Dealey Plaza alive, John Kennedy might easily have suffered the same fate as his arch-nemesis Richard Nixon -- humiliation and removal from office.

With the eyes of the world on the United States and the media in a frenzy, with JFK himself alive and not a martyr, an immediate investigation would have been launched into who might have been interested in killing our popular American President. And the Kennedy brothers would have been hell-bent to ensure their political as well as their physical survival.

Starting with the Secret Service, the blame-game would have taken on a life of its own, forcing explosive revelations in mere months that have instead dribbled out over decades. Kennedy’s reckless conduct would have become public: the lies about his medical condition, contacts with mobsters, election money-laundering, numerous attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and even the hundreds of high-risk sexual encounters that endangered Kennedy’s safety and, by extension, our country’s security.

This alternative history novel covers the period from the November 22, 1963 near-miss assassination attempt of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas through the events of early 1966 when the fate of John F. Kennedy was in the hands of 100 United States Senators worried about their own careers in the next election.

The Story Behind The Story

We want to thank you for dropping in on this website. We're Harry Turtledove and Bryce Zabel, a couple of writers who met back in 1999 -- strange as this may seem -- at an awards ceremony where our middle-school kids were each finalists in a WorldCon science-fiction writing contest!

We both love our history bent and twisted whenever possible. We've each had a chance to do some bending and twisting in our two different business worlds -- publishing (Turtledove, Worldwar) and TV and film (Zabel, Dark Skies). So even though we've begun this alt-history project in book form, we hope to tell the story in film eventually as well.

After meeting through our talented kids, this particular project started over lunch at Korean BBQ in the LA valley. We began to imagine a world where, rather than Watergate exploding the world of journalism and politics as it did in our timeline, the engine is the JFK meltdown from a decade earlier. Think of this alternative history as the First Wave of the New Journalism -- basically, All The President’s Men for the Kennedy generation. Since we live in bitter and partisan times, it is also worth noting that both of us have been life-long Democrats. We do this because we think it's an enormously fascinating story, not because we hate JFK. We don't.

The John Kennedy of this alternative history is still an enormously likable man -- much like Bill Clinton -- skilled in politics, charming in person, intelligent, and deeply flawed as a human being. Unlike Bill Clinton, however, we think a strong case can be made that Kennedy's transgressions would eventually have been seen by a majority of Americans as having risen to the level of impeachable offenses. And, like Richard Nixon in our timeline, John Kennedy -- having survived the bullets of assassins in Dallas -- might very well have been forced to leave office before his second term was finished.

Introduction by Authors

NOTE: The following introduction is assumed to be written from the point-of-view of Harry Turtledove and Bryce Zabel, writing from today's date in the alternative reality where President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963.

    Had John F. Kennedy died from the assassin’s bullets that were fired at him on November 22, 1963, chances are his reputation today would still burn brightly.  Yet in a marvelous instant of anticipation by Secret Service agent Clinton J. Hill and fast reaction by fellow agent and driver William R. Greer, the President of the United States lived. Looking back, it seems that surviving Dallas was the easy part.

    The wrenching agony of President Kennedy’s impeachment and trial is less vivid today.  For many Americans, it is only something they have read about in history books.  For those of us who lived through the cold winter of 1966, however, the memories, brought to the surface by a phrase or a photo, can be as stark and vivid today as they were forty-one years ago.  Kennedy’s fall from grace was monumental exactly because we as a people placed him on such a high pedestal.

    John Kennedy cheated death in Dallas only to face a fate that for him might have been even worse – the public revelation of his private double life.  Learning the truth was just as difficult for many Americans.  We loved him when we knew him less well.  Being forced to face the whole picture – for Kennedy and for the nation – was something no one ultimately was prepared for, yet we all took the journey together.

    Maybe the sense of denial, anger and tragedy which hung over those days leading up to March 17, 1966 made us all just wish that it had never happened, that it would just go away.  Some of us may have secretly wished that our charismatic and vigorous leader died in Dallas, leaving only cherished memories.

CHAPTER 1: THE MIRROR CRACKS (Part 1)

Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel  

    Nobody ever took a job at the Washington Ledger intending to get famous.  Walter Lippmann didn't start here.  Neither did Walter Winchell, or even Walter Cronkite.  You took a job at the Ledger for two basic reasons:  you knew something-–or thought you knew something-–about the newspaper game, and nobody else in town wanted to hire you.  As consolation, D.C. was still the best news beat in America.

    First in boos, first in shoes, last in the American League wasn't just about the Senators.  With better-heeled competition from the Post and the Star-News, with TV news starting to cut into every paper's circulation, the Ledger was hurting.  Get famous?  By November 1963, you were happy if your paycheck cleared on the first and the fifteenth.

    Chuck Duncan was the Ledger's White House correspondent.  That was what they called him, but around the time Lee Harvey Oswald shot Governor Connally and Special Agent Hill, Duncan was in the paper’s Washington, D.C. newsroom drinking strong coffee and eating an already stale morning doughnut.  The big boys were all in Dallas, probably having BBQ ribs for lunch.  Not Duncan; he had no travel budget to get there.  Whatever happened in Texas, the paper would pick it up off the wire services.  That’s what his desk editor, Andy Callahan, had told him last week.  You could tell it made Callahan sad to say so, but that was the business. 

    So, today, sitting at his desk during a presidential trip, Duncan fumed.  He would have enjoyed writing on the road just for the change of pace.  And he enjoyed hanging out with the competition, seeing how they worked, and it pained him to get stuck here. 

E. Howard Hunt: Voice from the Grave Blames LBJ

We seem to have picked an interesting week to start telling the story of WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL OF JOHN F. KENNEDY. Just when you think it's safe to dip your toes in the Kennedy conspiracy, along comes radical new information from someone with spy cred and seemingly lots of inside knowledge about the facts...

It's actually a new "old" story getting significantly more play thanks to Rolling Stone. Basically, E. Howard Hunt, the CIA agent who organized the Watergate break-in, says in a new memoir published last month, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, that the man behind it all may, incredibly, have been Kennedy's vice-president Lyndon Johnson. This idea has existed on the radical fringe of JFK conspiracy theory almost forever, going even past Oliver Stone's "JFK."

Recently, it gained new currency in January during the run-up to the publishing of this book which, for the record, includes Hunt vehemently denying he had anything to do with the JFK assassination. The chapter, however, reads a little bit like OJ's book, If I Did It.

In any case, there is an excellent and comprehensive article about this in the just-out (April 5) Rolling Stone, "The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt" by Erik Hedegaard. But it's more than a re-tread or synopsis of the book. Because the details of the JFK assassination come from Hunt's son and they were given to him on several occasions, and in writing. And they are in direct conflict with what Hunt says about his own involvement in the book itself. In both cases, though, Hunt's speculation about how it might have happened seems consistent with the point of divergence being his own involvement.

CHAPTER 1: THE MIRROR CRACKS (Part 2)

    Lefkowitz was still standing by the teletype when Duncan returned, out of breath.  The clattering 1955 AP wireless receiver seemed to be the only place to get anything out of Dallas on this story.  No--by this time, Walter Cronkite was broadcasting on CBS.  But a lot of what he was reading was AP copy anyway.  TV guys can’t handle a story like this, Duncan thought, even as some Dallas reporter named Dan came on the screen talking to Cronkite.

    Lefkowitz approached Duncan, waving a piece of wire copy.  “Your lead’s back to Connally.  He’s dead.”  Duncan thought, My lead always was Connally, but didn’t play journalism professor about it.

    He walked over to his desk, fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and wrote from his notes:  Governor John Connally of Texas was assassinated in Dallas this afternoon.  Connally is the first governor ever to be murdered while in office.  Also slain was Secret Service agent Clinton J. Hill.  The Secret Service was present because Connally was riding in a motorcade with President Kennedy.  The President was not injured in the attack on Connally.

    As Duncan finished, he felt Lefkowitz’s eyes on him. “What?”  Duncan said.  This city reporter was one of those guys who read over your shoulder.  They were as bad as kibitzers at a poker game.  Worse.

    Lefkowitz held out his hand.  “I’ll look it over for you.”  He watched Duncan’s face redden.  “Come on, Chuck, everybody needs another set of eyes on the big ones.”  Duncan, his own words coming back to bite him, handed over his copy to Lefkowitz.

Articles of Impeachment: If Nixon and Clinton, Why Not Bush and JFK?

After Chuck Hagel let loose the "I" word on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, people are buzzing about the possible impeachment of that other George, George Bush. After Andrew Johnson actually got himself impeached back in 1868, it took another century before Richard Nixon resigned to avoid the same fate in 1974. Now we look at it as just another political weapon to use against a vulnerable incumbent -- going after Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2007.

There's no question impeachment would have been a very steep hill to climb in the case of John Kennedy. He was still quite popular and he had a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. But coming up with possible articles of impeachment wouldn't have been that difficult. We know, because we've actually done it.

In both the Nixon and Clinton cases, the "Articles of Impeachment" were drawn up and, in reading them, we certainly noticed there is a lot of overlap and similarity in form. Like filling in a contract template, we've used those examples to write the Articles of Impeachment for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We plan to modify and finalize them as the novel is completed, but our working draft reads like this.

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT, JFK.pdf

Because many people still think of impeachment as the end result and not part of the process, a basic fact set helps to set this novel's world in a solid alternative-reality.