Surrounded by Enemies Read online

  Surrounded by Enemies

  What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?

  Bryce Zabel

  AN ALT.WORLDSTM BOOK

  Copyright © 2013 by Bryce Zabel

  Publish Green

  212 3rd Ave North, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401

  612.455.2293

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or used fictitiously.

  ALT.WORLDSTM is a trademark of Stellar Productions, Inc. that refers to creative works of alternative history.

  Cover art and Top Story images by Lynda Karr Design.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

  "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference."

  Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1916

  ISBN: 978-1-62652-332-6

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Seven Days in November

  November 22, 1963 - November 28, 1963

  From the Editors of Top Story

  "The Day JFK Dodged a Bullet"

  Dealey Plaza

  Hickory Hill

  Parkland Memorial

  Love Field

  Dallas Police Department

  Andrews Air Force Base

  First Brothers

  The Morning After

  Ground Truth in Dallas

  The Fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  On the Record

  Thanking God

  Johnson Agonizes

  Change of Plans

  A Tale of Two Funerals

  Another Profile in Courage

  Chapter 2: Battle Lines Being Drawn

  November 28, 1963 - December 31, 1963

  Giving Thanks

  Web of Suspicion

  Lee Harvey Oswald

  The Soviet Union

  Cuba

  Organized Crime

  Joint Chiefs of Staff

  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

  Secret Service

  Vice President Lyndon Johnson

  All Or Some Of The Above

  Fight for Jurisdiction

  The Three Bad Options

  Sounds of Silence

  The Warren Omission

  Oswald Casts a Shadow

  Christmas Truce

  Chapter 3: An Election With Consequences

  January 1, 1964 - December 31, 1964

  A Family Retreat

  State of Whose Union?

  Life in a Foxhole

  To Run or Not to Run?

  Parallel Tracks

  Back Channels

  Till There Was You

  The Primary Thing

  Rebalancing the Ticket

  The State of Texas vs. Lee Harvey Oswald

  Opening Arguments

  Nowhere to Hide

  A Plea to Leave

  Stroke of Midnight

  Choices and Echoes

  All the Way With LBJ

  Cursed

  Split Decisions

  Tiebreaker

  Distant Thunder

  General Anxiety

  The Arguments

  Now What?

  Chapter 4: Proxy Wars

  January 1, 1965 - August 23, 1965

  Second Chances

  Night Vision

  Moving On

  Shadow Voices

  Whispers in the Dark

  Justice Delayed

  Flashpoints

  Strangelove Leaks

  Assassination Theater

  Changing the Subject

  Mission to Moscow

  The Secret Life of the President

  The Debate

  The Final Hours

  The Top Story at Top Story

  Better Late Than Never

  Ground Zero

  The Day After

  Blowback

  Catch-25

  A Tale of Two Committees

  Chapter 5: Impeachment and Trial

  August 23, 1965 - February 25, 1966

  The War Not at Home

  Impeachment

  The People’s Grand Jury

  House Politics

  Blackout

  Tale of the Tapes

  The Case for Impeachment

  Article One: Abuse of Power

  Article Two: Obstruction of Justice

  Article Three: Contempt of Congress

  Coal for Christmas

  Failure to Launch

  Go Away, LBJ

  Trial

  The Winter of Our Discontent

  The Century Club

  Dallas on Trial Again

  New York Stake

  Clean-Slaters

  The End

  The Long Count

  Fall from Grace

  Chapter 6: Life After

  Closing the Book

  Justice Swerved

  Lyndon Baines Johnson

  The Conspirators

  David Powers

  Aftermath

  The Ex-President and the Ex-First Lady

  Politics Continue

  End of an Era

  Whodunit?

  Strangelove’s Identity Revealed

  Another Torch Is Passed

  The Unmaking of the President

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Coming Up from alt.Worlds

  The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie —deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

  President John F. Kennedy

  Commencement Address at Yale University

  June 11, 1962

  Foreword

  By Harry Turtledove

  When I was a kid, I noticed that my parents — and everyone else of their generation — could (and, at the slightest excuse, would) tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I thought that was pretty strange... until November 22, 1963.

  I was a high school sophomore that November. It was not quite half past eleven in the morning. I was walking from Spanish to PE when a guy who’d snuck a transistor radio into school (for those too young to remember them, tiny transistor radios were what the benighted ’60s had to use instead of iPods) told me John Kennedy had been shot. I said the first thing that popped into my head: “You’re crazy.” But maybe a minute later, I heard somebody coming the other way say the same thing. I started to think Frank wasn’t crazy — I only wished he were. I turned out to be right about that, worse luck.

  Anybody my age can tell you a story like that. As with my folks’ generation all those years before, it won’t take much to get people my age to tell you what they were doing when they heard Kennedy was killed.

  Eventually, I had three kids of my own. For a long time, they didn’t understand how every so often my mind would slip back to that dark day in fall, 1963. Then September 11, 2001 rolled around. Two of them were in high school at the time, the youngest still in middle school. Now they get it, and their kids (I just had my first grandchild) will wonder what they’re going on about... till those kids have their own black day on the calendar. And I’m afraid they will. Such horrible things do happen, however much we wish they wouldn’t.

  Even after half a century, we remember —
or, if we aren’t old enough to remember, we think about — John Kennedy’s brief presidency with fondness. Those of us with white beards (guilty) recall that we were young then, and had seen and been through a lot less sorrow. We remember the Kennedys’ own youth, their vigor, their flair, their style.

  And we remember their beauty. Has a more photogenic couple with prettier children ever graced the White House? I don’t think so. One of the reasons JFK won the election in 1960 is quite simply that he was better-looking than Richard Nixon. Not a high standard to meet, I know, but he flew high over the bar.

  Because we remember the times and the handsome martyred man with such affection, to this day we don’t want to hear anything bad about him. We didn’t hear much bad about him then. The press was different in those days, and cozied up to people in power. Reporters didn’t try to catch them with their pants down; they mostly didn’t write or say anything when they did catch them like that.

  All of which went a long way toward keeping John Kennedy’s reputation burnished bright. By what’s come out since his death, he made later philanderers like Bill Clinton seem pikers by comparison. He would and did screw anything that moved, and gave it an experimental shake to see if he could get it moving in case it didn’t. Some of the ladies of his intimate acquaintance had other intimate acquaintances who could easily have embarrassed or wanted to kill the President because he was boffing their women.

  He and his brother Bobby, the attorney general, weren’t always the Constitution’s best friends either. Bobby, let it not be forgotten, was appointed by Joe McCarthy as assistant counsel for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1951. Bobby had also served as John’s campaign manager in 1960. He was, perhaps, not completely objective about everything he did in the attorney general’s office. After all these years, we still remember the Kennedys as ruthless, too.

  So we could wonder whether John Kennedy’s reputation shines so bright precisely because he was assassinated so early in his presidency. We could wonder what it would look like had he lived past that day in Dallas, campaigned for reelection in 1964, and gone on to a second term with all that added time for his excesses to become visible to the power brokers in Washington and to the American people as a whole.

  We could, and Bryce Zabel has. That’s what Surrounded by Enemies is all about. It’s an alarmingly believable look at what might have happened had Lee Harvey Oswald missed. Some of you will know that I’ve written a lot of alternate history, which is the usual name for this what-might-have-been kind of story. One of the things about which you need to warn readers, and especially readers unfamiliar with this sort of story, is that people don’t write them to tell you what would have come next had the world turned left instead of right. By the nature of things, what would have come next is unknowable unless you happen to be God. People write alternate histories for two main reasons. One is to tell you what plausibly could have come next in a world after a particular kind of change. The other, and closely related to the first, is to make you think in a whole new way about what did come next. Imagine alternate history as a funhouse mirror, squeezing this and stretching that, and giving you a different picture of the way things did work and all the myriad way they might have.

  Plausible development, building from what we know about what really did go on, and a whacking good story are the two things you can reasonably expect from a good alternate history. Surrounded by Enemies delivers on both, big-time. So hold on to your hats, folks. You’re in for quite a ride.

  Harry Turtledove

  Chatsworth, California

  June 7, 2013

  ✪

  Preface

  By Richard M. Dolan

  My first encounter with Bryce Zabel occurred years before I met him. That, of course, was when I followed his TV show, Dark Skies, along with millions of other Americans, back in 1996 and 1997. It was, and remains, a great moment in American television history.

  Indeed, it was a show that beautifully integrated two of America's most classic cover-ups: JFK and UFOs. What made it work was a combination of courageous historical imagination, reasoned analysis, and a great script. Bryce, along with his co-producer Brent Friedman, had the guts and moxie to envision a plausible scenario that connected two of the biggest secrets of our era.

  A few years ago, I was fortunate to work with Bryce on one of the great intellectual adventures of both our lives: a vision of the future in which the UFO reality is openly acknowledged. This was the book, A.D. After Disclosure. It wasn't easy to undertake this. How, we wondered, might such secrecy even end, considering that it appears to be so deeply entrenched within the black budget, national security apparatus in which a supine and subservient corporate media does nothing to expose it, and in which the intelligence community has placed key individuals as gatekeepers?

  Next, we asked, after such a seemingly insurmountable obstacle has been cleared, how would such a revelation transform our world? That was when our real adventure began. Throwing as much objectivity, imagination, and courage as we could muster into the mix, we came to understand that the end of such a secret would affect everything: politics, economy and finance, culture, religion, science, energy, infrastructure and ultimately, global geopolitics. It was a sobering exercise, one that made it easy for us to understand why such secrecy might have begun all those years ago, and why certain groups would want it to continue indefinitely. For the changes brought about would be like a strong wind, blowing away so many lies, so much detritus.

  I learned that one of Bryce's many gifts as a writing partner was his ability to see things. That is, to see them concretely, vividly, and to have real human beings react to the events we envisioned in our book. This came from his years of experience as a screenwriter. After all, if you can't portray people acting and reacting to complex situations realistically, you have no business being in the game. One of his key contributions to A.D., in my view, was his ability to make the reader experience "disclosure," to see it and feel it, almost viscerally.

  Now, Bryce Zabel has done it again, with an extraordinary and thought-provoking scenario. What if President Kennedy had survived Dallas?

  Many people have wondered how our world might have been different had JFK not been assassinated. Writers and pundits have occasionally tried their hand at this, usually arriving at some feel-good conclusion, such as Kennedy helping America to exit the Vietnam debacle sooner, or taking on the Federal Reserve, or even ending UFO secrecy. Who knows, perhaps such things could have happened.

  But Bryce Zabel asks a much more interesting question, one with greater realism and nuance. For John F. Kennedy had powerful enemies. After all, this was why he was assassinated to begin with. Eliminating such nefarious elements from an analysis of his presidency and assassination, as most of these other alternative what ifs do, amounts to little more than an exercise in fantasy. JFK was taken out precisely because he turned out to be a threat to powerful interests on a full spectrum of issues. Indeed, he seems to have been the last President in American history who tried to act as President on behalf of The People, not simply a shadowy elite that has sought to continue and strengthen its chokehold over the global political and financial system.