Thus the curtain was pulled back even further, revealing to me what had been going on in the shadows, but unlike Harmon Butler and his Operation Mongoose, Colonel Haig and the CCC impressed me as people who knew what they were doing. I’ll admit to being more than a little in awe of the length and breadth of the secret war we had been waging against the Communist government in Havana.
Just what my part would be was spelled out by the Attorney General when Colonel Haig was finished: “You are among the privileged few now, Colonel Maddox, the very few who can see the whole picture when it comes to our dealings with Cuba. That puts you in a unique position as we go forward after a lot of arduous hard work and sacrifice by some very brave men; unfortunately, the hardest labor is yet to come, and it will call for even greater courage. Castro will never give up those three men who maneuvered Oswald into that 6th story window from which he nearly blew the back of my brother’s head off, and we’re going to use that fact to put Fidel in a vise and squeeze for all it is worth. Tighter and tighter until it appears certain we are about to send in the B-52’s and level Havana, followed by the 82nd Airborne to mop up and hand his sorry fucking ass over to a group of good Cuban patriots who will promptly stand him in front of a firing squad. Khrushchev will bellow and bluster and make all sorts of threats how if we touch even one little hair on his bearded little friend’s head, the big bad Soviet bear will show its claws and bare its fangs, but we will pay them and their threats no attention. That is because Commander Almeida will make his move at the last moment to eliminate Fidel and then install a provisional government, telling his nation how he has acted out of true patriotism when deposing their revolutionary idol, saving them from domination by the Russians while preventing a bloody invasion and an imminent occupation by the colossus of the North. That is the cover we need to give Commander Almeida so he can act on our behalf.
“Your job, Colonel Maddox, will be to get us there, to take all the tools and intelligence at our disposal and hone them toward the goal of replacing the Castro brothers with a free government, one which will get the Soviets off that island for good. We will need from you a step by step plan which will appear to be taking us to war. But will in fact be the catalyst to finally rid this hemisphere of the of the Communist blight and free an oppressed people. You have just over 60 days to get the job done, as Commander Almeida has let it be known that April 1 is C for Coup Day. This is a chore my brother and I could not entrust to Langley or the Pentagon, despite all the best minds at their disposal, because we have learned the hard way, that if you really want to get something done in this town, you do it with your own people.”
These were marching orders if I had ever them; the end purpose of all the briefings and analysis of the past month and a half. The meeting ended, as best as I can remember with Harry Williams shaking my hand and saying he would see to it that I would be received as a hero in a free Cuba. “Before the 4th of July,” he said, “Havana by the 4th.”
I will admit to leaving the Justice Department building feeling like a Marine who’d just been ordered to take Tarawa from the Japanese, only I had been ordered to take an island the size of Pennsylvania. But it would not come to that; at least if the things went according to the plan I was charged with creating.
Only much later in the day, as I was driving home did the full import of what I was doing hit me: the USA, the Soviets, and Cuba; all of us again hurtling toward a confrontation and it was my job to thread the needle and make sure our side won without a lot of good men getting killed on a battlefield. At no time in Korea, when all of Chairman Mao’s legions were trying to kill me, did my hands shake - not once; but they started to shake right there behind the wheel of my Chevrolet Impala heading south on Rt. 1 on that Thursday in January of 1964.
The next morning I was back in my office in the White House basement, confident in my work and that I had everything to achieve the goal my superiors desired; I say this because it was the day I first heard the name Vance Harlow, the man who would show me the error of my thinking.
Wade Lawton Harbinson
Owner and President of Harbinson Oil and Drilling
Houston, Texas
November 1963 - April 1964
When I was a child, this was a free country, a place where a man could get as rich as a king through good honest hard work, do as he pleased with what was his own, and God help the thief or the bum who got the notion he somehow had a right to what his betters had earned. But that was before Roosevelt and his New Deal socialism, which set the Federal Government to perpetually picking the pockets of every good taxpaying American, starting right with the first buck they ever made.
Like I said, America was once a free country, and there is no damn good reason why it couldn’t be one again. All it would take is enough right thinking people to take the right kind of action, and in January of 1964, as far as I was concerned, that meant moving heaven and earth to get Barry M. Goldwater elected President of these United States of America. Not to be too modest, but I was in a position to make it happen since I was willing and able to write the kind of six-figure checks that get things done in politics. That’s because my Daddy was a wildcatter like Dad Joiner, one of those who got rich during the Depression when they hit gushers in the East Texas basin; when I was sixteen he put me in charge of a drilling crew of men, some of whom were triple my age, and told them no one would get paid unless I brought in a well in less than a week-made them sign a paper agreeing to such. That’s how he operated…and I did bring in a well and the crew got double for the job.
By the early 60’s the company my father had started in 1931 was annually ranked in the top ten biggest oil producers in the Lone Star State, that’s what I mean by good honest hard work. But in a country where Communist-led labor unions, in league with the Federal government, were threatening to take away the fruits of all that my father had built, a man like me could no longer afford to stay on the sidelines; I had been an admirer of Barry’s for years, especially when he would take on some of the weak sisters in the Eisenhower Administration who wanted to cut the budget for the Army, Navy and Air Force-like they didn‘t know who the hell kept the Russians from taking over. After Kennedy stole the election from Nixon and proved to be worse than FDR at Yalta for selling out free people, it was Barry Goldwater who spoke up and called a spade a spade in the loudest voice. He was my man from the moment he got up at the 1960 Republican convention and said it was time for conservatives to take back the Republican Party after Dick Nixon cut a deal with the welfare loving Nelson Rockefeller to get the nomination without a fight. Where I come from, we are not afraid to put our money where our mouths are; it’s why I cut some big checks to the AMA when they needed help fighting Kennedy’s Medicare scheme-nothing but socialized medicine by another name.
For that reason, I was among the fortunate few invited to a meeting in Chicago in December of 1962; there was about fifty or sixty of us at the Essex Motel, like-minded patriots who despised what was happening to our country and determined to do something about it. We were there at the invitation of three of the smartest men I’ve ever had the privilege to meet: Cliff White, Bill Rusher, and John Ashbrook, young men who had found a cause. We gathered around a big oak table, and after a prayer asking for God’s blessing on our enterprise, Cliff White got down to business, telling us this was to be an organization dedicated to the specific goal of nominating Senator Barry Goldwater at the Republican convention.
Then White showed us just how it was going to come to pass with graphs and charts delineating how Goldwater was going to get the 655 delegates needed to capture the prize. It was a real plan, worked out down to the finest detail, showing how dedicated and mobilized legions of Goldwater supporters would - starting at the precinct level - pack meetings and win elections to district and state conventions where delegates to the national conventions would be chosen. Of those 655 votes, 451 of them would come from the South and the West, where Goldwater was adored; that was not counting the 86 votes
to be won in the California primary on June 2, where Barry had a good chance of winning. The remaining delegates could easily be picked up in the Midwest and New England where there was a lot of strength for our guy, even if he wasn’t the first choice of most Republicans there. When I heard this from Cliff White in that conference room in Chicago, I knew in my gut for the first time we could do this thing, we could fundamentally change the direction of America. All it would take would be one election.
That, and a lot of money, because to pull this thing off, it was estimated the price would be somewhere north of three million; such was our faith in White, Rusher and Ashbrook, that we raised two hundred thousand right then and there, twenty-five thousand of it from my own pocket. This is the way it should be, good men of property in a common purpose, seeing what needs to be done and taking care of it.
There was one problem, though, our man wasn’t sure he wanted to be President, much less run for the job; I think it says something good about the man, that he didn’t burn with the desire for power, that he needed to be persuaded to throw his hat into the ring. I was among the many who flew to his office in Phoenix, Arizona early in 1963 to make sure he got the message: millions of his fellow Americans were not only counting on him, but he was their only hope to live in a truly free country again. I had met the Senator a few times earlier in my life when he addressed various businessmen’s associations in Houston, but this was the first time we’d ever had a meeting one on one - he actually remembered my name which pleased me no end.
“Wade, there must be a dozen good men who are a hell of a lot more qualified than me to be President,” I remember him saying, “you ought to be talking to one of them.”
I’d thought he might say something along these lines and was ready with an answer. “Senator, there is absolutely only one man whom millions of Americans are willing to move heaven and earth to put in the White House, and that man is Barry Goldwater. None of those other good men can say the same thing. Frankly, if you don‘t run, we‘ll draft you for President.”
The Senator laughed at this and said, “Well millions of Americans are frequently wrong; my only intention has been to run for re-election to the Senate next year, but if they’re willing to move heaven and earth, the least I can do is think about it.” In truth he was already running, having hired some heavy political hitters ostensibly for his Senate re-election campaign.
So we went about our work of getting everything in place to take over the Republican Party in ’64, and the Senator edged toward making an announcement early in the new year. It was my job to raise money, even though I refused to take any official title like treasurer; I was on the road a couple days a week over the summer and fall making personal calls on men and women who loved their country and wanted to make a difference; not once did I walk away empty handed. By November it was a sure thing the Senator would officially throw his hat into the ring come January, in time to run in the New Hampshire primary; Clif White’s master plan was well underway, he had no shortage of people willing to pack meetings and file as delegates for Goldwater. We paid no attention to the polls showing the Senator running behind Rockefeller and Nixon for the nomination and losing to Kennedy in the fall. They would all be taken down one at a time.
Then that Cuban stooge, Oswald, took a shot at the President on the streets of Dallas; my reaction was “Thank God,” but not for the reason most Americans said those words on that November day: I thanked the Lord we were at least spared the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, a liar, thief and cheat, not to mention a traitor to everything dear to all proud and true Texans. But the truth is the President’s popularity shot up to eighty percent in the Gallup poll after Dallas, and that is one sweetheart of a place to be when you’re an incumbent, and it’s less than a year before re-election. Seeing those kind of numbers drove home to all of us in the Goldwater effort how this campaign would not be a cake walk, and I won’t shade things by saying we didn’t feel not a little bit discouraged. Seeing those covers of Life and Newsweek in the first week of December with Kennedy flashing his toothy triumphant grin on them drove it home.
Then it came out in detail how Castro was behind the whole thing, and I could not for the life of me understand why Kennedy did not call up the Joint Chiefs and order them to start planning to make a landing in Havana. I mean, my God, these Communist sons of bitches have taken a shot at not only yourself, but your wife as well, and you don’t have the guts to draw on the bastards in return. Instead, we got investigations and arrest warrants and prattle about “all available avenues.” Those words alone sum up everything wrong with the Eastern Liberal Internationalist world-view, the kind of thinking which has allowed Communism to roll over a third of earth’s land surface in less than a lifetime. It made want to double down and raise the ante in our efforts to defeat every damn one of them.
I was in that Phoenix audience in January when Senator Goldwater made it official, he was running for President, and I was most gratified when he did not mince words when it came to Castro and Cuba, quite the contrast to those weak-kneed liberals in Washington. But I must be honest, what happened when the Senator went up to New Hampshire to take on Rockefeller, and the rest of the Eastern liberal establishment was a debacle for us; the political press took his remarks about Cuba and twisted them, so the Senator ended up looking like a lunatic. I mean saying, “I’d leave Castro to the tender mercies of the United States Marine Corp and get a good night’s sleep,” or “We have every right to enforce the Monroe Doctrine with the barrel of a gun, and if I were President, it would be a fact made crystal clear to the Soviets,” is exactly what Teddy Roosevelt would have said under similar circumstances. I guess recognizing what it means to have some guts is not taught in journalism classes anymore.
When I saw headlines coming out of New Hampshire proclaiming, GOLDWATER TO BOMB CUBA WITHOUT WARNING and ARIZONA SENATOR WOULD ELIMINATE SOCIAL SECURITY I knew we were in trouble, but there was little we in the Draft Goldwater committee could do, his New Hampshire operation was run by cronies and professionals from Arizona, who kept trying to explain what the Senator “really meant” when they what should have been telling the jackals in the press was that he meant every damn word he spoke. The results were worse than expected, on March 10th, the Senator managed to come in a weak second behind Henry Cabot Lodge, another big Eastern internationalist who had been Nixon’s running mate four year before; what made it worse was that Lodge wasn’t even an active candidate; he’d spent not one day in the Granite State, the whole time he was on the job in the embassy in South Vietnam, more than a few thousand miles away. The day after the voting, the pundits declared Goldwater’s prospects for the nomination virtually nil.
But they didn’t reckon with Clif White’s planning and the millions of us for whom this was not just a political candidacy, but a holy cause.
And to his credit, the Senator recognized this truth after New Hampshire; I think the defeat there made him realize just how much he wanted this thing after all, not just the Republican Presidential nomination, but the White House as well. Three days after the primary drubbing, he issued marching orders and merged the campaigns; no longer would the official campaign be run solely by the old hands from Arizona, but those of us in the Draft Committee came aboard in an official way, brought into the room and made a part of all decisions. Clif White was made Director of Operations, a nice title which let him share power with Dean Burch, the official campaign manager, and because I had proved to be such a success at raising money, the title of Deputy Director of Operations was created for me so as not to compete with the hack they had has Treasurer. We all never became one big happy family, in truth, some of those Arizona guys hate the ground we walk on to this very day, but we were all united in the purpose of electing Barry Goldwater President.
Our main opponent for the nomination was the luckless Tom Dewey’s successor as Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, a multi-millionaire who would turn the Republican Party into a hand maiden with the N
orthern Democrats on welfare and Negro equality. Rockefeller would be easy work; the man had already shot himself in the foot by divorcing his wife of thirty years and then marrying one of his secretaries, who’d left her husband and given up custody of her own children. The good Governor was an out and out womanizer - no other word for it - and all we had to do was point out his personal history to convince Republicans of what a disaster the man would be in a general election.
It was Kennedy we were already thinking about back in March right after having our asses kicked in New Hampshire, and nobody was kidding themselves as to what a bitch of a chore it would be to defeat him in November. Yet everyone at the March 15th meeting was absolutely sure that in the end, we were going to take him down on the issues, that when the hard working, over taxed and Communist-hating real Americans saw and heard our candidate, there would be no choice.
It was what we told ourselves, but I for one thought it might be necessary to find an edge.
The Kennedys, with their fine clothes and high style, might have fooled a lot of Americans, but I most certainly was not one of them. I took one gander at the old man, Joe Kennedy, who’d made a fortune bootlegging during Prohibition among other things, and knew the apple didn’t fall far from the tree; if there were any edge to be found against the Kennedy clan, I would have to shake the tree. My Daddy always said where there was money, there was at least a secret or two; the Kennedys had plenty of money…
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 4