The President ended by reminding Andreyev that as young men, both of them had gone to war against the same enemy; that both of them had seen too many other young men like themselves die far from home, never to see their loved ones again, never to have families or know the love of their children. Now, so many years later, with both of them holding positions of great authority, did they not have a sacred obligation to the dead to try and prevent any more good men from sharing the same fate.
General Andreyev’s response was to say that he had heard the President’s words and they were true, “though it was a shame their conversation had never occurred.” He told the President he had no such fine words of his own to speak, and besides, he was a man who believed actions said more anyway. The General asked the President to do him the courtesy of staying close to his phone over the next day or so and then hung up, but not before telling Major Firsenko he hoped to see him soon, and then he could tell him all about how he came to be in America.
I don’t think President Kennedy had a finer hour than the one in which he talked General Alexander Andreyev into pulling all forty thousand Soviet troops out of the fight in Cuba. Later, on Tuesday afternoon, aerial reconnaissance photos of Camaguey showed a greater concentration of Soviet troops there, photos on Tuesday afternoon showed an even bigger concentration. Andreyev was doing as the President requested; in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the phone in the penthouse at the Mirabeau Hotel rang, it was Andreyev. “Please thank the President for his kind words and consideration for my men,” he told the CIA translator who picked up, “and tell him I have done my part, now I expect him to do the same.”
Thus the biggest roadblock to an invasion of Cuba was removed.
On Wednesday morning I received my marching orders from the Attorney General, Op Plan 365 was now a working blueprint for a military operation, one that would go forward in a matter of days It had been designed to be a bluff, but that bluff had been called, and folding was not a viable option.
The President scheduled a meeting with the JCS that afternoon as soon as he returned from the funeral for General Douglas MacArthur, who had passed away on Sunday; MacArthur was a personal hero of mine, and we sure could have used a man of his abilities on this day. At the meeting, the plan was gone over and approved; Theodore Sorenson was tasked with writing a speech announcing the start of military operations in Cuba. At noon on Thursday, I briefed the NSC on what came to be known as Operation Cuba Libre. The only major concern raised at this meeting was the Soviet Union and what its potential reaction would be once American bombs started falling. Director McCone mentioned reports of unusual troop movements or naval vessels being rerouted, while Khrushchev remained on vacation at Pitsunda, having been there throughout the crisis. There was plenty of blustering in the Soviet press over Cuba, with Pravda running daily denunciations of the “American Imperialists” who were responsible for all of Castro’s woes. TASS carried stories of “atrocities” and “war crimes” committed by American puppets against the Cuban people. They all agreed that, other than talk, all was quiet on the Soviet front.
We were wrong.
“This is the toughest part of this Goddamn job,” the President said after he signed the orders. “If anybody ever puts up a monument to me years down the road, I hope it’s not for what I’ve done today.”
I do remember what the Attorney General said to me as we were leaving the Oval Office. “If he hadn’t dropped dead two years ago at a Naples airport, I would’ve given Lucky Luciano a full pardon and welcomed him home; his secret phone line was the ace we needed to cash out Castro.”
The decision to go into to Cuba had come not a moment too soon; forces loyal to Castro retook the National Assembly building in Havana from Almeida’s men on Thursday; the Commander himself had not been heard on the radio since Tuesday. The refugee arriving in Florida that week told stories of round the clock firing squads, as neighbor turned on neighbor and pointed the finger at any and all suspected “traitors to the Revolution,” while in Miami, thousands of exiles demonstrated and demanded Kennedy intervene. The Huntley-Brinkley Report on Tuesday led with a huge demonstration in Miami where speaker after speaker demanded that Kennedy go in now; one sobbing woman who spoke was the wife of a naturalized Cuban-American who’d earned two Purple Hearts in Korea, killed near Mariel two days before.
Late on Thursday night, the phone rang in my basement office. It was Vance Harlow. “You boys do realize you’re going to be expected to come through on all those deals you made, you won’t be able to use the coup as an excuse to get out of returning some valuable property - not to mention a pardon for all crimes committed. This one is on you Colonel; hope you don’t regret it your deal with our friend in Louisiana.”
I told him petty deals were the last thing I on my mind at the moment.
“You call them petty deals, Colonel?” he replied before hanging up. “Well, petty deals are what it’s all about, you’ll see.”
I remained in my office all night, monitoring communications from the Southern Command so I would have a report ready for the President at 9:00 a.m.; I stepped outside to watch the sun come up on a gorgeous Friday morning, at the same time, a squadron of jets took off from McDill AFB in Florida, and entered Cuban air space minutes later.
John Compton
Washington D.C./Atlanta, Georgia
November 1963 - April 1964
If there was one thing for sure, it was that John F. Kennedy’s domestic agenda was dead in the water as of November 1963. I had taken a job on Capitol Hill earlier in the year to help get the Civil Rights Act passed and after Dr. King’s march on Washington at the end of the summer, not to mention Bull Conner’s shenanigans in Birmingham, there was real momentum as public opinion turned in favor of racial equality and the need for federal action to achieve it.
But we had been woefully naïve when it came to the southern bloc in Congress, the grandsons of the of the men who’d taken up arms for the Confederacy were determined to fight on without a hint of compromise, much less surrender. While the Civil Rights Act, which would have put a bullet through the head of Jim Crow, passed the House Judiciary Committee easily, it was promptly bottled up in the Rules Committee whose chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, was a man who’d dedicated every day his eighty years on this earth to reversing Appomattox. It had to pass the Rules Committee before the full House would take a vote, and hell would freeze over before Judge Smith let that happen.
I still consider myself a good son of Georgia, but like a lot of men of my generation, I didn’t grow up enduring the depression and then going off to fight in World War II only to come home and aspire to be Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon. The GI Bill was my ticket to a law degree and by the time I passed the bar I had developed the firm conviction that it was not right for me to have risked my life fighting Fascism abroad and then turn around and tolerate a police dictatorship for citizens of a darker complexion right here in America. So I became a rarest of species, a white Southerner who was willing to go into the courts of old Dixie and defend the victims of Jim Crow.
Although I never joined either organization formally, both the ACLU and the NAACP called on my services regularly to defend clients in criminal court whose plight they championed. I was most proud of having saved the life of Aaron Graham, a Jackson, Mississippi delta farmer railroaded for the murder of a white man who attempted on his own to forcibly take one of Graham’s mules as payment for a debt. The facts clearly pointed to self-defense. I was told point blank to my face by the local Sheriff that if I saved Graham from the electric chair, he’d hunt me down and put a bullet between my eyes; well, Graham got life in Parchman prison, which might well have been worse than the chair, and I’ve yet to see Sheriff Bennett Wilson.
But this kind of work was merely putting a band-aid on a gaping knife wound, something I realized after a few years; if things were going to change, it would mean electing men willing to make it happen. That’s why I signed up with the Hubert Humphrey
campaign in 1960, taking on any job they gave me. Humphrey had been a tireless warrior for civil rights since the ’48 Democratic convention, and the one man in America who I felt would really make a difference.
Thus I became one of the poor souls who went up against the Kennedy juggernaut in the West Virginia primary. I suppose I should have been happy that a fellow WWII vet was emerging as the frontrunner for the nomination, but the way old Papa Joe Kennedy spread the dough around in the valleys and hollows of West Virginia to sew up the state for his little boy, while a good man like Humphrey, whose father had been a druggist, got plowed under, left a really bad taste in my mouth. So much so, I seriously considered voting for Nixon in the fall, which wouldn’t have been a stretch since I’d voted for Eisenhower twice; if I hadn’t been swayed by Kennedy’s phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King when her husband was jailed in Georgia, I really might have voted for the Vice President.
Out of gratitude for my help in his campaign, Senator Humphrey offered to help get me appointed a Federal prosecutor back in Georgia, I was tempted to take the job, but I was no fan of Robert Kennedy, the man behind the smearing of Senator Humphrey as a “draft dodger” during the West Virginia primary. Instead, I went back to Georgia and resumed my practice, only now I was bringing suites against school districts to force them to desegregate.
Then in the summer of ’63, I got a call from the Senator with a different job offer; President Kennedy had just sent a civil rights bill up to the hill, and Humphrey was going to lead the fight for it in the Senate once it got there. “Johnny,” the Senator said from the other end of the line, “this is going to be one tough battle, and I’m going to need a man like you - a man who knows the southern justice system backwards and forwards - to help me get the job done. Your country needs you; I need you.”
I couldn’t say no and was put on Humphrey’s congressional staff, where my courtroom experience would be put to good use lobbying Congressman who might be sitting on the fence. “You’re a professional man, Johnny, and most members of Congress fool themselves into thinking they’re the same - they’ll listen to you.” It’s not boasting when I say I made a difference in a lot of cases. The President’s bill sailed through the House Judiciary committee in early November, before hitting the Rules Committee, where Howard Smith stood ready to turn it back like a Confederate sentry.
Then on November 22nd, that bastard Oswald shot at JFK in Dallas and things got worse. The Civil Rights Act had been a story below the fold before Dallas; it disappeared completely from print afterward. The confrontation with Cuba consumed all of Congress’s attention, as the country forgot about marches, protests, police dogs and church bombings. Christmas Day 1963 was the most depressing of my life, and I include the one in 1944 spent manning a machine gun in a forward position in the Philippines.
Our opponents in Congress made the most of the crisis, in the words of Senator Strom Thurmond, the old Dixiecrat demagogue himself, “In this hour of crisis, when foreign enemies have struck at the heart of our democracy right here on our sacred home soil, it is not the time to debate a piece of legislation championed by the kind of people who fired the bullets in Dallas. This so-called Civil Rights Act will tear this great nation apart in an hour of great peril; to even consider it on the floor of this body in any way is to give aid and comfort to those who wish us the greatest harm. If the President will not withdraw it, then we here in Congress must kill it forthwith.”
I am sad to say a lot of good men on Capitol Hill who were not in the same corner as Ole Strom began expressing similar sentiments, not because they were secret hard core segregationists - although many of their constituents were - but because they were cowards. We saw it happening and was galled by it, they had battled the Old South and its strangle-hold on the Senate and House for more than a decade with nothing to show for it but weak legislation borne of bitter compromise, and now it looked as if they wouldn’t even achieve so much as a symbolic victory.
It was a bitter blow to Dr. King and the good men and women in the Southern Christian Leadership Council who had taken the blows in places like Birmingham only to see it slip away because America took its eye off the ball.
I was especially bitter at Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department for abandoning the fight after November of ’63. I guess vengeance against Castro took precedence. There were meetings at the White House where the President told Senator Humphrey that the Civil Rights Act remained among his highest priorities, bur Congress had to do its part. The Attorney General told the Senator the same thing in a meeting just before New Year’s. Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, saw the President and his brother the same week and got the same message; Dr. King himself, journeyed up from Georgia the last week of January hoping to speak to the President, but all he got was fifteen minutes with the Attorney General where the good Reverend made a forceful plea that the moment had come to strike at Jim Crow and it could not be allowed to pass. Bobby Kennedy listened and agreed with Dr. King, but also pointed out that it was Congress who had the ball and that was where his attention should go.
Two hours after his meeting with the Attorney General, King and his associates were in Senator Humphrey’s office, and they were not happy. “Politicians often mistake rhetoric for action,” Dr. King told us. “And seldom do they understand while they prattle inside these marble halls, there are good people dying trying to achieve their basic rights as American citizens.” Dr. King then gave us a detailed account of arrests, beatings and four murders committed in the South against peaceful protesters since the beginning of the year. It was clear the man was not impressed with our efforts, and I did not blame him. Ralph Abernathy voiced the opinion that President Kennedy wanted to have it both ways; get the credit for sending a Civil Rights Bill to Congress, but just as happy to not have it pass in a Presidential election year so southern Democrats wouldn’t desert his re-election campaign in the fall.
It was at this low point after King returned to Georgia that Senator Humphrey decided to go to the office of his old Senate colleague, the Vice President to get some advice - and that’s the operative word, “advice.”
Despite how some historians portray it, this was not an act of desperation and Senator Humphrey did not go on his hands and knees seeking help from Lyndon Johnson. No, on the last Thursday in January, Senator Humphrey had a half hour meeting with Johnson in the Vice President’s office. The next morning, it was the Vice President who came over to the Senator’s office, and he came not with “advice,” as Humphrey requested, but with a plan, one he said guaranteed us success in breaking the logjam keeping the Civil Rights Act from getting passed.
This was the first time I had seen the Vice President up close and in person; I had glimpsed him passing in the halls or presiding over the Senate, the one duty given to the Vice President by the Constitution, and one that Johnson seldom bothered to fulfill.
The man I saw sitting at Senator Humphrey’s desk looked older and heavier than the one I remembered from the ’60 campaign. And if the rumors were true, we wouldn’t be seeing much of Johnson in ’64. There was no love lost between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy and that disdain extended to the tight circle around the President, the men who would run his re-election campaign. What the President’s real intentions were concerning the Vice President he would not say, beyond reiterating that there were no plans to change the Democratic ticket in 1964. Which wasn’t saying much; maybe it was a bad fit from the start as Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader during the Eisenhower years, looked painfully out of place among all those New Frontiersmen. That was before the Bobby Baker scandal broke, and though Johnson was not directly tied to his former aide’s illegal actions, the two men had been joined at the hip during the Vice President’s days in the Senate and when Congressional investigators had shown a light on how Baker made his money, it illuminated Johnson’s dealings as well. There was a particularly juicy story concerning an insurance policy kickback in the form of a nine-hundred dollar Magnavox TV which made for un
flattering comparisons with the crony scandals under Truman. Then there were investigative stories in Life magazine where they looked at how Johnson had become such a wealthy man on a Congressman’s salary, or more to the point, how Lady Bird had grown rich by investing in industries with heavy government regulation, starting with a pair of Texas radio stations.
All of this was embarrassing to the Vice President, to say the least; others would call it criminal. But Johnson’s troubles were driven out of the news by the events in Dallas. Those shots fired at JFK might have been one lucky break for Johnson, indeed Life was going to put him on the cover that week, but instead there was a photo of the President’s limo speeding to the hospital on the cover with Kennedy’s Close Call in big block letters above it. The Johnson story was inside, but it’s not why anyone bought the magazine.
But Johnson’s lucky break hadn’t stopped the trickle of rumors he would be dropped in ‘64, if anything, they’d increased during the winter while most of the capital was obsessed with the assassination attempt and a trail leading from Dallas to Havana. The JFK reelection committee was still hard at work behind closed doors, it was headed by the President’s brother in law, Stephen Smith, but everyone knew Bobby Kennedy really ran the show, and no crisis, no matter how grave, could ever distract the Kennedys from politics. You didn’t need a PHD to figure out where most of the dump Johnson rumors originated.
So it was a man staring at political oblivion who sat in Hubert Humphrey’s office that January day, but if it was true, we wouldn’t have known it by the performance we witnessed when Lyndon Johnson immediately went into a detailed account of how the Kennedy Administration had ignored his good advice and not cleared the legislative decks before sending the Civil Rights Act up to Congress - now all of Kennedy’s agenda, which included an across the board tax cut and a bill to provide health insurance for the elderly, were being held up by the Southern block as potential hostages against civil rights. “If they had only listened to me, we wouldn’t be up this particular shit creek right now, all they had to do was get those other bills disposed of and then go for Civil Rights, but all the smart boys around the President in the White House knew better than a man who’d spent most of his adult life on Capitol Hill.”
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 10