All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  After he’d made the case that everyone should always listen to Lyndon Johnson all the time, the Vice President said, “It would pass the House in a heartbeat if it could only get to the floor for a vote, but old Judge Smith’s got it locked up tighter than a hen’s ass in his Rules Committee and he’s never going to let that happen. If it ever gets to the Senate, Jim Eastland is going to drown it like a litter of barn kittens in his Judiciary Committee. And if by some miracle it gets voted out of Judiciary, then Dick Russell and Strom Thurmond will make sure the damn thing is filibustered till hell freezes over.”

  The answer to these problems he went on to say was to break them down and tackle each one at a time, all the while keeping a steady pressure on Congress to get this thing passed even if there was a major foreign crisis happening at the same time; there was no other way, Johnson explained except to push right on through and make the showdown with Castro work in our favor. “While all the country’s eyes are on Cuba and what we’re going to do to those bastards behind Dallas, we’re going pull off a legislative coup right here under the capitol dome. There are some in this town who would compare me to a cut dog, well a cut dog still has a tongue and can bark, and he still has teeth to bite with; all I need is a telephone. ”

  The first order of business was the House, and that meant moving the immovable Judge Smith and the only way to do it was by using a discharge petition - a resolution to discharge the control of the Act from the Rules Committee and bring it to the floor of the House for a vote. It required the signatures of a full majority of the House members, which meant the magic number needed was 218. Democrats had a majority of 257 out of 435, but getting to the necessary majority was complicated since 90 of them were from the South outright with others from Border States where the cause of racial equality had few supporters. This meant we could count on only 160 Democrats at best, the rest would have to come from Republicans, many of whom had sympathy for our cause, but far more of whom felt deference toward powerful committee chairman no matter how odious their politics or how out of touch they were with modern America.

  The Vice President was undaunted by these hard facts and proceeded to use Senator Humphrey’s phone for the next hour to make calls to various members of the House and the Senate. When he was done, Johnson assured us we’d have more than half the votes we’d need within 24 hours and then left. He proved to be true to his word as we had most of the Democrats needed by the end of the next day; over the next two weeks, Johnson returned to the Senator’s office, working the phone and making lists of those committed to our side. It was the House Republicans he was working on now, and we would need at least 50 of them to sign the discharge petition. How we came by them is a story that’s never been told.

  This much can be said, on or about the first day of February of 1964, I was given a list by the Vice President with the names of five Republican Congressman on it and told that I was to make an appointment with each one. “Johnny boy,” Johnson said with his hand squeezing my shoulder and his face leaning in close, “This is a job for a good lawyer who knows how to say the wrong thing in the right way; I can’t do it, neither can Hubert or John McCormack, but you can.” Then he went down the list, name by name, and told me what to convey to each Congressman.

  I had to call some offices multiple times before a face to face meeting was guaranteed between the men on the list and myself, they were all busy men, and I was a nobody on the staff of Senator Humphrey; the reason given for the meeting was for a brief opportunity to lobby the Representative on behalf of the Civil Rights Act and if any refused, William McCulloch, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a big supporter of the Civil Rights Act would call them and request they to meet with me as a favor; I want to say Congressman McCulloch did not know what I was going to say in such meetings or the business transacted, he was doing it because the Vice President of the United States told him it was all nothing more than routine lobbying for a cause we all believed in.

  Thusly I paid a visit to the offices of five Republican Congressman and told them in delicate, and carefully legal language, that they were in a position to render drastic and unique aid to the cause for racial equality in these United States, firstly they were to sign the proper resolution to discharge the Civil Rights Act from the Rules Committee, and secondly, they were to get commitments from at least ten other members of their Republican caucus to sign the same discharge petition in writing and deliver them to Congressman McCulloch’s office. None of these Congressmen had expressed any public willingness to vote for the Civil Rights Act before my meeting with them and all of them to a man politely and firmly declined my request when first asked. Most gave what to them were valid reasons for not giving their support: the legislation was too great an expansion of Federal power; they really didn’t like the part of the bill concerning “public accommodations,” that it might violate property rights; that it would be handing Kennedy a big victory in Congress in an election year; a majority of their constituents didn’t believe in telling Southerners how to live.

  I heard them out and then told them that if they could find a way to render “drastic and unique aid” to the cause of equality, then there might be a way for them to receive “drastic and unique aid” in return. And then depending on to whom I was speaking, I explained what that last part could entail. A California Congressman, who was the silent partner in an Orange County construction company in which he’d invested his life savings, and which was now facing bankruptcy, could possibly receive a low-interest loan from a Fort Worth, Texas bank; the Army Corp of Engineers could reverse themselves on a recently killed big project and drain a hundred acres of Mississippi bottom land, greatly benefiting Continental Agriculture, one of the largest employers in a Missouri Congressman’s district; First American Bank of Springfield, Illinois would be allowed to merge with Union Trust of Fort Wayne, Indiana, something which required SEC and Treasury department approval as it was a transaction that ran afoul of much regulation and red tape and would be to the great financial gain of Union Trust’s largest stockholder, the brother of an Indiana Congressman; a trash company owned by the wife of a Nevada Congressman could double its business if it was to get the contracts to haul the garbage from a half dozen military installations in Southern California and Arizona.

  The operative word I used there was “could” and never once did I use any language which might be construed as the proffering of a bribe or a quid pro quo…at least not in a court of law. If I felt any guilt about my actions, I just remembered the common good I was serving; the statute of limitations has long since expired, and most of the parties involved are long dead. Anyway my work paid off, by the end of February, we had nearly 50 Republicans committed to sign the discharge petition. Word evidently got around, I was contacted by at least three other Republicans, and to my surprise, two Democrats from Georgia and Arkansas, all offering to round up names for the discharge petition for the right price; I discussed it with the Vice President and he said not to push my luck and politely tell them no thank you. In the end, all it took was the mere threat of discharge petition being filed to get Judge Smith to strike his colors and admit defeat. He promptly allowed the bill to come up in the Rules Committee and then be sent on to the House for debate.

  The day after this happened, front page stories appeared in both the Washington Post and the Star detailing how Vice President Johnson, a man whose political fortunes could charitably be described as waning only a month before, had diligently been working behind the scenes to resurrect the Civil Rights Act and free it from the death grip of the Rules Committee. The story painted the Vice President as the hero who arrived at the last moment to save the hapless liberals from themselves. I was none too happy with the way Senator Humphrey was made to look so feckless that he had to beg his old Senate mentor to save the day.

  It was a hard pill to swallow and when I told Senator Humphrey call a press conference and tell his side of the story, he simply dismissed me with, �
�Johnny, that’s just the price of having Lyndon on your side, he gets the job done, but he has to get all the glory.”

  I was not the only one who was less than happy with the story. There was a late night meeting between the Kennedy brothers, where Bobby reportedly blew a gasket over the way LBJ had made an end run around them on the issue of civil rights, something which had been the bailiwick of Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice; he raged about the way Johnson had obligated them to Republicans in Congress and exposed them to extreme political risk. “The son of a bitch could get us all impeached and kicked out of office,” Bobby was later quoted as shouting at his brother. “He was buying Goddamn votes, which means you were buying Goddamn votes.” The President let this go on for awhile before he told his Attorney General, “Bobby, we got our hands full, and Lyndon got the damn bill moving again, it’s a victory and I’m not going to turn around and snatch defeat from its jaws.”

  Bobby Kennedy didn’t like it, but LBJ was officially put in charge of the effort to get the Civil Rights Act passed the next day. I think Johnson’s actions really impressed JFK, a man who valued success no matter how it was achieved. Just to keep on top of things, Lawrence O’Brien and his staff were brought in to “assist” the Vice President.

  Late in the evening of this same day, the phone rang in my Arlington, Virginia, apartment; I had been dozing, but came wide awake when the voice on the other end identified themselves as the White House operator and that I was to stand by. There was a click and a familiar voice with a Massachusetts accent came on the line. “Mr. Compton,” the President of the United States said, “I understand you are the man to talk to when it’s time to make a deal, and I hear you have been making them all over the capitol building. I would be pleased if you would enlighten me as to what you discussed with certain gentlemen of the House Republican caucus.”

  I don’t remember exact words of my stammered response to the President of the United States, only that I told him what he wanted to know. “Sounds reasonable enough,” he said when I was done, “I knew men who sold their votes far cheaper when I was in Congress.” The President thanked me for what I had done; he was sure the country would be better off in the long run. “But in the future, Mr. Compton, please do not go into anyone’s office on Capitol Hill with any kind of similar offer without letting Mr. O’Brien know about it first. And I would consider it a great courtesy if you make no mention of this phone call, or that you and I have discussed these matters, to anyone. Thank you and good night.” Then he hung up.

  I will note that no recording of this call has ever turned up and as we all know, JFK taped himself thoroughly when it was in his own best interests.

  A lot of heavy hitters came to Washington to lobby the full House when the Civil Rights Act came up for a full vote, the AFL-CIO, the National Council of Churches, and every major organization dedicated to advancing equal rights starting with NAACP. Dr. King himself stayed away, fearing he’d become too much of a lightning rod. All the hard work paid off as the House passed the Civil Rights Act on March 26, 1964, by a vote of 265-160, not an overwhelming margin as a number of northern Democrats and mid-western Republicans got cold feet at the last moment after putting their fingers to the political winds. It didn’t help when Harry Belafonte and some other activists held a rally on the Capital steps on the eve of the vote declaring their solidarity with the people of Cuba and all of “history’s victims of colonialism and militarism.” Didn’t these fools remember Joe McCarthy?

  And despite the good publicity Lyndon Johnson received for his efforts on behalf of the Civil Rights Act, it did not stop talk of him being replaced on the ticket. Days after the vote in the House, a transcript of testimony to Senate investigators by an insurance agent who’d been shaken down by the Vice President’s associates during the sale of a policy to Johnson was leaked to a number of reporters and columnists. Again, the crisis with Cuba softened the impact of the story, but it was damaging enough, and everyone knew the source of the leak had to be Bobby Kennedy.

  Nevertheless, the Act had cleared the House, but our victory was a classic case of going from the frying pan into the fire; on the day the Civil Rights Act was introduced in the Senate, a move by Senator Mansfield to use parliamentary procedure to keep it from the clutches of James Eastland and his Judiciary Committee failed because not enough Republicans would back him.

  “This so-called Civil Rights Act is as dead as day old road kill,” the Mississippi Senator said to a group of reporters in his Senate office on the day the bill came to his committee.

  “Looks like we have got our work cut out for us,” said the Vice President minutes later to a group of us in Senator Humphrey’s office.

  Lt. Colonel Martin Maddox

  April - May 1964

  “This is a fight not of our making, no American wanted this, but our hand was forced and we have no choice but to intervene in order to rescue a suffering people.” It is the line most people remember from the speech President Kennedy gave to the nation on Friday, April 10th, 1964, announcing our military intervention in Cuba. He would take some heat for those words in the years ahead.

  By the time the President spoke on Friday afternoon, over two dozen sorties had been flown over Cuba, most of them hitting anti-aircraft batteries and coastal artillery positions trained on potential landing sites. For the first couple of days, the fighters concentrated on targets around Havana, Mariel and Santiago, softening up the areas where the troops would be going in; although not all the targets were purely of military value - it took multiple tries before Radio Rebele (from which Castro was attempting to rally the Cuban people against “Yankee aggression”) was knocked off the air on Saturday. On the third day, the B-52’s began saturation bombings on military positions and transportation hubs in central Cuba. That was also the day we took our first casualty, Air Force Major Glenn Farris of Cleveland, Ohio, who’s RF-101 was shot down over Havana while on a reconnaissance mission.

  I took great satisfaction at the way Op Plan 365 had gone from a bluff to a fully functional operation. I lived in my basement office during those early days of Cuba Libre preparing briefings for the President, who was always asking pertinent and somewhat skeptical questions when I was done. “Castro will attempt to go to ground and fight it out,” was his comment after one of my more optimistic talks.

  The bombing campaign itself spawned contention behind the closed doors of the White House and the Pentagon right from the start, one which would eventually go public. The Chief of Staff for the Air Force was still General Curtis LeMay, a man not in the good graces of the Kennedy brothers to say the least, for it had been LeMay who had argued most vociferously (and some would say rudely) against the President’s plan to quarantine Cuba in October of ’62. The General had invoked Munich to the President’s face in arguing that Kennedy immediately take out the missile sites in an operation the President had likened to Pearl Harbor in reverse, which was not the best way to approach this President…to put it mildly.

  I delivered the Oval Office briefing on Sunday, April 12th, with LeMay and the rest of the Joint Chiefs in attendance where the plans for ground operations on Cuba were discussed. General LeMay sat quietly through my positive report on the success of the air campaign so far, and the number of targets taken out, but when I mentioned the concentration of Russian forces at Camaguey and the need for this area to remain off limits, LeMay spoke up. “Cuba is a theater of war where Americans are engaged,” he said to the President, “and those Russian personnel are enemy combatants and should be treated as such. It makes no sense to allow the enemy a safe haven on their home ground.” The General was not privy to the information we had, and the President did his best to explain the arrangement reached with Andreyev. LeMay would have none of it. “The only thing the President should have done when he was on the line with this Russian General was demanded his total surrender,” LeMay said to me with the sharpest glare I’ve ever received from a superior officer in my entire career. “We have
him outnumbered ten thousand to one; those Russians would be nothing but a grease spot within an hour if I could just give the order.” At this point the President reminded the General of the obvious, that the Kremlin had a say in this and Russian casualties were sure to provoke a military response from them in Europe or elsewhere; so far the only thing coming out of Moscow were fierce denunciations of American aggression which killed no one, but that could change.

  “Khrushchev hasn’t mobilized one single soldier since the first bomb fell on Havana, there’s nothing he can do, and he knows it. There are tons of munitions, artillery and ordinance there with those Russian personnel in Camaguey and it will all be handed over to the Cubans as soon as the first American GI hit’s the beach. A lot of good boys are going to die when we go into Cuba; some them could be saved if I’m allowed to act right now.” It was how LeMay laid it out, but the President would not budge, and no bombs would fall on Camaguey. There are many differing versions of the exchange between President Kennedy and the General on the second Sunday in April, and I’ll put my hand to God that is how it happened. Curtis LeMay was the man who reduced Tokyo and Yokohama to ashes and built the Strategic Air Command, and I would never dare cal him a liar, just certain other historians and hacks.