All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  I still to this day think we should have pushed and got the Act before the Senate in May of ’64; still bitterly regret not doing so.

  Lt. Colonel Martin Maddox

  June 1964

  On the evening of June 5th, 1964, the Attorney General and I, accompanied by a pair of United States Federal Marshalls went to one of Georgetown’s finer French restaurants, not to eat dinner, but to wait for a regular Friday night customer, Sergei Ivanov, whose official title was Special Attaché to the Soviet Ambassador, but in reality, he was Colonel Sergei Ivanov, the highest ranking KGB official in the country and a man whose secret cables were read by members of the Politburo daily. Traditionally the top KGB man in any country is the Kremlin’s true eyes and ears, while the diplomats are nothing more than ventriloquist dummies.

  We arrived early as per our plan, worked out in the Bobby Kennedy’s office earlier in the day. The two of us retired to a storeroom in the back while the pair of Marshalls took a seat right next to Ivanov’s regular table in the corner. I was not in uniform, as per the Attorney General’s request, such attire might have attracted attention and stayed in the minds of other diners.

  The Kenney brothers were going outside of channels once again on the day when the President and the NSC had seriously discussed a first strike against the Warsaw Pact.

  The Attorney General and I passed the time waiting by discussing the Red Sox’s poor prospects for that year; I’d begun to fear we had picked the one Friday night that Ivanov would be a no show when one of the Marshalls appeared and informed us he was just being seated. I followed the Marshall back to the dining room and took great satisfaction at the look of surprise on the KGB Colonel’s face when I sat down across from him and introduced myself, flashing my driver’s license at the same time just to prove I had put one over on a top agent of the world’s most secretive organization. Robert Kennedy assured me Ivanov would know who I was since, “they make it their business to know the names of everyone on the NSC staff, your service records, school, marital status and number of children.” I didn’t like it much that a KGB officer would know my wife’s name, but couldn’t do much about it either.

  Ivanov, a tall, almost cadaverous man with a thin mustache, looked at my license and then asked in heavily accented English why a member of the NSC would interrupt his dinner. I politely asked if he would not mind accompanying me to a back room where a gentleman wanted to have a brief word with him; afterward he would be free to return and enjoy the fine meal he must have been looking forward to all day.

  I had a suspicion he might not go for it, figuring it might be a ruse to kidnap a top enemy agent and pump him for he was worth with the world situation being what it was at the time. It was a fear for nothing, for less than a minute later the head of the KGB in the United States was shaking hands with the President’s brother in a back room whose shelves were packed with flour and cooking oil, while air smelt faintly of vinegar.

  I stepped outside as part of the plan; Robert Kennedy intentionally didn’t want anyone listening in on this conversation; I believe so that no American could later contradict his version of what was said for the historical record.

  Why was it necessary for me to be there? “You’re an insider,” Robert Kennedy explained earlier, “I couldn’t send a Marshall, nor a CIA or FBI man, Ivanov would never have gone with any of them, but you work under the same roof as the President, and Ivanov knows it.”

  Despite what some “historians” have alleged, I believe Robert Kennedy when he says he gave Ivanov a message from his brother proposing a face to face meeting between the President and Chairman Khrushchev as soon as it could be arranged in a place of mutual agreement. Ivanov, it must be emphasized, had absolutely no authority to negotiate anything; he was merely an expedient conduit to the Kremlin. Ivanov played his part to perfection, listening politely to the Attorney General, making few comments, then shaking Robert Kennedy’s hand before returning to the Soviet Embassy only 45 minutes after leaving for what he must have thought would be a leisurely evening of fine dining. By the time we walked through the doors of the West Wing at 8:30 p.m., an urgent cable was already on its way to Moscow.

  “This is one hell of a roll of the dice,” John F. Kennedy said after his brother reported on his meeting with Ivanov. The President boldly predicted we would get a positive response from the Kremlin in no more than 24 hours.

  Only much later did President Kennedy learn how close he came to being made to look the fool.

  A complete account of the meeting between Ivanov and Robert F. Kennedy was in the hands of KGB Chief Semichastny by midnight Washington time, which was just after sunrise in Moscow on a Saturday morning. All later accounts agree on what happened next, telephone calls were made and the major movers among the secret junta running the Soviet Union (Brezhnev, Suzlov, Shelepin) were made aware that the American President was requesting a face to face meeting with the man who the rest of the world thought was still in charge of the world’s second super-power, Nikita Khrushchev; a man who had been under house arrest for nearly 3 months. The Soviet Junta in the early spring of ’64 had somehow run the largest empire in history from the shadows and had not been found out, no small accomplishment.

  Now in the first week of June, their bluff was being called and their run of luck was all but played out. Upon hearing of Kennedy’s request for a summit, the immediate consensus was for a full meeting of the Politburo to discuss the matter; one was set for 11:00 a.m. local time. That perhaps was the only thing these men agreed upon, for in the days and weeks since seizing power, many of the alliances of convenience had frayed to the point of pulling apart. When they gathered around a conference table at the appointed hour inside the Kremlin, the hardliners, led by Suzlov, made it plain that they wanted to reject Kennedy’s request out of hand. “The Americans have lost their nerve,” Suzlov asserted, “they posture like a bully, but have no stomach for a real fight against a real foe. It’s a fear we must exploit here and now for our own advantage. Let’s not jump at their first offer. Instead we hold out before going to the negotiating table, let them become even more fearful, so that in a week or so, they will come hat in hand, willing to sign anything that assures them a precious peace. We must instruct Dobrynin to go to the White House this day and tell Kennedy we are not interested in any talks.”

  The hard line Communist’s words swayed the room and might have carried the day if others had not already been making plans. Leonid Brezhnev, the original instigator of the palace coup against Khrushchev, had for weeks believed the Soviet position was unsustainable: the Red Army was taking tremendous casualties in Iran despite an intense bombing campaign and unrest in Eastern Europe that was threatening to bubble to the surface at any time. The one thing the Soviets feared above all else was the loss of control among their European satellites. Though he was in the minority, Brezhnev had found one potentially powerful ally in the Defense Minister Malinovsky, who was being quietly made the scapegoat for the failures in Iran in whispered conversations by other junta members. Marshall Malinovsky had gotten wind to this talk, probably from Brezhnev himself, and was infuriated at being blamed for simply following the wishes of his fellow conspirators; it should be said that Malinovsky was looking at an inglorious exile to Siberia at best for his supposed incompetence, far worse if his former allies were not in a merciful mood.

  By all later accounts, the Kremlin meeting of junta had droned on for about an hour before Brezhnev and a few others excused themselves from the deliberations, promising to return momentarily. No sooner were they gone before the door to the conference room was kicked open, and a squad of Soviet paratroopers entered the room, Kalishnakovs in hand. There was a brief argument followed by a few seconds of gunfire which left a half dozen men dead-Shelepin and Semichastny among them, but not Suzlov, who was taken into custody. When Leonid Brezhnev re-entered the room a few minutes later, he was the undisputed leader of the junta and for the moment, the most powerful man in the Soviet Union.

/>   Brezhnev did not waste any time, accompanied by a group of loyalists, which included the ultimate survivor, Andrei Gromyko, but also Khrushchev’s longtime friend, Anastas Mikoyan, he went to the dacha where the Chairman had been held under house arrest for so many weeks and offered the old man a deal whereby his imprisonment would end, and he would resume his public role as leader of the Soviet Union, albeit under the strict supervision of the surviving members of the junta. Khrushchev reportedly told his old comrade to go to hell; he wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of the whole thing and simply retire. Besides, he proclaimed, he was an old man and tired, his days of usefulness were at an end. Brezhnev appealed to his patriotism, saying that in the present crisis, his country needed him.

  “You want me come and clean up the mess you have made,” Khrushchev declared, “I have too much pride that I would foul my hands with another man’s shit.” It was a stinging rebuke, but the old man did not stick to his guns, for his friend Mikoyan appealed to that very pride, saying that if his career ended there and then, history would record that for all his hard work and sacrifice on behalf of the Soviet Union and its people, he had simply been kicked aside in the end by men lesser than himself.

  At 5:00 p.m. Moscow time on that June Saturday, Nikita Khrushchev road back through the gates of the Kremlin and strode into his office; two hours later, Sergei Ivanov received a cable from the Chairman himself, ordering him to immediately inform the American Attorney General that the Soviet leader was prepared to meet with President Kennedy in New Delhi, India in five day’s time to discuss the world situation.

  I got the word from the Attorney General just after 3:00 p.m., Washington time, informing me that they’d just heard back from Ivanov and the summit was on; the President went on TV that evening and informed the country that he would meet with Khrushchev in an emergency summit in New Delhi, India, commencing on the morning of Wednesday, June 10th.

  Almost immediately there was trepidation among the NSC over having the summit in New Delhi, the Soviets choice of location. CIA Director McCone and the Secretary Rusk were adamant that the Nehru government had never been a friend of the United States, and for all their proclamations of neutrality between East and West in the Cold War, the Indians had always tilted to the Soviets when the chips were down. Prime Minister Nehru had from the beginning of the crisis been in touch almost daily with Washington and Moscow offering himself as a mediator, and the Soviets had simply taken their old buddy up on it; in truth, the Indian Prime Minister was in poor health, and when he died suddenly the day after the summit ended, it was said that he would have passed weeks earlier if not for his determination to mediate an end to the crisis. McCone and Rusk wanted to move the summit to Zurich in Switzerland, but the President would have none of it, saying preparations were already under way and the matter settled.

  By this point in time, everyone was exhausted after putting in a week upon week of twenty hour days, and it had been my hope that my services would not be required in New Delhi, but it was not to be, I was tasked with preparing briefing papers for the President to take into the meetings with the Soviets. It also meant that I rode over on a crowded Air Force One, which except for a brief stopover in Paris, spent eight hours in the air. I was struck by how utterly relaxed the President was during this trip over, despite hours of intense meetings in the back of the plane going over the points they needed to make with Khrushchev, not to mention the stakes at play when he got to New Delhi, President Kennedy spent a lot of time just sitting around talking sports, mostly with his staff, or telling anecdotes from foreign visits. When he talked about his trip to Ireland and the enthusiastic greeting he received in his ancestral homeland, his eyes really lit up, and you could hear the joy in his voice. The man clearly took great pleasure in his job - most days.

  For some reason, the conversation turned to current music and President Kennedy expressed his bafflement at the popularity of The Beatles, telling us he couldn’t understand the youth of America’s passion for quartet of young British men of questionable sexual orientation, only the President put it in much cruder terms, stating that no matter what, he’d always be a Sinatra man.

  We arrived in New Delhi early on the day before the summit was scheduled to begin; no sooner had the President was settled in at the American embassy to catch up on some much-needed sleep, a whole new problem arose. It seemed that in their capacity as hosts of the summit, the Indian government had not just invited the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union to attend, but had also extended a blanket invitation to all nations with a grievance to send a representative. In all the rush to get to the meeting with the Soviet leaders, this fact had been overlooked. Now we were greeted with the news that Chinese Premier Chou En Lai had arrived by plane only an hour after Air Force One had touched down to represent the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese.

  The presence of the #2 man in Red China at the summit put most of the President’s men in a panic; since 1949, as far as the USA was concerned, the only legitimate leader of China was Chaing Kai-chek, currently enjoying his exile on Taiwan. So adamant were we in this, that in 1954, then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had reportedly refused to shake Chou’s hand during the Geneva conference that settled the partition of Indo-China. Then there were the Chinese troops Mao and Chou had sent to aid their fellow Communists during the Korean War; I’d had the pleasure of meeting a few of them personally in 1951. Any Democratic President who so much as thought about acknowledging the existence of Red China was opening himself to charges of appeasement, especially in an election year.

  Behind the scenes, Secretary Rusk was most insistent that the President not be in the same room with Chou, if necessary, he should be prepared to simply get on Air Force One and leave rather than give any recognition to the Communist government in Peking. Some of the others, like my old boss, McGeorge Bundy, advised the President to simply ignore Chou and his presence at the summit. A tired John F. Kennedy listened to all this and then called his brother in Washington, who told him it was too great a risk in an election year to acknowledge Chou, he would be handing the Republicans an issue to run against him; just let it wait until the second term.

  As soon as he concluded the call to his brother, the President then called in Secretary Rusk and instructed him to call the Indian Foreign Minister and request that he serve as an intermediary between the American delegation and the Chinese Premier - this was asking something of the Indians because of the short war they’d fought with Red China in the fall of ‘62 over some piece of territory in the Himalayas, but as President Kennedy pointed out, the Indians had taken it upon themselves to host the summit, so it was the least they could do under the circumstances. To their credit, our hosts readily agreed, settling the matter for the moment and allowing the summit to proceed.

  While the President was able to sleep off some of his considerable jet lag in a nice bed inside the embassy, I was up all night preparing reports on the situation in Cuba among many other things for the President to take into his first meeting with the Soviets in the morning. As of the first week of June, we had over 125,000 combatants engaged in pacifying the island; organized resistance was supposed to have ended two weeks before, but units of Castro’s forces refused to give up and even though our casualty rate was down dramatically from the first week of the invasion, we were still losing at a minimum a half dozen men a day down there. As of the 10th of June, there was no real governing authority in Cuba other than General Abrams; Castro himself was being held under guard in the Guantanamo Bay hospital, his brother Raul had reportedly sought sanctuary with Andreyev while Che Guevara had escaped back to Argentina.

  All of this was in the report I handed the President in the morning as he left the embassy for the site of the summit, an old 300 room British colonial era hotel called The Burnham. It was a massive building, a relic from the days of the Raj and perfect to host a superpower summit. The sessions between the Soviets and us were to be held in the main dining
room, an ornate area with a high chandelier dangling from the ceiling over the long tables where the delegations were to sit. John F. Kennedy made sure he was there a good 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and though he had been complaining of back pain earlier, he made it a point to jump from the back seat of limo when the car pulled up in front of the Burnham, vigorously shaking the hand of the Indian Foreign Minister for all the news cameras to record.

  The self-assured public image the President was projecting was helped immeasurably when the Soviet delegation turned out to be late; there was much speculation as to the condition of Nikita Khrushchev after seemingly being AWOL throughout most of the crisis. The Soviet leader we observed enter the Burnham was noticeably heavier and moving slower as he ambled through the same doors the President walked through earlier. The biggest contrast between the American President and the Soviet Chairman was the entourage who followed close on Khrushchev’s heels. At this time, we had no knowledge whatsoever of the recent events behind the walls of the Kremlin, but something appeared different here, as Brezhnev, Kosigyn, Mikoyan and Gromyko, among others, shadowed their supreme leader. Our Kremlin experts had pages of notes ready by the end of the day.

  Though Khrushchev appeared older and slower at first, his old aggressiveness came back the minute he walked into the hotel, again becoming the man who’d greeted President Kennedy at Vienna in their first summit almost three years to the day in 1961. He marched across the lobby with his hand thrust forward for the President to grasp, and then with his finger jabbing the air, made it clear through an interpreter, that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned the Americans were solely responsible for the tense circumstances which had made the summit necessary. Despite all the nastiness inside the Kremlin, Khrushchev and the rest of the gang put on the tough guy act when confronting their enemies from the West. When the President finally got a word in, he suggested “it took two to tango,” and Khrushchev shot back that they were most certainly not there to dance.