That was fine with me.
I flew home from Dallas more convinced than ever of the rightness of my actions and if they bent the rules of propriety to the breaking point, then so be it. An abomination of a Civil Rights Bill was actually being considered in the Senate, while the President of the United States kissed the ass of the dictator of the Soviet Union and extended his hand to the Communist Chinese - desperate times required desperate measures. No, the times required real and true Americans to fight back against the vipers in our midst, to sever their heads before they destroyed the hard work of nearly two hundred years.
“Senator,” I said to Barry Goldwater when I saw him two days after my meeting with Harlow, “you might want to pick out the drapes for the Oval Office right now.”
“Wade you’re putting the cart before the horse,” the Senator replied, “there’s a campaign to be waged, and I know Jack Kennedy very well, it’s not going to be easy.”
I so wanted to tell the Senator he didn’t know Jack Kennedy nearly as well as he thought, but he would learn soon learn otherwise.
Kevin McCluskey
Re-elect Kennedy ’64
March - July 1964
There was one thing everybody knew from the beginning, Bobby Kennedy was running his brother’s re-election campaign, even if Steve Smith was “officially” in charge. And the one thing the Kennedy family valued above all else was loyalty; that’s how I got my job with them. My family on my father’s side was true Massachusetts Irish - my great grandfather from County Cork came over to Boston in 1848, but it was my old man who opened the door for me. He’d enlisted in the Marines the week after Pearl Harbor and saw his action in Pacific, and when a fellow Irish American veteran first ran for office in the Bay State, he was among the first to sign up for Jack Kennedy. As the owner of a chain of dry cleaners stretching all the way up to Bangor, Maine, my father was in a position to raise some big bucks for John F. Kennedy in both his Senate races in the 50’s. One of my first political memories was taking Kennedy posters around to people in our neighborhood when I was in the 7th grade. What I’m saying is my Dad was an original Kennedy man who’d always been there when they needed him and had always come through; the kind of person JFK and Bobby never forgot.
Not that I hadn’t already proven my bona fides as a Kennedy warrior in 1960 when I took off a semester from Brown to work in the trenches for the campaign. I spent the months of September and October going door to door for Kennedy-Johnson in the Italian neighborhoods of Paderson and Bayonne, New Jersey. I got the job because, as the head of the Kennedy campaign in the Garden State put it, I was a “little wop.” The slur didn’t bother me, that’s because I got my looks from my Sicilian mother, the jet black hair and olive skin, but at five feet eight inches, I’ve always been touchy about my height - played a lot of football in high school to compensate. My younger brother, Eddie, took after our father with his red hair and fair complexion, but as far as I know, nobody ever called him a “Mick.”
It was our common Catholic heritage that made my family fierce Kennedy partisans from the beginning; both my parents were not shy about letting my brother and I know how our grandparents and great-grandparents had not been welcomed to America with open arms. My father was proud he’d made a success of himself in Boston, a city where’d they’d once hung out “No Irish need apply” signs. But for me it was also something generational, for John F. Kennedy was a break with the past, with a country where everyone waited their turn, respected their “betters,” and never dared rock the boat. So many of my parents’ generation would have been just as happy to have lived out their lives like the Cleavers and the Nelsons on TV, but JFK promised to get this country moving again, to not just manage the status quo, but to meet challenges like the Cold War head on.
That was why I was such a Kennedy partisan going into 1964, plus I knew a good opportunity when I saw one, the contacts I could make in the Kennedy campaign would open a lot of doors for me if I played my cards right. All it took was a few calls from my father to Lawrence O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell to get an interview - a formality - since all the Irish Mafia knew Sean McCluskey. Without a formal title or salary, I was told to fly to Oklahoma and interview prospective candidates to head the re-election effort in the Sooner State and come back with a recommendation in two days.
The President had little chance of carrying Oklahoma, especially against Goldwater, but I was more than happy to take on a job for which I had no qualification; I booked a flight to Oklahoma City, did exactly as I was told and was back in DC 36 hours later to recommend the owner of the largest Ford dealership in the state for the job as Chairman. My criterion for picking the man: he was a Navy veteran of the Pacific and his enthusiasm for Kennedy was palpable.
Steve Smith heard my report on Oklahoma, listened to my recommendation, thanked me for my hard work and showed me the door. More than a little puzzled, I went back to hotel room, not sure what had just happened or what to do next. Then the phone rang, and I was amazed to find myself talking to Robert F. Kennedy himself, the Attorney General and JFK’s brother. He didn’t waste words but said he was impressed since the man I’d recommended in Oklahoma was exactly who he would have picked if it had been his call. Therefore I had the job as special assistant to Kennedy ’64 campaign, a fancy title which meant little, for my real duties would be trouble shooting for the campaign - going around the country and getting on top of problems at the ground level - like some local Democratic office holder who was putting his own interests before that of the reelection campaign - before they got on the front pages of the papers and caused an embarrassment or a distraction to the President. It paid $150.00 a week plus expenses.
The next day, Oswald took a shot at Kennedy in Dallas.
I was shopping for a new suit and saw the news breaking on a display TV in a Sears window in downtown Washington; when I got to the campaign headquarters, all anyone knew was that the President’s limousine had rushed to a Dallas hospital. There were rumors saying the President and the First Lady were dead while the Vice President was wounded. The tears were flowing, first out of fear and grief, then out of relief when the news came that JFK and the First Lady had walked out of the hospital and spoke to reporters.
Dallas changed everything, for within days, all the country could talk about was who was behind the attempt to murder the President. Nobody thought Oswald could have acted alone, the tip to the police proved as much; it was just a matter of finding his accomplices. That it would be Castro came as no surprise, the guns and money found in the Dallas bus depot locker closed the case. “We need to get those Communist sons of bitches once and for all,” were my father’s words at Christmas dinner that year. My brother Eddie urged caution and was shouted down for his trouble.
After Dallas, the country was facing an ongoing foreign policy crisis, not just with Cuba, but potentially with the Soviet Union and it drove the campaign off the front pages; and for us, it meant a campaign without an active candidate as it was made clear to us by Steve Smith that as long there was the possibility of American boys dying on a battlefield, the President would not be making any partisan political appearances
We naively thought the country would rally around the President in a crisis.
I spent the winter of 1964 on the road touching base with the reelection effort in more than 20 states. The marching orders we’d received was to start building the well-oiled machine needed for in the fall-get back the people who’d been with us in ’60 and bring in newcomers and win by a landslide in November.
I was determined to do my job well; there were plenty of stories about more than one advance man who lost his gig because he did a lousy job for one of the President’s surrogates who were barnstorming the primary states in his place. Somewhere along the line, I got the reputation as a guy you didn’t want to cross; it got back to me that I’d been called a “little know-it-all son of a bitch” by the state chairman in Ohio after a contentious meeting in Cincinnati.
New Hampshire
voted on March 12th, and Kennedy took 90% of the vote; no big surprise there, but when I flew into Madison, Wisconsin the next day, I quickly discovered that the smooth running JFK re-election campaign was about to hit a speed bump in a state that went to polls on April 7th.
I hadn’t been in town an hour before two members of the state central committee were in my hotel room with news I found hard to believe: John F. Kennedy was facing a close race in their state on primary day from Alabama Governor George Wallace. It seemed that a genuine grass roots movement for Wallace had sprung up overnight, spearheaded by a right wing couple who had accomplished all the work needed overnight to get the Alabama Governor’s name on the ballot along with a full slate of delegates filed to compete with the President’s. Wisconsin’s primary was “open,” which meant Republicans were free to vote in the Democratic race, something that was a real possibility since none of the Republican candidates had bothered to run there.
Why was Wallace doing so well? It seemed that while most of the press had been concentrating on the crisis in Cuba, a lot of working class voters had been following the debate over the Civil Rights Act in Congress and they didn’t like what they were hearing about this bill. Union workers in auto plants would lose their seniority if the company were forced by the Federal government to hire blacks; homeowners who’d spent 20 years paying off mortgages would see their home values plummet when the Feds forced their neighbors to sell to blacks; qualified whites wouldn’t get good jobs because the Feds would make the boss hire shiftless Negroes. These were the sentiments being expressed by many good Democrats according to the Wisconsin state party chairman.
When I expressed some doubts, I was told, “If you think Wallace can’t win here, you should remember this is the state that elected Joe McCarthy to the Senate twice.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing; the President was getting high marks in the polls for his handling of the crisis in Cuba, and the numbers were even higher among Democrats. Nobody had been paying attention in January when the segregationist Wallace, who had tangled with Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, had announced he would challenge the President in the primaries.
To see if things were really as bad as they were being portrayed, I went to a Wallace appearance the next day at a VFW hall in Milwaukee. If I wasn’t convinced Kennedy had a problem before going inside, I was more than persuaded by the time I left. The room was packed like sardines, at least a crowd of 700, and when the bantam-sized Wallace first took the stage he looked distinctly uncomfortable in front of this distinctly northern crowd. But something electric happened when the MC, a Marine veteran and bar owner, began his introduction by ordering the few Negroes in the crowd to leave and then excoriated them by recounting how they beat up old ladies, raped white women, refused to work and lived on relief. He ended this with an emphatic, “I didn’t survive months of hell on Iwo Jima to come home to this!”
The crowd went wild when they heard this and when Wallace finally spoke, he clearly realized he was among the like-minded. His message was simple and direct: the Federal government in Washington wanted to take away your freedom and if it could force the people of Alabama to integrate against their will, then what could they do to good people of Wisconsin. “It’s time for the pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington to get the message,” he said at one point, “we want them to leave our homes, our jobs, our schools, our farms, our businesses alone. They belong to us, not them.” Then he added, “I wish the President cared as much about the freedom of the citizens of Alabama and Wisconsin as he does about the freedom of a bunch of foreigners in Cuba.” The crush of admirers was so great it took Wallace more than an hour to get out of the hall.
Back in my hotel room, I placed a call to Steve Smith and did my best to convince him we had a potential problem in Wisconsin. My words fell on deaf ears; there was no way the President could be having a hard time against a two-bit demagogue. The problem that all this was happening at the same time the ultimatum to Castro was coming due and neither the President nor the Attorney General had any time for political matters - or so I thought. For the next two weeks, we watched as Wallace drew large and enthusiastic crowds across the state while the President’s supporters were relying on the power of an incumbent to rally the faithful.
I was back in Washington one week to the day before the voting in Wisconsin when the phone in the Arlington, Virginia apartment I was subletting rang; it was Robert Kennedy, and he wanted to know what the hell was going on in Wisconsin, the latest newspaper poll in the state had it a dead heat between Wallace and the President. I gave Bobby Kennedy a rundown of all I had seen, along with a detailed description of the Wallace rally. “There’s no damn way that little son of a bitch is winning Wisconsin over my brother,” Kennedy said and thanked me for being honest and giving him the low down. I want to point out this conversation occurred on the day there was an attempt to overthrow Castro when as far as the country knew, the entire Kennedy White House was focused on Cuba.
Whatever, but somebody lit a fire under the Kennedy effort in the final week before the primary vote, overnight Kennedy campaign signs began dotting yards, while billboards touting the President went up on every major highway. The national Presidents for the UAW and the Meatpackers came in to personally fire up the rank and file who were very susceptible to Wallace’s fiery rhetoric. To ice the cake, Senator Hubert Humphrey, from next door in Minnesota and a beloved figure to many liberals in Wisconsin, took time out from getting the Civil Rights Act through Congress to make a series of speeches on the weekend before the vote.
When the returns came in on the 7th of April, the President won with over 60%, but Wallace came in with a solid third of the vote; it would have been a big story if the invasion of Cuba had not been imminent on Wednesday morning. PRESIDENT WINS WISCONSIN; WALLACE IN SECOND PLACE was a below the fold story in the New York Times.
Two days after Wisconsin went to the polls there was a meeting in Washington attended by all the old hands from the ’60 campaign, along with newcomers like me. Given the situation in Cuba, neither the President nor the Attorney General was in attendance, but it was chaired by Lawrence O’Brien, a first among equals when it came to politics in the Administration.
Many of the participants have written their memoirs in the years since - O’Brien’s being the best and most honest in my opinion - and they have downplayed the threat Wallace was now posing to the President in upcoming primaries, especially in Indiana and Maryland. No one was in a state of panic, but it was made clear that we were going to the mat with Wallace from here on out; to call on Union leaders to twist arms for the President; touch base with every single volunteer from 60 in those states and get them on board again; make sure every Democratic office holder gets off their asses and out working for the President; stage events from one end of each state to the other with Presidential surrogates; get lists of Wallace supporters, especially financial ones and find out if they did any business with the government in any way. “Maybe it’s a bar owner in Indianapolis who’s writing Wallace a check,” someone used as an example, “well, he has to get a liquor license from the state. Make sure Governor Welsh knows who he is and what he ought to do about it.”
At one point in the meeting, I made a pitch to have the Vice President come out on the campaign trail and speak for the President; after all, he was up for re-election too and he’d gotten some recent good publicity over his efforts to get the Civil Rights Act through Congress. This was met with stony silence from the Irish Mafia, later I broached the idea to Dave Powers, an old friend of my father’s, and learned that Bobby Kennedy was damned and determined to get Johnson replaced on the ticket. Powers added that while the President had not made a decision, “Bobby can’t stand old Rufus Cornpone, never has and never will; he’ll use that Baker stuff to dump him, but it’s pure hate, pure and simple.” Rufus Cornpone was the nickname the inner circle had given Johnson, and though I was a solid Kennedy man, I felt bad for the Vice President.
So we had our marching orders to make sure there were no awkward headlines coming out of Indiana and Maryland, the two states where Wallace was taking on Kennedy next. The Democratic rank and file in the Hoosier state, which voted first on May 5th, was mobilized for the President in a big way that did not escape the notice of the political press core: INSURGENT WALLACE FORCES KENNEDY TO PICK UP PACE was the headline of a story in the Los Angeles Times on May 1st. The Alabama Governor was drawing huge crowds in both states, hitting the Civil Rights Act at every event and playing to the fears of middle-class white voters by making the case over and over that any gain by a black man meant a loss for a white. “They talk a lot about the so-called civil rights of Negroes,” he said at a rally in Evanston a week before the primary, “but they never mention your property rights; they don’t talk about how some pointy headed bureaucrat in Washington is going to force your neighbor to sell his home to a Negro.”
I’ll never forget what the head of a steelworker’s local in Gary, Indiana, told me three days before the primary vote, “I fought in WWII, I love John F. Kennedy, but I’m marking Wallace’s name on the ballot and sending JFK the message he can’t take us for granted.”
The primary fights in Indiana and Maryland enlightened me to something that had been going on away from the attention of the networks and the big daily papers while they focused on events in Cuba, Iran and the Soviet Union, how the struggle for racial equality in America had turned into to a pitched battle: in Cleveland, Ohio, a white mob had beaten up blacks protesting employment discrimination; a high school in Tennessee facing a court order to integrate had been dynamited over the Easter school break; black protesters in San Francisco had joined hands vowing to block the entrances to the city’s largest supermarket chain until the company’s management met with them and agreed to promote blacks to management positions - the store’s owner called the police and a violent melee resulted; a black man had taken a seat at a table in a white’s only restaurant and bar in Baltimore, the establishment’s owner promptly attacked him with a tire iron and cracked his skull, an act which set off three days of demonstrations and violent encounters with the police; the Committee for Racial Equality arranged to have several hundred pounds of garbage dumped on the ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge just before morning rush hour to protest “the system;” eight black churches were set afire by arson, six were in the deep South, but one was in Kansas, and the other was all the way out in California; footage of Malcolm X was repeatedly shown on the TV news calling for blacks to arm themselves and form “rifle clubs” for self-protection. All of this happened between the middle of March and late April, just as the Presidential contest was getting into high gear and the Civil Rights Act was making progress in Congress.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 19