All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  To punctuate all these developments, I caught a snatch of a speech by Goldwater on the CBS Evening News where he said, “As your President, I will work tirelessly to protect law and order, and I pledge full cooperation with Federal, State, and local law enforcement to defend the families, the homes and the jobs of every honest and hard-working American.” He was speaking to an overflow crowd at an arena in Oklahoma City on the weekend of the state Republican convention; the similarity between what he was saying and Wallace’s message was striking.

  This boded potential trouble in the fall for the President, but first, the re-nomination had to be locked up. True to form, the Kennedy machine kicked into high gear, first in Indiana and then in Maryland. They changed the tone of the campaign; both primary fights coincided with the invasion of Cuba and overnight every speaker for the President began appealing to the voter’s patriotism, telling them it was their duty as good Democrats to stand behind the President in this moment of crisis.

  “Jack Kennedy is fighting for you; he needs you to fight for him.” That line was repeated by every pro-Kennedy speaker at every rally and gathering across the Hoosier state. Still, when the returns came on the night of May 5th, Wallace polled 37% of the vote against the President, a good showing against a sitting President. Indiana had been a state with a big KKK presence for much of the 20th Century, so it could have been worse, or so I told myself.

  Maryland had rural areas with much in common with Alabama, plus Baltimore had been the sight of recent strife between blacks and whites, things which made the state fertile ground for Wallace’s message. So word went out to every Democratic office holder in the state that if anyone of them so much as thought about voting for Wallace, they could kiss their public careers goodbye. Not only that, but everyone was expected to have a Kennedy sign in their yard and to bring at least ten other voters to the polls on Election Day. Word also got around that certain lucrative federal projects, like money to upgrade the port facilities in Baltimore, might suddenly become scarce if Maryland embarrassed the President. I also know for a fact that Wallace’s biggest financial backer in the state, an Eastern shore poultry farmer, was told he could expect visits daily from FDA inspectors at his three Cambridge processing plants unless he stopped writing checks to Wallace for President and stroked one for Kennedy ’64.

  Still, Wallace drew large and enthusiastic crowds wherever he went; his speeches were a litany of the evils of the Civil Rights Act and its proponents. “When I am your President,” he said in a speech at Laurel the Friday before the primary vote, “there won’t be any more of this nonsense about marching and protesting and whining and complaining; the only people who I’ll listen to will be the good Americans with jobs who don’t have time to march around waving some sign saying, ‘Gimme or else.’ And if any civil rights protestor sits down in front of my car, it’ll be his last time.”

  It was potent language, and in the end, it got Wallace 43% of Maryland’s vote, his best state; it might have gotten a lot of press if not for the President raising the readiness of NATO in anticipation of some other move by the Soviets. That was the headline in every paper the day after the primary, so we got off lucky in that respect, but there were those picking up on a trend: “THE WHITE BACKLASH HAS OFFICIALLY ARRIVED“ was the title of a three-page story in Time magazine‘s next issue.

  Wallace went on to compete in the California where he didn’t stand a chance in the June 2nd primary; Governor Pat Brown was a fellow Catholic, a huge Kennedy supporter, and a hell of a politician who wasn’t about to get caught napping. Yet the Alabama Governor won nearly 40% of the vote when California Democrats went to the polls, with his biggest totals coming from suburban Orange County. Again, we caught a break of a sort because the crisis with the Soviets was coming to a head and the summit in New Delhi was only days away, so the Democratic results in California were not big news.

  The Wallace insurgency was for me, ultimately the backdrop for a real turning point in my career and my life as well. It was during the week before the California primary, and I was in Los Angeles basically killing time since Governor Brown had things well in hand when the phone rang in my hotel room and to my absolute shock, discovered Bobby Kennedy himself on the other end of the line. “Mr. McCluskey,” he said, “you’ve proved yourself quite capable in the last few months, the kind of young man who knows how to get things done and how to be loyal; those are things my brother and I value highly, and your contribution to the campaign hasn‘t gone unnoticed.” This was quite a compliment coming from the #2 man in the administration. After my swollen head had deflated to normal size, I was told of an urgent task in need of attention. That I would take on the job was not a question; instructions were given, certain details were elaborated upon when requested, I profusely thanked the Attorney General for the opportunity and then he hung up.

  In short, what I did next was to take a rental car up to the Holmby Hills section of L.A. to the home of one of the top men in the William Morris Agency, a man whom I later learned represented one of RCA’s biggest recording stars and the top box office star of the 1950’s; a man who knew everybody who was anybody at every studio. This person, whom I will not call by name, handed me a satchel filled with fifty thousand dollars in cash, which I did not take my eyes off of for the next eight hours as I left the City of Angels and flew back to Washington D.C. where I handed the satchel to Dave Powers, who was waiting for me at 4:30 a.m. in Steve Smith’s office at the Kennedy ’64 national headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. He told me, “In this business, you’ve got to be prepared because you never know what you’ll find on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.” Mr. Powers took the satchel from me and put in a closet. When he opened the door, I got a glimpse of the closet’s contents: at least a dozen more satchels and briefcases inside, and I had no doubt in my mind what was inside them.

  That was my introduction to campaign finance; I was about to learn much more; much more indeed.

  Dorothy Jean Brennan

  Goldwater for President

  January - June 1964

  They say I got my job on account of my pretty face, I don’t deny it, I was Miss Idaho, 1960, after all, but they never seem to mention the degree in journalism I got from Bosie University the following year, third in my class. I had dreams of being just like Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the plucky reporter who always got the story, but life is not like the movies, there just wasn’t many jobs for a woman reporter unless she wanted to start out writing obituaries or advice to the lovelorn, but I was raised by my parents to use my talents and abilities to always find a way to make a difference in this world.

  That’s how I got into politics, a field where there were almost no opportunities for a woman unless she was a secretary or a candidate’s wife. Though I grew up on my father’s ranch in southern Idaho, my mother’s family had roots in Arizona all the way back to the days of Spanish rule, and my uncle had gone to work in one of the Goldwater family department stores during the depression when he lost his salesman’s job. He’d risen to a manager’s position and knew the Senator personally, he was the one who called me in the fall of ’63 and tipped me to a position in the Goldwater for President campaign; at the time I was working a file clerk for the Los Angeles Times, the only job in anything close to journalism I could get. Uncle Jack said it might be good experience, something which would look nice on a resume in the future.

  It was an easy choice to make, more so since my family had always been active in the Republican Party-I joined the Young Republicans at USC, something which came in handy when I applied with the campaign. Even though I was in grade school at the time, I can well remember how crushed my father had been when Thomas Dewey lost to Truman; my father detested the New Deal and thought the whole thing was a criminal waste of the taxpayer’s money. Surprisingly, he didn’t care all that much for Eisenhower, mainly because he wouldn’t even attempt to repeal Social Security and had gone all the way to Europe to meet with Khrushchev durin
g his first term. “No damn good can ever come from talking with the Communists; Roosevelt proved that at Yalta; the only thing which they understand is actions, not words.” As for John F. Kennedy, he was Irish, Catholic and from the East, it didn’t matter what his politics were, he already had three strikes against him as far as my family was concerned.

  It was with great enthusiasm that I applied for a job with the Goldwater campaign; I flew out to Phoenix for an interview with Dennison Kitchel, the man putting together the nuts and bolts Goldwater ’64. It proved to be a mere formality as my Uncle Jack knew Mr. Kitchel; I was hired as an assistant to the press secretary.

  That meant I spent a lot of time typing, but it also gave me the opportunity to travel around the country with the candidate, a man whom I met on my second day on the job. What immediately impressed me was how utterly down to earth and unpretentious Barry Goldwater was, the man you saw in public was the man you saw in private, which also meant he didn’t make much of an effort to clean up his language in front of ladies, but you got used to the “hells” and damns” pretty fast. It all seems tame compared to the way people talk now. You couldn’t be around this man anytime without becoming passionate about electing him President.

  It was a conviction that everyone in the campaign shared: Senator Goldwater was the only man who could turn this country around after decades of socialists and internationalists running things. This faith sustained us through the first rocky days of the campaign in the winter of ’64 as the Senator tried to rally support for the New Hampshire primary and caught hell from the press for daring to suggest Kennedy’s response to the assassination attempt was weak. All the polls showed him trailing the other contenders - Rockefeller, Lodge, Scranton, and Nixon - while losing to the President by double digits. It got so bad in the last weeks in New Hampshire that the regular spokesman for the campaign just came out and refused to go do the daily briefings which were part of the political rituals. “They’re all a bunch of pro-Communist liberals,” he said, “and I’m not going to take any more of their disrespectful questions.” I believe it was Steve Shadegg, a man who had helped in the Goldwater campaigns in Arizona, who suggested that I go out there and brief them, because, after all, I was a former beauty queen and knew how to handle myself in front of a crowd.

  I was terrified the first time I stood before the political press core in Manchester, New Hampshire, but what Mr. Shadegg said was true, my experience on the pageant runway came back to me, and I pulled it off. Then I pulled it off the next day and the day after, and soon the job was mine permanently. Before long I was writing up the press briefings myself, condensing what the Senator said that day into a few short lines, which was usually that Castro and his Communist Cuba should receive no mercy; that the Federal government taxed too much and wasted too much. The press was determined to portray the Senator as a warmonger and hard-hearted, but I would give them my best smile and repeat the truth over and over, whether they understood it or not. I think I earned some grudging admiration for my efforts; Mary McGrory, a reporter for the Washington Star and part of the liberal Kennedy-worshipping Washington press, would always compliment me on a job well done at the end of each briefing.

  We took on the chin in New Hampshire, losing to Lodge in the state’s primary on the 10th of March. It was even tougher to read the analysis of the results the next day in the papers: all of which said Senator Goldwater’s campaign was as good as dead; it just hadn’t fallen into its inevitable grave yet. I was part of the March 15th meeting in Phoenix where everyone got together and hashed thing out. That was the meeting where the two sides of the Goldwater campaign - the old Arizona people and the new guys who’d gotten the Draft Goldwater movement off the ground - came together. I think the galvanizing words came from Clif White, who told us, “I don’t care how much money Rockefeller and Lodge have right now, what they don’t have is a group of people like us, people who love their man and will do anything to put him in the White House.”

  Everyone came out of that meeting with their marching orders; first the nomination and then the election-win them both. I formally put in charge of dealing with the press. It was a real point of pride to me that my work was one of the few things both sides agreed on as having gone well in the campaign so far.

  Those days in March prove to be the rock bottom for Goldwater’s fight for the nomination; with a united effort, things started coming together. The campaign stayed on point and our people turned out by the hundreds and some cases, by the thousands, from the Carolinas to the Mississippi Delta to the plains of Kansas to the heart of Texas to the Rocky Mountain States; they showed up early and stayed late, and they won and they won and they won.

  This did not happen just because Clif White had a plan or Dennison Kitchel and Dean Burch knew how to run an organization. It happened because a man, Barry Goldwater, found his voice at the right moment and got people to listen to him.

  When I say moment, I’m talking about those days and weeks after Lodge beat us in New Hampshire, when the Kennedys were issuing “ultimatums” and treating an act of war on American soil as if it were an offense in traffic court. There was no doubt Oswald had been in the pay of the Cubans after all that incriminating evidence was discovered in the Dallas bus terminal, yet months later, the boys in the White House were prattling about negotiations because doing the right thing and defending America might upset Moscow. No other Republican candidate for the Republican nomination dared call out the Kennedy brothers for their timidity in the face of criminal aggression.

  But not Senator Goldwater; there have been stories of how his inner circle sat him down and explained how he needed to take an even harder line on Cuba and the Soviets than the one he’d already staked out. Nothing could be further from the truth, nobody ever had to set Barry Goldwater down and tell him what to think or what to tell anybody. Not that he would have listened if anyone had dared try. No, the Senator himself was disgusted at the administration’s course of action toward Cuba and simply told the truth as he saw it, and the crowds responded. “We’re going to have to go in and get rid of Castro,” he told us the day the ultimatum to Cuba was announced, “there’s no way around it and I don’t know why Jack just won’t get off his ass and do the job.” That was the sentiment he expressed over and over and his best speechwriter, Karl Hess, worked into his remarks.

  The thing that really did it for the Senator and for the rest of the true conservatives in America came when General Almeida rose up and tried to overthrow the Communist tyrant and Kennedy did nothing. “It is utterly intolerable…intolerable…that our President sits on his hands while good Cuban patriots are dying to free their island,” the Senator thundered to an open air noon crowd in Kansas City on the fifth day of April, “while looking over their shoulders to make sure they‘re not doing something which might get Khrushchev‘s nose out of joint. “ The crowd went wild when they heard this, and it was the same at the next event and the one after that one. He stayed true even after Kennedy finally sent in American troops to finally oust Castro, lamenting all the good and brave men, like General Almeida, who were lost because America drug its feet.

  As the events of that spring unfolded, we were ever more convinced Barry Goldwater was the only man who could turn America around; when the Soviet Union trampled over the people of Iran, when North Korea prepared to resume its aggression, when the Red Chinese sought to fan the flames of war; when the North Vietnamese took advantage of our weakness in Indo-China and tried to overrun the South, Barry Goldwater was the lone voice who stood up and said we had to hit back and hit back hard.

  As the crowds grew larger, so did the number of volunteers for the campaign; the same can be said for donations, as money poured in as winter gave way to spring ’64.

  I’ve read many accounts of the Goldwater campaign by outsiders - Theodore White’s The Making of the President book being the worst offender among them - which state how we were “desperate” and “flailing,” midway through the nomination battle
and that the Senator “stumbled” upon the issues that ultimately worked in his favor.

  Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Millions of Americans flocked the Goldwater banner because of what they saw happening in the country and then heard the Senator’s words.

  I’ll offer these examples:

  After Kitty Genovese was knifed to death in New York while her neighbors ignored her pleas for help, Senator Goldwater said in a speech in Concord, New Hampshire: “When I am your President, I will make the individual safety of every single American my priority, not only safety in their homes, but in the streets of our great cities as well. And to the predatory criminal who preys upon the innocent, there will be swift and true justice.” When was the last time anyone heard Kennedy say anything about the criminals who were treated better than their victims by the courts?

  On April 15th, when millions of Americans were scurrying to the Post Office to mail off their tax returns to the IRS, Senator Goldwater had this to say at a noontime speech in Kansas City: “It’s time we stopped confiscating the hard-earned wages of good Americans and then giving the money to bums on relief. It’s time for the bums to get jobs and start paying their way like the rest of us.” When did Kennedy ever talk about those who loafed on the taxpayer’s dime?