All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  His words did me little good that day, I remember going back to my apartment and getting drunk on a bottle of Jim Beam.

  It took a few days for everything to get put in place, but on June 29th, the vote for closure carried with nearly 25 Republicans voting for it; the South yielded the field and the amendment to Title II calling for jury trials was introduced-it was later learned that the amendment had been written in Senator Russell’s office. It was passed by a coalition of Republican Senators and Southern Democrats despite a pro forma futile opposition by Senator Humphrey and the liberals. The full Civil Rights Act went before the Senate for a vote before the 4th of July recess and it passed overwhelmingly with a lot of liberals holding their noses when they said “yea.” It then had to go back to the House to be reconciled, a fight which would have to wait until midsummer.

  I think Dr. King summed it up best when he said, “We have come to the point where half measures are no different than inaction. Those who settle for half a loaf are cheating themselves of the justice they deserve and have more than earned.” On the day the Senate voted for the full Act, a day which should have been one of great triumph, I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of committed Americans who had marched and protested for weeks to get this law on the books; of the rabbis, of the priests and clergymen who had made this a holy and righteous cause, of the those in the Deep South who on that same day were risking their lives to be full American citizens and know there was no way I could look any of them in the eye.

  If anybody took this turn of events worse than me, it was the Vice President; he was the very picture of dejection during the last week of June. And why shouldn’t he have been after having fought his way back from the brink of political oblivion and making himself relevant again by devising and implementing a strategy that took the Civil Rights Act from the basement of the House Rules Committee to the triumph of a vote in the full Senate, only to have the President strike a deal which tarnished this legacy.

  Then there were the raw politics of the matter, Johnson’s work getting the Act passed had won him legions of new allies and supporters in the activist left of the Democratic Party, like Joseph Rauh and the Americans for a Democratic Society, who had so staunchly opposed him in 1960. A watered-down Civil Rights Act made him look exactly like the old LBJ who made deals and sold out ideals when he was running the Senate - the kind of man who ought to be dumped from the ticket. On July 1st, a syndicated column by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson quoted unnamed sources in the Kennedy campaign as saying the dropping of Johnson had already been decided. “Too much stuff has yet to come out in the Bobby Baker case,” one of them was quoted as saying, “and the President just can’t take the risk of running in the fall with Johnson on the ticket.” Nobody thought these unnamed sources were speaking without Bobby Kennedy’s permission.”

  It was against this backdrop that I received a call from, of all people, Senator Russell’s secretary on the day before the 4th of July adjournment, requesting that I come by. I had been in the Senator’s presence a few times in my days on Capitol Hill, but we had never been formally introduced, and considering my background, I was hardly the type of person Dick Russell would ever want to associate with under any circumstance. Having no knowledge of why the senior Senator from my home state would want to see me, I traveled down to his office and was ushered by an aide into a back room where Senator Russell rose from behind his desk to shake my hand and offer me a drink. He then proceeded to ask about my home town of Newnan and of many mutual acquaintances we shared there. Not once did the man bring up the Civil Rights Act or anything else which would have been even remotely divisive, and I must say I was impressed despite his lifelong commitment to the preservation of segregation. When I remember my visit with Senator Russell now, I am filled with sadness with the knowledge this man might well have made a fine President of the United States if not for the place of his birth and its difficult history.

  After a good half an hour of conversation, the Senator got to the reason I was called to his office: “Mr. Compton, I need you to take care of a small chore for me and do so without question, do you think you can do that? It concerns our dear friend, the Vice President.” Since it involved Johnson, I didn’t hesitate in answering in the affirmative. The chore, as Senator Russell described it, seemed like an odd one to me at the time: go immediately to a bar two blocks away from Capitol Hill and find a man sitting at a table in the back-I would know him by the black bow tie he would be wearing. The Senator then took out a business card for his Capitol Hill office and signed his name to the back of it before handing it to me. “Show this card to man, he will give you a package. Please take it back to Lyndon’s office and hand the package directly to him. He’ll be expecting it. Be sure to give him this business card as well. Thank you very much, Mr. Compton.”

  After shaking hands with the Senator, I left his office and did as he requested, walking the two blocks on a particularly pleasant day for the hottest part of the summer. I found the bar and the man at the back table; he was wearing a black bow tie, which went well with his white linen jacket, the kind found in the best DC menswear stores. After taking a look at the card with Senator Russell’s signature, the bow tie wearing gentleman produced a large manila envelope from under the table and handed it to me; I distinctly remember the envelope bulging in the middle. “Sir, you are doing a great thing for your country and I hope one day you know just how much,” was his parting words. Doing as instructed, I hurried back to the Capital and the Vice President‘s office.

  I had no idea that by taking that plain manila envelope back to the Vice President’s office, I was helping land the hardest blow in the nastiest political feud in modern American history.

  Lt. Colonel Martin Maddox

  June - August 1964

  I spent the summer of 1964 working on Cuba every day, a place where things consistently refused to go according to plan. We no longer had an operations plan to guide us and thanks to the agreements made in New Delhi; we now had nine months to install a free government, get the economy up and running again, constitute new armed forces and get every American soldier off the island - except for Guantanamo; a tall order indeed.

  What no one knew, not even Ralph Gillison and any of my other co-workers in the White House, was how I had been drawn into the back alley of American politics, a place of sleazy betrayals and big time double crosses; a battlefield for which I had no training or preparation. I had to talk face to face with Vance Harlow and get the low down on how things had come to such a state. I asked for a meeting at O’Donnell’s and refused to take no for an answer.

  I came right to the point as soon as he sat down across from me in the booth, demanding to know just who was peddling pictures of me at Marcello‘s place.

  “Colonel, I could give you a name,” was his weary reply, “and what would that accomplish? You are an officer in the United States Marine Corp who obeys orders and follows a time-tested code of honor. The person you are asking about knows no duty, no honor and no country; the only thing they are “always faithful” to is their own absolute self-interest. There is nothing you could personally do or say to them that would affect anything they might ever do in any conceivable way. You are a good soldier and a brave man, but this is not your kind of fight.”

  I knew this to be the truth, but I simply could not sit there and have my fate completely in the hands of others who had utterly no concern whatsoever for me or my family. What do I do, I asked Harlow, what do I need to know? With whom did I need to talk; the Attorney General or my own lawyer as soon as I hired one?

  “You do nothing, you talk to no one,” Harlow replied, “except to me. But especially do not approach the Attorney General, do that, and he’ll decide you are a liability to him or his brother and orders will instantly be cut transferring you to the Aleutian Islands. Your story should be something like this, you hadn’t been to New Orleans in years and just slipped down there for a day or so by taking advantage of free mil
itary transport - wouldn’t be the first officer to do that. While in the Big Easy you made a stop at the Town and Country because the shrimp gumbo had been recommended to you by a number of fellow officers. I chauffeured you there because we share a mutual friend who worked on the Racket’s Committee with the Kennedy brothers. During your meal at the Town and Country, its owner, Mr. Marcello, an honest businessman as far as you knew, refused your money and the drinks and meal were on the house as a gesture of admiration and respect for our brave fighting men who were about to hit the beaches in Cuba. Mr. Trafficante, a dear friend and business associate of Marcello’s, was also there and shook your hand. Just a nice visit with nice people as far as you knew.”

  “Why would I desert my duties at the White House in the middle of a crisis to go and enjoy the charms of New Orleans?”

  Harlow shrugged and said, “Say it was the stress of the job, you just had to get away for 24 hours and since you’re a hard-core fan of both jazz and blues, the only place to be was The Big Easy on the Mississippi.”

  “Who the hell would believe such a bullshit story?”

  “It doesn’t have to a good story, it doesn’t have to be a believable story, it just has the same story that you tell over and over if required. Be prepared just in case.”

  Harlow words were of little comfort; doing nothing is seldom a solution.

  “Nobody will be able to prove otherwise,” Harlow added. “This is politics, which, it has been said, is war by other means. A war I am much better prepared to fight in than you are, Colonel. Look, you’ve been a real Marine through all of this; you just need to go on being one.”

  The people in the know would keep their mouths shut, Harlow insisted, there was no real proof in danger of becoming public which would reveal that the Kennedy Administration had made common cause with the Mafia against Castro.

  There was one more thing. “I’m saying this as a precaution, Colonel, but from here on out, if you feel the need to get in touch with me, don’t use your home phone and sure as hell don’t use the one in your office. They might be tapped.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. “That’s against the law,” I replied, the memory of my naiveté at this moment almost makes me wince, after all, I had already shaken hands to seal a deal with Carlos Marcello.

  I left O’Donnell’s no more assured than when I’d entered, but I had no choice but to go back to the White House and do my job, but I did a lot of thinking over the next few days, rolling over in my head exactly what I would do and say when and if I was called to explain my presence in New Orleans back in April.

  There was plenty to keep me occupied in my day job as we dealt with the aftermath of the New Delhi summit. Many now considered Cuba to be primarily a political problem where the setting up of a provisional government ahead of the pullout of our forces to be the task at hand. Despite continued armed opposition, General Abrams did a good job of getting the casualty rate down, but flag-draped coffins were still coming home every week.

  “Colonel, are you familiar with the war against the Philippine insurgency?” Ralph Gillison asked me at one point.

  I considered myself well versed in American military history, but I was only vaguely aware of what had happened in the former Spanish colony in the first decade of the century and confessed as much.

  “It lasted over three years and cost us at least six thousand dead; Filipino dead could have been as high as a million. But what is most remembered about that war was how savage it got, how brutal both sides were at the end.”

  I didn’t have to ask what point Ralph was making; mentally I began planning the inevitable briefing I might well have to give President Kennedy in the near future. It was not something I looked forward to doing, for the Administration had shifted gears after the summit and was stressing how “Cuba belonged to the Cubans and a freely elected, democratic and peace-loving government in place in nine months will be the final American victory.” Those were the words of the President as he stood before the cameras at Andrews Air Force upon his return from New Delhi.

  There simply was nothing with which to put together even a provisional government - the only people with experience running Cuba were former officials in Castro’s regime or Batista’s dictatorship, hardly the seeds with which to sow democracy on short notice. Secretary of State Rusk was laboring on the problem, and I wished him luck, he was certainly going to need it.

  Then there was the Russian contingent at Camaguey, a good 25,000 strong, and still on the island at the end of June, for Moscow seemed in no hurry to pull them out. “It is going to look like a flat out defeat,” the President observed in an Oval Office meeting, “when pictures of those Soviet troops boarding a transport bound for home are seen around the world. Khrushchev knows this, so does Brezhnev and the rest and they’re going to stall as long as they possibly can.”

  “Maybe they’re hoping all of them will defect en masse,” Secretary McNamara said, “and end this trouble.”

  No such luck was the President’s reply.

  In any event, General Andreyev and this Russians were creating more than a few problems, not the least of them being the high number of Castro’s men who had sought sanctuary inside the Russian enclave, some of whom were believed to be members of the Intelligence Directorate possessing critical information on the events in Dallas. General Abrams tentatively entered into negotiations with Andreyev to have these men turned over to us, but the Soviet commander refused to even discuss it; diplomats from the State Department took over the task with little success. What were so galling were the thousands of pounds of rations we were now delivering to Andreyev and his men, as per agreements made in New Delhi. I would have thought it would have given us some leverage, but evidently not.

  The kid glove treatment became a domestic political problem for the President, as Senator Goldwater, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, began referring to the “coddling of Communist invaders in the Western Hemisphere” in his speeches, it was taken up by more than one speaker at their convention in mid-July and looked to be issue in the fall campaign.

  On the other side of the political spectrum, there was a rally on the UC campus in Berkeley California on the last day of June decrying the invasion of Cuba, along with the bombing of North Korea and Vietnam, and the holding of Fidel Castro at Guantanamo. It was highlighted by some old fellow travelers like Pete Seegar and Dave Dellinger, but what was significant was the large number of young people who attended and applauded wildly to denunciations of “American militarism and imperialism.” If these malcontents didn’t like it in this country, they were free to leave. It’s how I saw it, but there was something about the images of those cheering kids, shown on the evening newscasts, that depressed me for days.

  If Cuba was at the top of list of foreign policy concerns post summit, then the situation in Iran was a close second as the Soviet incursion there ground to a final halt. Like the US in Cuba, they had agreed to have their troops out at the end of nine months; unlike the US in Cuba, they had to contend with a very active, organized and well armed opposition that wanted them out of their country immediately. If anything, the fighting in Iran had grown worse in the days after the New Delhi summit.

  After the President came back from there, we assumed the Soviets would leave and the Shah would return and take his seat on the Peacock throne; there was just one problem with this conceit: the future of Iran was being decided on the battlefield by the Iranian people, who were doing the heavy lifting to throw the Russians off their soil.

  It turned out that the opposition to the Soviets was not being led by officers of the Shah’s military, but by the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fierce opponent of the Shah’s who’d returned from exile in Iraq, who after seizing a radio station, began exhorting his countrymen to wage Jihad and show no mercy to the invaders. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians had heeded his call, many of them willingly sacrificing themselves in suicide attacks on the Soviets that would have made the Japanese kamik
aze fighters blush. But this Ayatollah was no lover of western style democracy, a report from British intelligence stated that Khomeini considered the Shah nothing more than a puppet of infidel foreign powers and detested him more than the Soviets. Ominously, the British report detailed how dozens of the Shah’s high officials and top officers had been summarily executed directly on this Khomeini’s orders.

  In an effort to mitigate the disaster, the Soviets had attempted to arrange a cease fire, something insisted upon by Khrushchev, but it had failed miserably and their casualties had continued to mount with more than 2,000 killed in the last week of June alone. When word reached the troops on the front lines that an agreement had been reached for a Soviet pullout at the end of eight months, morale collapsed. As an officer who has led men under fire day after day on a foreign battlefront, I can tell you nothing can be more calamitous than for your men to lose confidence in their mission. This is what happened to Soviet mechanized and infantry units who were taking fire round the clock in places like Qom, Istafhan, and Yazd. This resulted in junior officers being shot by their own men, soldiers self inflicting wounds in order to be sent to a hospital unit in the rear, while in some cases whole units refused to obey orders - not the kind of stuff that happened in the fearsome Red Army.

  This is what finally cost Marshall Malinovsky his job as Defense Minister, but then his replacement, Marshall Andrei Grechko promptly requested five fresh divisions be sent to Iran to stabilize the situation and relieve the clearly fatigued forces in the field. On this, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gromyko were of one mind and that was not to throw good after bad.

  “We cannot go forward and we cannot stand still,” Khrushchev reportedly said in a Poltiburo meeting called to discuss Grechko’s request for more troops on July 24th, “so the only thing to say is, the hell with it.” It was a decision with devastating consequences.