Most of this information came for Vladimir Roykov, the man in charge of Kennedy’s back ally channel to the Kremlin, who had failed miserably to predict the coup, but got the Iranian withdrawal right.
By September 1st, the Soviet forces on the ground had been reduced by half from their peak right after the invasion. It was a stunning reversal, spurred on no doubt by the continued seething unrest under the surface in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Behind the scenes in Washington, the mood had changed, for despite the fierce criticism, President Kennedy saw the New Delhi summit as an unmitigated triumph; in his eyes, we’d bagged Castro, forged an opening to Red China and weakened the Soviet Union, quite a feat. Much of the discussion in the Oval Office concerned the upcoming November summit with Khrushchev, where the President planned to discuss controls on the proliferation of nuclear weapons for the first time. He talked about that far more than the fall election, rapidly approaching. I would have thought different, even though the President saw the events of the last few months triumphantly, Senator Goldwater was coming on strong, at least that is how I saw it over the summer, then again, what did I know about politics.
But I was getting a hard lesson. On the afternoon of August 10th, I received a call at my desk in the White House basement from a gentleman with the hint of a Cajun accent who gave his name and said he was a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and wanted to ask me a few questions about my visit to the Big Easy in March, specifically a stop I made at the Town and Country Motel and Restaurant while there. A flat out denial that I had ever been in New Orleans, much less on the date in question, was almost out of my mouth when I simply slammed the phone back in the receiver, cutting the conversation off before it had begun. Better to say nothing than speak and risk anything. That’s when I realized a reporter for the Times-Picayune could not possibly have access to the phone in my office.
Had somebody been trying to get me to confirm my presence at Marcello’s back in March to make a recording of me incriminating myself? Somebody with enough pull to get the number of an office in the White House?
I sat there and felt a sense of anxiety not experienced since I was under fire in Korea.
That anxiousness was nothing compared to what I felt a few hours later when my phone rang a second time. “Colonel Maddox,” said President John F. Kennedy when I picked up, “could you please come up here to my office right away.”
Dorothy Jean Brennan
June - July 1964
I dismissed the man who had the message for Wade Harbinson as a Loony Toon, a type of person who showed up daily on the campaign trail, they always presented themselves as quite professional and competent, and each and every one claimed to possess vital secret information about President Kennedy’s personal life or something nefarious the American government was conducting secretly that our campaign needed to know about right away. In the course of a month, I heard about Kennedy’s “secret first wife” or his “love affair with a known German spy during WWII,” or the “100,000 Red Chinese soldiers just below the Rio Grande” who were about to attack with the collusion of the Pentagon or they had proof positive that “Martin Luther King had been educated in Moscow by the KGB” and received all his money from Communist Russia.
I promptly stuck the note in a file folder - because you never know when they might turn out to be valuable in some way - and went about my duties as assistant press secretary to Goldwater ’64.
It was about a week or so later, a time when the convention was coming up on us fast, when I arrived back at my temporary office in Phoenix one morning to find a visitor waiting for me. He was a middle-aged gentleman who greeted me by name, introducing himself as Vance Harlow. By his bearing, I instantly tagged him as a former officer in a branch of the military, or maybe the FBI, a serious man who had spent his life during serious work. I was proven correct when Mr. Harlow informed me that he had worked with Senator Goldwater on the Senate Investigations Committee when they had gone after labor thugs like Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Ruether, and how he was now a private investigator in the employ of men who very much wanted the Senator to be the next President of the United States.
He then surprised me by repeating exactly what the man in New Orleans had said, including the claim he could give Harbinson a better deal on something than Harlow, and that he knew something which could bury the Kennedy’s. “My I ask why you did not immediately inform Mr. Harbinson?” Harlow asked. I told him about the daily Loony Toons and explained why I did not waste either my or Mr. Harbinson’s time. Harlow thanked me for doing so, saying the gentleman who spoke to was named Clay Shaw, an associate of some bad characters in New Orleans, the kind of people the campaign did not want to be connected with under any circumstances and who would create quite a problem for Goldwater ‘64 if it were to become public. Furthermore, Mr. Shaw himself was a sexual degenerate, reason enough alone not to have anything to do with him.
Then he said, “Miss Brennan, by not giving that note to Mr. Harbinson, you did the campaign, Senator Goldwater and certainly the United States of America a great service. I believe it‘s a service you should continue to give. If in the next few weeks, you should be approached a second time by Mr. Shaw or anyone else wishing to use you as a conduit to Mr. Harbinson, I would be much obliged if you would contact me first. A lovely young lady like you doesn‘t know it, but there are some very bad people indeed out there; people who want to use good and faithful patriots like Barry Goldwater to further their own ends, I think it’s much better I deal with them than you.” He handed me a business card. “I can be reached at that number, and I don’t expect you to just do a favor out of the goodness of your heart or a sense of duty to our fine candidate. Anything you do for me will be properly compensated; I know those old money bags running Barry’s campaign aren’t about to pay a lovely young lady with a journalism degree from a great college like USC near what you’re worth, so I’m sure you can use the money.“
I thanked Mr. Harlow and put his card in the top drawer of the desk as soon as he left; quite sure I’d never have any use for it. Still, he was right about me needing the money, that’s when it hit me that Vance Harlow had investigated me before coming to my office, how else would he have known I’d gone to USC. I didn’t like it, and suddenly I didn’t trust Mr. Vance Harlow so much.
Once Senator Goldwater nailed down the nomination with his victory in the California primary, the real campaign began, and one of the first orders of business was the endorsements by former opponents in the name of party unity. The leader of this cohort was Richard Nixon, who’d been sitting on the sidelines gleefully hoping for deadlocked convention which would turn to him; with this hope dashed, he flew to Washington and endorsed the Senator in front of a room full of reporters. This was my first encounter with Eisenhower’s former Vice President, the man whose loss in 1960 so disappointed my father. I was not impressed, the man was an opportunist and a modern day Uriah Heep; if there had still been an iota of a chance he could have snagged the nomination, the man would have been on the phones night and day to the heads of the delegations, reminding them that he was available for a draft.
Nevertheless, we saw a lot of Nixon over the next few weeks as he worked to bring on board a lot of party establishment figures who had not been keen on Goldwater from the start; many of them big movers and shakers from the East who had been behind Eisenhower in ‘52. Clif White spoke for many when he said, “We didn’t come all this way and work this hard just to turn around and suck up to the Wall Street guys who sneered at us and then lost to us.” Dean Burch smoothed things over and helped Nixon set up meetings with the Senator and some big money men from Lehman Brothers and E.F. Hutton; someone said it was quite the triumph when your defeated enemies joined your side - except those money bags didn’t look defeated to me. What Nixon got for his trouble was a prime-time appearance at the convention where he would place Senator Goldwater’s name in nomination.
While this was
going on, the Goldwater campaign was being completely ignored by the press and the networks; their eyes were only for Kennedy and his shenanigans in New Delhi. A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a dejected looking Barry Goldwater off to himself while a mob of reporters and camera crews surrounded Kennedy and Khrushchev as they shook hands. This might be what the elites in the big eastern newspapers and the nightly news saw, but there were plenty of real Americans who were paying attention to what was going on, and more importantly, listening to what Senator Goldwater had to say. We got plenty of outraged calls and pledges of support in the weeks after the New Delhi summit, where the leader of the free world extended his hand to a blood stained Red Chinese tyrant. Seventeen retired Admirals and Generals flew to Phoenix to announce their support for Goldwater in the face of this “tide of appeasement.” The Senator was particularly incensed at the sellout of Chaing Kai-Chek, a man he called a “loyal ally and friend in time of war.”
There was much more animating the Goldwater people: the agreement to just walk away from Cuba after American boys had spilled blood to liberate it; the way Kennedy had let the Soviets off the hook after their aggression in Iran when we had the means to deliver a crushing military defeat to them by air power; the way we had yet again turned a blind eye to the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain, who at the height of the crisis, demonstrated their desire to be free only to be met with a stony silence from Kennedy, who issued an order to the commander in West Berlin not to resist if the Soviets made a move on them; the missed opportunity to finish off the North Koreans once and for all and the ignoring of Communist aggression in South Vietnam.
Then there was this so-called Civil Rights Act moving through Congress, millions of small businessmen and homeowners were terrified of what this act would do to the hard work of a lifetime. I had only to think of my own great-grandfather, who’d run a haberdashery in Sacramento, California for twenty-five years; he’d have burned it to the ground rather than let the government tell him who he could hire. A lot of good Americans felt the same way and were not about to stand by and let their country go to hell.
Neither was Barry Goldwater, who while John Kennedy was hobnobbing with Communist dictators, made speech after speech to ever increasing crowds, telling them, “we need a President committed to resisting with every ounce of strength and resolve at his command the aggression of our sworn enemies and one who will honor the hallowed tradition of individual liberty which has guided this country from its founding.”
If the starry-eyed reporters and worshipful pundits had looked around in the early summer of 1964, they would have seen an energized movement of real patriots ready to take on the vaunted Kennedy machine.
The Republican National convention opened on July 13th in San Francisco with no doubt as whom the nominee would be; it was Senator Goldwater’s party now and his people filled the delegations and called the shots. I spent four days shuttling between our hotel downtown and the Cow Palace, briefing the press and mostly enjoying the spectacle.
Again the eastern elite press and especially the networks devoted much time to looking down their noses at the assembled heartland patriots who had come together to take back their country. Over and over the network commentators used the terms “extremist,” “radical,” “right-wing,” and “reactionary,” in their commentary, Walter Cronkite being the worst for this, and I must say their contempt was thrown right back at them. I was proud to be in the hall when former President Eisenhower denounced “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators,” and the delegates who then stood on their feet to shake their fists at the network booths above them were only expressing their righteous indignation at their misuse of the freedom of the press. Nelson Rockefeller got some well-deserved boos when he appeared before the convention to endorse a proposed plank in party platform on “extremism” which was designed to do nothing more than embarrass the Senator.
The only real drama I was privileged to witness happened in Senator Goldwater’s hotel suite in the early hours of Thursday, July 16th, right after he had been formally nominated on the convention floor. It was time to pick a Vice Presidential running mate and to our astonishment, the Senator said he had not given it too much thought, and asked the room, which consisted of all the inner circle of the campaign, along with some heavy hitters like Nixon, whom they thought would make a good running mate.
One of the first names mentioned was General LeMay, whose opposition to the way Kennedy had been pulling his punches ever since the Missile Crisis was well known, but Senator Goldwater said LeMay would make the ticket too unbalanced by having a pair of Air Force officers on it. Wade Harbinson spoke up and said, “Why not put John Wayne up for Vice President; Goldwater-Wayne, that could be a winning ticket.” This touched off a serious discussion of whether the movie star would actually accept the nomination; someone else brought up Paul Harvey, which led to Clif White to say why not consider Ronald Reagan, “he’s been making great speeches on behalf of GE for years, and the camera loves him.” A couple of genuine office holders, like Ohio Governor James Rhodes, were thrown into the discussion. Finally, Senator Goldwater said he liked Bill Miller, a Congressman from New York and the RNC chair who almost no one had heard of before, because he knows “how to needle Jack Kennedy.”
Former Vice President Nixon took the floor and said emphatically that this was an opportunity which could not be treated lightly; how every national poll had us within striking distance of the President and in order to get serious consideration from serious voters, there had to be a man with real statue and substance on the ticket with the Senator. “Statue and substance,” Senator Goldwater responded, “that sounds an awful lot like you, Dick. You want your old job back?” I thought Nixon’s words were a thinly veiled pitch of himself for the second spot on the ticket, but the look on his face when the Senator actually offered it to him told me it was the last thing the man wanted. Nevertheless, a lot of those assembled thought a Goldwater-Nixon ticket to be a good idea, the perfect bridging of the past and the present. By that point, it was getting daylight and a decision had to be made very soon, so it really did look like the former Vice President was going on the ticket whether he liked it or not. Although I didn’t speak up at all during the discussion and no one asked me for my opinion, the thought of Nixon running again for Vice President again was an abhorrent idea. I doubted the man’s sincerity and I think events have proven me right.
Thankfully, Senator Goldwater himself was not serious about putting Nixon on the ticket. “I know you don’t want it, Dick,” he said at last, “and I won’t twist your arm, but you are right about getting someone with statue and substance. My old friend Ev Dirksen fits that bill, get him on the phone and let’s see if he’ll run with me.” Senator Dirksen was 68 years old and had been mentioned as a possible running mate on a Republican ticket as far back as when FDR and Dewey ran against each other, but in that room and at that moment, he seemed like a wise and serious choice, much better than a movie star or some little-known Congressman. It took Senator Goldwater a half hour of cajoling before Dirksen would agree to run with him, the man was reluctant at the prospect of having to give up the United States Senate; no matter, when the announcement was made at 9:30 a.m. local time, it officially became the Goldwater-Dirksen ticket.
The final night of the convention, when Senator Goldwater made his acceptance speech and set the tone of his campaign, was one of supreme triumph for all of us who had worked so hard for so long. I was in the hall sitting behind the podium where first Senator Dirksen and then Senator Goldwater spoke. “It is a profound and distinct honor” the Vice Presidential nominee said in his speech, “to run with a man who is the modern embodiment of the virtues the Founding Fathers treasured: courage, honor and the dedication to principle over self-interest.”
Everett Dirksen had a reputation as quite the orator, but nobody remembered what he said after Senator Goldwater spoke. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. An
d let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” It was the line everyone remembers, and the delegates cheered for nearly five minutes in response; it was the perfect repudiation to everything the pusillanimous Kennedy Administration stood for. He drew the line in the dirt clearly and unambiguously: Negotiate from a position of strength with the Soviets or no negotiating at all; no pull out from Cuba until real democracy had been restored, and Castro had faced justice; no more cozying up to Red Chinese tyrants and no backing down in Korea and Vietnam; no more coddling of the switchblade-wielding criminals who are taking over the streets of our great cities; respect for the rights of states and individuals to conduct their affairs as they see fit and reign in the tyranny of the Federal government.
When he began his campaign many months earlier, Senator Goldwater had promised us a choice, not an echo; it was a promise he had most certainly delivered on. The audience at the Cow Palace rose as one when the Senator speech was finished and cheered him for nearly a half hour. There was no doubt in my mind that we would beat John F. Kennedy decisively and thoroughly in November.
I was feeling the effects of sleep deprivation pretty good the next morning as I was checking out of the San Francisco Hilton; as I was making my way across the lobby after paying my bill at the front desk (and rifling through my purse for a pair of sun-glasses to hide my red eyes if memory serves me) when a figure appeared in front of me. “Little lady, could I please have a moment of your time,” said Wade Harbinson.
Wade Harbinson
July 1964
I was not in San Francisco for the opening day of the 1964 Republican National Convention, a triumphant moment for all of us who had dedicated so much time and effort get the nomination for Barry Goldwater, but as much as I hated to not be at the Cow Palace, there was a far more important chore waiting to be done, one which could deliver to us and Senator Goldwater a far, far greater triumph. On that Monday, as the opening session of the convention was being gaveled to order, I was yet again at the Carousel Club in Dallas, Texas, on far more important business.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 23