What followed was an explosion of rage across a thirty block section of Los Angeles that worsened by the hour as stores were looted and fires burned out of control, while anything with any connection to white authority was attacked with a fury. This had happened in America before, more than once, but this was the first time it was broadcast to the whole country and the world beyond. On Saturday evening, every broadcast on every channel featured footage of black mobs smashing plate glass storefront windows and snatching whatever was in arm’s reach, followed by scenes of looters brazenly walking down the street with newly stolen TV’s, cases of liquor, and cartons of cigarettes clutched tightly. Even more shocking were the images of unfortunate white motorists, who because of a wrong turn were in the wrong place at the wrong time, being surrounded by black mobs and dragged from their cars to be beaten and left for dead in the street.
By Sunday more than a thousand officers of the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department were being deployed to restore order. Before the day was out, three thousand National Guardsman were ordered in to back up local law enforcement; by then there were more than fifty dead and four times that many injured. I was in my DC apartment on Saturday night packing for a morning flight to Detroit where I was to be part of a troubleshooting team whose job it was to go in ahead to the President’s Monday event in the city and take care of any local problems, when my phone rang right after 9:00 p.m.; it was Steve Smith’s chief deputy informing me that it would be announced in the morning that the President’s trip to Detroit had been postponed due to the events in Los Angeles. “The President made the call himself,” I was told, “since there was no way possible for him to engage in partisan political activities while an American city burned.” I was stunned in the moment, so engrossed was I in the campaign; everything depended on sticking to the plan, or so I thought, but by Monday, it was clear L.A. was going to be a big political problem for the Democrats. The riot in Watts was a potential boon for Goldwater, as it seemingly made his argument that lawlessness was out of control in the country for him. And coming less than a month after the compromised Civil Rights Act had been signed with much fanfare in the White House and on the eve of the Presidential campaign kickoff, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
The mood inside Kennedy ‘64 headquarters on Labor Day was anxious, to say the least; the riot showed no sign of being suppressed and the airwaves were filled with accusations and recriminations as to the cause of the carnage. Depending on which side you were on, the Watts riot was a long overdue insurrectionary response to years of racism and oppression by the police department and city government in Los Angeles or a breakdown in social order led by the lazy, the ignorant and the criminal, and instigated by malcontents and agitators eager to do the bidding of Moscow.
Shortly after the noon hour, a group of us younger guys were sitting in a back room, all of us nursing beers and stewing in our disappointment that we were not in Detroit listening to the President make his speech before thousands in Cadillac Square when the call came down: we would be traveling, after all, only it would be a day late and not to the Motor City, instead President John F. Kennedy would be flying to Los Angeles on Air Force One the next day.
Lt. Colonel Martin Maddox
August - September, 1964
“Colonel, I understand you had quite a trip down to New Orleans last spring,” said the President as I stood before his desk in the Oval Office on the afternoon of August 10th. Hearing those words, I was sure the trajectory of my military career was about to take a sharp turn into a dead end. “You don’t have to answer that,” he continued. “I called you in here today because at some time in the immediate future, you will hear an explanation for that trip and the events surrounding it which varies greatly with the facts as you know them. Very probably you will be in the room when said version of the truth will be spoken; in that case, I will not ask you to tell an untruth or even to nod an assent. All I ask from you is your silence, nothing more. After all the hard work you have done for the good of your country, do you think you can do that, Colonel Maddox, can you give me your silence?”
There were only the two if us in the Oval Office on this day, just myself and the President, and though he was not asking me to lie, to compromise my honor as a Marine officer, I knew damn well what my silence would mean. I knew it then, and I know it now.
Without hesitation, I told President Kennedy he could count on me.
What neither I nor anyone else in Washington knew on August 10, was that events were happening thousands of miles away which would have tremendous repercussions in the near future. The accelerated pullout of Soviet troops from Iran was proceeding at a steady pace, and so were the mass arrests of ranking officers from returning Soviet units, most of who were picked up by the KGB within hours of their setting foot back on Russian soil. Somebody had to take the blame for the failures of the Iran invasion, and the worst of it was reserved for the poor guys who’d done nothing but obey their orders from the men inside the Kremlin. It wasn’t their fault the whole operation was doomed to failure because of improper planning and a rushed implementation, not to mention a complete underestimating of the enemy they would be facing. How many Colonels, Majors, and Lieutenants dropped to their knees in gratitude when they got back to Mother Russia, thankful they’d survived the meat grinder in Iran, only to find themselves whisked before a Kangaroo court martial on trumped up charges of “incompetence and betrayal” and then sentenced to a work camp for ten years in Siberia. No mercy was spared for the KGB officers who accompanied the Red Army units into Iran either, their failure was even greater in the eyes of their superiors, for it was their job to ensure the success of the operation and maintain party discipline. Several hundred agents found themselves breaking rocks on the tundra along with the men they were supposed to have been watching.
These developments were meant to inspire fear and intimidation, but sometimes people just don’t or won’t get the message.
At about this same time, several dozen high-ranking members of the Shah’s government, including Cabinet ministers, were released from confinement in Teheran by the KGB, given transportation and sent south to Qom, a holy city where the forces of Khomeini’s resistance were in full control. These members of the Shah’s government were given a cease-fire proposal by the Red Army commander on the ground in a bid to suspend the fighting until the withdrawal was complete. All but three of the Iranians sent to Qom were summarily executed by the Khomeini’s irregulars, who did not even bother to listen to the Soviet’s cease-fire proposal. The three who lived did so because once out of sight of the Russians, they high tailed it to the Iraqi border. I point this out because, at this time, Washington’s policy was that the Shah would return as soon as the Soviets were out of his country and resume his rule; nobody here had bothered to ask the Iranian people what their thoughts might be on their future.
There were other simmering brush fires left over from the multiple crises of the spring: the bombing of North Vietnam appeared to have been effective in the short run; Viet Cong units in the South had gone on the defensive and dug in, it was left to the newly arrived US Marines to try and push them out.
Of course, the most smoke was coming from Cuba, where multiple problems for our now occupation forces were cropping up, the least of which was a population which did see us as liberators. Organized resistance had melted back into the Sierra Maestra mountains, where units of Castro’s army still held out, but it was small groups, some nothing more than a pair of snipers, who were giving General Abrams real trouble-eighteen US service men came home in coffins the third week of August, each of them taken out by an ambush on the streets of Havana and Santiago. On August 27th, the day President Kennedy accepted re-nomination at Atlantic City, General Abrams sent a memo to the Pentagon stating for the first time that there was significant resistance on the island from “guerrilla forces.” This was not what the Administration wanted to hear since it wanted to start a significant drawdown of forces on the island
before the summer was over and the Presidential campaign was in full swing.
There were also real complications in Cuba yet to be dealt with as the summer moved toward fall, the foremost of them still being the large Russian presence on the island. General Andreyev’s command at Camaguey had grown by several thousand by August, as more Russian “advisors” and former Castro officials, now refugees in their own land. The Soviets dragged their feet in repatriating their troops out of spite, repeatedly claiming that they had been invited into Cuba by the “legitimate government” and could only remove them when so requested by the same authority. There being no government in Cuba at the time except for General Abrams’s command, Khrushchev’s standing on the strict letter of the law just to poke the United States in the eye despite agreements reached in New Delhi. The President was taking a lot of flak for “coddling” the Red Army in Cuba on the campaign trail, but worse, important Cubans who could have shed light on the events in Dallas were behind Russian lines in Camaguey, safe from American interrogators.
The other Cuban problem was Fidel himself, now recovered from his injuries and currently residing in a naval brig at Guantanamo Bay, while the State Department insisted his fate would be decided “by the free people of Cuba.” In mid-August, a delegation made up of British Labor MP’s and other members of various western European Socialist parties arrived in Havana demanding a visit with the former Communist dictator, denouncing the imprisonment of Castro as an “outrageous breach of international law.” This was quite the contrast with Senator Goldwater, who called for Castro to be extradited to the United States where he could promptly be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Things were not helped in the least when 75 prominent law professors, including the Dean of Harvard’s school, signed a petition calling the continued holding of Castro an illegal act and violation of Habeas Corpus.
With no central authority on the island other than the United States military, which had its hands full, the Cuban people took full advantage of the opportunity to even all the scores accumulated under Communist rule as anyone even remotely suspected of ratting out their neighbors for so-called “counter-revolutionary activities” was dealt with most harshly. On the first of September, every morning newspaper in the country featured a photo of five dead Cubans, face down in a Havana alley, gaping bullet holes in the backs of their heads from which streams of blood trickled into a nearby storm drain. The accompanying story explained how this was the fate of former block captains for the Communist Party, responsible for sending many Cuban citizens to Castro’s work camps for “re-education.”
For us, in the basement of the White House post invasion Cuba was turning out to be more of a headache than when Castro was in charge. Not the least of our problems was that Cuba was no longer the priority now that there were a hundred thousand American troops on the island and Fidel was locked away in Guantanamo. There were two top priorities for the Kennedy Administration at the end of the summer of ‘64: re-election and the summit with Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership in Stockholm a week after the election in November. The winning of a second term took up 75% of the President and his brother’s attention from the week of the Democratic National Convention onward, and what consideration remained was given over to the upcoming summit, the achievement the President was most proud of coming out of New Delhi. “After this past year, there is no way the Cold War status quo can continue,” the President told us in one NSC meeting, “I know this and Khrushchev knows it as well.” He went on to explain that he was going for broke at Stockholm, not only a reduction of tensions over Berlin and the division of Germany, but a reduction of nuclear arms as well; maybe even a discussion of a joint USA-Soviet effort to reach the moon. “We have too long been living with the mistakes and miscalculations of World War II and the generation that blundered into it,” he said as a way of summing up what he wanted his legacy to be. “It’s up to us who fought on the front lines to find a path to a more peaceful world.”
These were lofty sentiments, certainly words worthy of a statesman, but it was street level concerns which put me in a seat on Air Force One on the day after Labor Day when the President flew across the country to Los Angeles, a city engulfed by a race riot, now in its fourth day. I’d gotten the call at the last minute from the President’s secretary, informing me that I would be accompanying the President on this trip because he “needed someone with my military expertise by his side when he got to L.A.” This made me believe the President was planning some kind of dramatic federal intervention in the City of Angels; from the reports that had come into the White House and what I could follow on TV, it was the worst eruption of urban violence in an American city since the Civil War. When I inquired as to why my I would be making the trip to California, the President’s answer to me was, “Colonel, I need a man of your experience on this thing.”
I learned what he was talking about when I found myself sitting behind the President in the Los Angeles city council meeting room as the council, the Mayor, the Police Chief, the commander of the National Guard, and Governor Brown, along with state legislators, businessmen, and community leaders. All of these Californians were doing their best to explain how they would get the situation under control very soon - we had seen plumes of smoke rising from the city as Air Force One flew in and was greeted at the airport with reports that more than hundred dead and three times as many wounded. There was a lot of hemming and hawing in answer to the President’s question as to why such racial violence had broken out in this place at this time - giving the impression that Kennedy was calling them all on the carpet.
I was sitting right behind President Kennedy as he listened to all this, sticking out like a sore thumb in my Marine uniform as I sat among the civilian staff who had accompanied us to California. The President listened intently to their assurances, nodding his head and furrowing his brow at different times, and not breaking in to ask questions as was his usual style. When they finished, he told them that he hoped their assessment of the situation was the correct one, because if it was not, he, as President was not about to sit by and let an American city burn while its citizens and property were at the mercy of a lawless mob. President Kennedy went on the say that the federal government had many more capabilities at hand to deal with a situation like the one raging in Watts at the moment, and extremely capable men. That is when he turned around and singled me out, saying, “Like Colonel Maddox here, he did much of the planning for our successful invasion of Cuba back in the spring.”
Those California politicians clearly got the message without any direct threats from the President: clean up this mess, or I’ll put the men who cleaned Castro out of Cuba in charge and they’ll get the job done. The fact that most of the office holders were fellow Democrats made the kid glove treatment necessary; President Kennedy would have to depend on them to carry the Golden State in November. And I now knew why he wanted me sitting on inches away when he made his point. One thing which sticks in my mind, more than anything the President said or did, happened after the meeting in the council room broke up and while President Kennedy was in a huddle with Governor Brown, the mayor and the police chief: an intense looking gentleman approached me as I waited for the President and identified himself as a member of the Los Angeles city council - he was wearing a white turtle neck, something seldom seen at the time. But it was not what the man was wearing that I remember most vividly; instead it was what he said. “The invasion of Cuba was a war crime and you, sir, are a war criminal, and if there is any justice, you will stand accused in a court of law one day.”
My first inclination was to punch the guy in the face, even if it wouldn’t have been a fair fight since the councilman appeared as if he barely tipped the scales at 120; but Marine officers do not hit civilians, no matter what the provocation.
The other vivid memory of the Los Angeles trip is of being with President Kennedy an hour later when he toured a neighborhood which had been the victim of rioters only a day previous. We walked pa
st dozens of looted storefronts and burned husks of what had been thriving businesses days before. It was a sight familiar to anyone who has ever been in a war zone; the shocking part was that this war zone was in an American city. That was how I got to be in an iconic photo, snapped by an alert press photographer when John F. Kennedy paused in his tour to listen to the plight of a dress shop owner whose business was picked clean by the looters. “They didn’t even bother to break into the register,” the shop owner told the President, “just carried the whole damn thing away with them.” In the foreground of the picture is President Kennedy, in a white shirt and dress slacks, and a middle-aged black man, hands high in the air in a gesture of exasperation while the President appears to listen with a pensive look on his face. They are under a cloudless blue sky while smoking ruins are off to one side. I am among the many standing a respectful distance from the President, sticking out because I’m the only one in uniform.
This image would grace the covers of both Life and Newsweek magazines the next week.
One other thing sticks in my mind from the L.A. trip, it was catching a glimpse of the drop dead gorgeous Angie Dickinson in an elevator at the Ambassador Hotel, where the President was staying; years later, I would learn that seeing her there was no happy accident.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 26