All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  Senator Goldwater hit back hard with his contention that the very act of meeting with Khrushchev and Chou En Lai was nothing less than surrender. I thought the Republican candidate was scoring points until I heard Kennedy’s reply. “We live in an age where it is possible to reduce all the work of human civilization to ashes in less than a day. That this horrendous fate might come about through miscalculation or mistake is unthinkable. It requires us to go the extra mile, to make the larger effort, to cross barriers and borders, to pull back curtains either Iron or Bamboo, if only for a day, or even a moment, to establish even the smallest measure of trust and make sure such a holocaust does not happen.”

  Goldwater accused the President of selling out our “loyal WWII ally, Chaing Kai-chek, but Kennedy had the perfect comeback. “Meeting with Chou En Lai does nothing to diminish Chaing Kai Chek’s contributions to history and how we fought side by side against a common enemy. But the high risks of this dangerous age ultimately compel us to recognize the reality that Chaing does not rule China, now or in the future.” It was a brave thing to say; Chaing had a lot of supporters in America, big and powerful ones like Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time and LIFE.

  I noticed the contrast between the John F. Kennedy I saw up on the stage and one I’d witnessed the night before at the Hotel Adolphus. One was a statesman, pure and simple; the other was a politician, ruthless and crafty.

  We were euphoric after the debate; sure the President had scored a knockout over Goldwater. It was the Vice President who brought me back to earth. “Jack did well,” he said backstage at the Trade Mart, “but Barry is still standing.” The next day, most of the daily papers pronounced the second debate a draw.

  The most immediate consequence of the debate was a sudden announcement that Kennedy would do a campaign swing across Texas with the Vice President and Governor Connolly over the next two days. It was a testament to the friendly reaction Kennedy received in Dallas, and it was the boost our efforts to carry the state needed.

  At every stop, from Fort Worth to San Antonio to Austin to Houston, Kennedy defended his plan to meet with Khrushchev again right after the election. “We must take every step necessary on the path to a just and lasting peace; we must never let pass an opportunity to look our adversaries in the eye and let them know we are determined to achieve it.” This was strong stuff in hawkish Texas, and at every stop there were signs in the crowd calling Kennedy a Red appeaser or worse, but only a few. At every rally, those words prompted applause and cheers from the audience.

  Kennedy’s swing through the Lone Star state coincided with a speech Goldwater gave to the country after buying a half hour of time on the networks. In it, he doubled down and boldly stated, “As your President, it will be my stated objective to seek a resolution of the Cold War on terms favorable to the United States and for all free people everywhere. Communism must give way if humanity is to have a future.”

  “So, old Barry is telling the American people he’s not going to be satisfied with anything less than World War III,” the Vice President commented as we were flying from a rally in Galveston to one in Texarkana. “That ought to guarantee us a few million votes right there.”

  Everyone agreed the Republican candidate had gone too far, and how he was pissing away what chance he had left of winning, little did we know that unseen events were about to force John F. Kennedy to eat his words.

  Colonel Martin Maddox USMC

  October 1964

  If I have given the impression that all the White House was concerned with in the fall of 1964 was political maneuvering, then it is a false one. There was unfinished business in Cuba and Iran to concern us every day, while preparations were going forward for the next summit with Khrushchev right after the November election. The upcoming summit became the focus of the President’s foreign policy team, who, in hindsight, were operating under the assumption the Kremlin would be on their best behavior lest they do something which might scuttle the summit or endanger Kennedy‘s re-election. It quickly became apparent that a lot of concerned parties did not get the memo.

  The continued ineffectiveness of the South Vietnamese Army meant the Marines in country had to shoulder the burden of the fight against the Viet Cong, who were being resupplied with Soviet weapons from the North; our casualties there increased every week during the month of September.

  The events in Southeast Asia did not escape the notice of the press, which put them on the front-page of all the major dailies. That meant Vietnam became a topic on the campaign trail where the President had to take heat from Goldwater over it.

  On September 15th, the New York Times published a front page interview with Che Guevara, who was in hiding somewhere in Latin America after escaping Cuba late in June. He claimed to be in touch with elements of the Cuban Army still resisting the American occupation on the island and was actively recruiting volunteers, ”who are eager to go to Cuba and continue the fight the American Imperialist oppressors.” Guevara promised tens of thousands of them would soon be taking to the sea in small boats to slip past the American navy and land on the beaches in a second invasion which, “would drive the Yankee bastards into the Caribbean.”

  Good luck in that I thought, because American forces on the island at the end of September included over 80,000 Army infantrymen and specialists, 25,000 Marines and another 20,000 Naval personal. There was still active resistance from Castro’s dead-enders, but they were mostly in the country side and the mountains; our casualty rate had dropped from a hundred men a day at the height of the fighting in April to barely a trickle now, although flag-draped coffins were still coming home every week. Ominously, the casualty rate among the civilian population had skyrocketed, as the victims of Castro’s dictatorship sought retribution against anyone who might have aided the former tyrant; roving bands of vigilantes dealt out summary justice in what had become a civil war at its most ugly. Making matters worse, there was not even the semblance of a provisional government; that part of the plan went up in smoke with the disappearance and presumed death of Harry Williams and Manual Artime.

  The problem of General Andreyev and the Soviet troops at Camaguey had not resolved itself, mainly because the Soviet leadership was dragging their feet on sending transport to evacuate them from the island. The CIA speculated the Kremlin’s strategy was to avoid the humiliation sure to occur at the sight of Russian troops marching past the victorious Americans on their way to the ships which would take them home; there were also concerns the Kremlin was stalling because it wanted to preserve some kind of presence in Cuba once American forces withdrew. To further complicate things, Andreyev made it plain, first to General Abrams and then to officials from the CIA that he would not even consider turning over any official from the Castro government who had sought asylum inside Soviet lines, including members of Cuban Intelligence wanted in questioning in the November ’63 assassination attempt; this led some to question if Andreyev’s real motivation was to cover up a Soviet connection to Oswald.

  Another complication was the plans by the Kennedy campaign for the President to visit Cuba before Election Day. A touchdown at the airport followed by a big rally where grateful Cubans would show their appreciation to the man responsible for freeing them from Communism, a plan I’m sure originated in the Oval Office.

  This was not a good idea. “It’s like the Wild West down there,” a fellow Marine officer told me, “half of Havana has guns, and they’re pointing them at the other half and shaking them down. You can make a fortune running cans of soup, beans, and spam into the island. And you can make even bigger bucks running guns down there too; it’s worse than when Fidel was in charge.”

  While all this was going on, the situation in Iran was not getting the attention it should have; we were forced to rely on British Intelligence tell us what was going on until late summer when Director McCone finally managed to insert multiple teams of agents into the country. They were real professionals who managed to get a network up and running i
n a matter of days, giving us accurate reports on a country in chaos as the Soviets rapidly pulled out. The Red Army in retreat lashed out at the Iranian civilian population, burning to the ground entire villages when a sniper killed a single Russian soldier, raising apartment buildings in Teheran to the ground if they were believed to house resistance fighters, while immediately executing any man or woman who impeded their withdrawal in any way.

  The real news in these reports was the picture it painted of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who if anything was worse than the Russians. Khomeini believed in summary executions as well; there were no Soviet POWs held anywhere in Iran. Equally worse was the fate of any member of the Shah’s regime who fell into Khomeini’s hands; they joined the luckless Soviet soldiers in front of a firing squad. It was obvious from these reports that there was no way the Shah would simply return home and resume his place on the Peacock throne, even if it was still the policy of the American government that he do so.

  What we had absolutely no intelligence on were the happenings a few hundred miles to the north on the other side of the border with the Soviets. The purge of officers suspected of failing to do their duty during the operation in Iran, both in the Red Army and among the KGB, continued without letup, inching up the chain of command to district commanders, who were accused of insufficiently instilling the proper “Revolutionary Spirit” in their troops. In the last week of September, the Generals in charge of the Turkestan and Caucasus military districts were hauled before a pair of Kangaroo tribunals and the next thing they knew they were packing for Siberia. During the same week, a least forty East Germans managed to scale the Berlin Wall and make their way to freedom, this is notable because they did it within plain sight of their country’s border guards who refused to obey orders and fire upon them. On the first day of October, five guards simply walked away from their posts and into the West. An infantry squad was prevented from hijacking a half dozen trucks and ramming one of the Wall’s gates by a Soviet tank which blocked their way at the last minute. Hours later, Walter Ulbricht sent a message to Moscow warning that a general uprising among the East German people was imminent.

  These actions lit a fuse under another far-flung group of conspirators inside the Soviet government, powerful men in the Red Army and the KGB who were, as one later put it, “not going to simply fall in line while we were nailed to cross for the sins of Iran while the men inside the Kremlin escaped all blame.”

  These were members of the Communist Party and the military who were more than alarmed at the possibility of an East German disintegration and collapse of the Warsaw Pact. And they believed the first appropriate action to remedy the situation was the removal from power of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, whose rash policies since the second coup were responsible for this crisis.

  That the two leaders in question didn’t move swiftly to confront an impending crisis in East Germany nor understand how there would inevitably be a backlash in the middle ranks over their harsh punishments for the failures in Iran can be blamed on fatigue after months of crisis, and hubris on the part of Brezhnev, who believed he was untouchable once all his rivals on the Politburo were gone. A terse note was sent to Ulbricht to take “whatever matters necessary to resolve his countries problems;” Brezhnev then promptly flew to Leningrad, ostensibly to meet with the Mayor and other city officials, but really to look over some of the latest models from Chevrolet, which had been smuggled across the border from Finland. Khrushchev on the other hand badly needed to get away and take a true vacation ahead of the Stockholm summit with Kennedy in November; the events of the past year were making the man feel his age. Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s departure from Moscow on the 9th of October was the opening their enemies needed.

  Sometime in the early hours of the next morning, elements of the 8th Rifle Division, a unit which had gotten the hell shot out it in Iran, along with a squad of handpicked KGB officers, infiltrated the Kremlin, before sun up they were in complete control of the palace, while orders were being dispatched by Marshall Grechko to commanders in all Soviet military districts and the Warsaw Pact. Before the morning was out, three agents walked into the Lubyanka, requested access to the acting KGB Director’s office by claiming they had knowledge of an imminent coup. As soon as they were standing across the desk from the Director, they pulled out their guns and shot him to death, then killed his secretary and four deputies. That effectively brought the KGB on board and the success of the third Moscow coup in less than a year was guaranteed.

  The first hint of the doings in Moscow came when Vladimir Roykov arrived at the gate of the American Embassy requesting asylum. Within the hour a cable was in the hand of Secretary Rusk, who called the President in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was looking forward to a day of hard campaigning, with news of yet another crisis breaking. The President would spend the day getting updates every time he walked off a stage after a speech, with the eagle-eyed press core, who’d vowed never to let the wool be pulled over their eyes again like it was during the early days of the Missile Crisis, quickly catching on that something was up.

  “The shit just won’t stop hitting the fan,” was Vice President Johnson’s take on this turn of events.

  This was why the Attorney General and I were back at that fine French restaurant in Georgetown two nights later, meeting with Colonel Sergei Ivanov. He had little actual intelligence to tell us, but of those now in charge, he would say, “These men have learned the hard lessons,” Ivanov told us, “and they’re not going to leave anyone in a position to turn the tables on them. It’s how Stalin did things.”

  Robert Kennedy pressed him on who was in charge, he wanted a name and a face, and he wanted to know who his brother would have to sit across the table from now. “You will need to have a little patience,” was Ivanov’s answer. “I’m sure a first among equals will rise in due time.” The Attorney General inquired about the Colonel’s own position and if he was safe in light of this new regime. He also let Ivanov know there was a standing offer of asylum if he felt the need of it. The Colonel thanked the Attorney General but said he was a true Russian patriot at heart and could never leave behind the homeland where his wife and children dwelt. We never saw him again after that meeting; he was recalled to Moscow a month later with orders to personally brief the new head of the KGB on all his dealings with the Kennedy Administration. We later learned he was accused of passing state secrets in his meetings with the Attorney General and me, and subjected to lengthy interrogation and torture. Sergei Ivanov died in a Soviet work camp; I never found out what happened to his wife and children.

  MOSCOW COUP; KHRUSHCHEV OUT was the New York Times headline on October 12, 1964; the NSC had been meeting virtually round the clock since the first news reached Washington and we still had little or no idea whose finger was on the nuclear button. All attempts to establish contact with the men inside the Kremlin had come to naught. There was footage of troops on the move in the Soviet capital in the early hours of the coup before total blackout was ordered by the new government and any foreign correspondent caught on the streets would make the acquaintance of the Red Army.

  It wasn’t until the 14th that we got our first real look at who was in charge when a Moscow television station broadcast what was purported to be a meeting of the “State Committee of the National Emergency” in the Kremlin. It consisted of nearly a dozen men, seemingly headed by the notorious hard-liner Mikhail Suzlov, a man who had been out of sight for nearly three and a half months. That was because he had been in a cell after his arrest was ordered by Brezhnev in June, a fact which precluded him from being the mastermind of this latest coup. Who we should have been paying attention to at the time was the man who sat at Suzlov’s side at the meeting, Yuri Andropov.

  This “Committee” declared a state of emergency as the Ministry of State Security ordered 300,000 pairs of handcuffs and emptied Lefortovo Prison in preparation for what came to be called the Third Great Purge.

  One thing abundantly clear was t
hat the Stockholm Summit with Khrushchev scheduled for the week after the November election was now dead. This was a deep personal blow to the President; only his closest aides knew how hard he took it at the time. In his memoirs, John F. Kennedy wrote of “a golden opportunity to halt the nuclear arms race with the Soviets and permanently thaw the Cold War,” which slipped away in October of 1964. There was no chance the new men in charge in Moscow were going to enter into the kind of hard negotiations and agree to the tough sacrifices that an end to the Cold War would have entailed; only an old Stalin hand like Khrushchev or even a veteran Kremlin infighter like Brezhnev could have managed such a feat. Both of them were lucky to have made through October alive. The President himself gave the order for American fighters from one of our bases in Turkey to give air cover to the plane which flew Khrushchev and his family out of the Soviet Union on October 14th; the man had to be forcibly put aboard the Russian version of our DC-10 at an air base in the Crimea where he was vacationing. In fact, the plane had trouble taking off because all of Khrushchev’s security detail jumped in the plane with him; they were directly disobeying orders to hold him in custody until a KGB execution squad arrived from Moscow. Our jets shadowed the Russian plane all the way until it touched down in Egypt, protecting it from any Migs which might have been scrambled to shoot it down. Khrushchev didn’t mention that little detail in his own memoirs, which portrays his daring escape and flight in an exceedingly different light.

  Leonid Brezhnev simply road across the border to Finland in one of those Chevys he’d gone to Leningrad to look over and made a deal on the spot with British Intelligence to tell them everything he knew about the men who ousted him for the equivalent of five million dollars in British currency. Despite monetary inducements from MI5 and the CIA, he never gave up any state secrets, in those matters, Brezhnev remained a Soviet patriot.