All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  Kennedy, on the other hand, seized the moment when asked his inevitable question on a “foreign policy seemingly in shambles after the events in Moscow.” He said, “I have not given up, nor will I ever give up on my quest for a more peaceful and secure world for all of our children. If the new men in the Kremlin feel the same, they will find no more willing partner in such an endeavor than me. However, if they wish to rule their Communist empire in the manner of a latter-day Stalin, they will find me to be a relentless foe. If they doubt my words, then I suggest they go and ask Fidel Castro.”

  I knew a great line when I heard one and “Go ask Castro” would be heard many times at Democratic rallies in the remaining days of the campaign. Our fears that the Republicans would make hay out of the Moscow coup were allayed.

  The reason I was in Baton Rouge was to see a gentleman named Howard Prentiss, who had a plan which would put some of the money in that Dallas vault to good use. We met in the kitchen of a barbecue and ribs joint during the lunch hour since we mutually decided his home or too public a place might entail too much risk of future exposure. Mr. Prentiss walked with a limp he got at Leyte Gulf when a Jap Zero strafed while serving as a cook in the segregated Navy in the Pacific. After the war, he came back to his home in Louisiana and vowed he’d never let fear and intimidation rule his life; somehow he got a small loan with a high interest rate from a bank, bought a little grocery store in the black section of Baton Rouge and proceeded to work hard. Now twenty years later, he owned half dozen small stores in similar neighborhoods, along with two funeral parlors; pretty good for a black man in the Deep South. And during those twenty years, Howard Prentiss had paid a lot of taxes and the more taxes he paid, the more determined he was to vote despite poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests. Through sheer guts and will, he had gotten his name on the voting rolls in his parish and stayed there despite having the barrel of a pistol put to his head by a deputy sheriff who ordered him to get his ass back to the courthouse and remove his name removed by the registrar.

  Now in the fall of 1964, Howard Prentiss was showing the same fortitude, only it was now a plan to organize and transport every black registered voter in the state of Louisiana to the polls on Election Day. Mr. Prentiss assured me he had the people; he just needed the money for transportation drivers and protection for the citizens to and from the polls. The risky part of his plan concerned hiring black men with guns for security. Secrecy was the key, because if news of his plan got out before November 3rd, it was a cinch that a few of the black men and women on the voting rolls would get a bullet in the back as they were going to and from work.

  What was needed was cash, something in the mid five figures, to make Prentiss’s plan work. I was sitting across from him because an officer on the ship on which he served at Leyte Gulf went on to become a successful shoe manufacturer in Massachusetts and a big contributor to the political campaigns of a fellow Navy veteran from the Bay State. There were many reasons for not giving Howard Prentiss the money he wanted; the least of them being a potential charge of vote buying; accessory to murder if any of the security men were forced to use deadly force on Election Day. The political blowback could be devastating.

  I didn’t give any of it a second thought; I shook Howard Prentiss’s hand and made arrangements for him to get every penny he needed. “My good friend, Doctor King,” Mr. Prentiss said as we parted, “would not approve of my hiring men with guns to protect our people. I’m afraid the good Doctor will just have to be disappointed.” I asked him why he was so willing to take such a risk to vote in a state where all the polls said Goldwater would take it in a landslide. He replied, “The President of the First Bank and Trust of Baton Rouge, where I pay my mortgage every month, says Goldwater will protect state’s rights, and every good son and daughter of Louisiana should vote for him. What he’s really saying is Goldwater will protect to right of the good white sons and daughters of Louisiana to deny me my rights. I say to hell with them and to hell with that. Besides, don’t count us out down here in Louisiana just yet, you have friends you don’t know you have.”

  I would contrast my meeting with Howard Prentiss with the one Bobby Kennedy had with Martin Luther King the same week, when he quietly slipped down to Atlanta to try and persuade Dr. King to publicly endorse JFK for re-election. The Attorney General got a polite, but very firm no, and then sat there while Dr. King explained his problems with the President’s willingness to compromise with Southern Senators on civil rights, his refusal to commit during the Presidential campaign to a new Civil Rights Act which would guarantee the right to vote to Black Americans, his promise to consider an outright segregationist for the Supreme Court, his decision to invade Cuba, bomb North Korea and South Vietnam, all of which resulted in the deaths of many defenseless men, women and children. Bobby Kennedy was not a happy man when he left Atlanta, and calls were made as soon as he got back to his office in the Justice Department. There was much cursing and shouting as he wanted to know who had leaked the fact that Harold Cox was at the top of the President’s list for the next Supreme Court vacancy because of a deal made with James Eastland. It was the reason why I received a call from Senator Humphrey in the middle of the night, wanting to know if I had breathed a word about what I’d seen and heard in the Vice President’s office that day. I could honestly deny it, I knew who I was dealing with and was not about to do something which would burn every bridge I’d built in Washington. They never did discover who let it slip out about Cox, but my best guess, considering how things turned out down the road, would be LBJ himself.

  On the last weekend before Election Day, the Vice President made a swing across the Old Confederacy. According to all the polls and analysis, it was sure to be Goldwater country when the voting was done, but it was important to fly the Democratic flag nevertheless. Kennedy had made a foray into several Southern states the week before and had received a surprisingly warm welcome in Dixie, so it was decided a visit by Johnson might payoff in some upsets. So between Friday and Sunday, we flew to New Orleans to Nashville to Atlanta to Miami to Charleston to Raleigh to Richmond. What I remember mainly was the absence of any and all Democratic elected officials, most of whom didn’t want to get on the bad side of their constituents who were going to vote overwhelmingly Republican the following Tuesday. Surprisingly, the major exception was Senator Russell in Georgia, who though he did not come and sit on the stage with the Vice President at the Democratic rally in Atlanta, did greet Johnson’s plane at the airport and was photographed shaking his hand.

  There were plenty of Confederate flags and Goldwater signs waived from the back rows at those rallies, but otherwise, those crowds were the picture of Southern hospitality, even in Charleston, where it was rumored Strom Thurmond was marking his ballot for Goldwater.

  We had just boarded the plane in South Carolina on the last Saturday afternoon of this long campaign when I was informed that the Vice President wanted to see me back in his compartment. Three minutes later I was in the room alone with Johnson, who turned to me and said, “Well, it looks like we’re going to have to spend every Goddamn penny sitting in the bank vault, Howard Hughes arranged for Goldwater’s treasurer to tap into a $500,000 secret account set up in a bank in the Bahamas.”

  I asked the Vice President how he came by such confidential knowledge.

  I’ll never forget LBJ’s answer. “That should be Goddamn obvious; one of Barry’s top guys is really working for us.”

  Kevin McCluskey

  October - November 1964

  The re-election campaign of John F. Kennedy has never been written about with the same fervor the down to the wire battle with Nixon in ’60 has. That first crusade, with the built-in drama of two World War II veterans fighting it out as the torch is passed, was an epic which told itself. Not so in 1964, for some reason, the battle with Goldwater against the backdrop of a near third World War just has not captured the imagination of historians in the same way.

  I don’t know why, I h
ad a ring-side seat during the last month, and what I witnessed from the front lines was a battle royal. Kennedy came out of the Dallas debate in good shape, and the game plan was for the President to begin pulling away in the polls over the next two weeks, then putting it away in the final debate on the 20th of October. After that, it would be a cruise to victory.

  If only it could have been so easy.

  One speed bump were the polls coming out of Michigan, Illinois and Ohio the first week of October, after leading by more than 5 points in all three states since Labor Day, Kennedy had fallen to within the margin of error in the first two states, while Goldwater had edged ahead in Ohio. Those hard hat voters were responding to the Republican’s “What kind of country do you want?” appeal; another unpleasant echo from that Wallace rally in the Wisconsin VFW Hall in April.

  To the great credit of Lawrence O’Brien, Steve Smith, and the Kennedy brothers themselves, they realized they had a potential problem and got on top of it in record time. By the second week of October, every UAW man in Flint and Detroit, every steel-worker in Gary and Youngstown, and every meatpacker working the line is a Chicago slaughterhouse, knew exactly what Barry Goldwater thought of unions, the minimum wage, overtime pay, the 40 hour work week and Social Security.

  Those tight poll numbers were the reason why I spent the first two weeks of October in the heartland, traveling from one party headquarters to another, with more than one detour to a union hall. It was my fault the state chairman in Michigan was quietly eased out of his job with three weeks to go before the election because he couldn’t stay sober after the lunch hour.

  There was one other job I was asked to do that October, three times I journeyed back to Dallas and to a certain bank vault, where each time I left with a satchel full of cash. How much? I made a point of not counting, but somewhere north of six figures would be my guess. One trip was to Chicago, where I handed over the money to a gentleman who worked out of Mayor Richard Daley’s office, even though he was on the payroll of the Sanitation Department. The other was to Nashville, where I put the money in the hands of a high-ranking official of the Teamsters, which told me the politics of necessity had forged some strange bedfellows. My final trip was out to the West Coast, where I left a suitcase filled with packs of twenty dollar bills in the company of a well-dressed man of Latin heritage who wore the coolest pair of sunglasses I have ever seen anywhere on anyone. I have no idea who he was or what he what he was going to do with the money. I was just the delivery boy.

  While all this was going on, the Soviets kicked out Khrushchev, the North Vietnamese went to war with the Marines, and some old fanatic in a turban took over Iran. You would have thought the country would have become used to foreign policy crisis by this point, by my count it was at least the sixth one in less than a year, but you could feel the country suck in its breath yet again. On the inside at Kennedy ’64, there was a fear the country would say “enough,” and decide it was time for a change. For a week, the Washington headquarters took panicky calls from Governors, Senators and Congressmen who were up for re-election, claiming they could feel a shift toward Goldwater in their states, though in most cases it was a slight one. They were worried that we were at a point in the race where even a slight shift could turn into a tidal wave under the right conditions. The big worry was that the new guys in the Kremlin would seek to regain the initiative and do something catastrophic like try to snatch West Berlin as payback for Cuba.

  I watched the third Kennedy-Goldwater debate from a hotel room in Los Angeles, and when it was over, I breathed a sigh of relief; Goldwater had been aggressive in his attacks on the Kennedy foreign policy, but had completely tripped himself up over the Klan, while everyone remembered Kennedy’s retort, “Go ask Castro.”

  As soon as I arrived back in Washington, there was a call to come to Steve Smith’s office, where I was praised for the exemplary work I had done so far; so exemplary they felt, that I deserved some “lighter” duty; in other words I was to take over the advance detail for the President in the remaining days of the race. This meant I would fly into any city where Kennedy was to make an appearance 24 hours ahead of his arrival and make sure everything was running smoothly and that expectations were being met. “And if they are not,” I distinctly remember Steve Smith saying, “it will be your job to kick ass until things are running smoothly.” It would be my fault if the President were embarrassed in any way, at any time, during these waning days of the campaign. And woe to anyone found at fault, we’d heard stories about the verbal ass-kicking administered by the President’s brother to even the most senior men who did not fulfill their duty to John F. Kennedy in his eyes.

  I didn’t ask about the guy who’d had the gig before me; I later learned he’d been exiled to Boston to oversee mass mailings. Like a good soldier, I saluted and did the job handed me and flew to Seattle where the President was scheduled to speak before thousands the next day. Being the Pacific Northwest, the organizers wanted to move the event inside because they feared small crowds, I overruled them and kept the event outside; I gambled the voters would turn out no matter what, and the downpours held off long enough for John F. Kennedy to speak before a record gathering for that city. I immediately decided this job was going to be a piece of cake.

  I lost any such notion over the next few days when I was called on to deal with snafus over food, marching bands, permits and potential security threats, and worst of all, who would sit next to the President and get their photo on the front page of the local paper. It was almost enough to make me want to quit, but not quite, because I was making myself useful to powerful men who could open any door in the country for me in the future, and because I grew to like the work, any and all of it.

  My worst moment came on a West Coast campaign swing which took the President to San Francisco in late October; forty-five minutes before Air Force One touched down at San Francisco International airport, I was informed that thousands of demonstrators had gathered downtown with the intention of crashing the President’s motorcade on the way to a rally. With memories of what happened in Dallas the previous year fresh in everyone’s mind, the Secret Service talked of canceling the event, which would have been a huge embarrassment, but Mayor John Shelley insisted we stay with the plan and got the extra manpower in place to prevent what could have been an ugly scene. Nevertheless, both sides got bloodied in the process as the demonstrators were kept well away from the President’s motorcade.

  This was my first brush with the growing opposition to the Kennedy foreign policy on the far left since the Atlantic City convention; it had found a home on college campuses, especially at Berkeley. In San Francisco, I got a good look at them, a mostly young crowd, mixed black and white and carrying signs which said things like, KENNEDY: GET OUT OF CUBA AND VIETNAM or STOP BOMBING PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT WHITE. This incident in the City by the Bay sparked this left wing movement, their presence began turning up in every stop for the President in the days ahead and they just weren’t confined to left wing college towns, but in places like Santa Fe and Denver. They were not always thousands in numbers, sometimes only a bare hundred, but the passion for their cause was fierce. They wanted America out of Cuba and out of Vietnam, first and foremost, but their signs also proclaimed opposition to nuclear weapons, the Cold War and racial injustice. It was easy to dismiss them as malcontents and agitators, which is what the campaign press office did, but it didn’t mean their message was falling on deaf ears. At Thanksgiving dinner that year, my younger brother called Kennedy’s policy in Cuba criminal, my father had to physically separate us before we were done.

  Nevertheless, my position in the campaign gave me a ringside seat to history and a great view of one the finest politicians in American history at the top of his game. In the last weeks of the Presidential race, John F. Kennedy was on fire, striding onto the stage at open air rallies or taking command of the podium in auditorium after auditorium, his voice firm, his finger jabbing the air to make a point, and giving speech a
fter speech after speech on where he wanted to take the country in the next four years, somehow making it sound new and original before each audience. Ted Sorenson and the other writers really earned their pay because the President had to adjust his tone more than once during the month as events beyond his control forced him to do so.

  The coup in Moscow and the escalation of fighting in Vietnam ended any and all talk of the Stockholm Summit; speeches on the subject of reducing tensions with the Soviets and ending the nuclear arms race were thrown in the trash. Overnight, everything had to be rewritten; a politician of lesser talents could not have pulled it off, but JFK did not miss a beat, going from dove to hawk without so much as getting his hair ruffled. “We have been sorely tested,” he said in Denver on the 25th of October, “and have not been found wanting; we have been gravely challenged, and have risen to meet it, we have looked into the eyes of the tyrant, and not blinked. Let Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi remember; we have not retreated one step, we have not faltered once in our resolve, we have not let the flag of freedom touch the ground.” The audience stood and applauded for five minutes when the President was done.