While on the ground in Havana, I did get a brief look at the badly damaged remains of the Tropicana and some of the other hotels, the once and future property of Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello; their tough luck, I thought to myself.
We arrived back in Washington from the Havana trip on Halloween’s Eve for a day’s layover, just enough for me to get time at home with my long-suffering wife and extraordinarily patient kids. While coaching my son on his Little League swing, a call came from Dave Powers at the White House. I picked up the receiver fearing the Soviets had created yet another crisis and quickly discovered the problem was much closer to home. Mr. Powers informed me that a reporter from the Washington Star was asking questions about the President, the Hotel Adolphus, and the night before the debate in Dallas. I will be honest, the first thing that popped into my mind was an image of myself taking the Fifth before a Congressional Investigating Committee - it was so vivid I actually saw the TV news cameras recording my public humiliation.
Then Powers told me that if I was to receive a call from any reporter from either a newspaper or one of the networks concerning the evening in question: I was to say I had spent those hours at the ranch house outside Dallas where the President prepared for his second debate with Senator Goldwater. I knew nothing about the Hotel Adolphus or any purported visit there by the President or anyone else for that matter. “Can you do that, Colonel,” Mr. Powers asked me. “If asked, can you deny you were ever at the Hotel Adolphus and state that you have no knowledge of anything which might have occurred there.”
I did not hesitate; I told Dave Powers I could do just that and then some, whatever it took to get the job done. I was a Marine, and I would hold the line.
That is what I have done through all the years until now, I’ve held the line long after the war was over and there was no longer an enemy to make a stand against. And in all these years, I’ve often wondered who it was who tipped off the papers in the first place because somebody there that night had to have talked.
Dorothy Brennan
November 1964
This is what I did, once back in my hotel room at the Roosevelt on the night of the Rose Bowl rally, I first wrote out in long hand everything I remembered from the evening at the Hotel Adolphus - names, dates and everything else I heard, especially concerning John F. Kennedy - liar, adulterer and extortionist. What I didn’t do was state my own name or mention anything I personally did that night, the last thing I wanted was a reporter calling me, instead of the guilty parties involved. When it was all down on a legal pad, I borrowed a portable typewriter from the press room and typed it all up, multiple times, until a had half a dozen copies, each six pages long and single spaced. The next step was to stuff all six copies into envelopes and address them, each one to a different political reporter at a different major newspaper, including The Washington Star, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times. The sun was coming up when I dropped them into a mailbox on a corner located a block from the Roosevelt. I had worked straight through the night, not stopping until I was done lest I lose my nerve. I knew what I was doing in that moment, and I didn’t care, it was better than lying down and taking it.
Only later in the day, when I had time to think about it, did the recklessness of my act sink in and the possible unintended consequences begin to dawn on me; namely the harm to my own personal safety or my parents, because, after all, in mailing those envelopes, I had threatened more than one Mafia boss. I realized I had been very foolish, and looking back, quite naïve in believing the press would just take the word of an anonymous tip and go after the President. In the end, my tip produced only one phone call to me, and that came from Wade Harbinson, it was the first time we’d spoken since Dallas. He said he’d just received a call from his old friend, the editor of the Dallas Morning News, warning him that some unknown tipster was peddling a story full of smears against not only President Kennedy, but also against some fine citizens of the Lone Star state. He then asked me if I knew anything about it, which I, of course, denied vehemently.
Harbinson said that was a good thing, but, “If you ever breathe a word to anybody about the Hotel Adolphus, if you so much as ever have that place and my name on your lips, I will make damn sure you are implicated up to your neck in the whole fucking mess. Think about that, little lady, not only will the Kennedy brothers move heaven and earth to bury you in a deep hole; I will be right beside them with a bulldozer. You have no friends. Remember that, girl!”
I spent the night in my hotel room, sobbing into a pillow, determined to quit the campaign in the morning and go back home to Idaho.
That did not happen, and nothing came of my anonymous letter writing. I went back to work: I am not a quitter, not then and not now. I would not talk about the Adolphus Hotel, and I would not let them run me off, but nobody was ever going call me “girl” in such a snarling tone ever again.
By now the campaign had only a few days to go, and we sensed a changing dynamic: we could feel the country making up its mind and rapidly moving ahead with the rest of us trying to catch up. The Senator flew from California to Ohio for a final swing through the Midwest; the last appearance was in East St. Louis, Illinois with Senator Dirksen, whose folksy style had been a big hit with the voters. I would like to say Senator Goldwater hit the ball out of the park, but he was dead on his feet and basically sleep-walked through his last appeal to the voters; Dirksen, who was on his own home turf, received the loudest cheers from the crowd.
On the plane back to Phoenix, a memo from Clif White was distributed to us, in it he gave a detailed analysis of how Senator Goldwater was going to win the Presidency the next day by sweeping the Old Confederacy, including Texas, taking Ohio and Illinois in the Midwest, carrying the normally Republican states of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains and then California on the West Coast. He made a point of saying that in all probability, Kennedy would win the popular vote by carrying the big cities on the East Coast, but Goldwater would pull it out in the Electoral College. Understandably, I had not been in the best of moods during those last days, but White’s memo, which spelled out how we would march to victory on paper, reminded me why I had signed on in the first place.
We were going to kick those corrupt Kennedys out of the White House and make America the country it used to be again.
John Compton
November 1964
The last polls came out in Texas the weekend before Election Day, and the news was not as good as we would have wished. The Dallas Morning News had Kennedy and Goldwater tied in the Lone Star state, while the Houston paper put the Republican candidate up by three points. A Gallup poll said about the same thing. It was clear the bump we’d gotten early in the month after the Dallas debate had leveled off, while the undecided voters were breaking late for Goldwater.
The Vice President’s mood was dark on the last day, the worst thing that could happen, would be for Kennedy-Johnson lose outright, the second worse thing would be for the ticket to win, but not carry Texas, a brutally humiliating prospect for Johnson. His last campaign appearance was in San Antonio, I would like to say Johnson hit a home run, but it wouldn’t be true. Instead, he gave a rote speech hitting upon the same reasons to vote for Kennedy he’d made in every other speech for the past six weeks. Afterward, I went to Austin, where the Johnson victory celebration was supposed to be held in a little over 24 hours, the Vice President went back to his ranch, or so the press was told, only later did I learn he spent the wee small hours of Election Day down in the Rio Grande Valley.
The prospect of losing Texas hung over us all on November 3rd, we’d worked so hard and more to the point, risked so much, that losing, in the end, was something too bitter to contemplate. I was in my hotel room in the Austin Hilton watching TV, resisting the urge to get on the phone and talk to well-connected friends in Washington because I was scared at what they might tell me. In the afternoon, I went down-stairs and found a bar, so I had some liquid courage in
me when the first returns started to come in at 6:00 p.m. local time. Kennedy jumped to a lead in the popular vote, but it was the state by state breakdown to which I paid attention, and as the Republican ticket swept across the South, my heart sank.
The Vice President arrived a half hour after the polls closed in Texas and we expected him to be in one of his rankest moods because of the close race in his home state, but the man who greeted me was anything but. “It’s going to be a great night, Johnny,” he said as he threw an arm around my shoulder, “A great night indeed.” That is when I remembered how upbeat Johnson had been the previous summer when everyone was predicting how he would be dropped from the ticket and writing his political obituary. My spirits rose instantly, even though the early returns put Goldwater up by 50,000 votes in Texas and David Brinkley on NBC was talking about “an historic sweep of Dixie” by the Republicans. LBJ knew something and that was enough for me.
At 11:00 p.m. the margin for Goldwater was still the same with more than half the state reporting, that is when the Vice President, who was holed up in the room next to mine, got on the phone and made a series of calls behind a closed door; within 45 minutes, most of the remaining counties in the state reported. The upshot: at midnight, Kennedy pulled ahead of Goldwater by a half a percentage point. That’s when Johnson announced he was going down to the ball-room and claim victory. When it was pointed out that none of the networks had called Texas for the Democrats yet, he replied, “It’s in the bag, and I’m not waiting on any damn network to call anything. We’ve won.”
A lot of news coverage the next day would talk about LBJ’s brass and nerve in claiming victory prematurely on election night, in effect stealing some of the spotlight from the President. But his claim would prove to be true, Kennedy-Johnson would carry Texas by a little more than 24,000 votes, a margin too close for comfort by any reckoning, but it was a win, and that’s what counted. It would not come out for decades, but a good chunk of those winning votes came courtesy of some veteran ballot box stuffers in South Texas who’d gotten their marching orders from Johnson himself the day before. It was his ace in the hole, one he’d played many times in the past.
There was one other thing which caught my notice as I sat in front of the TV; it was the neighboring state of Louisiana. Kennedy was behind there most of the night, but not by nearly the margin as the other Deep South states, at midnight he pulled even and by the time the sun was coming up on Wednesday morning, the President pulled ahead ever so much. It would take a couple of weeks, and no small amount of contention, before the final numbers were certified and John F. Kennedy was awarded Louisiana’s electors by only 1,562 votes. Later, I would learn Louisiana had the highest percentage of registered blacks voting of any Southern state. It looked like Howard Prentiss’s plan had worked out to perfection; I remembered his remark about us having “friends we didn’t know we had.” It turned out a lot of Catholics in Louisiana were not about to vote out the first Roman Catholic President no matter what his views on civil rights.
I was standing behind LBJ in the ballroom when he jumped the gun on the victory call in Texas; if you look at the old footage of it now, I can be seen standing in the background looking especially animated, which I attribute to all the liquid courage consumed in the hours before. I don’t recall exactly what Johnson said in his speech to a packed room filled with enthusiastic supporters, but I do remember what he said to me as he left the podium, “Well Johnny boy, you ready to sign on for ’68, because it’s going to be All the way with LBJ next time.”
Kevin McCluskey
November 1964
The last swing of the Kennedy campaign was a two-day sprint through the Midwest, which took the President to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, Saint Paul, Springfield, Saint Louis, and then back to Boston late on Election Eve so he could vote in his home-town before heading back to Washington on Election Day. Everyone was dead tired, except JFK, who seemed energized on what he knew to be his last campaign for elective office. The crowds were enormous, in Ohio, people waited six hours to just get a glimpse of him; they started showing up at three in the morning in Springfield, Illinois for a rally scheduled for three in the afternoon. There was an energy in the air like electricity, coming off the throngs of people that literally crackled.
I think Kennedy’s best moment of this final swing came in Saint Louis, where he barely missed Goldwater, who made an appearance on the other side of the Mississippi the same day. “This generation,” he told the crowd, “has seen the world torn apart by a World War; this generation has seen our country brought to its knees by an economic depression. This generation has paid the price and restored the peace; this generation has done the hard work and restored prosperity. But this generation will not be satisfied with that; this generation will not be satisfied until peace reigns over every corner of the earth and every one of its people is free from want. Our work will not be finished until that is done.”
It was the kind of pie in the sky oratory the President’s critics would take him task for in the future, but on this day, these farmers and factory workers and teachers and clerks standing under a late afternoon sun applauded every word. They were the people who’d grown up on county relief during the Depression and then gone on to storm the beaches on D-Day, the people who had raised families and put in long hours to put food on the table, and had asked for nothing more than to have a good life, a better life. And on this day, the last day of the 1964 Presidential election, these people truly belonged to John F. Kennedy, who despite being born to wealth and privilege, was truly one of them.
After the final rally in Boston, which went off without a hitch, my job was done. The last rally, late at night, was the only one during the whole re-election effort where Kennedy was actually seen to tear up during a speech. He usually never got sentimental in that way on the stump, but it was his last speech ever as a candidate, and these were the people who had started it all by electing him to Congress back in 1946. “To you, I will always be grateful,” he said with Mrs. Kennedy at his side. “Your faith in me made it all possible.” That was when he had to pause, clear his throat and wipe his eyes before continuing, it only lasted a split second, but everyone there had at least a lump in their throats as well.
I slept in my old bed in my parent’s house, got up early and voted, then caught a flight and was back Kennedy ’64 headquarters by late afternoon. The final Gallup poll had the President up by four points over Goldwater; the final Harris poll had him ahead by five points; the last Roper poll gave us the best numbers with Kennedy up by seven, while U.S. News and World Report had the worst figures with Kennedy ahead by only two points. Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Florida, and California were considered too close to call, which meant neither Kennedy nor Goldwater could be said to have the necessary electoral votes locked up to win.
With all of this in mind, the mood at the headquarters was cautiously confident when I got there; turnout was either at the same levels from 1960 or higher - a good sign, except for the South, where voters were flocking to the polls in numbers not seen in decades. The big worries were Texas and California, the former because Goldwater had shown consistent strength there all throughout the fall, and the latter because of a feared backlash from the riots in Los Angeles over the Labor Day weekend. If both of those states went Republican, Goldwater would have an excellent chance of winning the needed electoral votes while losing the popular vote.
An hour before the polls closed in the East, Bobby Kennedy made an appearance at the headquarters and told us, “It’s not going to be close, there is no way Goldwater will win this in the Electoral College, my brother is going to win it going away.”
Those were welcome words and our mood brightened considerably when the first returns started coming in right after 7:00 p.m. The President jumped into an early lead in the popular vote as Maine and Vermont went Democratic for the first time since FDR; New York and New Jersey fell into our column in short order. But Indian
a went for Goldwater right off the bat; then we watched as one state of the old Confederacy after another go Republican. “Old Dixie has shown us exactly what it thinks of John Kennedy’s policy on Civil Rights,” was Walter Cronkite’s comment when Mississippi was called for Goldwater. By then the President had won Pennsylvania, but was uncomfortably behind in the Buckeye state. Everyone was holding their breath when the first returns from the central Midwest came in, especially Illinois, because of Senator Dirksen’s presence on the GOP ticket. When key precincts in the Land of Lincoln and Michigan reported heavily for Kennedy; I knew for sure we would win. The President was well ahead in the popular vote at 9:00 p.m., but there was still a long way to go. I remember nodding off in a chair as the long hours I had been putting in caught up with me, I didn’t wake up until the room erupted in cheers when LBJ went on TV and claimed victory in Texas. There was some consternation because the state hadn’t been officially called yet, but as someone observed it was Johnson’s state and if he said we’d won it, then we’d won it.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 37