The returns from Texas remained incredibly tight with the President ahead by a mere handful of votes; and as the hours moved toward midnight, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states fell into the Republican column one by one. Meanwhile the polls had not yet closed on the West Coast. By then, we were pulling ahead in Illinois, but the big worry increasingly was California, Kennedy’s last poll numbers were good, but I remember Lawrence O’Brien saying if Goldwater could carry Texas and California even at this late hour, he would still have a chance at winning the necessary electoral votes to deny Kennedy a second term.
Then late returns from Tennessee put the President ahead narrowly there, and Louisiana tightened until it was too close to call, and out of nowhere, Arkansas went for Kennedy and suddenly, Goldwater’s sweep of Dixie was no more. “That’s it,” I remember O’Brien saying, “it’s all over.” It didn’t register at first, but of course, it was true, there was no way Goldwater was going to get the Electoral votes he needed without all of the Old Confederacy in his pocket. But who would have thought it would come down to Arkansas? As far as I knew, neither major candidate had set foot in the state; because of the President’s record on Civil Rights and how Orval Faubus was still in the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock, we’d written the state off as a hopeless Dogpatch for Goldwater. Yet ultimately the state would go for Kennedy by just over 60,000 votes. Go figure.
In the end, Kennedy-Johnson was re-elected by a vote of 353 to 185 in the Electoral College and split the popular vote roughly 55% to 45% with Goldwater-Dirksen.
Sometime after the first returns from California came in, a wave of drowsiness came over me, and I found a couch for a catnap. I woke in the early hours of Wednesday morning having missed the networks making the call for Kennedy at 1:00 a.m. I missed being there when the newly re-elected John F. Kennedy came over to the HQ to make a victory speech with Mrs. Kennedy at his side in the press room. There was just enough time for me to crash the line as JFK was leaving to return to the White House. All of my disappointment vanished the instant he grasped my hand, and with a look of recognition, said, “Mr. McCluskey, couldn’t have gotten it done without your help.” Anyone who overheard it might have thought the President was talking about all that time on the road I’d put in making sure all those rallies came off without a hitch, but I knew better.
A couple of hours later, I was back in my Washington apartment for the first time in weeks, watching a replay of Senator Goldwater’s concession speech where he thanked all the volunteers who were wiping away tears in the Phoenix auditorium as he spoke. He’d said something about holding their heads high despite losing when the camera caught a familiar blonde lovely standing in the background, dabbing her eyes.
I immediately got up and went in search of a phone number I’d written down almost a month to the day earlier.
Colonel Martin Maddox
November 1964 - January 1965
The first week of November proved to be a quiet one, but the calm didn’t last, on Veteran’s Day, the Viet Cong staged an attack on Ton Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon, killing two dozen USAF personal there in an advisory capacity. Over the next few days, similar attacks were launched all up and down South Vietnam, as it became obvious the VC and the North Vietnamese were operating freely out of bases in Cambodia and Laos, two supposedly “neutral” countries. Every evening news-cast of Huntley-Brinkley and Cronkite during the holiday season opened with video-tape from South Vietnam of burning villages, bombed out towns and fleeing ARVN troops.
But as bad as the news from South Vietnam was, the main focus of the White House right after Election Day was Cuba. “Maybe Khrushchev getting canned was a blessing in disguise,” said the President at the first meeting of the NSC after the election. “If we had left Cuba in the shape it is in today, somebody who’d make Batista look like Thomas Jefferson would have ended up in charge down there.”
With the withdrawal canceled, we now had to come up with a plan for how to proceed in Cuba. Not that there wasn’t plenty of advice being freely given, especially from certain members of Congress and elements of academia who called what we did to liberate the island from Communism “aggression.”
There was no provisional authority to work with in Havana; no functioning law enforcement or courts anywhere on the island; resistance by Castro supporters was still active in the countryside; armed groups of vigilantes controlled large parts of the cities and most towns; food distribution systems were barely functioning; the only the thing resembling authority on the island was General Abrams and the 100,000 troops doing occupation duty. Then there was the reason why we were in Cuba in the first place: Oswald’s assassination attempt, exactly twelve months ago.
As of November, no investigation had yet to start on the ground in Cuba.
The Administration had put all of its chips on the table and bet on Harry Williams, Manual Airtime and Commander Juan Almeida to take up the reigns after Castro was ousted; but they were dead, and all that remained to take their place were discredited flunkies of Batista and turncoat Communists.
I sat in on the meetings where many of these problems were hashed out between Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, CIA Director McCone, my old boss, Mr. Bundy, and of course, the Attorney General. To further complicate matters, Senator Fulbright, had announced plans to hold hearings on the future of Cuba by his Foreign Relations Committee, while at the same time, a bipartisan group in the House let it be known that they would introduce legislation in the new Congress requiring all American military personal to be off the island by the end of 1965. The New York Times, the Boston Herald, and the Washington Star ran editorials calling the continued military occupation an untenable situation and demanded the installation of a provisional “government of national unity” which would include Communists.
The general consensus among the President’s advisors was that a governing authority had to be established and soon, but the devil was in the details.
A week before Christmas, I was called to the Oval Office by the President and his brother. “Colonel,” said Robert Kennedy, “what do you think will be the end result if we were to set up a provisional government in Havana and then hold free elections? My brother and I would really like your honest opinion.”
I gave the Kennedy brothers my honest answer: “Sir, I firmly believe anyone you would appoint to any provisional government at this point will be seen by the Cuban people as traitors and puppets of the Yankee Imperialists, and if you hold free elections, they will elect the most rabidly anti-American bastards they can find. I personally believe it will be many years before Cuba will be in a position to govern itself and live in peace with us. We lost our best chance for an easy resolution in Cuba when we lost Commander Almeida. It’s just going to take a lot of hard work now. That is my honest opinion, Sir,”
“You are not alone in your thinking, Colonel,” was how President Kennedy answered. “Not alone at all.”
There were no more meetings about Cuba and a few calls to the right people in Congress got the Foreign Relations Committee hearings and any House resolution temporarily postponed until after the President’s State of the Union address, which would come after the inauguration.
That was where things stood when on the morning of January 17th, 1965, the President stepped into the press room at the White House; accompanying him was the former Vice President of the United States and his opponent in 1960, Richard M. Nixon. The President read a statement announcing the formation of a “Provisional Administration” in Cuba, headed by Nixon, who would have the title of Governor General. President Kennedy said this was to be an interim authority until such time as a “government chosen by the Cuban people in a free election” could take over. When this would come about and how long it would take to get there was not specified, only that, in the President’s words, “it would happen when Cuba is ready.” Nixon said he was taking the job with gratitude and humility, happy for the chance to help a country which had been “the victim of a Comm
unist tyrant return to the family of free nations.”
The sight of Kennedy and Nixon, standing side by side, smiling and shaking hands, came as a shock to the political establishment in Washington, but not to me. I knew exactly who Murray Chotiner had been representing that evening at the Hotel Adolphus, someone who had been in a room just down the hall with all of Dr. Jacobsen’s’ medical records in his possession; records which ended up in the President’s hands after a face to face meeting.
Later in the day, I was delegated to giving the former Vice President a full briefing on the Cuban invasion and the aftermath; I’m sure Nixon recognized me from that evening in Dallas, but he never let on; he as much as anyone knew the value of silence. “This job is going to be a bitch,” he said when I was finished. “But it will get done, and when I’m finished, the stain of Castro will be wiped completely clean from one end of the island to the other. And I’m going to make sure that son of bitch pays for every crime he committed.” He had his work cut out for him, the next day, an Army convoy was ambushed on a highway in Oriente province by militia units still loyal to the Communists, killing over 50 GI’s before they faded back into the countryside. On the same day, a Communist-run newspaper in Paris printed a communiqué from Che Guevara calling for a worldwide revolution against the “forces of Imperialism” and vengeance for the “murdered innocents in Cuba.” The CIA speculated he was in the Congo.
The consequences of our actions in Cuba were just beginning.
I spent Inauguration Day, 1965, in my basement office of the White House, monitoring cables from Europe; two days before, the Soviets began moving more troops and armor in Poland and East Germany, in the coming days, the military forces of both countries would be ruthlessly purged of all “undesirable elements.” The new men in the Kremlin were making their presence felt.
In the days after the election, President Kennedy had been determined to open some line of communication with the men on the “State Committee on the National Emergency,” specifically Mikhail Suzlov, who seemed to first among equals on that body, but to no success. The American Ambassador had been rebuffed multiple times since October when he requested a meeting, while at least twice; personal notes from the President himself had gone undelivered. A sad loss presented an opportunity when five days after President Kennedy was sworn in for a second term, Winston Churchill died; it went without saying that the President would attend the state funeral and he vowed to meet face to face with whomever the Kremlin sent to represent the Soviet Union at the last rites for the greatest statesman of the 20th Century.
The men heading the Soviet delegation were the recently rehabilitated V.M. Molotov and Marshall Georgi Zhukov, Churchill’s World War II contemporaries, along with the great survivor, Foreign Minister Gromyko. The President got what he wanted, a meeting with the Soviets on the evening of January 30th in a reception room at the British Admiralty in London. There the President learned what it was really like to deal with one of Joseph Stalin’s right-hand men. Molotov, though a much older man than the one who once sat at the Dictator’s side, still proved himself to be quite a formidable presence. He made it clear that the Soviet Union and the United States represented two economic systems which would always be in opposition with each other, and that, “sentimental appeals to a common brotherhood of mankind, were the fantasies of bourgeois milksops.” There was no amount of charm the President could muster that would melt the wall of ice he received from the old Stalinist. “You can’t imagine how much I miss Khrushchev,” the President told us when he arrived back in Washington the next day. He made several appeals for the deposed Soviet leader to come to America and meet with him, but Khrushchev, who had found temporary exile in India, turned him down. Only later, when some lucrative offers came in and with his health beginning to fail and in need of medical treatment did Old Nikita decide America might not be such a bad place to live after all. I always figured he was pretty jealous of the way Brezhnev was living high on the hog in Scotland on the dime of the British government.
“We are in a new Cold War,” the President told the NSC a week after his fruitless face off with Molotov, “one which threatens to turn hot a lot faster than the old one we were fighting.” He paused for a moment, and then said, “But we’re not going to let that happen.”
Despite such noble sentiments, South Vietnam was literally going up in flames as the second term was getting under way. At the end of the rainy season, the North Vietnamese began sending men and material south in a big way, by the end of January, General Westmorland estimated there were more than 100,000 Communist irregulars in the South, along with two divisions of the North Vietnamese army, a huge escalation in a matter of months and a force which would easily overwhelm the pitifully weak South Vietnamese armed forces and the American contingent already there. It was the view of Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and Mr. Bundy, this was a direct challenge by the new Soviet leadership, and it could not go unanswered. This is why in an address to the nation on February 1st, the President announced that America would be sending the equivalent of two Infantry divisions and one Marine Combat Division to South Vietnam. “We must heed the warnings of history,” he said to the country, “and not let aggressions by a ruthless dictatorship go unchallenged.”
I went into the Oval Office on the day after the President’s speech and asked for a transfer to a field command, specifically in Vietnam. When asked why I was making such a request, I replied, “Sir, I’ve sat in an office and taken actions in the past year which have created a lot of veterans, in the years to come, I’d like to be able to look them in the face.” The President nodded and said he understood.
My orders came through the next day; I was to report to MAACV in Saigon in ten day’s time.
While I was at home packing to go on my last Friday in Washington, the phone rang. On the other end was a familiar voice, one I had not heard for some time. “You are one crazy son of a bitch, Colonel,” said Vance Harlow. “You got it made with a nice office in the White House, the confidence of the President and his brother, and here you are throwing it away to go to a shit hole like South Vietnam. You know they shoot at you there.” I had a million questions to ask Harlow, starting with where the hell was he and why couldn’t anyone get in touch with him. “You got to know when it’s time to close down the act,” he said, “and get out of town ahead of the sheriff.” That was all he would say about himself, the reason he called was to wish me well and that he would get in touch when I got back. “You’re one of the good guys, Colonel, and I’ve met damn few of them in my life.” The last thing he said was not to tell anyone we’d talked, life would be much easier for both of us, he said.
On my last day at the White House, the President called me into the Oval Office after a farewell party down in the basement, a party where Ralph Gillison had a little too much to drink and had to be chauffeured home.
The Attorney General was with his brother when I arrived. “Martin,” the President said, calling me by name for the only time since I’d known him. “I just want you to know that the day you get back from South Vietnam, I will personally add your name to the promotion list and make sure you get your star.” This was quite a surprise; it’s rare for a President to jump over the recommendations of the promotions board and the service chiefs to put up a name of his own.
“It’s our way of thanking you for all you’ve done for your country, Colonel.” That was how the Attorney General put it.
In the light of what I’ve revealed, it can honestly be said the offer of an extra star could be considered a payoff. And it also might ensure my silence concerning certain things when I was out of earshot of Washington.
I’d prefer not to see it that way. I’d prefer to say that I earned everything I’ve got.
I thanked President Kennedy and his brother for the opportunity to serve, for the chance to make a difference and that it was an honor to work with them both.
And with that my tour of duty at the White House came to an end; I
saluted and left the Oval Office; it was the last time I ever saw the two Kennedy brothers together.
John Compton
November 1964 - September 1996
It was my intention to go back to Georgia after the first of the year and resume my practice there, during my time in Washington and on the campaign trail, I had grown quite lonesome for the tall pines of home. Three days after Christmas, I received a call from the newly re-elected Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who offered me the number two spot in the President’s Congressional liaison office, a job which would pay me twice what I’d earned in my best year as a lawyer. “Johnny,” the Vice President said, “you will have a chance to put your mark on every piece of civil rights legislation that will come before Congress in the next four years. History will literally be in your hands to be made. You won’t be able to make near as much of a difference back in Cherokee County, Georgia, arguing a case before a jury of rednecks.” I thanked the Vice President and said I’d consider it.
The next day I got a call from the President himself, asking me to take the job, telling me, “I know you want to help, I need your help, and your country needs your help. Can I count on you?” I gave the President the same answer I gave the Vice President.
I was genuinely torn because my heart really was back in those old courtrooms of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with their big overhead fans, brass spittoons and the faint scent of furniture polish rubbed deep into the hardwood benches. It was my old hero, Hubert Humphrey, who helped make up my mind when I asked for his advice. “Johnny,” he said, “there are hundreds of lawyers who can go down South and do what you do; very few are being asked to lead the fight right here in Washington.”
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 38