All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  I decided to stay, motivated in no small part by guilt over the compromises made to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed; maybe I could accomplish more in the second term. Maybe I was naïve.

  But the prospects for progress in the next four years were undermined from the start by the aftermath of the ’64 election. There was no small amount of antagonism still festering between Bobby Kennedy and LBJ, made even worse by Johnson’s premature declaration of victory in Texas on election night. According to Bobby, the Vice President had “made a Goddamn fool of himself in front of the whole country.” There was much more to it. Thanks to my role as a go-between in Bentley Braden’s little scheme, I knew Lyndon Johnson had used the tape of Ellen Rometsch to guarantee his retention on the ticket at Atlantic City. Johnson supposedly delivered the tape himself to the Oval Office in a gesture that said, “You know that I know that if you don’t want anyone else to know, then...” JFK thought the whole thing funny and admired Johnson’s nerve, but Bobby couldn’t stand the idea of LBJ having pulled a fast one on them after he was all but booted out the door. I suspect JFK intended to keep Johnson on the ticket all along and just indulged Bobby, but the bad blood would stain all the good intentions of the second four years.

  The other shadow was the rift between the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King after 1964, it was something none of the parties involved ever talked about openly; from my vantage point, I believe it was a matter of trust, and bad faith, starting with the ease with which the Kennedy Administration was willing to cut compromises to get the Civil Rights Act passed and the never publicly acknowledged deal with Senator Eastland to nominate Judge Cox to the Supreme Court. What none of us knew was the undercover harassment Dr. King was receiving at this time from Hoover’s FBI; that, and the strong differences Dr. King had with Kennedy’s policies in Cuba led to an almost complete breakdown in communication between both camps which did no one any good. Nobody in the White House was happy when King declared the continued American occupation to be, “a crime against a free people,” and called for Fidel Castro to be freed from his cell at Guantanamo Bay.

  We went into the second term intent on passing a federal voting rights act to end discrimination at the ballot box, it was the first legislation introduced in January 1965, but instead of taking six months to pass, it took a torturous eighteen, as Southern Democrats fought us tooth and nail, while Republicans offered little help because Goldwater’s appeal to white fears had proven there were votes to be had by going down that road and many GOP Congressmen saw future electoral success in making sure barriers remained between blacks and the voting booth.

  While we were fighting the good fight in Congress, Dr. King, SCLC and SNCC were fighting a real fight by confronting the segregationist voting system head on; week after week, there were well-organized marches and confrontations at courthouse after courthouse as hundreds of long-disenfranchised black citizens showed up and demanded they be registered to vote. Emboldened by the fact they had somehow saved Jim Crow, white segregationists went all out to stop the push for voting rights in its tracks. It really tried my patience to watch Walter Cronkite on the evening news reporting on the violence which erupted all across the South that spring and summer - beatings, fire hoses and dogs set on peaceful demonstrators and then having to sit down at the table the next day with Senators and Representatives who said they couldn’t do anything to help us because their constituents thought, “the Negroes were being too pushy.” What really hurt us was when the violence spread to the north in the summer of ’65, as clashes between blacks and the police erupted into more full scale riots in Detroit, Philadelphia and Newark.

  After an exhausting battle in both houses of Congress, we got a Voting Rights Act passed, but again, there was bitter compromise after President Kennedy negotiated behind closed doors with Richard Russell and Sam Ervin, the Senator from North Carolina who led the floor fight against the bill. We had hoped to consign the literacy test to the dust-bin of history, but it survived in a provision which allowed states to bar people who could not read or write from voting. JFK has been excoriated in many recent history books for his willingness to compromise on civil rights and his lack of boldness for the cause. What those of a later generation do not understand is the hardening of attitudes in that second term; the sight of black mobs burning down city blocks ignited the white backlash like a match to gasoline.

  Since I was there on Capitol Hill and sat in on many meetings, I can honestly say JFK was a far more able politician in his second term than his first. The man would talk to anyone, even his most committed opponent, and always made sure the lines of communication remained open. Yes, he talked to Richard Russell while the Georgia Senator was planning a filibuster of the Voting Rights Act, making sure to remind the Senator it was nothing personal and that he still had the highest esteem for those who took a stand on principle. But he always turned around and had the Attorney General call someone close to Dr. King and tell them what to expect from Washington when they went into Mississippi to register thousands of disenfranchised blacks to vote.

  If the President could be criticized for being too evenhanded, his brother was a different story. From the beginning of the second term, Bobby Kennedy embraced the cause of racial equality and made it his own, not afraid to order Federal Marshalls into even the smallest hamlet in the Mississippi Delta if a Deputy Sheriff so much as gave a dirty look to a civil rights worker there to register blacks. I was among the millions of Americans who applauded in September 1966, when he sent the Marshalls to Montgomery with a warrant to arrest Governor Wallace after he refused to turn over Alabama’s voter lists to the Justice Department. Wallace would later claim he’d worked the whole thing ahead of time with Kennedy so he could look like a martyr to the white South. A judge would dismiss the charges the next day, but not before the whole country got to see the Governor taken away in hand-cuffs, just like many a black man who’d run afoul of the authority Wallace represented.

  When Justice Tom Clark retired from the Supreme Court in 1967, the President proved himself to be as good as his word, personally calling Senator Eastland to tell him that Judge William Harold Cox was at the top of the list of replacements. Then the President made sure the list was leaked to the press, and the predictable uproar exploded over the possibility that a staunch defender of segregation might be named to the high court. Democratic and Republican Senators lined up to denounce Judge Cox as a racist and a reactionary who would never get their vote for confirmation. This drama went on for a few days, during which time President Kennedy had Judge Cox to the White House, ostensibly to discuss his taking the spot on the Court-it only fanned the flames of opposition even more. In the end, Senator Eastland got the message and called Kennedy to ask that his old friend and college roommate’s name be withdrawn because he did not want to see him “dragged through the mud by a bunch of Northern Communist sympathizers.” President Kennedy told Eastland he understood; two days later he named another man named Cox to the Supreme Court-Archibald Cox, former Solicitor General and Dean of the Harvard School of Law, and a Kennedy man from back in 1960 as well. I had spent years worrying about being an accomplice to putting Judge Cox on the Court, so glad it all turned out to be for nothing.

  If in the end, the job of finally ending Jim Crow fell to Kennedy’s successors, he at least had done the hard work of digging the grave so that when the time came, that rotten system could be buried deep.

  I left Washington for good after the tragic events of April, 1968; afterward partisan politics no longer had any appeal for me. I pulled some strings and called in some chits, and got myself appointed a United States Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi. To get this job, I had to go over a lot of heads, and it wasn’t secured until I wrangled an Oval Office meeting with President Kennedy; out of consideration for the circumstances, I won’t repeat anything from our conversation, except to say that I got the job I wanted. Over the next seven years, I racked up 28 convictions for violations of the Civi
l and Voting Rights Acts, including two Klansmen who got life for first-degree murder. They were the best years of my life.

  In 1975, President Humphrey offered to put my name up for a Federal Judgeship, but Senator Eastland shot it down, he was still chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the man had a long memory. I’d put a few friends of his behind bars when I was a US Attorney, and I believe he still had it in for me for bad mouthing Judge Cox to his face all those years ago. On that matter I have no regrets, I’d do it again.

  Over the years, the events at the Hotel Adolphus on the evening of October 1st, 1964, have taken on the trappings of a political urban legend. I believe the wall of silence held up because we all had too much to lose, and I’m not just talking about the principles involved, the rest of us involved did well for ourselves. I’ll use myself as an example; the job in the Administration which came my way right after the election was not just in appreciation for all I had done for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket - although my hard work was deserving of it. The job paid for my children’s education - something which was the least a far too absent father could do.

  Around the mid 70’s, I started getting calls from so-called journalists inquiring about the place and the date and if I had anything to say about it. I would always tell them I had no idea what they were talking about and hang up. The most persistent were activists like Mark Lane, who just wouldn’t let it alone, but he could be dismissed as a crank - at least for a while. It was not so easy to blow off Bob Woodward, Joe McGinniss and others when they came a calling, but I can honestly say they never got anything useful out of me. But I had some sleepless nights when the Inouye Committee was looking into malfeasance by the CIA and the FBI; a lot of dirty laundry from the 1960’s got dumped out for all the world to see and when they started subpoenaing the secret files from the Bureau, I couldn’t help but wonder what might be locked away in some folder with my name on it in a file cabinet in the director’s office. I had no trust in the discretion of J. Edgar Hoover or his successor, Cartha DeLoach. The best thing President Hubert Humphrey ever did was to clean out that nest of vipers at the Bureau.

  So I guess no one talked on the record about the Hotel Adolphus… until now, when all the principles are dead, and the statute of limitations has long run out on any possible crimes committed. In the end, the people deserve to know the truth and make up their own minds.

  I was never directly involved in another political campaign after 1964, except for one. In the spring of 1976, I left my practice in Washington D.C. to go down to Louisiana and help a candidate win a special election to the State Senate. I spent six weeks down there, stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors, the fun stuff of campaigning I’d never gotten involved in before. When my candidate was behind in the polls by a few points, and there was less than a week until the election, I got on the phone to Hyannis Port and recounted a story from the ’64 election; two days later former President John F. Kennedy flew down to appear at a rally and personally endorse Howard Prentiss, who went on to win by 20,000 votes. When asked why he had come all this way to support a candidate for such a minor office, JFK, who was permanently on crutches by then because of his declining physical condition, replied, “I just wanted to return the favor for a fellow veteran of the Pacific.”

  I think about that now and smile.

  Kevin McCluskey

  November 1964 – August 2014

  I called Dorothy Brennan three times before she would agree to go out with me, the first time she hung up when I identified myself; the second time she calmly explained why she would not go out with a Democrat under any circumstances, but on the third try, I impressed upon her how the two of us actually had a lot in common, not the least of which being our common close proximity to the two men who had just battled it out for highest office in the land. She said I could buy her dinner; I was on a plane to Los Angeles the next day, the reservations already made at Giorgio’s in Beverly Hills for that evening. That first date led to a second one a week later, this time for dinner and a movie. She hadn’t seen Dr. Strangelove yet, even though it had been out for nearly a year. We had a real spirited discussion afterward; I considered it a brilliant satire, and while Dorothy conceded it was funny, she still considered its basic theme to be borderline treasonous in the way it portrayed Americans as being no better than the Russians. I was quite pleased when Strangelove, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and Stanley Kubrick won Oscars the next year, while Dorothy was thoroughly disappointed My Fair Lady didn’t take the golden statue.

  That’s how I met my wife, and we are proof positive opposites attract.

  One thing we did have in common was the Hotel Adolphus, and though we had many conversations on that subject, none of them within hearing of another person.

  After Kennedy’s re-election and finding a new girlfriend, the biggest thing that happened to me in November of 1964 was getting a job at the White House. My official title was Special Assistant to the President’s Council, although it had nothing to do with what my actual duties would be. It was Dave Powers who laid it out for me, saying that while President Kennedy had won re-election by a solid margin, they had no illusions about the breadth and depth of the opposition to his plans for the next four years. My job would be to help gauge the strength of the forces fighting the Kennedy Administration. “We’re not going to end up like Harry Truman in the last years of his second term,” Mr. Powers said, “on the defensive while Senator McCarthy and his Red Baiters made every Democrat on Capitol Hill hide under their desks. If there is to be a Joe McCarthy in the 1960’s, we want to see him coming.” That was all I needed to hear, and the best part was once this plum gig was done, I’d be able to use John F. Kennedy as a job reference.

  I was in the crowd in front of the Capital on inauguration day, 1965, having snagged a good seat near the front, I tried to talk Dorothy into coming with me, but she begged off, saying she was willing to date a Kennedy man, but not willing to watch the man himself put his hand on the Bible. I wished she could have seen what I witnessed, as first LBJ, and then Kennedy were sworn in for a second term, the goal for which so many had worked so hard and so long to achieve. Mrs. Kennedy, who had been such an asset on the campaign trail, looked especially radiant despite it being cloudy. The man who stood before us that day looked markedly older than the one who’d been there only four years prior; his temples were gray now and his face showed the wear by the pronounced crow’s feet around the eyes - all made plain in the cover photo in Life magazine later in the week. However, there was nothing aged or worn about John F. Kennedy’s voice. While his second inaugural address is not as memorable as the first - the critics said he spent too much time patting himself on the back for avoiding World War III - one line does stand out in my memory: “As arduous as the challenges have been in the last four years, they pale compared to what may confront us in the next four, but I have no doubt whatsoever that America will end the 1960’s a far more prosperous and more peaceful nation than it is today. When we land a man on the moon, let that be seen as the crowning achievement of a generation that answered its nation’s call the day after Pearl Harbor.”

  I moved into my office across from the White House the next day and started on what would come to be known as “opposition research,” and “opposition” was not necessarily defined as Republican, but anyone who might be an impediment to the President’s agenda. My work often required me to “think outside the box.”

  It went something like this: in the summer of ’65, I pretended to be a freelance journalist and traveled through the South in order to find out what the foot soldiers of Dr. King’s SCLC were thinking and saying as they prepared to challenge segregation once again; I was a truck driver looking for work at union halls in the Midwest to find out what steel and auto workers really thought about the civil rights movement as opposed to what the union chiefs were telling the President; I feigned being a student at more than a dozen colleges from coast to coast to gauge the mood of higher education, a hotbed o
f antagonism toward the Administration’s policies in Vietnam and Cuba. When 75,000 more troops were sent to South Vietnam in August of 1965, the White House was not caught in the dark when demonstrations erupted on college campuses the next month. President Kennedy anticipated the blowback, and when he went to the University of Wisconsin in October, he was able to tell a hostile young audience that, “Your voices are being heard in the corridors of power, but there are other voices as well, the voices of those who are being crushed under the heels of tyranny, and we hear those voices too.” Those words did not mollify the college kids opposed to the war, but the President did earn respect for at least being willing to come and speak.

  My reports made the President aware of just apprehensive many white Americans were toward legislation which guaranteed black Americans the right to vote, get a job, or own a house. These were the people who labored long on assembly lines to keep a roof over their families’ heads, and there was nothing they feared more than declining home values; I learned in no uncertain terms that nobody valued property rights more than the American Middle Class. “We’re not going to give up the white working class to the Republicans without a fight,” the President said at one point. That was why he never failed to mention hard work when he spoke places like Youngstown, Gary, and Flint during ’65 and ’66. It was also one of the reasons why universal health care came about under Kennedy, and if critics want to say it was just a payoff to keep whites from jumping from the Democratic Party while it pushed civil rights through Congress, then so be it.

  There have been many books written heaping much praise upon John F. Kennedy’s nimble political maneuvering in his second term; I would like to think all my hard work played some small part.