All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964

by F. C. Schaefer

  It was a strategy which worked well for a while, but as those of us who walked in “the corridors of power,” came to realize, events moved fast in the 1960’s and staying ahead of them ultimately became a losing proposition. President Kennedy’s appeals to the white working class only went so far, especially when they increasingly saw themselves not as workers struggling to get ahead, but as taxpayers who were footing the bill. When the racial violence we’d seen in Los Angeles broke out again in Detroit, Newark, and Philadelphia in the summer of 1966, not even the President’s prompt ordering in of Federal troops could soothe the fears of white Americans who now thought Goldwater’s law and order rhetoric was right on the mark.

  This truth was driven home when I went out to the West Coast in September of ’66 and posed as property assessor for a week. I came back and told the men in the White House how their good friend Pat Brown was going to lose to the Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, in a landslide. When they recovered from their shock, I repeated what I’d heard from the good suburbanites of the Golden State, who were tired seeing students at their state colleges carrying signs which said GET OUT OF CUBA NOW and comparing the American military to the Nazi war machine; while black militants threatened to start another riot in Los Angeles unless their demands were met. Not only that, but the long hair the kids were now sporting and the marijuana cigarettes in their back pockets - a sight seen everywhere in California while I was out there - had convinced them their country had taken a wrong turn.

  It did not help when Dr. King led the Second March on Washington at the end of the summer; there were 50,000 protesters, most of them black, descending on the capital demanding an end to the war in Vietnam, the occupation of Cuba, direct intervention to end Jim Crow; a billion dollars in government spending to end poverty; and the adoption of an Equality Amendment to the Constitution. This time the speakers did not stand at the Lincoln Memorial, but upon the backs of flatbed trucks at the foot of Capitol Hill (in violation of their permits) instead, giving the deliberate impression they were there to demand action from a bastion of authority. After the march, it was not the President who met with the march’s organizers, instead, the job was delegated to Vice President Johnson, a man with no power.

  Discontent with war in Vietnam, the occupation of Cuba, and the split over the pace of the civil rights revolution had its effect on the Democratic Party in the November midterms when scores of Republicans mouthing sentiments identical to Goldwater two years earlier were swept into Congress and the state houses.

  The last two years of the second term are the toughest; it was true for Wilson, for Truman, for Eisenhower. The same would be true for John F. Kennedy.

  It was during 1967, the toughest days of the Kennedy Administration, when my “undercover” work was cut back, so I spent a lot of time in the office writing reports for the President concerning the level of antagonism toward him and his policies. In this capacity, I was given transcripts of telephone and private conversations of a number of individuals, including Martin Luther King and the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; assorted radicals who’d spoken out at protests against American foreign policy like David Dellinger Abbie Hoffman and Pete Seeger; outspoken right-wingers like the head of the John Birch Society and the big wigs who’d funded it. There were also transcripts of meetings between Senator J. William Fulbright, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and opponents of the war in Vietnam. I had no knowledge of how this information was gathered or of any laws broken by Federal Agents in obtaining it; all I was asked to do was use it compiling a report to be read by the President’s men and in some cases, by the President himself. I was as shocked as anyone when the truth about Hoover and his FBI came out, along with the Kennedy brother’s complicity. If anyone wants to call me naïve, I’ll plead guilty.

  There is one memory that stands out: on a beautiful day in the summer of ‘67, I received a call at my desk to come across to the White House. There to my surprise, I was ushered into the Oval Office, where I stood before President Kennedy and was questioned about certain points in a report I’d just compiled on the activities of Tom Hayden during his recent surreptitious visit to Cuba. The founder of the Students for a Democratic Society was believed to have smuggled guns to pro-Communist guerrillas, or at least that is what one of Hayden’s associates claimed in a phone call to his girlfriend. For ten minutes, I stood there and answered questions put to me by the President and his brother, the Attorney General who was also in the room, along with J. Edgar Hoover himself, who sat unsmiling in a chair and glaring at me, clearly not amused at the sight of the President of the United States getting info from what to him was the office boy. The questions concerned whether anyone actually had seen Hayden and company handing weapons over to any Castroistas, and if my memory is correct, my conclusion in the report was in the negative as to that assertion. When the President was satisfied, I was thanked and dismissed; I remember how he called me by name and that Mr. Hoover never spoke once while I was there. That was my only encounter with the director of the FBI, and afterward, my shirt was wringing wet from the sweat, not all of it from the heat. I never learned the particulars of that meeting in the Oval Office that day, but two weeks later the Justice Department filed charges against Hayden on three counts of smuggling; he ended up doing three years in prison. Lest nobody forget, the Kennedy brothers played rough right to the end.

  In August of 1967, Dave Powers invited me to join the Robert F. Kennedy campaign to succeed his brother as President, which came as something of a surprise as I, and the rest of the country, was unaware he was planning to run. “Bobby is going to run because he is the only one who can continue the President’s work,” Mr. Powers explained. “Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office? What a disaster that would be for the country, I know you don’t want that and we know you are a guy who can be depended upon. Don’t worry about the dynasty issue; there’s a plan to take care of it.” I thought it over for a day and then said yes, it was tiring being tied to a desk in Washington and politics was in my blood now. I wanted to get back into the thick of it.

  The plan to get around the “dynasty” issue was to make it appear as if there was a spontaneous yearning in the Democratic Party for the President’s brother to succeed him. This meant having some discreet talks with assorted state party chairmen and selected power brokers. My first job for the RFK campaign was to fly out to Indiana to talk with the owner of the largest slaughter house in the state and prevail upon him in his capacity as chairman of the state central committee of the Indiana Democratic Party to introduce a resolution calling on Robert Kennedy to run at the committee’s October meeting. He politely heard me out and then said no thank you because he was leaning toward Senator Humphrey in the upcoming campaign. I thanked him for his time and called Washington as soon as I got back to my motel room. An hour or so later, the state party chairman got an anonymous call informing him of a surprise inspection of his slaughter house’s killing floor was coming in two days, and if he wanted to repay the favor, he should introduce that RFK resolution at the central committee meeting on October 2nd.

  A similar scene was acted out over and over during the fall of 1967, so much so that by Thanksgiving more than a dozen state Democratic Parties had passed resolutions calling on Attorney General Robert Kennedy to run for President in 1968; by December there was a fully-fledged campaign operation on the ground in New Hampshire even though RFK had yet to resign and make an announcement. Time and Newsweek put him on their covers the same week and talked about the unprecedented possibility of one family occupying the Presidency for multiple terms. What both articles made clear was the difficulty Robert Kennedy would have running with his brother’s “baggage,” chief among them being the war in Vietnam, now raging in its third year after losing over 30,000 men there with no apparent end in sight. The Soviets were pouring men and material into the North at a level matching ours, while the South hung on for its life and the country’s patie
nce for the war was waning by the day as the election year loomed. This attitude reflected what I heard from good Democrats when I was out in the country, where over and over they’d tell me a variation on, “We love Jack Kennedy but our people are really starting to hate that damn war.”

  Lyndon Johnson, knowing it was now or never, announced he was running for President the first week of January of 1968; Senator Humphrey, no doubt feeling similar sentiments, threw his hat in the ring a week later. Governor Wallace, saying there had to be “one candidate who’ll stand up for the little guy,” stood in front of the Governor’s mansion in Montgomery on the 30th and entered the race. Despite all this competition and the war, Bobby Kennedy topped the polls of Democrats nationwide and in New Hampshire. But it was a narrow lead, and people who should have been the first to flock to his campaign held back because of Vietnam and the occupation of Cuba, now entering its fourth year. To my mind, it was going to be a fight all the way to the convention in Chicago to get RFK the nomination, with an even bigger battle in the fall.

  Then on February 5th, out of nowhere, the President went on air at 8:00 p.m. EST to announce to the country that after a series of secret negotiations in Paris, a cease-fire agreement in Vietnam had been reached. It had been pulled off with the covert assistance of the Red Chinese, something which started with Kennedy’s handshake with Chou back in New Delhi. The New York Times headline the next day told the story: VIETNAM CEASE FIRE! TROOPS COMING HOME! Right below the fold was this story: Attorney General Resigns to run for President.

  I have been involved in many Presidential campaigns in the years since, made a good living at it, but none of the ones in subsequent years was anything like Kennedy ’68. With the Vietnam War no longer a drag on the Kennedy name, Bobby surged in New Hampshire, winning the primary by 12 points over Humphrey on the 12th of March and bested the Vice President by 6 points in Wisconsin three weeks later. The nomination was now within our grasp, despite a still determined and vocal opposition to the occupation of Cuba among many Democrats, but after the sudden end to the war in Vietnam, everyone believed a similar resolution would be forthcoming for that sticky issue as well. I was given the names of 50 prominent state Democratic Committeemen and told to nail down as many endorsements for Bobby as possible; it was really a homecoming as many of the faces I’d seen four years before, returned to help put another Kennedy in the White House. Every day when I checked back in with headquarters in Washington, there was news of another major endorsement by a Governor, Senator or mayor - even Daley in Chicago was reported ready to jump on the bandwagon. The only other candidate making any progress was Wallace, who was clearly going to have the support of his Southern back yard, but nothing else.

  On the day Bobby won the Wisconsin primary, we got the word that at the end of the week, he would be journeying to Memphis, Tennessee, to mend the rift with Martin Luther King, who would be in the city to support black sanitary workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions. This raised the possibility of putting together the kind of coalition between blacks and working class whites which would be unbeatable in November; I remember daydreaming about what position I would be offered in the Robert F. Kennedy Administration and whether I would rate an office in the West Wing.

  I had just arrived at a motel in Kansas City on that fateful Friday afternoon when I learned the tragic news. It was on the black and white TV playing in the manager’s office; the image was unforgettable: John F. Kennedy, standing in the press room of the White House with a tearful Jackie at his side, his voice shaking as he read a statement reacting to the death of his brother and Dr. King, gunned down in the streets of Memphis by two snipers who put a round each right through their heads. I still have the issue of Life magazine with the iconic cover photo of two bright red smears of blood on black asphalt taken at the crime scene.

  I learned some things over the following days and weeks, as two good men were buried after two very different funerals on two very different days, while cities in America burned and the people who were paid to do so told us what it all meant. I learned you can be knocked flat and still get back up in the face of unbearable tragedy. I also learned that I wasn’t done with politics, despite what had happened; I knew a lot of guys who walked away from it all after Memphis, and never looked back; I was not one of them.

  I helped shut down the Kennedy ’68 headquarters and after declining an offer to come back and work in the Administration during its final months, took the Humphrey campaign up on a request to join them. The Minnesota Senator was not a Kennedy, but he was a good man and worth getting behind. I spent the summer of ’68 hunting delegates for Humphrey and believe I did a good job; we were only a few hundred votes behind the Vice President by the time we got to Chicago at the end of August. But Larry O’Brien had gone to work for Johnson after Memphis and he ran a tough, disciplined campaign while using his ties to party big wigs like Daley to maximum advantage; O’Brien was able to deliver all the big mid-western states, except Michigan, to his man. We had hoped to get an endorsement from President Kennedy, but in an appearance on Meet the Press in June, Humphrey said he had “some real differences” with Kennedy’s policy in Cuba, which nixed that possibility. Johnson said he’d stay in Cuba “as long as it takes,” but didn’t get any lying on of hands either; in truth, after his loss, I don’t think John F. Kennedy cared who succeeded him. With the South lining up behind Wallace, the Chicago convention went all the way to the third ballot before nominating Johnson, who then picked Humphrey for Vice President. The President came to the convention only long enough to make a speech honoring his brother on the second night. I stayed on for the fall campaign as an advance man for Humphrey, all good experience which paid off well later. It was an easy victory on Election Day, as the great Republican “Dark Horse” proved to have not been such a good choice for a deadlocked GOP convention. Johnson and Humphrey took it by an even bigger margin than JFK did four years earlier; a fact which rankled many a diehard Kennedy loyalist.

  Dorothy and I got married in December of 1965 at the home of her family in Idaho; we’d come back to DC and lived quietly while I worked at the Kennedy White House; now at the end of 1968, I turned down an offer to work in the new Administration and the two of us, along with some other veterans of the Goldwater and Kennedy campaigns struck out on our own as campaign consultants, or “hired guns” as we liked to think of ourselves. It was a decision to put what we’d learned to good use and make some big bucks along the way. Many doubted our marriage would last, but not only did it flourish, but we also managed to raise two boys and a little girl in the process. Right from the start, we made one rule: I never bash Goldwater in front of her, and she never disparages John F. Kennedy in front of me. You don’t have to make up if you don’t have the fight in the first place.

  I “made my bones” in the 1970 midterm election by helping save the careers of many Southern Democrats after Johnson rammed the toughest civil rights bill through Congress since Reconstruction. At the 1972 Democratic convention, when the choice for Vice President came down to Governor Carter of Georgia or Senator Harris of Oklahoma, my voice was one of the deciding ones when President Humphrey picked Fred Roy Harris to be Vice President. In October, when the race was tight, I was the first one to say that the Humphrey-Harris campaign had to put more effort into Illinois in the closing days, in the end, those 26 Electoral votes made all the difference.

  A few years later, I journeyed out to Sacramento to urge the young Governor of California to run for President, explaining how the final years of the Humphrey Administration too much resembled the last years of Truman’s, when after nearly two decades of Democratic rule, the country wanted change. The party would need a fresh face and a break with the past if it wanted to retain the White House. “If I’m the new Adlai Stevenson,” Jerry Brown said, “then this doesn’t end well, because Stevenson lost by a landslide.” I answered that he wasn’t Stevenson and the Republicans didn’t have an Eisenhower. In the end, Edmun
d G. Brown Jr. did run for President in 1976, and at the age of 39, was a true break with the past. I was also instrumental in getting Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, one of those Democrats I’d helped save back in ’70, to run as his Vice President. Unfortunately, history did repeat itself, Jerry Brown lost, although not by the same margin as Stevenson did in 1952.

  Over the years to come, I managed to get used to losing Presidential races as the Democrats spent as many years in the wilderness as the Republicans had in the previous decades; among those losing efforts were the campaigns of John Glenn, Hugh Carey, Walter Mondale and Lloyd Bentsen, all good men who got into the ring and gave it their best shot. I never lost my love of the game and figured we couldn’t lose them all. I take great pride in being one of the earliest to see the potential in Bill Clinton, whom I met when I was helping Bumpers win his first Senate campaign in Arkansas. He was a natural politician and decorated veteran of Cuba, running him for President was a joy; I take credit for getting Mario Cuomo to take the Vice Presidency on the ticket with the Arkansas Governor after losing a tough nomination fight to him at the convention.

  Besides three children and a love of politics, my wife and I have one other thing in common, the Hotel Adolphus. We did what we agreed to do, keep our silence, even when the investigators of the Inouye Committee got uncomfortably close to the facts in 1975, we actually thought about getting a lawyer at one point because we were so afraid a subpoena was imminent. But the other people from that night in Dallas who found themselves in the witness chair never talked either, although God knows some of them spilled their guts about plenty of other things. We were more than lucky to have been left alone, and neither of us is under the illusion that more than one door was opened for us over the years by unseen hands who had a vested interest in our continued well-being. We both know we might have ended up like Daniel Ellsberg.