October 14, 1960
New York City
Alabama governor John Patterson needed to see Jack Kennedy as soon as possible, in private. The future of his presidential campaign was at stake. At least that’s what the governor told Kennedy’s advisers.
Patterson had been an ardent JFK supporter since 1959, when the candidate had won his vote over breakfast at the Massachusetts senator’s Georgetown home.
Patterson was only thirty-nine years old, way too young to be a governor, but his privileged life was straight from the pages of a Hollywood script. Like Kennedy, Patterson had served in World War II. He was a lieutenant assigned to General Eisenhower’s London staff.
Once home, he earned his law degree from the University of Alabama and went into the family law practice in Phenix City, Alabama, working with his father, Albert Patterson.
His father ran for state attorney general in 1954 on a platform of cleaning up the sleazy brothels and gambling joints that catered to soldiers at Fort Benning in Georgia and had turned his town into “Sin City, USA.”
Albert Patterson won the Democratic nomination to become the state’s top cop. But he was gunned down in June 1954 before the election.
John Patterson had little interest in politics, but Alabama Democratic Party officials pressured him to run for attorney general in his father’s place. He won.
In his first year in office, John Patterson called in the National Guard and drove the racketeers out of Phenix City. With an eye to moving up to governor, Patterson pandered to white voters with a court order to bar the NAACP from operating in Alabama.
By the 1958 gubernatorial election, Patterson was Alabama’s toughest segregationist. Ku Klux Klansmen papered the state with his campaign posters. In the primary, Patterson easily defeated George Wallace, who at the time was a circuit court judge and was viewed by many white voters as a racial moderate. After losing the election, Wallace said that he had been outmaneuvered on race, and vowed to never let it happen again.
In late 1959, General Reid Doster of the Alabama National Guard asked for a closed-door meeting with Governor Patterson. He brought along a senior official from the CIA.
The United States needed Alabama’s help to deal with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Doster said. Cuba was aligning itself with the Soviet Union, and that could spell trouble for the United States and its allies.
If the governor agreed, the Alabama Air National Guard would help train an army of Cuban exiles now assembling in Guatemala. Once they were ready, the exiles would invade Cuba and overthrow Castro and his communist cronies.
Patterson was skeptical. This didn’t sound right. He pumped the men with questions. “Does the old man know about it?” Patterson asked, referring to his former boss Eisenhower.
“Yes. He’s on board,” Doster assured him.
The governor took a deep breath. If Eisenhower was behind it, how could he say no? Yes, Patterson was a Democrat, but he admired the president. He’d seen up close how confidently Ike had coordinated U.S. operations in Europe during the war.
Patterson agreed to let them use the National Guard. And every time Doster returned to Alabama, he’d travel to Montgomery to keep Patterson apprised. About 350 Alabamians were involved in the top secret training program.
Sometime in early to mid-October, Doster visited the governor.
It was getting close, the general said. The Cuban rebels were ready.
“Any morning now, you are going to read in the morning newspaper that…we’ve invaded Cuba,” he told Patterson.
The governor’s heart hammered with the same possibility that had struck Sam Giancana. Whatever happened could have big implications for the race for president.
After Doster left, Patterson sat by himself in his office, trying to decide what to do. If he told Kennedy what he knew, he’d be violating national security. But this information was too important to keep secret. JFK had to know. His political future was riding on it.
If a successful invasion was launched and Castro was overthrown, Richard Nixon’s campaign would get a huge boost. The race was neck and neck, and if Nixon could boast that his administration had eliminated one of America’s greatest national security threats, it would swing the election to the Republicans.
If the invasion didn’t come until after the election, Kennedy would benefit. He could amp up his call to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. That position would play well with conservatives—especially in Florida—who thought the United States should be doing more to undermine Castro’s regime.
Patterson knew what he had to do. He reached out to Steve Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and campaign finance manager, and said he had to meet with JFK.
“It’s very important that I see him,” Patterson said. It was a national security issue, something he couldn’t discuss over the phone. “I’ll meet him anywhere, anytime,” Patterson said.
After a pause, Smith gave him instructions. Kennedy would meet the governor the next day at the Barclay Hotel in New York at 9:00 p.m.
Now there was no turning back. The next morning, Patterson packed his bags and headed to New York. He was waiting in a private conference room at the hotel when Kennedy walked in. Patterson quickly got down to business.
He prefaced his comments by asking Kennedy never to repeat what he was about to tell him. It was a matter of national security.
Kennedy agreed. Patterson disclosed to JFK everything Doster had told him.
The CIA was using Alabama National Guard troops to train Cuban exiles for the attack. The guard would provide logistics for the invasion and help train pilots. Somehow, they had turned a ragtag group of exiles into a full-scale fighting force—complete with air support.
But the most important piece of information was this: the invasion was “imminent and if it occurred before the election I believed Nixon would win.”
Patterson noticed that Kennedy didn’t express any emotion.
Kennedy already knew some of the information. CIA director Allen Dulles and Eisenhower had disclosed to Kennedy, as the nominee, that something was planned for Cuba, but they didn’t divulge any details. Patterson had just given Kennedy the missing pieces.
The meeting ended. The men got up and shook hands. Kennedy again promised not to say a word. But after Patterson left the hotel, Kennedy knew this information was too important to keep completely under wraps. Since Nixon was a member of the administration, he probably knew, too.
His campaign had to take advantage of the inside information. This had the potential to be a game changer.
Kennedy hadn’t taken a strong position on Cuba. But now he’d work Cuba into his stump speeches. He’d argue that overthrowing Castro was the only way to stop the potential spread of communism in Latin America.
All of a sudden, Cuba had become a potential political liability for Nixon. Kennedy, always on Nixon’s left, would take a tough public position to his right.
It was time for Castro to die.