October 22, 1962: "The First Family" Is Recorded Amid the Cuban Missile Crisis

October 22, 1962: Eight days after finding out that the Soviet Union has set up missiles in Cuba, which could reach the United States, and debating what to do about it, President John F. Kennedy addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House.

Obviously, JFK couldn't simply do nothing, and let the missiles stay there. It would have been nuclear extortion on America and its allies. He also knew that standard diplomacy, trying to get the Soviets to remove the missiles that way, or to convince Castro to refuse them, wouldn't work.

Most of the President's military advisors had recommended a first strike on Cuba -- not nuclear, but with conventional weapons, meaning planes and bombs. This would be followed by a land invasion.

JFK knew that this would be considered an act of war, not just on Cuba, but on Cuba's ally, the Soviet Union, and might lead to that country launching its missiles on the West, including any missiles that the hypothetical bombing raid failed to take out. If ever there was a President who, as Donald Trump once suggested he did, "knew more than the Generals do," it was Kennedy.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara suggested a naval blockade, preventing any more Soviet supplies from arriving in Cuba by sea -- including aircraft carriers whose planes could enforce the blockade by air.

But this, too, was problematic: According to international law, a blockade is an act of war. Admiral George Anderson, Chief of Naval Operations, told JFK to, instead, call it a "quarantine." JFK's Attorney General, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, told him that this would provide legal justification, under the Rio Treaty, effectively establishing the Organization of American States (OAS) as a NATO for the Western Hemisphere, and also backing up the Monroe Doctrine, prohibiting European interference in the Hemisphere. And so, JFK announced the "quarantine."

For the next week, the world was terrified that this is it: World War III is coming, and, as JFK had said before, "The living would envy the dead."

And while this speech was being broadcast, among the few people not seeing it were in Fine Recording Studio in Manhattan, watching the recording of the comedy album The First Family, a parody of the Kennedy family. Presidents had been portrayed before, and comedians had made jokes about incumbent Presidents. But comedian Vaughn Meader, a fellow New Englander (from Waterville, Maine) had already made a name for himself impersonating JFK, including the accent, the phrasing and the gestures.

Unlike some later Presidential parodies, this was mostly in good fun, riffing on various facets of Kennedy life: JFK's comparative youth and inexperience, his reliance on his brother Bobby's counsel and their father Joe's money, his bad back and the rocking chair he used instead of a stiffer chair, his affinity for cigars, Jackie's redecoration of the White House, the raising of daughter Caroline and baby John Jr., and the family's love of sports, including football and water-skiing.

Naomi Brossart played Jackie. She was a model, and this album was her recording debut. Canadian actress Norma McMillan, an experienced cartoon voice actress, and older than either Meader or Brossart, ironically provided the voices of both Caroline and "John-John."

Also among the cast were Earle Doud and Bob Booker, who co-produced the album; and Chuck McCann, a comedian known for his commercials ("Hi, guy!" for Right Guard antiperspirant, and he was the voice of Sonny the Cuckoo Bird who went "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" cereal). McCann also starred in a kids' science-fiction comedy, Far Out Space Nuts, with a post-Gilligan's Island John Denver. That show, too, was produced by Earle Doud, for the Krofft Superstars, as was another McCann vehicle, Magic Mongo. Also for Sid & Marty Krofft, Doud created and produced Wonderbug.

Meader later said, "A lot of people don't know this, but we recorded The First Family on the night of October 22, 1962, the same night as John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis Speech. The audience was in the studio and had no idea of the drama that was taking place. But the cast had heard the speech and our throats almost dropped to our toes, because if the audience had heard the Cuban Missile Speech, we would not have received the reaction we did."

"Mr. President, we recently learned that you sent an agent into Cuba.

Did he return with any useful information?"

"Well, I didn't send him for information. I sent him for cigars!"

Cadence Records almost cancelled the distribution of the record, assuming America would be going to war. But the crisis was resolved on October 28, so the album was released a few days later. It rode JFK's post-crisis popularity to became the fastest-selling record in American history, until The Beatles came along a year later, and in 1963 it won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Since the music business is a copycat's business, Jewish comedians Buck Henry, Joan Rivers and George Segal recorded The Other Family, imagining the Khrushchevs at home.

On November 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated. The night before, Meader had done a show in character in Milwaukee. Right after the news of the assassination hit the media, he hailed a taxi to take him to the airport. The driver recognized him, and said, "Did you hear about Kennedy in Dallas?" Since Meader hadn't heard, he presumed this was the setup for a joke, and said, "No, how does it go?" The driver told him, and turned on the radio so Meader could hear.

That night, a far more controversial comedian, Lenny Bruce, was due to go onstage at a nightclub in New York's Greenwich Village. He wondered if it were possible to be funny that night. He wondered if anybody would even show up. He decided to go out, and there were 12 people in the audience. He sat on a stool for a moment, and then, his usual bad taste kicked in, and he said, "Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked!" And the 12 people laughed like crazy. Bruce walked offstage, knowing it wouldn't get any better than that, and collected his pay from a satisfied club owner.

Sadly, Bruce was right: Nobody wanted to hear from Meader anymore. He couldn't do JFK material anymore, but anything else he tried reminded people of the sadness of those 4 days in November. He went back to Maine, and ran a bar.

Earle Doud, who produced the original album, tried again, with Welcome to the LBJ Ranch and Lyndon Johnson's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But instead of impressionists, they did it as a "cut-in" album, in the style of Dickie Goodman's "Flying Saucer" records: They would ask a question, and then use a recording of LBJ, a figure in his Administration, or another politician, the result intending to be funny. It didn't work.

David Frye was an amazing impressionist, who managed to not only sound like, but use his facial expressions to even look like, not just LBJ, but also Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and even William F. Buckley. Sometimes, he would play talk show host David Susskind, interviewing each of them. He recorded the albums I Am the President and Radio Free Nixon.

Of course, once Nixon's own recordings were released, the paradigm was changed: Since the world had heard just how mean a President of the United States could be, it was okay to really skewer him in comedy routines.

Meader had a brief revival in 1981, with The First Family Rides Again! But Doud made him just a supporting player on that album: Rich Little provided the voice of Ronald Reagan. Meader died in 2004, at the age of 68. Norma MacMillan died in 2001, Chuck McCann in 2018. As of October 22, 2022, Earle Doud, Bob Booker and Naomi Brossart are still alive.

*

October 22, 1962 was a Monday. Actor Bob Odenkirk was born.

The baseball season ended 6 days earlier, with the New York Yankees winning Game 7 of the World Series over the San Francisco Giants. Football was in midweek: There wouldn't be Monday Night Football until 1970. The NBA and NHL seasons were underway, but no games were scheduled for either. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 4, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

USS Maddox

August 4, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurs. What happened? That is still in dispute.

On August 2, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol, was approached by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox fired warning shots, and the North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire. In the ensuing engagement, one U.S. aircraft, which had been launched from aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, was damaged, all of the North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties. According to its report, the Maddox was "unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round."

Two days later, on August 4, another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, joined Maddox on its mission. That evening, the ships opened fire on radar and sonar returns that had been preceded by communications intercepts which U.S. forces claimed meant an attack was imminent. The commander of the Maddox task force, Captain John Herrick, reported that the ships were being attacked by North Vietnamese boats -- when in fact, there were no North Vietnamese boats present.

While Herrick soon reported doubts regarding the task force’s initial perceptions of the attack, the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on wrongly interpreted National Security Agency communications intercepts to conclude that the attack was real.

While doubts regarding the perceived second attack have been expressed since 1964, it was not until years later that it was shown conclusively never to have happened. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War -- the title taken from a German expression for the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations -- Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, admitted that the August 2 attack on the Maddox happened; but that the August 4 attack, for which LBJ authorized retaliation, never happened.

The outcome of these two confrontations was the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted LBJ the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "Communist aggression." The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces to South Vietnam, and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

The Resolution passed the House of Representatives unanimously, 416-0. It passed the Senate by a vote of 88-2. While 10 Senators were not present for the vote, the only ones to vote against it were Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, both Democrats. (Morse, first elected in 1944 as a Republican, became an independent in 1952 because of disgust over McCarthyism, and switched to the Democrats so he could be in the majority and chair committees after the Democratic takeover following in the 1954 elections.)

On the NBC TV series The West Wing, John Spencer played Leo McGarry, White House Chief of Staff, and a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been shot down over North Vietnam in 1970, and barely rescued before he could be taken prisoner.

In the 2001 episode "The War at Home," where a military operation has gone badly, show creator and episode writer Aaron Sorkin had McGarry tell President Jed Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, that if he could go back in time to any moment, it would be to August 4, 1964, to tell Johnson, "Mr. President, don't do it. Don't consider authorizing a massive commitment of troops and throwing in our lot with torturers and panderers, leaders without principle and soldiers without conviction, no clear mission, and no end in sight."

While South Vietnam's President Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, the country's State Counsellor, had been assassinated in a coup the preceding November, the new President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu pretty much stayed the course, including being Catholic oppressing Buddhist, with under-regulated capitalism and corruption. General Nguyễn Cao Kỳ ran the country's armed forces. He was a rival of Thiệu, but the Army talked Thiệu into accepting Kỳ as Vice President in 1967, and that made things worse. So when it came to the real-life leaders of South Vietnam, Sorkin knew what he was talking about.

But Johnson was running for re-election. All the polls showed he would easily beat the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. But he was concerned that, if he let the Gulf of Tonkin Incident go, he would be seen as "weak" and "soft on Communism." Instead of saying, "Let them say that, the American people know I'm handling things well," he panicked, and sent America down a path that led to nearly 60,000 deaths in 8 years -- around 36,000 by the time he left office on January 20, 1969 -- taking all his accomplishments, and they were many, some of them changing things tremendously for the better, and giving them the rebuttal, "Yes, but... "

After leaving office, he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was working on his authorized biography, "I knew from the start that, if I left the woman I loved, the Great Society, in order to fight that bitch of a war, then I would lose everything. All my programs. All my hopes. All my dreams." He had blown it, and he knew it.

Greuning and Morse were both defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1968: Gruening by 2,000 votes, Morse by 3,500.

USS Maddox, launched in 1944 during World War II, was the 3rd ship named for Captain William Maddox, U.S. Marine Corps, a hero of the Battle of Santa Clara in the Mexican-American War in 1847. It remained in service until 1972, was sold to Taiwan, and scrapped in 1985. Her Captain, John Herrick, lived until 1997. His brother, Curtis Herrick, was a General in the U.S. Army.

USS Turner Joy, launched in 1958, was named for an Admiral who served as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Only this 1 ship, as yet, has been named for him. Since 1991, she has been a museum ship berthed at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in the Seattle suburb of Bremerton, Washington. Her commanding officer, Commander Robert C. Barnhart Jr., lived until 2012.

*

August 4, 1964 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Kansas City Athletics, 5-1 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. The only Yankee run came on a home run by Mickey Mantle. John O'Donoghue, later to be a member of the Seattle Pilots and mentioned in Ball Four, the book by 1964 Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, outpitched Hall-of-Famer Whitey Ford.

* The New York Mets lost to the San Francisco Giants, 4-3 at Shea Stadium. Jim Davenport singled home the winning run in the top of the 14th inning. Willie Mays went 0-for-5, but did draw a walk. Despite the length of this game, no home runs were hit.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers swept a doubleheader from the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field, 5-1 and 10-7. Sandy Koufax won the opener, and Roberto Clemente went 0-for-3. But in the nightcap, Clemente went 3-for-5 with an RBI. Willie Stargell didn't play in the 1st game, but went 1-for-5 with 2 RBIs in the 2nd.

* The Washington Senators beat the Cleveland Indians, 4-2 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The Cincinnati Reds swept a doubleheader from the Milwaukee Braves at Crosley Field, 5-2 and 4-2. Over the 2 games, Frank Robinson went 3-for-7 with a solo home run, and Hank Aaron went 0-for-8.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox, 4-3 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. They did this despite Al Kaline going 0-for-4.

* The Minnesota Twins beat the Boston Red Sox, 12-4 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Harmon Killebrew went 4-for-5 with a home run and 4 RBIs. Carl Yastrzemski went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs.

* The Chicago Cubs beat their arch-rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-0 at Busch Stadium (formerly Sportsman's Park) in St. Louis. Lew Burdette, better known as a Milwaukee Brave, allowed 10 hits, but still pitched a shutout. Ernie Banks went 1-for-4, and Lou Brock went 2-for-4 with a stolen base.

* And the Los Angeles Angels beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which the Angels shared with the Dodgers from 1962 to 1965. Angel pitcher Don Lee had to leave the game in the 5th inning due to injury, and Barry Latman went the rest of the way, and they combined for a 7-hit shutout. Brooks Robinson went 0-for-4.