by Alan Gomez and Gregory Korte
At: USA Today
Tag: CUBA
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John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Volume 1
I
In this reviewer’s opinion, Professor John Newman has written two of the most important books on the JFK case in the last 25 years. The first was published in 1992. Since Newman was a professor of Asian history, he had done a lot of work on America’s struggle in Indochina. He had come to the conclusion that the mainstream media’s belief that President Johnson had continued President Kennedy’s policies in Indochina was false. So he decided to prove, in a scholarly way, that the MSM was wrong on this point.
Newman’s work was finally published in 1992. Entitled JFK and Vietnam, it was the first book length study to vitiate the establishment view that there was continuity between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the conduct of the Vietnam War. Newman’s book was the first systematic and categorical rejection of the Kennedy/Johnson continuity concept. In 460 pages of sober, careful, and documented text, Newman essentially rewrote the history of 1961-63 as far as American involvement in Vietnam went. He showed, among other things, that Lyndon Johnson was in the pocket of the Pentagon on this issue as far back as 1961. Unauthorized by Kennedy, but influenced by the military, he had offered the leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, the introduction of American troops into the theater. (See p. 72)
In addition to that, Newman also proved that while Kennedy was trying to disguise his withdrawal plan around the rosy and unrealistic reports of Diem winning the battle on the ground, LBJ knew the truth. From his military aide Howard Burris, Johnson was getting the actual intelligence reports, which showed the contrary: Diem was actually losing the war. (See pp. 225-27)
By the end of the book, Newman had exposed one of the great historical lies of the second half of the 20th century: namely, that American involvement in Vietnam was an inevitable tragedy. A myth that had been sustained, not just by the MSM, but also by self-proclaimed historians like David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow. Others have further mined the field Newman pioneered, and today we have good books by people like Gordon Goldstein and James Blight—Lessons in Disaster, and Virtual JFK—that have furthered Newman’s milestone thesis.
Newman had worked as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s film JFK. He was also commissioned by PBS to do some work on the Lee Oswald files, then just beginning to be declassified at the National Archives. This was in regard to the PBS 1993 anniversary program about Oswald. Stone’s film had created such a national outcry that congress created the JFK Act of 1993 to begin declassifying tens of thousands of records that had been, either wholly or partly, classified. That experience caused Newman to write his second book, Oswald and the CIA. Which was another milestone in the field. This time it was in the study of Lee Harvey Oswald’s relations to the intelligence community: from his defection to Russia to his return to Dallas from Mexico in 1963. Originally published in 1995, it was reissued in 2008. In his Afterword to the later edition, Newman squarely pointed his finger at James Angleton, the CIA’s longtime chief of counter-intelligence, as the ultimate control agent for Lee Harvey Oswald. In my opinion, the MSM deliberately ignored the revolutionary findings in this important book. (For my review of the reissue, click here).
There is a difference between the two books. Not just in subject matter. The first book was artfully organized and written. Therefore, although it was dealing with highly complex persons and issues, and it was dense with new information, it was quite readable. Newman had an editor on that book. As I wrote in my review, Oswald and the CIA is not as easy to read—perhaps because it was written in a much shorter time, maybe because it lacked a strong editor.
A few years after the publication of this book, Newman retired from the field of JFK studies. He resigned from his position as an instructor at the University of Maryland, and migrated to James Madison University in Virginia. He also became a yoga instructor. He then wrote a book about the historic parallels of that subject with mysticism and Christian theology. This was called Quest for the Kingdom.
Three years later, in 2014, Newman decided to re-enter the JFK field. Before he had left, he was planning a comprehensive study of the Kennedy administration’s relations with Castro. That book was tentatively entitled Kennedy and Cuba, and was to be issued in tandem with a re-release of JFK and Vietnam. Once John left the field, that endeavor was, in part, abandoned. I say in part, because in speaking to the author, he is now updating his first book in a plan to have it reissued. But secondly, it seems that the author kept many of his research files from his Cuba project, because they seem to form the backbone for his planned multi-book series entitled Where Angels Tread Lightly. We will discuss part one of that series here. But before beginning, it is important to note that because this is a multi-volume series, that is, a work in progress, any ultimate evaluation will have to be delayed until the last volume is published. So the reader should see this review as something of a descriptive marker, a buoy in a channel on the way to land.
II
In the preface, the author reveals that the title comes from a phrase in a letter that one Catherine Taafe wrote to Bobby Kennedy in late April of 1961. She figures in the book. For she had been a CIA asset involved in Agency dealings inside of Cuba. She was writing the Attorney General about the humiliation he and his brother had just experienced over the Bay of Pigs debacle. In the following Prologue, Newman says this book will be about something he calls “dark operations”. Later on, he will describe this specifically as the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro being a pretense for the boomerang theory: that is, the idea that these attempts formed the pretense for the murder of President Kennedy. And specifically the CIA’s plotting around Oswald, i. e., building a pro-Castro legend around him, while also manipulating his files concerning the Mexico City episode; this was all done while inbreeding the threat of nuclear war from his alleged visits to the Cuban and Russian embassies there. These were all elements of the plot.
Newman also writes that it is necessary to break into the CIA’s codes, that is, its pseudonyms and cryptonyms, in order to unmask these “dark operations”. For as he says:
Without unmasking the CIA’s pseudonyms, cryptonyms, and multiple identities, it will not be possible to find out … who was behind the assassination in Dealey Plaza, and how they got away with it.
As the author sees it, this is the key to unraveling the murder of President Kennedy. And at the end of the first volume, he assembles a long appendix, which features his deciphering of the multiple names, identities and cryptos used by say, Howard Hunt—along with several others.
Newman begins Chapter 1 with what he considers the bungling of the Eisenhower administration in the handling of a dual problem: the weakening of the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and the growth of overt civil disturbances against him. He notes that, even in the middle of 1958, the CIA was still funneling money to Castro’s forces. Castro was using men like Frank Sturgis to get weapons from a supplier in Miami. Sturgis was caught smuggling arms twice but released with the help of the CIA. He then was a captain in Castro’s army.
Castro grew bolder throughout 1958. He abducted personnel from Guantanamo Bay and seized the Nicaro Nickel Plant, a huge subdivision of powerful Freeport Sulphur. The CIA now stopped arms shipments to Batista, since they perceived him as being ousted soon. But they also begin to investigate if Castro was part of the international Comintern. The CIA and businessman William Pawley dreamed up a couple of last minute Hail Mary schemes to stop Castro from gaining power, but they both failed. In December of 1958, CIA Director Allen Dulles told the president that the indications were that Castro was a communist. But it was too late to stop his march to Havana. (Dulles would not inform Eisenhower until late March of 1959 that Castro was running a communist dictatorship.)
Chapter 2 begins with Castro’s takeover and the evacuation of thousands of Americans out of Cuba. Santo Trafficante was arrested, but he made a deal with Raul Castro. Castro declared martial law. Eisenhower now relieved the American ambassador, Earl Smth.
Castro was careful in the beginning to disguise who he really was. He distanced himself from the existing Cuban communist party. But some remnants of the anti-Batista movement suspected Castro was at least a commie sympathizer. Some of these men, like Pancho Varona, Rolando Cubela, and Carlos Tepedino actually were informers for the Agency on Batista. Once they began to realize who Castro was, and suspecting he would install a leftist dictatorship, those men now become the opposition to Castro. They will soon meet with two CIA officers. This was the beginning of the DRE, or the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil.
III
FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was shocked by the rise to power of Castro in Cuba. In his files, Newman found evidence that Richard Nixon’s lifelong friend, Bebe Rebozo, fronted as a funnel for Mob money and investment in business ventures between Ambassador Earl Smith and Batista. Nixon was also getting a cut of this graft. The author has three sources for this. (Newman does not note it, but this makes three fonts of dirty money Nixon was getting prior to becoming president: from the Shah of Iran, from Romanian industrialist Nicolae Malaxa, and now Batista. JFK researchers like to point out how corrupt LBJ was. He had nothing on Nixon.)
Parts of the CIA, and a larger part of the State Department, were willing to wait on Castro. But another part of the Agency developed other informants on him. This included Sturgis—a relationship that was actually approved by CIA HQ—and military commander Camilo Cienfuegos.
When Sturgis had a falling out with Raul Castro, he was instructed to visit the American embassy in Havana. From there he was told to meet two CIA officers in Miami. It is there that he began his relationship with Bernard Barker. Barker and Sturgis were assigned to William Kent of the psy-war branch. Sturgis now began work with James Noel, chief of the CIA office in Havana, along with psy-war expert David Phillips. Phillips was undercover as one “James Stewart”, working for an advertising agency. (As the author notes, whenever one hears that the CIA had no formal relationship with Sturgis, we can now show this is a deception.)
Castro, at first, closed the casinos, and their gambling operations. But there were so many foreigners still on the island that he decided to reopen them temporarily. Castro asked Sturgis to work as his liaison to the casinos. It is here that Sturgis got to know Juan Orta, Castro’s secretary. Santo Trafficante will later recruit Orta to take part in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. But Sturgis had already volunteered to plant a bomb in the second floor conference room at an Air Force Base he regularly visited.
The author now introduces another female protagonist. She is June Cobb. Readers of Oswald and the CIA will recall that Newman spent a good deal of time with Cobb there, since she was a CIA infiltrator—one among many—inside the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. It seems that Cobb began her intelligence career as a double-dealing drug peddler. That is, she was dealing drugs in Cuba, but also working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This began as far back as 1957, when she actually informed on her boyfriend.
In 1959, when Castro first visited America, Cobb landed a job as a translator for Fidel. She actually translated his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech. Castro liked her work and invited her back to Cuba. He put her in charge of English publications.
Frank Sturgis was also hard at work as an informant. In March of 1959, he went to Washington to inform the FBI about Castro. He did this at the behest of Pedro and Marcos Diaz Lanz, two commanders in Castro’s military. Sturgis told the Bureau that all three were alarmed about the growing communist influence in Cuba. They worried that Cuba could now become a communist forward base in the Caribbean, e.g., against Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Both men were backed by the USA. In fact, Cuba did make very small incursions into both countries, along with Panama, in 1959. When this happened, certain soldiers of fortune now joined up in the battle against Fidel; e.g., pilot Leslie Bradley, trainer Gerry Hemming, and the man the FBI would wrongly accuse of being at Sylvia Odio’s door, Loran Hall. After joining the Cuban army, Hemming later engaged in training Nicaraguans. Hall did also. While in Cuba, Hall got to know Mafia Don Santo Trafficante.
n June of 1959, Raul Castro began to purge the military of all suspected informers and double agents. This included later CIA assets like Sergio Sanjenis. He especially concentrated on the higher ranks. Lanz took over Radio Havana on June 29, 1959 and criticized Castro’s leftward drift in a lengthy speech. Castro was outraged. He ordered Diaz Lanz under house arrest, and gave Juan Almeida his job as commander of the Air Force. Sanjenis and Pedro Diaz Lanz defected with the help of the CIA in June of 1959. Diaz Lanz became a prized asset of the CIA. He testified in public before Senator Thomas Dodd’s Internal Security committee. He would later take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Diaz Lanz defection really hit home with Fidel. He now turned even more to the left.
IV
The first drastic piece of legislation moving Cuba toward a communist state was the Agrarian Reform Program. At first, this bill did not allow for compensation when Cuba confiscated property for future redistribution. As a result, the minister of agriculture, Sori Martin, resigned.
Castro’s program set up a body of local cooperatives that he labeled INRA (the National Institute for Agrarian Reform). Now, only Cubans could buy land on the island. INRA was a very powerful agency that shaped land distribution and all infrastructure projects in Cuba. Manuel Artime ran Zone 22.
It was the creation of INRA that now drove American business interests to lay siege to the White House, especially in light of the lack of promises by Castro to pay compensation for land. (Castro did tell the new ambassador Philip Bonsal that he would pay later, but not right now.) In the summer of 1959, these business interests wanted Eisenhower to start a formal program of counter-revolution. And now, people like Bernard Barker joined up with Manuel Artime (before his defection) to aid Mario Lazo. Lazo was a high level Cuban attorney under Batista. He served as corporate counsel for Freeport Sulphur on the island. Taafe used her contacts to steal inside documents from INRA.
In the fall of 1959, Castro came out of the closet. After keeping the communist party at arm’s length, he now appointed the leader of the party as Minister of Labor. He then began to appoint members of the party to all levels of his government. Thereafter, he announced that Cuba would be a fully communist country in three years. The CIA heard about this meeting announcement through Artime.
Through the Havana CIA station, David Phillips and Dave Morales now worked on the defection of Marcos Diaz Lanz. This decision went all the way up to Chief of the Western Hemisphere, J. C. King. Phillips and Morales were assisted on this by Bernard Barker.
The author now addresses a weird episode. Both the Dominican Republic and Cuba had plans to invade each other almost at the same time in the summer of 1959. Because he was informed of the Trujillo action in advance, Castro struck first by about four days. But he was not informed of the CIA backing of Trujillo’s invasion of Cuba. The American Ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, did not back the Dominican Republic invasion, since he thought it had little chance of success, and would therefore strengthen Castro. Through informants and agents, Allen Dulles pushed for the Cuban invasion of the Dominican Republic, but said little to the NSC about the Dominican Republic invasion of Cuba. Both attacks were failures. But Trujillo’s was much worse since Castro rounded up about a thousand POW’s. After this there were even more defections to the USA, since Castro now started a purge of the military of all suspected American allies.
After this victory, in September of 1959, Castro announced that Freeport Sulphur’s 75 million dollar plant at Moa Bay would come under property review. Since the regime needed money, Raul Castro actually wanted Fidel to directly expropriate the property. In reaction, business leaders now called for an emergency meeting with both the State Department and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. As a result, David Phillips became a PR advisor for the business interests still on the island. But he reported back that these interests wanted more than PR, they wanted action.
Short of an American invasion, it was probably too late. For, in October of 1959, Castro wearied of all the defections by people like Sturgis, Sanjenis, and Diaz Lanz. The last one was Manuel Artime, a project that, again, Phillips and Morales worked on. Fidel now made his brother Raul minister of defense. Bonsal wired Washington that, in and of itself, this was a disturbing development, since Raul was considered even more leftist than Fidel. Further, Fidel Castro cracked down on all suspects who he thought were about to defect: for example, jailing former Commander Huber Matos. A week later, Artime began the MRR, an anti-Castro exile group, with Sergio Sanjenis.
Also in October, the State Department announced a new policy paper in regards to Cuba. It was titled “Current Basic United States Policy Towards Cuba”. Part of the objective entailed the removal of Fidel Castro from power by no later than the end of 1960. President Eisenhower adopted this paper in November, along with CIA Director Allen Dulles. In January of 1960, it extended to the Pentagon.
At the White House, Vice-President Richard Nixon demanded an action plan. From the outside, William Pawley—former diplomat and now businessman—wanted another invasion of Cuba through the Dominican Republic. But Allen Dulles vetoed that move. In December of 1959 Dulles, Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, and Western Hemisphere Chief J. C. King now began to devise a covert action plan against Cuba. When it was completed, Dulles presented it to the National Security Council.
After Phillips worked on the exfiltration of Artime, he began work on getting Rolando Cubela out of Cuba. Cubela was another government employee who became disenchanted with Castro’s leftward drift. But the CIA decided that Phillips was becoming overexposed. So they recalled him back home. Two cohorts of Phillips handled the Cubela operation: the Cuban friend of Cubela, Carlos Tepedino, and CIA official Tony Sforza. In talks with Cubela, the CIA learned that government official Manolo Ray was also disenchanted with Castro. But, as time went on, Cubela decided to stay on the island to fight Castro. Sforza then focused on Juanita Castro, sister of Fidel, as a possible exfiltration target.
Newman notes that in the middle of all these fateful and furious debates about Cuba, the Russians had stayed hidden in the shadows. This minimized the specter of a Cuban/Russian alliance. But in late 1959, through Air Force General Curtis LeMay and former Air Force Secretary, and now Senator, Stuart Symington, there began to be talk about a Missile Gap—in favor of the Soviets. Since Symington was planning on running for the White House the next year, this is probably what motivated him to take part in this nonsense. As it did Lyndon Johnson, who said the Russians would have a 3-1 advantage in three years. The facts were that the USA was already two generations ahead of the Soviets in ICBM technology. The USSR was still testing its first delivery systems while Eisenhower was debating whether to bypass the Atlas rocket for the Minuteman and the Polaris. This gap in America’s favor would, of course, set the stage for the Missile Crisis.
This book is exceedingly rich in detail. Much more than I can begin to convey in a relatively concise review. What the author is doing has three layers. First, he is giving us a history of the Castro revolution. At the same time he is showing how the USA reacted to that epochal turnover, stage by stage in its evolution. Third, he is tracing certain people and movements who will return to the stage in 1963, after Kennedy changes policy, and begins a détente attempt with Cuba. Other authors have tried this before, but never on this scale or with this intricacy.
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Shenon and the CIA’s Benign Cover-Up
After failing to use a crap detector in order to provide a reasonable answer to a key question like “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?” (Politico Magazine, March 18, 2015), Philip Shenon has returned this fall. But again without such a tool in hand. So he asserts again that the Warren Commission was not really fraudulent or wrong, but rather did not have all the facts on time.
His newest piece “Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover Up” (Politico Magazine, October 6, 2015) emphasizes that CIA Director John McCone “was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now the CIA says he did.”
Shenon is trying to take advantage of a declassified chapter of the still classified biography of McCone written by CIA historian David Robarge in 2005. It was internally released as a report two years ago (“Death of a President: DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” in Studies in Intelligence 57, No. 3, September 2013). After being redacted for its public release on September 29, 2014, it´s now available at the National Security Archive.
Robarge didn´t question the Warren Commission findings, especially that Oswald was the lone gunman. Shenon adds that it’s “a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.” In making that preposterous statement about the evidence in the case, Shenon ignored the quanta of proof to the contrary. Which was furnished by, among others, Martin Hay in his essay Ballistics and Baloney. Shenon also snubbed the fact that the WC reported a wrong Mannlicher Carcano carbine as the murder weapon, (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 477), a wrong CE 399 as the Magic Bullet (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227), and a wrong CE 543 shell (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, p. 51). And finally, as Dr. David Mantik has revealed, the current autopsy report, that is by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, wants us to think that the bullet which killed Kennedy – that is the one which struck him in the head – also has magical properties. Why? Because it struck Kennedy in the rear of the skull, then split into three parts. Miraculously, the middle part stuck in the rear of Kennedy’s skull without penetrating it. But the head and tail of this same bullet proceeded through his brain, went out the side of his head, and fell onto the front of the limousine. (See DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 133-35) Nowhere in any of Shenon’s growing archive of literature on the JFK case, does he ever confront any of these disturbing, but true, facts. He just assumes that the ballistics evidence supports his thesis. It does not.
Shenon focused on Robarge´s suggestion that “the decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation.” In other words, Shenon is again ginning up the old news about the CIA not telling the Warren Commission about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Which has been around since the Church Committee report in 1975. In other words, for 40 years. Thusly, the former New York Times reporter persists in reopening a line of inquiry already proven fruitless: that the Kennedy brothers and the CIA compelled Fidel Castro to take a preemptive lethal action against a sitting U.S. President. As if the Cuban leader wasn´t aware that killing JFK wouldn´t solve anything, but entailed risking everything. And at the same time that President Kennedy was engaging in back-channel diplomatic moves to establish détente with Cuba, something that Lyndon Johnson, with help from the CIA, dropped after Kennedy’s death – much to Castro’s chagrin. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 394)
For Robarge and Shenon, the cover-up by McCone and others – Deputy Director Richard Helms, Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, former Director Allen Dulles – may have been benign under the bureaucratic impulse towards CIA self-preservation. But it was a cover-up nonetheless, since it withheld information that might have prompted an aggressive investigation about Oswald’s ties to Castro. In reality (something absent in Shenon’s writings), the CIA’s cover-up was aimed at avoiding a deep investigation of Oswald’s ties to itself and to anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
The key is not that the CIA revealed nothing about the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, but that it revealed very little about its close tabs on Oswald: the CIA knew what he was doing and was evaluating him. As John Newman, and others, have noted, three CIA teams were watching Oswald all the way down from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963): the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group (CI-SIG), Counterintelligence Operations (CI-OPS), and the Counter-Espionage unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).
Oswald’s longtime friend and Civil Air Patrol colleague, David Ferrie, was also a CIA trainer for the covert operations against Castro codenamed Pluto (Bay of Pigs) and Mongoose. He blatantly lied about not knowing Oswald and having no association to any Cuban exile group since 1961.
The CIA generated an index card for Oswald in the FPCC file (100-300-011) on October 25, 1963. In early summer he was leafletting the obsolete 1961 edition of The Crimes against Cuba, of which the CIA had ordered 45 copies. He was running his own one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New Orleans, while the CIA and the FBI were running a joint operation against that very same committee. Oswald was really working out of Guy Banister’s office and even put his address [544 Camp Street] on some FPCC flyers. A point that Banister was quite upset about. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 111)
Banister was not only close to Ferrie, but also to anti-Castro belligerent groups. When Gordon Novel was invited by Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha to a meeting in Banister’s office for a telethon supporting the anti-Castro cause, a certain Mr. Phillips was there, and his description aligns with CIA officer David Phillips. (ibid, p. 162) According to Cuban anti-Castro veteran Antonio Veciana, Phillips was his CIA handler, known to him as “Maurice Bishop”, and met Oswald at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963.
Just after the assassination, Phillips vouched for a “reliable” informant who told a story about Oswald being paid in advance by a “negro with red hair in the Cuban Embassy” to kill Kennedy. In 2013, Shenon followed Phillips´ steps by including, toward the very end of his book A Cruel and Shocking Act, the long-ago discredited remake of that baleful story by Mexican writer Elena Garro: that Sylvia Duran, a Mexican employee at the Cuba Consulate, was a Castro agent who cranked Oswald up to kill Kennedy in a twist party at her brother-in-law’s house, where not only the notorious red-haired negro, but Garro herself were in attendance.
Although Robarge also reported that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963, and had secretly monitored him since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 (through the illegal mail-opening program HTLINGUAL), Shenon overlooks this part. He wants to bolster the “Castro-did-it” propaganda campaign, apparently planted by the CIA even before the JFK assassination. Today it is clearly being orchestrated to manage public opinion in the face of the release – as required by law – of the remaining JFK records in October 2017.
Overlooking all the sound investigation after the declassification process unleashed by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), Shenon cherry-picked through Robarge´s piece in order to find “misconceptions [like] the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination,” as if it weren´t a fact that the CIA has never produced either an Oswald photo or a tape of his voice in Mexico City.
By posing again a question highly appreciated by the CIA, “Had the [JFK] administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”, Shenon has no choice other than to distort the facts by asserting that “Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death.”
In Brothers (2007), David Talbot has demonstrated that RFK´s suspicions settled instead on a domestic conspiracy. Neither his friends nor his relatives suggested that RFK feared that Castro was behind the assassination. On the contrary, he immediately asked DCI John McCone if the CIA was involved in the killing. His other leading suspects were the Cuban exiles and the mob. And his son RFK Jr. said the same years later in a Dallas interview with Charlie Rose (during the lead-up to the 50th anniversary: see The MSM and RFK Jr.)
Shenon of course, also adds that: 1) RFK was in on the CIA-Mafia plots, and that 2) RFK was instrumental in getting Allen Dulles appointed to the Warren Commission. The first assertion was denied by the CIA in its own Inspector General Report on the plots way back in the sixties (1967). Somehow, Shenon missed both that and the Church Committee report on the subject, which also denied that the Kennedys were in on the plots. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327)
As for RFK using his influence with President Johnson to get Allen Dulles on the Commission, well, what can one say? Except the following: Everyone and his mother knows that LBJ and Bobby Kennedy hated each other’s guts from an early date. And it only got worse, not better, after JFK was killed. In light of that, the idea that Johnson would ask for Kennedy’s advice to man the Warren Commission is ridiculous. But further, as Leonard Mosley wrote many years ago in his book on the Dulles family, Bobby Kennedy was the prime mover in getting his brother to fire Allen Dulles in 1961. Not satisfied with that, he then asked Dean Rusk if any other member of the Dulles family was still in their employ. Rusk said yes, there was Allen’s sister, Eleanor. Kennedy demanded she also be fired since he did not want any of the Dulles family around anymore. So why would he then request that Dulles be brought back after he helped get him and his sister fired – let alone to investigate the murder of his beloved brother? (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 395)
Martin Hay has also chimed in on this issue in his review of Howard Willens’ book, History Will Prove us Right. There is no record of any communication by Johnson with Bobby between when the Commission idea is accepted by him and his call to Dulles. LBJ suggested a series of names to J. Edgar Hoover. When he got to Dulles, he did not say a word about Dulles being suggested by Bobby Kennedy. When he got Dulles on the phone, he told the former CIA director he wanted him to join the Warren Commission “for me”.
But as Hay writes, even more convincing is LBJ’s phone call to his mentor Senator Richard Russell. Russell asked Johnson if he was going to let Bobby nominate someone. Johnson replied with a firm and direct “No.” (see Willens review)
In a note to Jeff Morley at the web site JFK Facts, Shenon tried to defend his contention by pointing to a memo written by longtime Johnson assistant Walter Jenkins. This document was allegedly written on November 29, 1963, the day that Johnson called Dulles to appoint him to the Commission. Why do I say “allegedly”? Because as Dan Hardway notes, what Shenon does not mention is this: a handwritten notation at the bottom of this memo says, “Orig. not sent to files”. And further, it bears a stamp saying that it was received in the central files in April of 1965! Moreover, as Hardway also points out, there was a three-way call between Dulles, Johnson and Kennedy in June of 1964. This was during a racial crisis in Mississippi. Both Johnson and Kennedy had more than one opportunity to affirm that RFK had suggested Dulles for the Commission. Neither of them did. (See JFK Facts entry of October 24, 2015)
Shenon´s approach to a benign cover-up by the CIA for diverting the WC away from Castro actually seeks to turn the public away from the largely declassified Lopez Report, the monumental 300 page investigation by the HSCA of Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City on the eve of Kennedy’s assassination. By doing so, he deflects the genuine line of inquiry about what appears to be the intricate CIA deception prepared in advance of the JFK assassination. In any case, Shenon and other mouthpieces for the “Castro did it” diversion – or in the light version of “Castro knew it” by Dr. Brian Latell – put the CIA in a very delicate position.
If Oswald, a former Marine re-defector from the Soviet Union, was a true believer in Marx, with the zeal to engage in a variety of pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, then it’s a colossal CIA blunder that he would be allowed to travel to Mexico City and visit both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies – which were under heavy surveillance by the Agency; and that, afterward, the CIA would lose track of him, even after the former Russian defector allegedly met with a Soviet representative in their embassy. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 354-55) And lose track of him to such a degree that no one from the FBI, the police, or Secret Service even talked to him upon his return to Dallas, despite it being just seven weeks before President Kennedy was slated to visit the city. And incredibly, the re-defector would now actually end up on Kennedy’s parade route, thereby walking through any FBI or Secret Service security scheme in broad daylight. What does the silence on the CIA-Mafia plots have to do with any of that? What makes this drivel even worse is that reportedly, Politico dropped an excerpt from David Talbot’s important new book on Allen Dulles in order to run more of Shenon’s fabricated bombast.
Shenon even avoids addressing the most recent declassification move by the CIA at a public symposium. This was called Delivering Intelligence to the First Customer at the LBJ Library. Among the 2,500 President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the Kennedy and Johnson administration released on that occasion, the one from November 25, 1963 reveals that the CIA told Johnson the same blatant lie in which Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway caught CIA Inspector General John H. Waller: “It was not until 22 November 1963 (…) that the [CIA] Station [in Mexico City] learned that [the] Oswald call to the Soviet Embassy on 1 October 1963 was in connection with his request for visa [and] also visited the Cuban Embassy.” In fact, six senior CIA officers reporting to Helms and Angleton knew all about “leftist Lee” six weeks before JFK was killed.
Shenon is simply performing another high-wire balancing act: dealing openly with CIA misdemeanors in order to hide more serious wrongdoing, and therefore supporting an unsupportable thesis; namely, that the WC was right about Oswald as the lone gunman.
See also Jim DiEugenio’s review of Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act.
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Philip Shenon’s Crap Detector
Shortly after Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize (1954), Time Magazine writer Bob Manning visited him in Cuba to do a cover story interview. A decade later, Manning joined The Atlantic Monthly. He revisited his notes and published “Hemingway in Cuba” in the August 1965 issue of that periodical. One remembrance from that piece was Hemingway’s notion of fiction writing as “to produce inventions that are true.” Hemingway elaborated: “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector (…) If you’re going to write, you have to find out what’s bad for you.”
Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, uses this machine for nonfiction writing on the JFK assassination. But in reverse, as a way of bringing forward the detected crap as good arguments for supporting his nonsensical hypothesis. Which is, “Oswald did it, Castro helped.”
After Shenon’s crap detector worked flat out in A Cruel and Shocking Act (Henry Holt and Co., 2013), it is now doing overtime in the new paperback edition of the book by Picador (2015). From its afterword Shenon has just drawn an essay, “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?” (Politico Magazine, March 18, 2015). Here Shenon does his, by now, usual high wire balancing act about how the Warren Commission was not really fraudulent or wrong, it just did not have all the facts it should. And therefore “historians, journalists and JFK buffs…would be wise to look to Mexico City.” What balderdash.
Why? Because Shenon deliberately ignores all the sound and provocative investigations that have been conducted about Mexico City since the creation of the declassification process by the Assassination Records Review Board. These inquiries would include, among others, the integral and seminal “Lopez Report” done for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, John Newman’s work in Oswald and the CIA, John Armstrong in his book Harvey and Lee, Jim DiEugenio in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed and Bill Simpich in State Secret. All of these authors; along with the most recent investigator, David Josephs–get the back of Shenon’s hand. As if nothing they produced has any relevance at all to the mystery of what Lee Harvey Oswald was doing in Mexico City; or if he even went there. Because, as both Josephs and Armstrong conclude, he did not; at least not the way the Warren Commission and FBI say he did.
Which brings up another dubious point about Shenon’s piece. In it, he writes that the FBI never adequately investigated Oswald’s voyage to Mexico City. This is simply not true. With ample evidence, both John Armstrong and David Josephs demonstrate that the FBI did investigate this aspect of Oswald’s life as well as they could. The problem was that the evidence trail they found was so full of holes, and so patently falsified by both the CIA and the Mexican authorities that it was almost made to fall apart upon any rigorous review. To use just one example: to this day, no one knows how Oswald even got out of New Orleans to Houston on the first leg of his journey. Or when he actually left the Crescent City. Its not that the FBI did not investigate this aspect. They did. But they could not find any ticket made out to Oswald from New Orleans to Houston or New Orleans to Laredo, which is where the official story has Oswald headed after Houston. The FBI did an extensive check on the two bus lines that could have gotten Oswald out of New Orleans after he closed his post office box and cashed his unemployment check. They could not come up with anything to substantiate Oswald’s travel to Houston. (See Commission Document 1553, based upon Bureau investigation by agent Stephen Callender.)
Or how about this one by our New York Times veteran. He writes that the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in Mexico City. If that is the case then why, when the FBI got the audiotapes of Oswald in Mexico, the tapes did not match Oswald’s voice? (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 357) And why has the Agency never been able to produce a photo of Oswald entering the Cuban or Soviet embassies there? Why did they send a photo of a person who was clearly not Oswald to the Warren Commission? And why did the Commission then print it in its volumes? (ibid, p. 354) Shenon tries to cover up this lacuna by saying that there is evidence some people saw a photo, and maybe station chief Win Scott saw a photo of Oswald in Mexico City at the time. For instance, if Mexico City station chief Win Scott saw a photo of Oswald why did he then not show it to David Slawson and Bill Coleman of the Warren Commission, when they visited him? They were there for that express purpose: to inquire about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. (ibid, p. 360)
Shenon fails to point up the reason we know about all these problems in the evidentiary record about Oswald and Mexico City. We know about them because of the work of Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. While preparing their 300-page report about Oswald in Mexico City, they found the work of Slawson and Coleman to be completely inadequate. They then got access to the CIA cable traffic record to and from Mexico City for the period of September,1963 to November 22nd. This is something the Warren Commission never even thought of doing. Their report is largely based upon that traffic; along with the records of the raw data as produced by the CIA’s electronic and photographic surveillance of the two embassies. This latter record, is again, something that Slawson and Coleman never even approached as evidence while they were there. This is why, in the Warren Report and in the Slawson-Coleman report, one comes away very puzzled over two further lacunae. Neither source record mentions either David Phillips or Anne Goodpasture. Both of these people had cleared access to the surveillance raw data out of the embassies. And there is evidence that both of them helped falsify the record of Oswald allegedly being there. (ibid, pgs. 354-55) If Slawson and Coleman had done their jobs correctly this information and falsification could have been caught back in 1964. Shenon does not mention these facts.
Nor does Shenon measure Slawson’s hoary canard about how any plot could not have been a far flung or complex one since Oswald did not get his job at the Texas School Book Depository until October, and the motorcade route was not announced until November. Shenon ignored the facts that the first announcement about Kennedy’s trip to Texas was made April 23, 1963. It was made by Lyndon Johnson in Dallas and reported in the Herald Tribune the next day. This was echoed with a specific note to Kennedy from a local Dallas resident already working on the visit. Again, Dallas is mentioned in the note dated June 12, 1963. There is also a story in the same paper in September which also states Kennedy will be coming to Dallas. Further, people organizing the visit that fall knew it would have to be late in November due to scheduling problems. In other words, maybe be Commission was in the dark about this, and the public. But not people in the White House, advance man Jerry Bruno, or the business and political elite in the Dallas-Fort Worth areas. (See the online essay “Why JFK Went to Texas” by Joe Backes) Further, Shenon fails to mention that the failed Chicago plot to kill JFK mirrored, in its design and mechanics, the successful Dallas one. If that is not complex planning in advance, I don’t know what is. (See Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pgs. 202-18) Could Castro have really done all of this maneuvering in two cities?
Instead our intrepid NY Times veteran peoples his mission of twisting conspiracy “facts” against Castro with the following “experts:”
– Thomas Mann, U.S. Ambassador in Mexico; who “suspected” and “was under the impression…”
– Winston Scott, CIA Chief of Station in Mexico City, who also “suspected…”
– David Slawson, WC investigator, who “believes” and has another “suspicion…”
– Clarence Kelley, FBI Director, who “came to believe”
– William Sullivan, FBI Assistant Director, who “admitted huge gaps” in the record
– David Belin, WC staff lawyer, who “came to believe…”
– Charles William Thomas, U.S. diplomat, who “was told by a friend…”
– And finally, “people who suggest that Oswald had many more contacts with people in Mexico City who might have wanted to see JFK dead…”
Let’s summarize. None of the Shenon’s sources brought a single quantum of proof for turning plausible his Castro hypothesis. Their suspicions, impressions, beliefs, admissions, second-hand tales, and suggestions are linked to long-ago debunked stories. For sticking with them along the substantiation of his hypothesis, Shenon must concoct, among others, these facts:
“Oswald had visited Mexico City (…) apparently to obtain a visa that would allow the self-proclaimed Marxist to defect to Cuba.”
Knowing that appearances deceive, Shenon fabricates this one to get around the fact; proven by both CIA transcripts of taped phone calls and eyewitnesses at the Cuban Consulate; that “Oswald” asked the Cubans for an in-transit visa with the declared intention of going to the Soviet Union. For defecting to Cuba, he would have only needed to say it at the spot. Shenon simply hides that Marxist Lee in Mexico City perfectly blends with Castroite Harvey in New Orleans due to a CIA-FBI joint operation to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). As Jim DiEugenio discusses in Destiny Betrayed Oswald was not connected with Castro, but with the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. (See especially pgs. 101-66)
“Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico was never adequately investigated by the CIA… and the State Department.”
Shenon is correct here. But not in his nonsense that the plot to kill Kennedy was hatched in Mexico by Castro agents, and the U.S. agencies covered it up to avoid World War III. The cover up by the CIA started before the assassination, as John Newman has so thoroughly established since Oswald and the CIA. When CIA officers like James Angleton began to bifurcate the Oswald file in advance of the trip to Mexico. (See Newman, p. 393)
“And in fact, lots of evidence has accumulated over the years to suggest [it] would be wise to look to Mexico City.”
Shenon is writing as if the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, also known as the Lopez Report (1978) wouldn’t have been almost fully declassified in 2003. It provides lots of collusion going on with the CIA in regard to Oswald in Mexico City, from phony cables to senior officers blatantly lying on facts as they were happening before the JFK assassination. It’s almost as if Shenon does not want the reader to know about this bombshell report.
“Much evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip; including CIA tape recordings of wiretaps of Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico; never reached the [Warren] Commission.”
That’s half-true. These tapes not only never reached the WC, but also have been never produced by the CIA, even though their transcripts were found. Since the CIA remained silent before the assassination about calls indicating that Oswald had been impersonated, no tapes at all is a conspiracy fact; as Gaeton Fonzi crystal clearly explained in The Last Investigation (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993; that turns Shenon’s hypothesis into excrement. (See Fonzi, p. 294)
“If Oswald openly boasted about his plans to kill JFK among people in Mexico, it would undermine the official story that he was a lone wolf whose plans to kill the president could never have been detected by the CIA or FBI.”
FBI super spy Jack Childs reported on his mission (SOLO-15) to Cuba in March 1964 that Castro himself had told him: “When Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a madman and started yelling and shouting on his way out, ‘I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy’.” Shenon recycles this discredited report and magnifies such an outburst; at the Embassy, not at the Consulate; as an assassination plan. Even though the HSCA already put the issue to rest in its Final Report (1979): “Nothing in the evidence indicated that the threat should have been taken seriously, if it had occurred, since Oswald had behaved in an argumentative and obnoxious fashion.” (italics added) And, in fact, as both John Newman and Arnaldo M. Fernandez have shown, it likely did not happen. (See section six of the following review for details, http://www.ctka.net/reviews/shenon.html)
Shenon’s “Oswald did it, Castro helped” must match with the notorious fact that a former Marine, re-defector from the Soviet Union, who had openly engaged into pro Castro activism in New Orleans, according to Shenon, this man was spotted by the CIA in Mexico City on September 27, 1963, as soon as he visited the Cuban and the Soviet diplomatic compounds. Since the CIA and the FBI missed him as a security risk in Dallas by the time of JFK visit, Castro could have helped the killing only in a conspiracy of silence with the CIA. Thus, Shenon’s crap detector didn’t find out what’s good for him.
“State Department and CIA records declassified in recent years show that the agencies rebuffed Thomas in his requests for a new investigation.”
That’s another half-truth. Thomas’ request was rebuffed on the grounds that the subjacent story; told by his friend, Mexican writer Elena Garro; was mere crap, like all the other allegations of red conspiracies in Mexico City made by Gilberto Alvarado, Pedro Gutierrez, Salvador Diaz-Verson, Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, Antulio Ortiz Ramirez, Marty Underwood… etc. Shenon interweaves some of these, and other inventions that are not true, in order to arrive beforehand at a fact-free analysis on the Castro connection. As Hemingway told Manning, “no good book has ever been written that [way].” Accordingly, Shenon’s latest essay on the JFK assassination is another cruel and shocking act against his readership. But before leaving it at that, let us add one other pertinent and disturbing fact about Shenon and his latest diversion from the truth.
Why did he write such a book? In his original 2013 edition, Shenon wrote that his inspiration for writing the volume was a call he got from a junior counsel to the Commission. Once he agreed to the project, this unnamed counsel then got him in contact with the other surviving staffers. According to researcher Pat Speer, the mysterious caller was none other than Arlen Specter, Mr. Single Bullet Theory himself. Since Specter died in 2012, and Shenon’s book was first published in 2013, it turns out that; via Shenon–the Philadelphia lawyer was continuing the JFK cover up from his grave.
with Jim DiEugenio
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Frank Mankiewicz: Secret intermediary to Cuba
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 494
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Justin Anstett, At: The National Security Archive
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JFK: A President Betrayed
Last November was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It provoked one of the most bizarre, depressing and extreme displays of MSM irresponsibility in recent memory. Even though respected pollster Peter Hart found that 75% of the public still believed that the Warren Commission verdict of Lee Oswald as the lone assassin was wrong, this meant nearly nothing to the media. Show after show, news segment after news segment proceeded as if we were still in 1964, and the Warren Commission had not been utterly discredited. This culminated with an absolutely Orwellian spectacle in Dallas on November 22nd. Mayor Mike Rawlings was clearly in the pocket of the Dallas Morning News and The Sixth Floor Museum. Rawlings literally blockaded Dealey Plaza. He had called up about 200 policemen to place wooden barriers around the site at incoming intersections. Only those who had been awarded tickets by a (pre-screened) lottery were allowed in the Plaza itself. There, inside the Missile Crisis type blockade, he and a few others gave some of the dullest and most pointless speeches ever made in the name of murdered president John F. Kennedy. It was one of the most wasted opportunities in recent history. There was literally a colony of media trailers on the site. With nothing to report; which, of course, was the aim of the whole exercise.
There was one documentary that managed to break through the physical and mental blockade. Unfortunately it had very limited exposure through Direct TV. This was Cory Taylor’s JFK: A President Betrayed. Taylor’s film is now available at Amazon Instant and also for DVD purchase. After the reader sees it, I think he or she will agree that this was, by far and away, the best original production for anyone to see last November. And that is not at all a purely negative statement, that is, because most everything else was so poor. There are many good things in Taylor’s film.
Taylor had previously mostly worked in television. Although he has several producer credits, he has worked mostly as an editor. And almost all of that work has been on documentaries and reality TV. But in looking through his credits, Taylor’s past work shows a strong social conscience, something lacking in Hollywood today. Therefore, we were lucky to have someone like him approach the Kennedy case at the 50th anniversary.
That last statement is a bit misleading. For Taylor does not really approach the Kennedy case from a forensic or investigative viewpoint. What he does in his two-hour documentary is take a look at Kennedy’s foreign policy during his presidency, and try to show how some people within his own administration opposed it. To me, it is clear that the main inspiration for the film is the influential Jim Douglass tome, JFK and the Unspeakable.
One of the main attributes of the film is that it uses some credible, and new, sources as interview subjects. And it bypasses the accepted mainstream historians who have, in reality, done little real research on JFK. Or, even worse, ignored Kennedy’s genuine interests. Therefore, to Taylor’s credit, one will not see the likes of Robert Dallek, Richard Reeves or Larry Sabato pontificating boringly and deceptively in this film. Some of the main academics in the documentary are University of Texas professor Jamie Galbraith, son of Kennedy aide and later Ambassador to India John K. Galbraith; Gareth Porter, a lecturer, journalist, and author who has written four books on the Vietnam War; former Wall Street journalist and editor Frederick Kempe, author of Berlin 1961; University of New Orleans professor Gunter Bischof, a specialist in Eastern European history. In addition to that, we see journalist Michael Dobbs, author of one of the better studies of the Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight, Peter Kornbluh, author and editor of Bay of Pigs Declassified, and Robert Schlesinger, son of Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger. This collection of commentators all makes for a notable improvement over the usual Dallek/Reeves/Sabato banal tendentiousness.
But where Taylor has really done some interesting work is in the direct witnesses he has secured. For instance, Taylor interviews the interpreters at the Vienna Summit Conference, the late Viktor Sukhodrev (translator for Nikita Khrushchev) and Alex Akalovsky (interpreter for President Kennedy). In addition to Sukhodrev, there is also Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Russian premier. Also on screen is the rather seldom seen Thomas L. Hughes. Hughes was an assistant to Chester Bowles in the Kennedy administration, and later succeeded Roger Hilsman as director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. Lawyer Willam Vanden Heuvel was an advisor to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and later wrote a book about RFK. Finally, in a real surprise, Taylor tracked down Andrea Cousins and Candis Cousins Kerns. These are the daughters of Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins. Cousins had been a tireless advocate for nuclear disarmament since, literally, the day after Hiroshima. As Douglass pointed out in his book, Cousins served as a kind of go-between between the Vatican, the Kremlin and the White House in their mutual efforts to construct a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He then wrote about it in his (much ignored) 1972 book, Improbable Triumvirate. It’s quite a promising roster. And it does not disappoint.
II
With actor Morgan Freeman narrating, the film begins with a brief discussion of a meeting Kennedy had on July 20, 1961 with, among others, CIA Director Allen Dulles and JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer. The subject was the feasibility of a nuclear surprise attack on Russia in the fall of 1963. Apparently, Dulles and Lemnitzer figured that such a first strike would eliminate all the Russian missiles and bombers accumulated at that time. And therefore, push back against their imminent effort to match the atomic arsenal of the USA. In other words, America would now be the unchallenged superpower as far as nuclear arms went. Kennedy asked some probing questions about Russian casualties. He then closed the meeting by asking the attendees not to talk about the discussion. Afterwards he said to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
This episode was first written about in that fine journal, The American Prospect back in 1994. A brief memorandum of the meeting had just been declassified in June of 1993. A little over a year later, Galbraith co-wrote the article with Heather Purcell, which the magazine featured as its cover story. As Dulles noted during the meeting, the fall of 1963 would be the optimum time for such an attack since America would be at its greatest advantage for strategic missiles vs. the Soviets. The backdrop to this meeting was the interim between the Vienna Conference and the Berlin Crisis. In fact, about two weeks later, Kennedy would make a speech in which he declared that the Russians would not drive the USA out of Berlin. Therefore, this opening is quite appropriate in that it shows Kennedy’s national security advisors trying to egg him on to do something incredibly violent; in fact, probably apocalyptic; while he quietly, yet resolutely resists. All against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions, this time in Germany. This pattern will repeat itself a year later. But, in 1962, the backdrop will be Cuba.
After this episode, Taylor now sets the historical era by introducing previous presidents Truman and Eisenhower and the beginnings of both the Cold War and the Nuclear Age. Kempe comments that the exit meeting at the White House between Eisenhower and Kennedy featured a 70-year-old president giving way to the youngest president ever elected. Vanden Heuvel comments that Kennedy quite consciously planned the New Frontier as a distinct break from Eisenhower. Sid Davis, a reporter of the time, says that in covering Kennedy, he found him to be very well versed on foreign policy and also quite articulate about his ideas.
The film now addresses the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Taylor writes that Kennedy had been misled about the operation, but he does not get specific as to how. Which is odd, since Kornbluh edited what I think is one of the very best volumes on the subject, Bay of Pigs Declassified. There is a comment in the film as to how the planners at CIA though that the US would commit militarily but Kennedy would not. Further, one of the commentators, journalist Evan Thomas, actually says there was a lack of air cover. As more than one person, including myself, has explained in detail, the whole lack of air cover myth was manufactured afterwards by the CIA to shift the blame for the debacle from them to Kennedy. (See Chapter 3 of Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, especially pgs. 54-56). Also, there is no mention of the investigations that took place afterwards, and how these caused Kennedy to fire Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell. This was important because it was these inquiries that led JFK to conclude that the plan was never meant to succeed. That the enterprise was contingent upon him caving in and sending in the Marines. Which is what Allen Dulles eventually confessed to in a famous essay published years later based upon his notes for an article he was going to co-write for a magazine. (ibid, p. 47) Even considering the time restrictions, this is probably the most unsatisfactory of the episodes. To repeat, I am surprised Kornbluh was not used more at this point.
From here, the film now goes to the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Kempe states that, upon Kennedy’s inauguration, Khrushchev made some small moves toward an accommodation with the USA. Sergei Khrushchev chimes in and says that his father wanted to improve relations with the Americans under Kennedy. But, as the film notes, Kennedy was bothered by a speech Khrushchev had made about starting small wars of national liberation throughout the globe. And this is how Taylor sets up the third major episode, which is the Vienna Conference and the Berlin Crisis.
The Soviets were losing about ten thousand emigres per month in Berlin. As Bischof informs us, that was the approximate amount of German citizens flowing from the east to the western part of Berlin in 1961. This was not just a public embarrassment, but it was a serious loss to the economy of East Germany. For as both Bischof and Kempe state, it was mostly the cream of the east; that is educated, professional people; that were fleeing. When the Vienna summit was arranged, the Russians had this subject, Berlin, at the top of their agenda. The Kennedy brothers wanted to tell Khrushchev that the Bay of Pigs had been a mistake, and they were ready to talk about improving relations. But, as Bischof and Sukhudrev explain, the meeting got off on the wrong foot. Khrushchev made a comment about Kennedy’s youth, comparing it to his son who had died in World War II. Then, the discussion turned ideological. As Bischof explains, Khrushchev, a thorough communist ideologue, naturally had the advantage there. From this, Khrushchev now turned to Berlin. The Russian threatened to isolate, even blockade West Berlin. Khrushchev was that desperate to get some kind of overall treaty on the issue. Like Stalin, he did not like the fact that West Berlin was a part of East Germany. Therefore causing the huge refugee problem. As the film notes, Khrushchev actually became vocally belligerent about the issue, even threatening war. To which Kennedy replied, “It will be a cold winter.”
Upon his return to Washington, Kennedy was clearly worried about Berlin. He brought in Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State. Acheson was the Democratic equivalent of John Foster Dulles, though not quite as extreme. There then came a battle of memoranda. Acheson prepared the hard line reaction to the threat. Arthur Schlesinger prepared the soft line. Acheson wanted to declare a national emergency, raise taxes, and prepare a troop build-up. In other words, a preparation for war in Germany. Kennedy was determined not to back down, but he essentially split the difference between Schlesinger and Acheson. He called out the reserves, but there was no enlistment drive. He went on television, but did not declare a national emergency. And he did not raise taxes for a military buildup.
We all know what happened. The Russians backed down from both the war threat, and the isolation of West Berlin. They decided to solve their emigre problem by constructing the Berlin Wall. This was a very sad and drastic solution, and the film shows how it separated families in Berlin. But as Kennedy commented, better a wall and not a war. Acheson had a different reaction. As Gareth Porter notes, Acheson said to a small circle of like-minded individuals, “Gentlemen, you may as well face it. This nation is without leadership.” He later stated the same sentiments in a letter to his former boss, Harry Truman.
III
As the film notes, when the crisis was over, the Russians broke a pledge to Kennedy. They resumed atmospheric nuclear testing. Although the film does not specify it, this was not just another test. In October of 1961, the Tsar Bomba explosion took place. That bomb had a yield of 55 megatons. To this day it is by far the largest atomic blast ever. The Russians were now saying two things: 1.) We are resuming testing because there was no agreement on Berlin, and 2.) We are making progress in catching up to your atomic arsenal. In other words, the Dulles/Lemnitzer warning about the nuclear advantage being dissipated was coming to fruition. The USSR was closing the gap.
In reaction, and reluctantly, Kennedy decided to resume testing. At this point, I wish Taylor had included some key information. As Jeffrey Sachs pointed out, the West German government had previously requested atomic weapons from Kennedy. To Konrad Adenauer’s chagrin, JFK had not given them to Bonn. In retrospect, and in spite of the strain it placed on West German diplomacy, that seems like a wise decision on his part.
The film turns to the debate over inserting combat troops into Vietnam. This formally took place in the White House in November of 1961. Porter briefly mentions Kennedy’s knowledge and experience of the failed French struggle in Indochina in the fifties. And then, for me, the film reaches a dramatic high point. Taylor plays a black and white video clip of Rep. John F. Kennedy from 1953. Kennedy says that there will not be peace in the area until the French hand over more control to the people of Vietnam. Until they do, the communists will have the advantage in the struggle since they are not seen as an imperial power. He then demands that the people of Vietnam be given a promise of independence before the United States intervenes there. If not, any American attempt to intercede will be futile.
It’s really good that Taylor dug up this clip. It’s one that not even I had seen before. But this is only one warning among many that Kennedy had given in public about Southeast Asia. (ibid, pgs. 25-31) And I wish that Taylor had mentioned the man who had caused Kennedy to make those perceptive comments. He was State Department official Edmund Gullion. Gullion had met with congressman Kennedy in Saigon in 1951 and explained to him how France could not win the war. That conversation, as proven by Taylor’s clip, greatly impacted Kennedy. (ibid, p. 21) When he became president, Kennedy brought Gullion into the White House to manage the immense Congo crisis.
The film now returns to the result of the troop debate. Vanden Heuvel and Galbraith comment that because of his beliefs about colonial struggle, Kennedy was not willing to insert troops into Vietnam. Only advisors would be sent, so that the USA would not be actually fighting the war in the front ranks. But as Porter adds, this decision also met with internal resistance. For almost all of Kennedy’s advisors wanted him to commit combat troops, and the Pentagon thought it could win in Vietnam.
IV
The last part of the film deals with three main topics: the Missile Crisis, the rapprochement attempts by Kennedy with Cuba ad Russia afterwards, and Kennedy’s issuance of NSAM 263, the orders to remove all American personnel from Vietnam.
Dobbs is a main interviewee for the first segment. He introduces it by saying that the Pentagon was not satisfied with the results of the Bay of Pigs. They wanted an all out invasion of Cuba and they submitted plans for this to Kennedy in early 1962. The Russians were worried about this possibility. So later in the year Khrushchev made the decision to move all three levels of the Russian nuclear armada onto the island, i.e. bombers, submarines and land based missiles. (There is a large debate about precisely what the motive was. For the simple reason that the amount of weapons the Russians moved onto the island was much more than enough to deter an invasion. It actually constituted a first strike capability).
The main problem with the deployment was it was done in secret. Therefore when it was discovered, it was perceived as an attempt at a surprise attack. As most of us know by now, the Joint Chiefs, and most everyone else, wanted a show of force. Either tactical air strikes, a full invasion, or a combination of both. As Dobbs comments, Kennedy deserves much credit; he actually uses the accolade “greatness”; for not giving into the hawks and persevering through intense pressure to get a negotiated settlement. This consisted of a no invasion pledge, and a mutual withdrawal of atomic weapons: the Russians from Cuba and the Americans from Turkey.
In the aftermath of the crisis–which had brought the world to the brink of atomic warfare–Kennedy decided it was now necessary to attain some kind of detente with the USSR. So he began to move forward, with the help of Cousins, in order to attain some kind of nuclear test ban treaty. It’s here that the two daughters of Norman Cousins now take some screen time to talk about certain events in April of 1963. In what has to be a film first, they discuss; with pictures; a meeting they and their father had with Khrushchev at his private resort on the Black Sea, a kind of Camp David for the premier.
They also reveal why Kennedy agreed to this informal back channel: Because he was very conscious of the power of the Pentagon and how they would look askance at formal talks toward detente. Khrushchev told the girls to take a dip in his pool while he talked to their father about Kennedy’s request. Khrushchev told Cousins that although he was interested in nuclear disarmament and detente, he was as much hemmed in by his own hawks as Kennedy was. Cousins concluded that what was necessary was for Kennedy to make a bold move, perhaps a speech, to break through the impasse. He therefore told Kennedy that a meeting of the Central Committee was scheduled for June of 1963. That would be a good time for some kind of milestone speech, one about the necessity of peace in an atomic world. This, of course, was the origin of Kennedy’s famous American University speech, which figures so importantly in the Douglass book.
We then shift to the other back channel Kennedy had constructed in 1963. This was with Castro. Kornbluh, who discovered some long secret documents in the early nineties, reviews this whole movement by Kennedy with the Cuban leader through a series of intermediaries. These maneuverings ended with a mission by French journalist Jean Daniel to Castro with a direct message from Kennedy about how he felt detente could be achieved. Kennedy said it was not really important to him that Castro was a communist. He could deal with that. Castro was overjoyed at this message and was jubilant about the possibilities. Which, as he predicted, were all dashed with the news of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
Finally, there is the Vietnam strand. Porter and Galbraith talk about two documents. The first is the set of papers discovered by the former about Averill Harriman’s thwarting of Kennedy’s attempt to get an agreement about Vietnam through India. This had been at the initiative of John K. Galbraith, who was the ambassador there at the time. In fact, Jamie Galbraith says that this was one of the purposes Kennedy had in mind when he moved his father out of the White House. When Galbraith wrote to Kennedy and said he had everything in place for negotiations to begin, Kennedy handed over the assignment to Averill Harriman, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. Harriman said he would send Kennedy’s memo–which included instructions on how to begin negotiations–by cable the next week. (Douglass, p. 119)
But Harriman did not forward Kennedy’s instructions as he wished. He actually changed the language from one of de-escalation, to one of threatening escalation. When Harriman’s assistant tried to restore the cable to its original intent, Harriman killed the communication altogether. (ibid)
But Kennedy still forged forward in his attempt to disengage from Vietnam. Galbraith talks about the issuance of NSAM 263 in October of 1963, which ordered all American advisors to be removed from Vietnam by 1965. He also relates Kennedy’s discussions with assistant Mike Forrestal just before he was assassinated. He told Forrestal he wanted a complete review of American policy in Vietnam, including how we ever got involved there. Considering Kennedy’s view of the French experience in 1951, this could only mean one thing.
The film ends with an attempt to summarize Kennedy’s presidency. Journalist Evan Thomas says he symbolized the good image of public service, the image that faded with the escalation in Vietnam and then with Watergate. Andrea Cousins says that Kennedy should be remembered for his willingness to risk going against the grain. Her sister Candis concludes that Kennedy took a stand in the face of the nuclear threat. Even though he knew it would be difficult, and perhaps even dangerous.
All in all, this is one of the better documentaries about Kennedy’s presidency. My only regret about it is that, although it presents much of the information from the Douglass book on screen for the first time, the Douglass book is not state of the art any more. Books by Philip Muehlenbeck and Robert Rakove have, in some significant ways, superseded it. (See here and here). These two books show that Kennedy’s foreign policy was even more revolutionary than depicted here.
But that is a cavil. This film is much worth seeing. And it deserved a much larger platform than it got last year. Right now, it’s the best screen depiction of Kennedy’s foreign policy that I know of.
You can buy this video by clicking here. It can also be viewed here. [Note: the film was also subsequently shown on Netflix.]
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Michael Swanson, The War State
Michael Swanson’s book, The War State, seems to me to be a unique and worthy volume. This is not a book on the Kennedy assassination. It’s not even mainly about Kennedy’s presidency; although it does deal with that subject in the second half of the book. What it really is about is the construction of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) after World War II. How that complex, as in no other country, then became a permanent and an integral part of our society. And how it then began to siphon and strangle parts of the American economy. It also deals with how two presidents helped start the phenomenon, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; and how two presidents then crashed into it, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. But the author makes clear that the crash by the latter was much more extensive. In other words, Swanson has written a Big Picture book, one in the tradition of, say, Fletcher Prouty. In my opinion, we need more of these types of books these days. Especially in light of what has happened to the USA since 1963.
I
Swanson begins the book with a telling quote by statesman and author George Kennan. Kennan writes that if the USSR would disappear tomorrow, the American military-industrial complex would remain unchanged, “Until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” The remarkable thing about this quote is that Kennan wrote it in 1987, two years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and four years before the collapse of the USSR. And true to form, the MIC did hang on for a decade. And then, almost to fulfill the dreams of Project for the New American Century (PNAC), came Osama Bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks. The MIC now had its new nemesis. And, as per PNAC, American foreign policy demanded an invasion into Central Asia (Afghanistan) and one into the Middle East (Iraq-twice). PNAC also demanded a reshaping of that area into republics; something they were not at all ready to be. That stipulation created a new Perpetual War to replace the Cold War. All of this was predicted in advance by Kennan.
From here, the author flashes forward to the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Pgs. 3-9) And he shows how the extremes in both the Russian and American camps made it difficult to settle that nightmare peaceably. To the point that President Kennedy had to use his brother to create a back channel to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to come to a peaceful conclusion to the crisis. Swanson then comments that this may be why Kennedy allowed director John Frankenheimer to use the White House while filming Seven Days in May, a book and film which depicts an attempted military takeover of America.
For his theme, Swanson now segues to Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address, in which, for the first time, the MIC, as we know it, was named and described, and its dangers outlined. (p. 10) And now, Swanson begins to describe just how powerful and sprawling the MIC has become. The USA spends 15 times as much on the military as does Russia. It spends 6 times as much as China. (p. 11) If one adds up all global spending on arms and the military, the USA is responsible for 40% of it. More than the next 20 countries combined.
How was this monster created? Prior to World War II, the USA had always demobilized after major wars. For example, in the thirties, the USA had an army of 140,000 men. We had only 80 tanks and 49 bombers. The total arms budget was only 243 million dollars. As Swanson comments, no one, not Huey Long, not John Maynard Keynes, could get Roosevelt to spend enough money to counter fully the Great Depression. But the threat of Germany and Japan did that in spades. By 1944, unemployment went from 14.6 % to 1.3 %. In constant dollars, FDR spent over 840 billion on the military. That figure dwarfed what he spent on the programs of the New Deal. By the end of the war, the USA had built 88,000 tanks, 97,000 bombers, 400 destroyers and cruisers and an amazing 22 aircraft carriers. (p. 13) Military spending was now 36% of GDP and had reached 86% of total budget expenditures in its biggest year. (p. 13)
Prior to World War II, very few people paid income tax, and it was usually the rich who did. But this war was much more expensive than World War I, therefore bonds were not enough to finance it. Therefore, taxes had to be supplemented by the withholding income tax feature on middle class people. By 1945, that tax had now surpassed the corporate income tax as the base of operations for the American budget. (pgs. 14-15)
When Roosevelt began to taper the economy to switch over to a wartime basis, he felt he had to go to the Eastern Establishment to man the high positions in this new behemoth. Therefore, the heads of companies like Sears and GE were placed on the War Production Board. And these men told Roosevelt only big companies could ramp up production fast enough to create a great war machine. Which, the author points out, may or may not have been true. (p. 18) These men also recommended the no-bid contract for much of the work to be done. Almost 75% of all contracts since have been of this variety. Further, they have also been cost plus contracts. Which means all costs of production are paid with a profit built into the contract. As the reader can see, this was the beginning of corporate socialism in military contracting. The biggest companies got even bigger and the MIC was now created. (p. 20)
As the author notes, these abuses eventually led us down the path to Ronald Reagan and the Pentagon’s $435 hammers, $600 toilet seats, and $7000 coffee makers. Many of these men FDR appointed, like Charles Wilson, urged him not to demobilize after the war. Others, like historian Charles Beard, saw the danger this created and said it was necessary to demobilize. Since FDR died before the end of the war, he did not make that decision.
II
As many scholars have noted, including the illustrious Barton Bernstein of Stanford, Harry Truman was responsible for many of the excesses of the national security state. Whatever his regrets were later, whatever New York Times hagiographers like David McCullough may write about him, Truman is popular with Republican mouthpieces like George Will for a reason. The reason is that, along with Winston Churchill, he bears a large part of the responsibility for the Cold War. (As I previously pointed out, the best book on this subject is Frank Costigliola’s Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances.)
As Swanson sees it, the Cold War began in earnest with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Swanson agrees with authors Gar Alperovitz and Stewart Udall that the dropping of these bombs was completely unnecessary. He also quotes people in the government at the time who agreed with that view. For example, Herbert Hoover, Curtis LeMay, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. (pgs. 38-39) That is quite a conservative gallery for the allegedly populist Truman to be out of step with.
As Swanson incisively writes, the arms race was accelerated because of the influence of Secretary of State James Byrnes. Byrnes was as much a contrast to Secretary of State Cordell Hull as Truman was to FDR. Byrnes pushed Truman into using the atomic bomb as leverage over the Russians at Potsdam. Which was an incredible misjudgment of Josef Stalin. Truman and Byrnes also looked askance at Stalin’s attempt to control Poland after the war; something that even Churchill understood and privately agreed to in principle. (pgs. 60-61) As Alperovitz postulated, one reason for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki was to thwart any more Russian influence in Japan since Roosevelt had agreed to have Stalin open a second front in Asia. Something Stalin did. But the Russians were so easily successful that this alarmed many of the White House hawks, who Hull and FDR had overridden. With the second bomb, and the closing off of the Russian military drive in Manchuria, Stalin now saw the handwriting on the wall. The USSR now had to build its own atomic bomb. In a monumental miscalculation, Truman thought this would take the USSR many, many years to do. (pgs. 66-67) He was wrong. They did it in four.
As Swanson astutely comments, this was not all to the origins of the Cold War. There were two other distinct elements. First, there was the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. Named after the town in New Hampshire where the representatives met, this was the creation of the economic internationalist system that would mark the post war world. Bretton Woods marked the beginning of incredibly influential agencies like the IMF and the World Bank. In other words, the Western financial centers of London and New York would now have a reach that would be truly global. (p. 48)
The second distinct aspect outside the creation of the bomb was the Truman Doctrine. Swanson mentions the struggle in Greece between the monarchists and the socialists after the war. The United States sided with the monarchists. (p. 69) Both Bill Donovan, former OSS chief, and George Kennan backed this move. Although Kennan did have his reservations about the USA becoming the policeman of the world. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a former isolationist, urged Truman to use the aid to Greece issue as a fear tactic against the Russians, to herd the American people into following him. (p. 72) Needless to say, the tactic was successful. The Truman Doctrine passed in 1947 by the large margin of 67-23. The USA was now allowed to direct aid and weapons to any nation perceived to be in danger of being taken over by communists. This gave the president a huge new power that really did not require a lot of consultation with congress. Therefore, as his advisers told him, Truman now had a great issue in his hands, that of anti- communism. These men did not understand how ogres like Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover would now demagogue that point.
The Truman Doctrine was followed up by the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. Both of which Stalin felt threatened by. Therefore, he joined neither one. As he did t join Bretton Woods. (p. 76) But when Stalin actually tried to act against this new coalition, he failed. Swanson describes here the attempt by the Russians to seal off West Berlin and force the USA out of the city and therefore make Berlin one, under Russian influence, inside of East Germany. The attempt failed due to the Berlin Airlift. And Swanson rightly states that, in practical terms, this was the extent of the Russian challenge to NATO in Europe. Which is why, for example, Kennan recommended unifying German as early as 1957. His doctrine of containment had won out.
Kennan, of course, with the famous Long Telegram from Russia, had predicted a struggle with communism and the Soviets. But he always regretted the fact that his message had been taken over by the hawks in the White House and turned into an excuse for higher military budgets. He felt that struggle would be much more of an economic, diplomatic, and cultural one. (p. 77)
III
Now comes one of the highlights of the book. After the Russians exploded their atomic bomb in 1949, Truman ordered a review of national security policy. (ibid) The wrong person was placed in charge of this review. The result was one of the great mistakes in modern American history. The man in charge was Paul Nitze, and the Frankenstein monster he composed was NSC-68.
Nitze is one of the most ignored figures present at the creation of the Cold War. Because not only did he play a major role in its construction, he was such an inveterate and unrepentant Cold Warrior that he stuck around for decades. He then revived it all under Ronald Reagan 30 year later.
He is one of the worst examples of the Eastern Establishment. Educated at Harvard, he went into investment banking and made a fortune before he was thirty. He then joined Dillon, Read, before founding his own company. But he returned to Dillon Read from 1939-41 as its president. His first wife was a member of the Rockefeller clan. Nitze therefore was one of the members of a privileged class of wealth who navigated between Republican and Democratic presidents for forty years. He had no real political convictions except 1.) to stay in a position of power and 2.) to exacerbate the Cold War. He achieved the last with spectacular success.
When Truman commissioned his review, Nitze was in charge of Policy Planning at State. He chaired a study group, which featured Dean Acheson and Chip Bohlen, among others. But as many authors agree, Swanson included, Nitze was the driving force behind NSC-68.
This infamous document recommended a huge, spectacular expenditure on new atomic bombs; a tripling of the conventional defense budget; and a raising of Kennan’s containment policy to levels that Kennan never dreamed of or contemplated. Nitze did this by exaggerating the Russian threat out of all relation to its real military capabilities. But he also did so by attributing to it designs on Europe which it simply did not have. (pgs. 81-82) He then presented his report to Truman with three options: withdraw from Europe, attack the USSR, or follow his recommendations. A skilled bureaucrat, Nitze did his work behind Truman’s back. He himself understood that many of his claims were unsubstantiated at best, and pure hyperbole at worst. But by going to each service chief separately, by getting their support for a huge budget increase, and then telling them he was doing the president’s bidding, he had cornered Truman. He also went to the press to tell them how much this program was needed. (p. 84) Truman resisted, and then relented. (Swanson could have added that Nitze repeated this performance again in the late 70’s with the Committee on the Present Danger. See Jerry Sanders fine book, Peddlers of Crisis.)
As a result of Nitze’s handiwork, by 1952, defense spending had gone from 13 billion annually to 56 billion. As Swanson comments, NSC-68 made the MIC created by World War II a permanent industry. For example, in 1953, 75% of the national budget was devoted to the military. In the first decade of the Cold War, over 60% of the national budget was devoted to defense spending. (p. 85) But beyond that, Nitze wrote in NSC-68, that even if there was no USSR, it was the purpose of the USA to keep “order” in the world. In fact, this was one of the Nitze’s favorite themes: America’s duty to keep a world order.
When NSCA-68 was declassified in the seventies, the Russians were aghast at just how wrong the information it was. Later, the Russian military estimates for Nitze’s Committee on the Present Danger were also shown to be wrong. In other words, instead of the media treating him like a Wise Man of the establishment, Nitze was nothing more than a rightwing shill. He did his shilling for his beloved Wall Street brethren’s economic interests. His lies ended up bankrupting two countries: Russia and the USA.
Previewing his next chapter, Swanson writes that the CIA would now become the chief mechanism for American control in all reaches of that world order.
IV
Swanson begins his chapter on the CIA by quoting from a speech Dick Bissell gave about the Agency at a CFR meeting in 1968. There, Bissell talked almost exclusively about the methods and goals of covert action programs. In other words, there was very little discussion of the collection and collating of intelligence. Swanson then observes that in a covert action program, sometimes things come up that are unforeseen. These command spur of the moment further covert actions. In fact, in an internal CIA 1972 report, it was observed that presidential authority had approved only 25% of all covert actions. (p. 101) In the formative years of the Agency, the 40’s and 50’s, some senators who were supposed to be practicing oversight, really did not want to hear about the Agency’s cloak and daggers activities. Therefore, the Agency had almost a blank check to do what it wished. An example of this was the extensive network of airlines the CIA developed over time. Which Director Richard Helms did not even know the extent of. He had to commission an officer to summarize their holdings. (p. 104)
From here, Swanson traces the history of the Agency from the Central Intelligence Group led by Sidney Souers to the formation of the CIA under the National Security Act. He notes the influence of Allen Dulles in the shaping of the National Security Act, especially those paragraphs dealing with the Agency. (p. 113) Some of the early employees of the Agency were Frank Wisner, E. Howard Hunt, James Burnham, and Bill Buckley (the last two would go on to found the National Review). One of the early propaganda projects these men worked on was the construction of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its flagship British magazine, Encounter. (p. 116) Some of its early covert action projects took place in Italy and Greece. But Frank Wisner, head of covert action at the time, utterly failed in his operations to undermine Russian control in Eastern Europe. The CIA also failed to predict the Korean conflict or the creation of the atomic bomb by the USSR.
Truman, gravely disappointed by these intelligence failures, now appointed Walter B. Smith as CIA Director. Smith had read the Dulles-Corrrea-Jackson report on CIA reorganization. So he brought in Dulles as Deputy Director of Plans, and then made him Deputy Director. Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, where covert action was planned, was now brought out of the State Department and into the CIA. (p. 122)
Dulles had been friendly with the Rockefeller family for many years. Through them, he had met the Shah of Iran. Therefore, he was instrumental, along with his brother, Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in recommending the overthrow of the nationalist Mossadegh in Iran. (p. 125) The CIA chief in Tehran suggested this was an attempt at Anglo-American colonialism. Dulles had him transferred out and replaced him with the head of the operation, Kermit Roosevelt. (p. 126) Needless to say the coup worked. But the warnings of the CIA chief turned out to be correct in the long run. In 1979, with the Iranian revolution, radical Islam began to sweep through the Middle East, along with radical anti-Americanism.
Allen Dulles now became CIA Director due to Smith’s health problems. At the request of United Fruit, he and his brother advocated for the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 in Guatemala. United Fruit hired advertising wizard Edward Bernays to control the press coverage about Arbenz prior to the coup. Bernays of course played up the Red Menace angle. (p. 129) In reality, there were about 4,000 communists in the country, and only four members of congress were communists. The coup succeeded. But as with Iran, the long-term effects on Guatemala and the region were horrific. Some estimates state that the number of Guatemalans eventually killed by a series of fascist dictators mounted into the tens of thousands.
Eisenhower began to get reports about Allen Dulles that portrayed him as being ruthless and a less than competent administrator. So Ike set up the 5412 group to supervise CIA activities and report back to him. But since Dulles gave this group incomplete information, they were never able to get a real grip on the CIA. Swanson writes that it was at this point that Eisenhower began to get disgusted with the intelligence community. And he now issued his famous warning about the USA’s intelligence apparatus being a mess since Pearl Harbor, and that he would bequeath his successor a “legacy of ashes.” (p. 140)
Swanson now veers off into a subtheme of, “the Road not Taken.” He writes a chapter about Republican senator Bob Taft of Ohio. Like many in the Eastern Establishment, Taft was an Ivy League graduate of Yale and Harvard. But unlike, say Nitze, Taft did not migrate to Wall Street to make his fortune after graduation. He returned to Cincinnati and practiced law. He then went into government service to resupply Europe with food after World War I. Observing the Versailles Treaty, in which the Dulles brothers were involved, he disliked what he saw. He did not think it was a just peace, but an imperial peace. (p. 148) On his return to Ohio, he went into state politics and then entered the US senate in 1938. Opposing Roosevelt’s New Deal, he became known as Mr. Republican. He opposed the concentration of power in the White House during World War II and the New Deal. He also feared the growing trend of the American president to be a czar in the field of foreign policy. Which tended to make the USA into a major player in international affairs. Taft called himself a non-interventionist. (p. 154) He frowned on the growing armaments industry. He felt that because of its geography; being bound by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; the USA only needed a strong navy to protect itself from invasion. Prior to Pearl Harbor, he was against American intervention in World War II. He felt that America should supply England and Russia with the money and weapons to defeat Hitler.
Taft saw the growing power of the presidency as making future wars more likely. He also felt that the growing spending on defense would weaken the economy by raising taxes and causing inflation. (pgs. 156-57) Taft’s ideas caused a split in the Republican Party in the fifties between the Eastern Establishment and the Midwest non-interventionists. In 1952, when Taft ran in the primaries, Thomas Dewey got Harold Stassen to serve as a stalking horse for Eisenhower and he branded Taft an isolationist.
Taft’s ideas did have an influence on Eisenhower. Ike wanted security with solvency. He complained that when he was in the military, no general ever wanted to get rid of anything, including horses, which stuck around 50 years after they were obsolete. (p. 171) But for all his efforts, by the time Eisenhower left office, military spending had declined only from 70% of the budget to 60%. Eisenhower and Foster Dulles wanted to rely more on atomic weapons, as a cheaper option to conventional armies. (This was called the New Look.)
But even at that, there were complaints about American weakness versus Russia. Curtis LeMay talked about a bomber gap. Senator Henry Jackson talked about a missile gap. Nitze now went to work on 1957’s Gaither Report, formally titled Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age. Nitze did all he could to promulgate the LeMay/Jackson myths about Russian strength versus American weakness. His report said that the Russians had 1,500 nuclear weapons, 4,500 bombers, and 300 submarines, all aimed at the USA. Nitze also said the Soviets could knock out our SAC with ICBM’s. Therefore, the report asked for 44 billion dollars over five years to repair the difference.
This was all a wild exaggeration. The Soviets only had four ICBM’s that could reach America at the time. Their nuclear bomber and submarine capability was primitive compared to the USA. (p. 191) But Nitze again leaked part of the report to the gullible media, which swallowed it. But much to his credit, Eisenhower rejected most of the Gaither Report. Which very much angered Nitze who wrote a very harsh letter to Foster Dulles at the time. (ibid) If one is to the right of Foster Dulles on national defense, where does that leave one?
But the damage was already done. By 1960, the USA had over 18,000 nuclear warheads. This was an incredible 2,000% increase from Truman’s era. Yet, as we have seen, the military still wanted more. Swanson sees this endless appetite, and Eisenhower’s rejection of Nitze, as one of the causes for Ike’s unforgettable Farewell Address, with its pregnant warning about the growing might of the Military Industrial Complex. (p. 193)
V
When Eisenhower briefed John Kennedy before JFK was inaugurated, the incumbent warned the senator about two trouble spots, Laos and Cuba. He said that Kennedy should be ready to send American troops into Laos. Eisenhower had already authorized a program of covert action against Cuba because of the large amount of American investment there. He also told him that contrary to what Kennedy said during the campaign, there was no missile gap. The upcoming Polaris submarine missile was invulnerable. (p. 203) Kennedy was disturbed by how calm Eisenhower was when the discussion broached the possibility of atomic warfare.
Swanson now discusses the shocking saga of the Bay of Pigs invasion. How it went from a small-scale guerilla operation to a large scale, big budget strike force. He brings up the key point that Allen Dulles and Director of Plans Dick Bissell, never left Kennedy any written plans to study. And how they stressed a reliance on thousands of defectors, and also the contingency of guerilla war in the Escambray Mountains if need be. Bissell even said that perhaps as much as one fourth of the Cuban population would rebel. (pgs. 222-24)
Kennedy requested a shift in the landing location and demanded a location with an air strip. The problem was that the CIA did not foresee that the new landing site contained a coral reef. It was also now 85 miles from the mountains. These two factors caused serious damage to two ships during the landing, and the impossibility of retreat to the mountains for prolonged guerilla warfare. (p. 225) Importantly, Swanson mentions the key fact that Kennedy wanted D-Day air strikes to proceed from an airstrip inside of Cuba. (p. 235)
The operation was a disaster from the beginning. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara offered to resign. Kennedy declined since every person in the room was also for the operation. The one exception was Senator Bill Fulbright, who was not on the White House staff. In retrospect, Kennedy told Dave Powers: “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.” (p. 241)
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy learned to pull in others from his personal staff to consult with on major operations e.g. Bobby Kennedy and Ted Sorenson. This ratcheted up the tensions between military mainstays like General Lyman Lemnitzer of the Joint Chiefs and LeMay on one side, and the White House.
I have one serious disagreement with Swanson in this section. He writes that the program which followed the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, included assassination plots. I have not seen any of these Mongoose plans which did this. We do have the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. But those were not part of Mongoose. They were done secretly without presidential authorization. Something which the CIA admits itself in the Inspector General Report on the plots.
From here, Swanson segues to the USSR and its new leader Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev actually consulted with the Presidium on a regular basis. Khrushchev also did away with the terrorist tactics Stalin used against perceived rivals. But the Russian was intent on holding onto Eastern Europe and encouraging wars of national liberation. Therefore, this entailed a rivalry with the USA.
Economically, Russia could not afford to build a huge navy. Therefore, Khrushchev concentrated on finding a way to build an atomic arsenal. The main nuclear bomber Russia had, the Bison, could not reach the USA since it had only a 5,000 mile range. Further, the USSR had only four of these. As per ICBM’s, the Russians were still reliant on liquid fuel boosters. These took hours to prepare. And in 1960, the Russians had only two launch pads and four rockets. (p. 267) It is debatable if they had a rocket that could reach the USA at that time. And they would not have one for certain until early in 1962.
Khrushchev requested a summit with Kennedy over Berlin. It was scheduled for June of 1961 in Vienna. Before this, JFK called a meeting with several advisers. Russian Ambassador Chip Bohlen was struck by how much Kennedy wanted to try for a peaceful co-existence strategy with the USSR. (p. 278)
The summit was unsuccessful because of the cross purposes involved. Khrushchev wanted an agreement on Berlin, which Kennedy would not give him. Kennedy wanted to talk about a nuclear test ban treaty and Southeast Asia. But Khrushchev would not seriously broach those areas without Berlin. Both sides were stymied. (p. 283)
On his return, many hawkish advisers, like Walt Rostow, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, recommended a large defense build-up. They thought the USSR would move on West Berlin. Some even talked about a nuclear threat. Put off by these dire warnings, JFK eliminated Johnson and Acheson from the second stage of talks about the Berlin Crisis. Kennedy decided on a reserve call up, and a speech on Berlin. He then called back Acheson and Johnson and announced his policy at an NSC meeting. When he left, Acheson said, “This nation is without leadership.” (p. 294)
The result of all this was twofold. The Russians now built the Berlin Wall to stem the tide of refugees fleeing to West Berlin. Secondly, they exploded the Tsar Bomba atomic bomb. This was the largest atomic explosion ever detonated before or since: 50 megatons. (p. 295) The Pentagon now asked for more missiles and more testing. The requests were for as many as 10,000 more ICBM’s. Kennedy granted them only a thousand. At that time the USA had hundreds of missiles that could reach the USSR; plus thousands of bombs on submarines and planes that could do the same. The mismatch was more underlined with the launching of Corona, an intelligence spy station in the sky. The Russians had all their ICBM’s at one installation; therefore they could be knocked out in one strike. Secondly, they had three bombers, which perhaps could reach the USA. They had only 12 atomic submarines and they were in port most of the time. (p. 297)
In July of 1961, in light of this information, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles presented Kennedy with a plan to launch a first strike on Russia. They said they had a window of superiority, which would close within two years. Kennedy was disgusted by the proposal. He walked out of the meeting and told Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.” (p. 300) After the meeting, Kennedy put together the Foster Panel to place a cap on the construction of atomic weapons. He then approved a speech by McNamara’s assistant, Roswell Gilpatric, to demonstrate that he USA had a large superiority over the Soviets. Therefore, there was no need for a big build-up. Also Kennedy began to replan American atomic tactics. This was based upon having a formidable second strike if the Russians would launch first. He thus began to phase out a first strike strategy. (pgs. 303-308)
VI
Swanson closes out the book with a chapter long discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I won’t detail this section since there have already been many summaries of this episode, along with several books on the subject. I will only enumerate things which I think are new or revelatory.
Swanson sees the origins of the scheme as a counter to the American missiles in Turkey and Italy. (p. 308) Khrushchev would secretly install the missiles. He would then announce the installation in advance of the November elections and then sign a treaty with Castro.
Khrushchev was successful in the installation since there was a lull in U2 flights over Cuba for a five-week period. Once they were detected, the CIA predicted they would be ready to launch in ten days. This turned out to be wrong. The Russians had installed all the missiles by the time the blockade was set up. It would only take hours to ready them for launch. It was Kennedy’s settling on the blockade option which allowed the time for both sides to come to a settlement short of warfare. For as Swanson notes, the Russians had given Cuba short-range tactical nukes which would have demolished any invading army.
Very adroitly, Swanson points out the difference between LBJ and JFK during the crisis. Johnson was clearly more militant and hawkish on the issue than Kennedy was. In fact, Johnson actually grew tired of the debate and called for action to be taken. (p. 321) Acheson also called for an immediate bombing strike. (p. 323) The Joint Chiefs also called for an immediate bombing strike followed by an invasion. (p. 327) General Maxwell Taylor also wanted a bombing strike. And later on National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy agreed with him, which disappointed Kennedy. Even Bill Fulbright and Sen. Richard Russell wanted an attack.
The night he ordered the blockade, Kennedy ordered his wife and children to the White House from there home in Glen Ora. (p. 333)
The break in tension occurred with two events. First, Khrushchev sent a letter asking for a pledge by JFK not to invade Cuba. Second, Kennedy sent his brother to see Ambassador Dobyrynin. RFK told the Russian that an exchange of the missile sin Cuba for a pledge, plus a removal of the American missiles in Turkey, would be acceptable. But the offer must be taken soon. Bobby did not know how long his brother could hold out against the Pentagon. Who he feared would act unilaterally if the situation was prolonged. (p. 348) Again, Kennedy cut Johnson out of these back channel communications. (p. 347) Incredibly, even after the offer was accepted, the Joint Chiefs still recommended an air raid. (p. 349)
Afterwards, Kennedy said, “But the military are mad. They wanted to do this [an invasion]. It’s lucky we have McNamara over there.” (p. 354)
After this, Kennedy moved for a wheat sale to Russia, the installation of a hotline to Moscow, a limited test ban treaty and a joint exploration agreement to the moon. He was successfully building toward a detente with Russia. It all ended in November of 1963.
Mike Swanson has written a valuable Big Picture book. One with many new sources for study, which bring in much fascinating information. The light he sheds on men like Nitze and Acheson show just what hollow clowns the so-called Wise Men of the media really were. It’s a book that also demonstrates just how powerful and dangerous the Military Industrial Complex has become. By showing Kennedy’s opposition to it, he may have also shown why Kennedy was killed.
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Jeff Greenfield, If Kennedy Lived
Many years ago, in an America that seems very remote from the country we inhabit today, Jeff Greenfield co-wrote an interesting and valuable book. That book was co-written with journalist Jack Newfield. Both men had worked for Senator Robert Kennedy. In 1972, they published a book entitled A Populist Manifesto. It was subtitled, “The Making of a New Majority”. The book’s title echoed off of the Marx/Engels volume, A Communist Manifesto. It wasn’t quite as extreme as that volume, since the American populist movement was never communist in nature. But there is no doubt it had a leftist agenda. For instance, it decried the failures of the tax code to properly collect tax receipts from corporate giants like General Electric. The overall aim was to forge a new majority: a “coalition of self-interest” among the young urban middle class, poor racial minorities, and the Democratic labor movement. There was no denying the egalitarian theme of the book. The aim was to redistribute wealth and power through things like medical insurance for all, reorganization of the legal system, the splitting up of giant corporations, nationalization of large major public utilities, reducing national defense expenditures, and, ironically, in light of Greenfield’s position today, diversification of the broadcast media.
As I said, I read the book as a young man. At the time I was working in the George McGovern campaign. I recall wrestling with several of its large, radical ideas. Many of which seemed attractive and almost common sensical to me. And back in the political environment of 1972, neither the title, nor the ideas, seemed out of place. But, of course, in a huge landslide, Richard Nixon crushed George McGovern later that year. And if one follows the career of Mr. Greenfield, it appears that the Yale Law School graduate got the message. Greenfield was 25 when his boss Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. He was 29 when he co-wrote A Populist Manifesto. Socially and culturally, Woodstock signaled the end of the sixties: the anger and frustration of the betrayal and murders of the sixties would now transmute into an ethos of rock music and drugs. But in historical terms, the McGovern campaign was really the last stand for the sixties liberalism Bobby Kennedy represented in 1968. In fact, at the 1968 Democratic convention, McGovern was nominated as a kind of stand-in for Robert Kennedy’s constituency. And Frank Mankiewicz, who announced the death of RFK in Los Angeles, was one of the top managers of McGovern’s campaign. The Democratic Party has never really been the same since. Neither has the nation.
As noted above, after his boss was killed and McGovern was swamped, Greenfield got the message. Books like A Populist Manifesto were not the way to get your ticket punched in a polity headed by RFK’s antithesis, Richard Nixon. Greenfield then went to work for several years in the office of political consultant David Garth. Garth was one of the most successful consultants in the history of New York City. He was a key figure-perhaps the key figure– in helping to elect Mayors John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Garth was a master of the use of television and what came to be called, “the sound bite”. Garth kept a low profile for himself. He shunned publicity and operated under the radar as he molded the city’s fate. Therefore, he was something of a political chameleon who worked for both Democrats and Republicans. Whatever his own political beliefs were, they remained a mystery. But its safe to say this: If Greenfield was now working for a man who’s main goal was winning, and if some of his winners included the likes of Giuliani, then its pretty clear that the law school graduate was now moderating the ideas he once advocated in A Populist Manifesto.
After his work for Garth, Greenfield was now ready to start on a third career. With the lessons learned in Garth’s office, he repackaged himself as a “political analyst”. And he now sold himself as such to the media. He started at ABC News in the eighties, working primarily on Nightline. He then went to CNN for about a decade. In 2007, he was hired as a “political correspondent” at CBS. Today, he does things like conduct public discussions in New York with people like Fox’s Charles Krauthammer and Time’s Joe Klein. In other words, after starting his career as being concerned with challenging the establishment, Greenfield has now become a part of that establishment. To see this in bold letters, one has to go no further than his book on the 2000 election heist in Florida, Oh Waiter: One Order of Crow. That tome just might be one of the very worst published on that disastrous election: superficial, breezy, lazy, and worst of all, accepting of almost everything the MSM broadcast about the episode. If one wants to see just how bad Greenfield’s book really is, just read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, or Jews for Buchanon by John Nichols. The first actually shows how the conspiracy to steal that election worked; the second is a good catalogue on all the irregularities which occurred during the entire months long drama. Which, of course, concluded with one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in recent memory. In 2005, Lance Dehaven-Smith wrote The Battle for Florida, a very good retrospective on all the failures of local and federal government that allowed a crime like this to occur. All of these works, and many more, make Greenfield’s book look like a grade school reader. And let us not forget, it was the heist of this election from Al Gore that directly caused the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Which was a completely manufactured and unnecessary war. That war’s repercussions are still being felt today. In both Iraq and the USA. Greenfield’s book does not even begin to fill in the outlines of that crime or its epic tragic results.
All of the above is appropriate background to Greenfield’s attempt at an alternative history of the Kennedy presidency. Before we address the work itself, the reviewer should note a bit about the genre. Alternative history tries to imagine what the world would have been like if some crucial event had not occurred. There are two ways to approach the subject. One is in a fact based, scholarly manner in which alternative information is argued and debated for value. A good example of this would be James Blight’s excellent book about whether or not President Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, Virtual JFK. A looser, more narrative type of alternative history would be exemplified by Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. In that book, a fine novelist reimagines America if isolationist and closet anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940. According to Roth, Lindbergh then negotiated a non-aggression understanding with Hitler and embarked on his own Jewish pogroms. The second method allows for more fictional devices and looser interpretations.
Greenfield’s is much more in the second category than in the first. In fact, he wrote a previous book of alternative history called Then Everything Changed in 2011. I did not read that book, and after reading this one I am glad I did not. First, Greenfield does not have the literary gifts to do this kind of thing well. As noted above, Philip Roth was a fine novelist. To put it kindly, Jeff Greenfield is not. There is very little in this book to mark the gifts of fine narrative construction. Some traits a good novelist should have are the ability to draw characters, to depict credible and memorable dialogue, to make a narrative flow, to construct a believable backdrop to his story, and to build drama (and perhaps suspense). For me Greenfield’s book is written at the level of The Novel 101 in all of those categories. And even at that level, it is the work of only an average student. Therefore, intrinsically, the book has very little gripping power.
Which leaves us with the choices Greenfield made in his version of a Kennedy presidency that lasted two terms. First of all, Greenfield has Kennedy surviving the assassination attempt because the Secret Service put the plexiglass bubble top on the limousine. Kennedy then goes on to Parkland Hospital where his life is saved by the doctors there. In his version, Oswald is then shot at the Texas Theater. Robert Kennedy then ponders if anyone else was involved in the murder attempt. But according to Greenfield, he is the only man of consequence who does so. In fact, one of the more bizarre things about the book is this: it’s President Kennedy who tries to discourage Bobby from investigating the case. In other words, Greenfield has JFK offering up the Warren Commission’s case against Oswald.
This takes us up to about the end of Chapter 2. And even at this early point in the book, any responsible reviewer has to note some odd choices Greenfield made. In the author’s introduction to the book, remembering who Greenfield is and was, he says two predictable things about what will follow. First, he finds the case against Oswald to be compelling. Remember, this is a Yale Law School graduate saying this. Secondly, he is not going to be writing a hagiography about the Kennedys. These two qualifications clearly mark the book throughout. And the first one seriously discolors the opening two chapters.
For instance, although Greenfield’s version of Oswald, like the real Oswald, never had a trial, its pretty clear where Mr. MSM stands on that issue. In his discussion of the Women’s Center or the Trade Mart as Kennedy’s ultimate speaking destination that day, he writes that if the former had been chosen, there would have been no sixth floor sniper. The author has Oswald also killing Officer Tippit. At the Texas Theater, Greenfield has Oswald pulling a gun before he is killed by Officer McDonald. As more than one commentator has demonstrated, including Gil DeJesus, this whole scenario, with Oswald trying to take a shot at a policeman, was very likely manufactured by the Dallas Police to make Oswald appear like a belligerent defendant who was capable of killing someone. (See here for the case.)
But along the way in these opening two chapters, Greenfield shows us even further how questionable and weakly scaffolded his alternative history really is. In depicting the assassination, he says that Roy Kellerman’s first reaction was to throw himself over President Kennedy. One wonders how many times the author has seen the Zapruder film. Because there is no evidence on that film for Kellerman ever contemplating any such act. And further, he would have had to throw himself over Governor John Connally to get to Kennedy.
And Greenfield has no qualms about walking over the dead body of his former boss. In his discussion of who Robert Kennedy may have thought killed his brother, he writes that the Attorney General knew about the CIA plots to kill Castro. As many, many others have written the problem with this is that is clashes with the best evidence we have on the matter. That is the CIA’s own Inspector General report, which says such was not the case. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 327-28) And also, there is J. Edgar Hoover’s memorandum of his meeting with Robert Kennedy. Hoover had stumbled upon the plots 2 years later and alerted RFK to his knowledge of Sam Giancana’s participation in them. This occurred when the Bureau found out about Robert Maheu’s illegal attempts to help Gianacana with a personal problem. When the FBI found out about their past association with the CIA plots to kill Castro, Hoover briefed RFK about the matter. Kennedy revealed nothing but surprise and anger. (ibid, p. 327) When he called in the CIA for further briefing, the same reaction was exhibited. As the briefer wrote, “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.” (ibid) The CIA had to brief him because he didn’t know about the plots.
As this reviewer noted in his essay, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy”, since about 1975 and the Church Committee hearings, there has been an orchestrated, never-ending campaign to reverse both the CIA’s and the Committee’s finding in this regard. Which was that the CIA planned and executed these plots independently. Greenfield goes along with this campaign against his former boss.
In Chapter 3, Greenfield has Vice-President Lyndon Johnson resigning office over scandals involving his former assistant Bobby Baker and insurance salesman Don Reynolds. In Greenfield’s scenario, Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford go to Johnson and tell him that Bobby Kennedy is bringing pressure on Life Magazine to go ahead and publicize these charges against Johnson. Therefore, Johnson resigns in January of 1964. Its clear that Greenfield got most of his material for this episode from Robert Caro’s book, The Passage of Power.
In Chapter 4, Greenfield has President Kennedy, now healed, returning to Washington and addressing congress. But he also returns to the idea of Robert Kennedy wrestling with the possibility that Oswald may not have been working by himself. But they way the author presents this is classic MSM cliché:
It was unimaginable to him that a single insignificant twerp of a man like Lee Harvey Oswald could have struck the most powerful figure in the world. But the more he and his team of investigators looked, the harder it was to fit any of the likely suspects with the facts.
Note first, Greenfield uses the whole banal adage of the psychological difficulty of accepting a loser like Oswald as the assassin of a great man like Kennedy as his starting point. In other words, it’s not the evidence that is the problem, it’s the paradigm. Well, a writer can do that if he recites the whole warmed over Warren Commission creed as gospel.
Which is what Greenfield does next. He presents the whole Commission case to the reader. Just as someone like Arlen Specter, or more in line with Greenfield’s profession, Tom Brokaw, would. He says CE 399, the Magic Bullet, was traced to the rifle found on the sixth floor. He then adds that the rifle was traced to Oswald who ordered it under an assumed name. He then goes even further and writes that it was this rifle which Oswald used to fire on retired General Edwin Walker. Then, apparently using Howard Brennan, Greenfield writes that witnesses saw a man fitting the Oswald description on the sixth floor moments before the assassination. He then tops it all off with a crescendo that would have had David Belin beaming. He writes that it was an undeniable fact that Oswald shot and killed Officer Tippit, and had tried to kill the officer who arrested him at the Texas Theater.
Now to go through this whole litany of half-truths and outright deceptions would take much more length and depth than this book deserves. I have already linked to a source which discredits the last claim. But briefly, to say that the Tippit case leaves no room for doubt is a bit daffy. For instance, the bullets used in that shooting could never be matched to the alleged revolver used by Oswald. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 101) And further, there is no evidence that Oswald ever picked up that handgun from Railroad Express Agency, as the Commission says he did. (ibid, p. 104) And perhaps Greenfield does not know it, but someone dropped Oswald’s wallet with an Alek Hidell alias in it at the Tippit scene. Because according to the Warren Commission, the Dallas Police took Oswald’s wallet in the car driving away from the Texas Theater. (ibid, pgs. 101-102) And to say that Oswald shot at Walker ignores the fact that Oswald was never accused of doing that until eight months afterwards. And the only way you can accuse him of that is by changing the bullet that was recovered from the scene of Walker’s house. (ibid, pgs. 79-80) Further, the best witness to the Walker shooting, young Kirk Coleman, said he saw two men escaping from the scene after the shooting. Both drove separate cars and neither resembled Oswald. Further, according to the Commission, Oswald did not drive.
To further cut off any possibility of a conspiracy, Greenfield writes that Oswald’s only link to anti-Castro Cubans was a clumsy attempt to infiltrate them. This, of course, refers to Oswald’s confrontation with Carlos Bringuier on Canal Street. An incident which drew a lot of publicity for Oswald, even though it was quite innocuous. But this can only be categorized as the “only link” if one disregards a rather important piece of evidence. Namely the Corliss Lamont pamphlet which was stamped with the address “544 Camp Street”. This was found among Oswald’s belongings upon his arrest for the altercation with Bringuier. As anyone who has studied this case knows, that stamped address was a ticking bomb. Because it happened to be one of the addresses to Guy Banister’s office. And that office housed many Cuban exiles. Further, there were numerous credible witnesses who placed Oswald at that address and/or with Banister. And since Banister was involved with both the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose, Oswald had many opportunities to intersect with Cubans working for the CIA, for example Sergio Arcacha Smith. (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, pgs. 109-16)
As noted above, one of the most repugnant parts of the book is that the author actually has President Kennedy trying to talk the Attorney General out of investigating further. So in addition to smearing RFK with the Castro plots, he tries to put the seal of approval on the preposterous Warren Report with John F. Kennedy speaking from the grave.
From here, Greenfield now covers all the MSM tracks. Like Philip Shenon, he writes that the FBI and CIA were careless in their surveillance of Oswald. And this is what allowed him to kill President Kennedy. He specifically says the CIA lost track of Oswald when he returned to Dallas. In the sentence before this, Greenfield writes something artfully inaccurate. He says that Oswald had visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City “just a few months before the shooting of the president.” (p. 60 of the e-book edition.) Oswald was in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination. Not a few months. But that “error” makes it easier to say the CIA lost track of him in the meantime. When, according to the Commission, Oswald returned to Dallas right after leaving Mexico City. This allows Greenfield to avoid the whole can of worms that Mexico City opens up for defenders of the official story.
Greenfield then notes the whole James Hosty incident with the destroyed note allegedly left at FBI HQ in Dallas by Oswald before the assassination. Hosty was ordered to deep-six the note about three days after the assassination. Greenfield writes that if this information about Oswald leaving a threatening note at FBI HQ had been given to the Secret Service, they may have been interested in knowing Oswald’s whereabouts during the motorcade. Well, maybe, maybe not. After all, what happened with the Secret Service in the wake of the thwarting of the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago? Answer: Nothing. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 266) Greenfield avoids that problem by not mentioning a word about the Chicago attempt.
The above summarizes the lengths Greenfield goes to in camouflaging the true circumstances of Kennedy’s murder. Let us now review what the author does with his version of Kennedy’s two terms in the presidency. Make no mistake, for the most part, Greenfield continues the agenda he showed on the assassination as he deals with Kennedy’s presidency. For instance, the author provides a brief and sketchy annotation section at the end in which he lists some of the sources he used in the book. Two of his main sources for Kennedy’s presidency are Richard Reeves’ President Kennedy: Profile of Power, and Nick Bryant’s The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality. Again, if one wanted to present a Fox version of President Kennedy, one could hardly do better than this choice. First for his overall presidency, second for his civil rights campaign.
Dealing with the latter, in my review of Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century, I demonstrated just how much Kennedy did for the civil rights struggle in less than three years. And how this was previewed by what he did in the senate. I also named three good books on this subject. All of them are ignored by Greenfield. I then presented the evidence that Kennedy had done more for civil rights in less than one term in office than the previous 18 presidents had done in a century. A combination of the regressive right and the loopy left (Bryant was the foreign correspondent for the The Guardian), wants to disguise that historical fact. They cannot. (Click here for that review and scroll to section 3.)
As for Reeves, his book was so bad I couldn’t finish it. It seemed to me to largely be a response by an establishment journalist to the depiction of Kennedy as shown in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. And when Tom Brokaw presented his 2-hour special on Kennedy’s assassination last year, Reeves was trotted out to neutralize the effect of NSAM 263 on the Vietnam War. Reeves said that if only concerned things like cooks and kitchen help. Which is nothing but fiction. But these are the kinds of people who Greenfield uses as sources in his book.
So its little surprise that the image presented of Kennedy here is that of a moderate conservative. For instance, because he does not want to be perceived as being too “out there” on civil rights, Greenfield’s Kennedy proposes a welfare-to-work program. This way he can negate any white backlash by saying the program is not targeted or black Americans. At his 1964 acceptance speech, Kennedy names a new theme for his second term. He dumps the title New Frontier for the New Patriotism. Greenfield actually then has Kennedy using a line from Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
But that is not enough for Greenfield. He actually has Kennedy proclaiming, “This is a conservative country at heart…Why can’t these damn conservatives understand a tax cut will give us so much growth, we’ll actually have more revenue. Its so obvious.” If Kennedy ever said anything like this, I have never come across it. The story behind Kennedy’s tax cut was not at all similar to what the Reagan tax cut was. Walter Heller, a Keynesian economist, designed Kennedy’s tax cut. Heller would have never gotten within ten miles of Reagan’s White House. Why? Because he used to poke fun at Milton Friedman. Kennedy’s tax cut was designed to speed up both growth and productivity. It was not weighted towards the upper classes. In fact it slightly favored the working class and middle class. After discussing the issue with Heller, Kennedy thought this was the best way to get the economy moving immediately, with a demand-side stimulus program. (In fact, Kennedy first thought of a New Deal type government-spending program.) And if Kennedy ever thought the program would pay for itself, I have never seen that quote either. In fact, it did not. (See Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 10/12/2012) As for promoting his tax cut, this speech is about as far as he went rhetorically in catering to the business class. (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9057)
Greenfield’s take on Vietnam is a decidedly mixed bag. He does have Kennedy withdrawing from Southeast Asia and flying to Moscow to cement a deal about this. But this is only after he writes “As president, he had pressed the military for a more assertive strategy in Vietnam.” Since the Pentagon wanted to insert combat troops, and Kennedy refused to do so, then this “assertive strategy” did not amount to much. In fact, it was fairly marginal. He then adds, “In his inclination to take the offensive, Kennedy was reflecting a long-standing national consensus that the loss of any territory to a communist insurgency was a threat to every other nation in the region.” In other words, Kennedy was a believer in the Domino Theory. As no less than McGeorge Bundy concluded after much study of the declassified records, this is simply not true. (See Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, a good book that, predictably, Greenfield ignores.) In fact, Greenfield actually implies that the reason Kennedy did do a deal in Vietnam was so the government of South Vietnam could not do one first.
According to Greenfield, Kennedy could not get his civil rights bill through congress. (An idea that is neutralized by Thurston Clarke who used interviews with congressional leaders of the time for his information.) So LBJ calls Kennedy and recommends going with a crew of black Americans who were war heroes to shame congress into acting. As the reader can see, Greenfield is now stage-managing JFK like Dick Morris did Bill Clinton.
Greenfield does mention that Kennedy was going to try an opening to Red China. (p. 174) And this, plus the Vietnam deal, ignites a plot to get rid of Kennedy. Headed by James Angleton, it threatens to expose his dalliance with Mary Meyer to the press. And, of course, Greenfield buys the Timothy Leary drug angle to this story also. One which Leary himself forgot about for almost two decades. The plotters decide to use reporter Clark Mollenhoff to expose the story. But Bobby Kennedy hears about it first. He then brings pressure on the newspaper not to print the tale. This kills the story.
But because people in the press heard about what RFK had done, they give the Kennedys a bad press until 1968. Therefore, RFK does not run in 1968. The two men who do run are Hubert Humphrey and a man who Greenfield apparently very much admires, Ronald Reagan. We don’t learn who won. At the very end, Jackie Kennedy decides to leave her husband.
This is the worst kind of alternative history. Because it’s an alternative that is seriously colored by the view from the present. More specifically, those who won and those who lost. With a decided bias in favor of those who won. Therefore it tells us more about today than about the past. What makes it offensive is that the author got his start in politics by working for one of those who lost. And today, that seems to mean little to him.
Here, Jeff Greenfield shows us just how bad the MSM can be. Even with the freedom to write an imaginary history, he still can’t come close to telling the truth.
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CIA and the Bay of Pigs
A Federal appeals court says the CIA doesn’t have to reveal information about the Bay of Pigs.
by Josh Gerstein, At: Politico