Part 9: The Devil's Chessboard...The Torch is Passed...Contempt...

The Devil's Chessboard
By Davis Talbot
14 

The Torch Is Passed 

The cruel circus of American politics has a way of exposing a candidate’s inner self, particularly the hurly-burly of congressional campaigns, where the battle is fought up close and on one’s home turf. Allen Dulles briefly threw himself into the political arena in August 1938, when he declared himself a candidate in the Republican primary for the Sixteenth Congressional District, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he and Clover maintained a town house. Like Foster, who later ran a similarly ill-fated campaign for the U.S. Senate, Allen had a nuanced feel for power but not for politics. The brothers were imbued with a sense of public service, but in their minds, democracy was something to be saved from the demos. “Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work,” Allen told the press on the eve of his campaign. “You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.” 

Dulles’s patrician sensibility did not play well in the campaign, even with the posh Republican voters on the Upper East Side. During the race, he put together all of the right elements, like a corporate lawyer meticulously building his case. He lined up the support of prestigious Republicans, such as Elihu Root Jr., the son of Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state, who served as his honorary campaign chairman. He secured the endorsements of the leading New York newspapers, including the Times and the Herald Tribune. And he opened up a campaign office at the Belmont Plaza Hotel, where Clover dutifully wrote several hundred letters soliciting support from women voters in the district, like a Junior League doyenne volunteering for a favorite charity. But there was no passion in the Dulles campaign. His speeches were stilted and his debate performance was lawyerly and bloodless. 

The monthlong primary campaign pitted Dulles against the incumbent, a conservative Democratic congressman named John J. O’Connor, who had cross filed in the Republican primary after President Roosevelt announced his intention to purge O’Connor as a traitor to the New Deal. During the brief race, Dulles tried to carefully parse his attacks on the popular president, expressing sympathy with FDR’s “broad social aims” while denouncing his “dictatorial attitude.” But O’Connor—who had established himself as one of the more effective opponents of the New Deal in Congress—came across as a more muscular enemy of Roosevelt. And when the battle-scarred political warhorse turned his invective on Dulles, accusing him of “selling out” his country to “international interests” and Wall Street titans like J. Pierpont Morgan, Dulles could only muster a rational-sounding, but feeble, reply. 

On Election Day, September 21, Dulles went down to a thumping defeat, losing the Republican nomination by a three-to-two margin to a man who did not even belong to the party. Dulles promptly returned to the world of discreet power that he knew best, never again subjecting himself to the slings and arrows of electoral combat. 

On the surface, John F. Kennedy seemed similarly unsuited for the rough and-tumble of democracy. Privileged, reserved, and physically frail, young Jack Kennedy was a far cry from his glad-handing political forebears, such as his maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the perennial Boston politician who wooed voters with his gift for song and blarney. Late into his career, JFK continued to worry that he was too introverted for politics. In January 1960, three days after declaring his presidential candidacy, Kennedy confided to friends over dinner, “I’m not a political type.” In contrast to his grandfather, who “wanted to talk to everybody,” added Kennedy, “I’d rather read a book on a plane than talk to the fellow next to me.” 

When he made his political debut in 1946, running for Congress from the Boston-Cambridge Eleventh District, the twenty-eight-year-old Kennedy was far from a shoo-in, despite his father’s wealth and connections. The sprawling district encompassed a slew of tough Irish and Italian working-class neighborhoods and slums, and the Choate- and Harvard-educated candidate seemed too aloof a character to outrun the crowded pack of experienced political pros that he faced in the Democratic primary. Joe Kennedy tried to outfit his son with the best campaign brain trust that money could buy, but JFK preferred to work with young war veterans like himself. Jack Kennedy sought out Dave Powers, an Air Force veteran who had grown up in scruffy, Irish-Catholic Charlestown and was a local political wise guy. The son of a dockworker who had died when Powers was two, leaving his widow with eight children to raise, the political operator knew the dreams and heartaches of the families crowded into the neighborhood’s “three-decker” tenements. Powers ushered five masses every Sunday at St. Catherine’s Church and played second base on the parish baseball team. “I knew just about everybody in Charlestown.” 

When Kennedy first approached him in a Charlestown tavern to ask him to join his campaign, Powers turned him down flat. A millionaire’s son running for Congress in a shot-and-beer district? He didn’t stand a chance. Kennedy didn’t seem cut out for Boston’s brawling politics. In fact, the young man—who would soon be diagnosed with Addison’s disease and told that he would not live past forty-five—did not seem long for this world. As the 1946 campaign got under way, Kennedy was plagued by severe back and abdominal distress that he had suffered ever since he was a teenager and had been aggravated during his war service in the South Pacific, where he had also picked up a case of malaria. He was painfully thin and his skin had an unhealthy, yellow tinge—whether from the atabrine he took for his malaria or from his Addison’s, it was unclear. 

Kennedy’s shy manner and boyish good looks made him seem more a poet than a politician to Powers, but he soon discovered that JFK was “aggressively shy.” Even after Powers turned him down over drinks at the bar, Kennedy kept dogging him, showing up a few nights later at his family’s three-decker flat and peppering him with questions. Well, if YOU were running in the district, what would YOU do? “He was very inquisitive. He could pick your mind.”

A few days later, when Kennedy invited him to come to his first campaign appearance, Dave Powers gave in to his political destiny. JFK was addressing a group of Gold Star mothers—women who had lost sons during the war—at the Charlestown American Legion Hall. As Kennedy began to speak, a polite hush fell over the crowd. Powers stood listening in the back of the room, and at first the political operator—who was used to the stem-winding oratory of Boston legends like James Michael Curley—cringed at what he was hearing. The young candidate was painfully nervous, stuttering and visibly struggling for a way to connect with his audience. And then, it happened. Kennedy—whose own family had lost its firstborn son, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., in the final days of the war —found his voice. “I was getting sort of nervous,” recalled Powers years later, “and then [Jack] looked out at all these wonderful ladies and said, ‘I think I know how you feel, because my mother is a Gold Star mother too.’ And all the years I’ve been in politics, smoke-filled rooms and from Maine to Anchorage, Alaska, this reaction was unbelievable. He immediately was surrounded by all these Charlestown mothers and in the background I can hear them saying he reminds me of my own John or Joe or Pat, a loved one they had lost. Even I was overwhelmed.” 

After the event, as they walked back to Kennedy’s hotel suite, in an old political hangout on Beacon Street, the young candidate asked Powers how he had done. “It was great,” said Powers. 

“And then he reached out his hand and said, ‘Then will you be with me?’ And I shook his hand and I was with him from that day to Dallas.’” 

Kennedy went on to win the Democratic primary and the general election by landslides. He spent the rest of his life in politics, a profession he regarded as honorable and at which he displayed a unique talent, even if he never felt entirely comfortable with its showmanship. As he prepared to run for president, he expressed hope that the country was ready for a new style of politics. Perhaps you didn’t have to be a backslapping “happy warrior” like Hubert Humphrey, a leading rival for the 1960 Democratic nomination. “I just don’t think you have to have that type of personality to be successful today in politics,” JFK told friends, a bit wishfully, early in his campaign. “I think you have to be able to communicate a sense of conviction and intelligence and rather, some integrity. . . . Those three qualities are really it.” 

Every great life in politics has a theme: with John Kennedy, it was his horror of war and the endless suffering it brings. He felt it in a way that most politicians, blithely untouched by the savagery and idiocy of war, never feel it. “All war is stupid,” Kennedy had written home as a naval lieutenant in the South Pacific, where he had nearly lost his own life when his PT boat was carved in two by a Japanese destroyer. The death of his older brother only confirmed his deep disgust with war. “He was very close to my brother Joe, and it was a devastating loss to him personally,” recalled Senator Edward M. Kennedy, JFK’s youngest brother, near the end of his life. “He was a very different person when he came back from the war. I think this burned inside of him.” 

Allen Dulles had also felt the personal impact of war, when his son and namesake returned from Korea irreparably damaged. But his own family tragedy provoked no deep agonizing within Dulles about war or his central role in Washington’s machinery of violence. The spymaster liked to talk, in a way that sounded almost boastful, about his ability to dispatch men—including his own loyal agents—to their deaths. In contrast, during his years in the White House, Kennedy continually wrestled with ways to avoid bloodshed, again and again deflecting belligerent counsel from his national security advisers. Dulles came to see this as weakness, while Kennedy would conclude that his CIA director was a man of the past, recklessly provoking Cold War confrontations when the world was crying out for a new vision. Though it was largely hidden from the public, the duel between Kennedy and Dulles would define Washington’s “deep politics” in the early 1960's.

Dulles first met Kennedy in winter 1954, while JFK was at his family’s Palm Beach mansion recovering from another agonizing round of back surgery. The freshman senator from Massachusetts, who had not yet made much of a political mark, did not strike the graying Washington power fixture as the sort of man with whom he would one day cross swords. Kennedy was so enfeebled from his latest surgical ordeal—which had put him in a coma, prompting a priest to administer the last rites—that he could barely hobble a few steps. He lay in bed most days, with nurses helping to turn him, reading, and taking notes for an article that would grow into his bestselling book, Profiles in Courage. 

From an early age, Kennedy’s afflictions had given him an acute sense of his fragile mortality. “At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth,” his brother Robert later observed, “were days of intense physical pain.” As president, JFK came to represent the very picture of youthful vigor and political revitalization. But in private, particularly during periods of extreme physical distress, Kennedy seemed to belong as much to the afterlife as to the living. In October 1953, while relaxing on Cape Cod after their wedding, Kennedy recited his favorite poem to his new wife, Jacqueline, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Written by a young American poet named Alan Seeger—the uncle of folk singer Pete Seeger—before he died in battle in World War I, the poem spoke to the shadows in Kennedy’s soul, even in the bloom of marriage to a beautiful and vivacious young woman: 

God knows ’twere better to be deep 

Pillowed in silk and scented down, 

Where love throbs out in blissful sleep, 

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, 

Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . 

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death 

At midnight in some flaming town, 

When Spring trips north again this year, 

And I to my pledged word am true, 

I shall not fail that rendezvous. 

Dulles was a frequent houseguest of the Kennedys’ Palm Beach neighbors, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. Charlie Wrightsman was a globe-trotting oil millionaire who had met his much younger wife when he was pushing fifty and she was a twenty-four-year-old department store swimsuit model. Under his bullying tutelage, Jayne Wrightsman grew into a world-renowned art collector and high society hostess who would mentor Jacqueline Kennedy during the First Lady’s elaborate restoration of the White House. 

Charlie Wrightsman was a blunt-spoken former oil wildcatter whose ruggedly Republican values were right out of the pages of Ayn Rand. Wrightsman and Dulles, who served as the oilman’s attorney when he worked at Sullivan and Cromwell, forged a tight, mutually beneficial friendship. Wrightsman generously shared his lavish lifestyle with the less affluent Dulles, inviting the intelligence chief for frequent winter retreats at his Spanish-style estate in Palm Beach, with its Renoirs and Vermeers and its parquet floors acquired from the Palais Royal in Paris. The oil baron also sometimes enticed Dulles to join his wife and him on their yachting expeditions in the Mediterranean as well as their aviation adventures in their Learstar jet. “Jayne and I are leaving Paris on Thursday August 20 for Stavanger, Norway and points North,” Wrightsman wrote Dulles in July 1953 from the Hotel du Cap d’Antibes. “If you will join us, I will promise not to mention during our entire cruise that Senator McCarthy might be the next President of the United States.” 

Dulles, in turn, opened doors for Wrightsman in far-flung oil capitals like Baghdad and Tripoli, providing him with introductions to ambassadors, government ministers, and sheikhs. The oilman made sure to keep the spy chief in the loop, reporting back to him on the political intrigues in Europe and the Middle East. 

Clover resented the way that her husband slid so easily into the lap of luxury provided by millionaires like Wrightsman. Spending time in this gilded atmosphere brought out all of Clover’s mixed feelings about the world of privilege, a world where Allen served but did not fully belong. 

“The mere mention of the Wrightsman's,” recalled Mary Bancroft near the end of her life, “was apt to set off one of those fights between Dulles and his wife when they went at each other like a pair of fighting eagles—with Clover always being defeated by Allen’s stronger claws, until she retreated from the fray with feathers awry and deep wounds from those claws. It was terrible to witness how they fought.” 

Clover blamed the Wrightsmans for bringing out her husband’s “more reprehensible characteristics,” Bancroft observed, “namely . . . that he liked good food, good wine, and the chance to swim in a heated pool and afterwards to dry himself with a large, soft, expensive towel that had been warmed ahead of time ‘so you won’t get a shock.’ Clover liked luxury herself, but she certainly fought this ‘weakness’ tooth and nail and was always forcing herself to do uncomfortable and unpleasant things that she thought ‘good for the soul,’ like the most rigid of the Puritan fathers.” 

It was the Wrightsman's who introduced the Dulles's to young Jack Kennedy. Charlie Wrightsman was no fan of the New Dealer Joe Kennedy, but he and his wife found themselves charmed by Jack and Jackie, who seemed to have the air of American royalty. Years later, after JFK was dead, Dulles recalled the day in early 1954 that he met the young senator. Invited by Joe Kennedy to drop by the family’s Palm Beach home while he was staying with the Wrightsman's, Dulles first came upon JFK as he was flat on his back. “He was suffering a good deal of pain, and he was lying on the sofa there in the study in Joe Kennedy’s house,” Dulles remembered, “and that was the first time that I saw him.” As the two men discussed various international hot spots, JFK would get up from time to time, wincing with pain, and gingerly walk a few paces before returning to the sofa. “He obviously wanted to learn,” said Dulles. 

On another occasion, JFK was invited to dinner at the Wrightsman's when both Dulles brothers were in attendance. “Jack Kennedy was quite a modest man in those days,” recalled the CIA chief. “I remember my brother was there and I don’t say Kennedy was overawed, but he was very respectful.” 

Thus began a relationship that Dulles regarded as tutorial—the education of a promising young man who had the proper regard for his elders. “He was always trying to get information—I don’t mean secrets or things of that kind, particularly, but to get himself informed. He wanted to get my views, and when my brother was there, his views on what we thought about things, and we had many, many talks together.” This, in Dulles’s mind, was the proper order of things—Kennedy as prince and acolyte and the Dulles brothers as court regents. 

If Dulles’s attitude toward young Kennedy was condescending, his wife was awed. Clover’s first real opportunity to become acquainted with JFK came in August 1955, when she and Allen were vacationing with the Wrightsman's on the beaches of southern France. “At Antibes, we did the usual thing,” Clover wrote to Allen Jr., “sitting in the cabana, swimming, eating good meals at good restaurants.” But the most memorable occasion, she wrote, took place when they dined with the Kennedy clan, who were also on holiday in France. “Joe Kennedy’s son, the Senator, was there. He is 36 [actually he was 38], but looks no older than a college boy, is nice looking and so straight forward, sincere, intelligent and attractive and likeable that I haven’t been so enthusiastic about anybody for ages.” The aging Dulles, who still regarded himself as something of a ladies’ man, must have found his wife’s schoolgirl crush on the young senator somewhat unnerving. But JFK also brought out tender, motherly feelings in Clover, calling to mind her own disabled son. “We talked of you,” Clover wrote Allen Jr., “for he too was wounded and only last winter had some operation on his back so that he was on crutches.” Talking with the bright, boyishly handsome, and attentive senator must have reminded Clover of what could have been if her own son had not been so badly hurt in Korea.

The Dulles brothers were slow to realize that if young Senator Kennedy was their pupil, he was an increasingly rebellious one. Kennedy began questioning the rigid Cold War paradigm that dominated Washington policy-making as early as 1951, when he undertook a fact-finding mission to Asia while still a congressman. His stopover in Vietnam, where the French colonial regime was struggling to put down a growing national rebellion led by Ho Chi Minh, made a particularly deep impression on Kennedy. When he landed in Saigon, the U.S. congressman with the prominent family name was immediately swarmed by French officials, but he slipped away and met with independent-thinking diplomats and journalists. Saigon was a city on the edge when JFK arrived in October 1951, with explosions rumbling in the distance, French agents whisking suspects off the streets at night, and headless bodies found floating in the Saigon River by morning. At the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Majestic, overlooking the gaslit, Parisian-tinged streets below, Kennedy met with an astute American embassy officer named Edmund Gullion. The diplomat told the inquisitive congressman that the French would never win. He said that Ho Chi Minh—who had once worked as a baker at JFK’s favorite Boston hotel, the Parker House, and who was inspired by the blazing ideals of the American Revolution—was seen as a national hero. Ho had awakened thousands of his fellow Vietnamese, who would rather die than continue to live under their French colonial masters. 

By April 1954, when Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower administration’s support for the doomed French war in Vietnam, he had become an informed critic of Western imperialism. Even as France headed toward its Waterloo at Dien Bien Phu that spring, the Eisenhower administration insisted that massive U.S. military aid and firepower could help turn the tide for the embattled French forces. But, as Kennedy told the U.S. Senate, “to pour money, materiel and men into the jungle of Indochina . . . would be dangerously futile and self-destructive.” The young senator had a much firmer grasp of the realities of national insurgencies than Eisenhower and his aging secretary of state. “I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” History would soon prove him right. 

Kennedy had an instinctive sympathy for the downtrodden subjects of imperial powers, one that was rooted in his Irish heritage. His political rhetoric often reverberated with extra passion when he addressed the subject of popular uprisings against imperial rule. 

In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s Independence Day, Kennedy declared, 

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.

Kennedy’s speech was a bold challenge to the Eisenhower-Dulles worldview, which interpreted all international events through the prism of the Cold War, and allowed no space for developing nations to pursue their own path to progress. Breaking from the Cold War orthodoxy that prevailed in the Democratic as well as Republican parties, JFK suggested that Soviet expansionism was not the only enemy of world freedom; so, too, were the forces of Western imperialism that crushed the legitimate aspirations of people throughout the Third World. 

Kennedy’s thinking about the historical imperative of Third World liberation was remarkably advanced. Even today, no nationally prominent leader in the United States would dare question the imperialistic policies that have led our country into one military nightmare after another. Kennedy understood that Washington’s militant opposition to the world’s revolutionary forces would only reap “a bitter harvest.” If the United States stifled these legitimate forces of national self-determination, he said, then rising generations around the globe would be left with a grim choice “between radicalism and feudalism.” 

Kennedy’s Algeria speech was a political bombshell. Ike sounded off about JFK’s speech at a cabinet meeting, sourly commenting, “That’s fine—everybody likes independence. We can all make brilliant speeches. But these things are rather difficult problems, and maybe somebody ought to make a speech to remind the senator that they’re not so easy.” Eisenhower began referring to Kennedy as “that little bastard.” Meanwhile, Secretary Dulles icily told the press that if the senator from Massachusetts wanted to crusade against imperialism, maybe he should target the Soviet variety. 

JFK brushed aside the Eisenhower and Dulles criticisms as predictable croaks from Washington’s ancient régime. Kennedy had little respect for Eisenhower, seeing him as a disengaged leader who would rather play golf with his millionaire cronies than confront the world’s emerging new realities. “I could understand if he played golf all the time with old Army friends,” Kennedy once told Arthur Schlesinger, “but no man is less loyal to his old friends than Eisenhower. He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” As for Foster, Kennedy dismissed him as an aging pontificator who saw the world through slogans—simplistic axioms like “godless Communism” and “Soviet master plan” that seemed increasingly “false . . . or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive coexistence in which we live.” 

While Kennedy’s denunciation of French colonialism in Algeria brought sharp rebukes at home—even from Democratic standard-bearers like Adlai Stevenson, who called it “terrible,” and The New York Times, which found the speech insufficiently “delicate”—it stirred hopes overseas, particularly in Africa, a continent swept by the anticolonial tempest. Dignitaries from African countries began calling regularly on Kennedy at his Capitol Hill offices, praising him for his “courageous position” on Algeria (in the words of an Angolan revolutionary). One of the senator’s aides had to spend much of her time trying to find housing in segregated Washington for the steady stream of African visitors. 

If Room 362 of the Senate Office Building was becoming a center of African aspiration, the Eisenhower administration remained a reactionary bastion. The president and his top advisers were convinced that the African people were not ready to take responsibility for their own affairs, and that any revolutionary mischief on the continent would only play into Communist hands. At one National Security Council meeting, Vice President Nixon observed, “Some of the peoples of Africa have been out of trees for only about 50 years,” to which Budget Director Maurice Stans (who would later serve as President Nixon’s commerce secretary) replied that he “had the impression that many Africans still belonged in trees.” The president did nothing to elevate the discussion, remarking with assurance that in Africa “man’s emotions still have control over his intelligence.” On other occasions, Eisenhower expressed resentment when he had to invite “those niggers”—by which he meant African dignitaries—to diplomatic receptions. 

But by spring 1959, the Eisenhower-Dulles regime was coming to an end. Foster was rapidly declining, as the colon cancer he had been fighting since 1956 spread throughout his body. On April 11, Allen, who was vacationing at the Wrightsman's in Palm Beach at the time, was summoned by his brother to the nearby Hobe Sound estate of State Department undersecretary C. Douglas Dillon, where Foster was resting between hospital visits. Allen found a gaunt looking Foster in bed, writing a letter of resignation on one of the yellow legal pads that he always kept close at hand. “I could see that my brother was in great pain,” Allen later remembered. “He told me that he felt the time had come for him to resign, and he wanted me to go to see the president and persuade the president to accept his resignation.” 

Allen chartered a plane and flew to Augusta, Georgia, where Eisenhower was staying in his “little White House” on the carpeted greenery of the famed golf course. At first, the president refused to accept Foster’s resignation—a gesture of respect for the secretary of state’s centrality in the administration that Allen would always appreciate. But Foster, whose resignation was effective April 22, was soon forced to return to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, where he died just after dawn on May 24, 1959, at age seventy-one.

Foster’s implacable Cold War philosophy remained stiffly intact to the very end, as he brushed aside narcotic painkillers and went stoically to his death. The one burst of passion in his businesslike resignation letter came when he reminded Eisenhower of their long struggle against the “formidable and ruthless challenge from international Communism,” an evil force that had made it “manifestly difficult” for their administration to “avoid the awful catastrophe of war.” In his deathbed conversations with his brother and other close administration officials, Foster urged them to continue steering a vigilant course, warning them not to be bewitched by the enemy’s siren songs of peace. Nixon dutifully took notes while listening to his mentor’s parting words of wisdom. So did Foster’s younger brother. 

“Foster had only days, maybe hours, to live, and he knew it,” Allen wrote. “Speech came hard as the cancer gripped him. I saw there was something very special he wished to tell me. Every word of what he said was a struggle and cost pain. This was his last legacy to me.” 

Foster’s final testament, as recorded by Allen, was a remarkable war cry, undimmed by pain or the creeping fog of death—it was a gift of forged steel from a dying knight to his loyal brother-in-arms. Remember, Foster told his younger brother, America was facing “no ordinary antagonist. . . . The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world.” Somehow, the American people must “be brought to understand the issues, their responsibilities and the need for American leadership anywhere, maybe even everywhere, in the world. This is what my brother said to me on that May day. This was his last message to me.” 

To defeat relentless Communism and to project U.S. power “everywhere in the world”—Allen Dulles was determined to continue pursuing his brother’s holy war. But with Foster buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the younger Dulles had lost his principal Washington ally. Allen had never been as close to Eisenhower as Foster. The president had given his CIA director a long leash, but he never felt fully confident in his judgment. The relationship between the two men would sharply fracture in May 1960 when a high-flying U-2 spy plane operated by the CIA was shot down over the Soviet Union—sabotaging an upcoming summit meeting with Khrushchev and ruining Eisenhower’s final chance for a Cold War breakthrough. Eisenhower was agonizingly aware of the political risks he was taking by authorizing the U-2 spy missions over Soviet territory, calling his on-again, off-again approval for the surveillance flights one of the most “soul-searching questions to come before a president.” But Dulles had repeatedly assured Eisenhower that the high-altitude spy planes were safe from Russian antiaircraft missiles. 

On May 1, the president found out his CIA director’s assurances were hollow, when a Soviet missile slammed into a U-2 plane flying over Russia’s Ural Mountains, resulting in the downing of the aircraft and the capture of CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers. The flight on the eve of the Paris Summit seemed so badly timed and planned that at least one close observer, Air Force colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, suspected that the CIA had intentionally provoked the incident in order to ruin the peace conference and ensure the continued reign of Dulles dogmatism. Prouty, a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA who was summoned by Dulles whenever CIA spy flights ran into trouble, later wrote that the U-2 shootdown was “a most unusual event” that grew out of a “tremendous underground struggle between the peacemakers led by President Eisenhower” and the Dulles “inner elite.” 

John Eisenhower, who was generally reluctant to give his father advice, was so disturbed by the deceitful way that Dulles handled the U-2 affair that he urged Ike to fire him. The president erupted at his son, “yelling at the top of his voice for me to drop dead.” But the younger Eisenhower sensed that his father’s rage came from the realization that he should have fired Dulles long before. The president told White House aides Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray that he never wanted to set eyes on Dulles again. 

In the final days of his presidency, Eisenhower was presented with yet another set of recommendations for getting Allen Dulles’s CIA under control, this time by the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which urged the spy agency to de-emphasize the cloak-and-dagger adventures of which Dulles was so fond in favor of intelligence gathering and analysis. But it was far too late for Eisenhower to do anything about his spymaster and the parallel government that he seemed to run. “I’ve tried,” Ike told Gray. “I cannot change Allen Dulles.” 

At a meeting of national security advisers convened in the White House to consider the panel’s reform proposals, Dulles brushed aside any suggestion that his management of the CIA was flawed. It would be folly for him to delegate any responsibility for running the agency, he insisted. Without his leadership, the country’s intelligence apparatus would be “a body floating in thin air.” 

Dulles’s display of arrogance at last triggered an explosive reaction from Eisenhower. He had delegated far too much of his presidency to the Dulles brothers, and he suspected that history would not be kind to him. In a scolding tone, the president told Dulles that the CIA was badly organized and badly run— and as commander in chief, he had been utterly powerless to do anything about it, despite one blue-ribbon presidential task force after the next. He would leave the next president a “legacy of ashes,” Eisenhower bitterly remarked. 

Dulles had little reason to take Eisenhower’s words to heart. He had already ensured his continued reign in the incoming Kennedy administration. 

As the 1960 presidential election approached its climax, JFK’s criticisms of Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy grew sharper, focusing on the Republican administration’s irresponsible record of nuclear brinkmanship as well as its disquieting ignorance of international affairs. (Foster, who had little interest in the world beyond the central poles of power, once mixed up Tunisia and Indonesia, and his State Department staff had a difficult time distinguishing between Niger and Nigeria.) But Allen Dulles did not let Kennedy’s often cutting campaign rhetoric disrupt their relationship. Dulles knew that the race between Kennedy and Nixon would be close. He was confident of his continued command of the CIA if the Republican candidate, a longtime disciple of the Dulles brothers, won the November election. But Dulles realized that if his job were to survive a Democratic presidential victory, Kennedy would require more charm and effort on his part. 

During JFK’s run for the White House, Dulles received inside reports on the Kennedy camp from a number of mutual friends, including Charlie Wrightsman and Mary Bancroft. Wrightsman, whose Kennedy ties seemed to trump his Republican values, reported to Dulles on the growing confidence within the Kennedy family circle as the election neared. Meanwhile, Dulles’s former mistress, who met John and Robert Kennedy through her Democratic Party activism in New York City politics, became increasingly smitten with JFK. In July 1959, Bancroft wrote Kennedy a gushing letter after meeting him at a New York political gathering, vowing that she would support his ambitions “all of the way—and not just for ’60—but forever.” 

Dulles and Kennedy engaged in a careful minuet during the 1960 campaign. Both men knew they belonged to different political worlds, but there was some social overlap between their circles, and neither man saw any reason to antagonize the other. Kennedy knew that Dulles ruled a powerful empire that could help or hurt his campaign, and he made an effort to stay in the spymaster’s good graces, going as far as to add his late brother’s name to the “honorable roster” of political heroes Kennedy wrote about in Profiles in Courage. 

It was Jackie Kennedy who tipped off Dulles to the pleasures of James Bond, giving him a copy of From Russia with Love, which became one of his favorite spy novels. After he got hooked on Ian Fleming, the CIA director would send copies of new Bond novels to the senator and his wife as soon as he got his hands on them.

In typical fashion, Dulles played both sides of the 1960 presidential campaign, currying favor with Kennedy as well as Nixon. On July 23, the CIA director met with the Democratic candidate at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port to give him an intelligence briefing. After the election, Nixon charged that Dulles had given his opponent an unfair advantage at this meeting by briefing JFK about the CIA’s plans for a paramilitary invasion of Cuba. In his memoir, Six Crises, Nixon accused Kennedy of using this inside information to straitjacket him on the Cuba issue. When JFK demanded militant action on Cuba on the eve of the final presidential debate, Nixon—who could not reveal that the administration was indeed secretly planning such a course—was forced to take a cautionary posture, chiding Kennedy for his “dangerously irresponsible recommendations.” 

Dulles later strongly denied Nixon’s accusation, insisting that he did not brief Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs operation until after the election. But his denial had a slippery feel to it. “Nixon indicated he thought he’d been double-crossed,” Dulles told former CIA colleague Tom Braden in 1964. “I said this is all a misunderstanding because as far as I know President Kennedy did not know about the training—from me anyway [italics added]. . . . He didn’t know anything about it from me, until after the election took place.” Dulles did not spell out whether any other CIA official might have tipped off Kennedy on the CIA chief’s authorization. 

If Dulles used his Kennedy briefings to win points with the Democratic nominee, he also used these private sessions to gain inside information for the Nixon camp. On a Saturday evening in September 1960, Robert Kennedy—his brother’s notoriously aggressive campaign manager—phoned Dulles at home, interrupting a dinner he was hosting, to inform the CIA director that Jack wanted another intelligence briefing on Monday morning at his Georgetown home. It was the kind of brusque request that CIA officials would grow used to receiving from Bobby, who was not known for his patience or ingratiating manners when his brother’s pressing needs were at stake. Dulles was not used to being summoned in so peremptory a fashion, particularly by political operatives like Bobby Kennedy, who was more than three decades his junior. But, still eager to please the Kennedys, he showed up at JFK’s town house at the appointed hour. 

When the presidential candidate, who was meeting with Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee at the time, kept the CIA director waiting, Dulles did not complain—and he even graciously allowed another waiting guest, a minor Middle Eastern prince, to see Kennedy before him. But after Dulles’s half-hour meeting with the Democratic nominee, the spymaster promptly sent a memo about their conversation to Andy Goodpaster in the White House, knowing that Eisenhower’s staff would certainly relay it to the Nixon campaign. 

The September 21 Dulles memo focused on the U-2 controversy, of which Kennedy had already made a campaign issue. The CIA director, who was acutely aware of his responsibility for the crisis and how it was being exploited by the Democrats, informed Goodpaster that JFK asked him for his reaction to Countdown for Decision, a new book by retired Army general J. B. Medaris that was sharply critical of the Eisenhower administration’s handling of the U-2 affair. “As I mentioned to you,” Dulles wrote the White House aide in a followup memo a few days later, “I have reason to believe that this book will be cited in the campaign in view of certain statements which were made to me by Senator Kennedy when I briefed him last Monday.” 

Despite Dulles’s efforts to help the vice president by informing on the Kennedy campaign, Nixon continued to hold a grudge about the CIA chief’s duplicity. Until the end of his Washington career, Nixon would harbor suspicions about the CIA and its political treachery. Nixon, who had carried water for the Dulles brothers ever since the Alger Hiss affair, had expected the spymaster’s uncompromising support in his run for the White House. But Dulles was not concerned with personal or political loyalties. By playing both sides of the closely contested 1960 race, Dulles ensured that he would be the victor, no matter who won. 

On Wednesday evening, November 9, the day after JFK’s breathtakingly close victory, the president-elect and several members of his inner circle sipped cocktails in the living room at Hyannis Port, recovering from their all-night ordeal and savoring the hard-won moment. At one point, the group of insiders began discussing what Kennedy should do first as president. The group was keenly aware of the historical turning point and of the unique opportunities open to JFK with his generational changing of the guard. The first thing he should do, suggested one insider, is fire J. Edgar Hoover. While he was at it, said another, Kennedy should get rid of Allen Dulles. Both men were symbols of a reactionary past—and there was something sinister about their interminable reigns. A relaxed Kennedy encouraged the free-flowing conversation, and the guests retired to their rooms at the compound that night under the impression that the new president was in step with their recommendations. But the next morning, they were unpleasantly surprised to read in the daily papers that Kennedy had already announced that he was retaining both Hoover and Dulles. 

Kennedy later explained to Arthur Schlesinger that, considering his slim margin of victory, he didn’t feel that he had sufficient political capital to uproot two Washington pillars like Hoover and Dulles. Jettisoning these “national icons,” as Schlesinger described them, would have provoked a sharp backlash from the influential network of allies that they had accumulated in the Washington bureaucracy and among the Georgetown and Manhattan chattering classes. 

Schlesinger, ever eager to put Kennedy’s actions in the best possible light, later called JFK’s decision to include prominent Republicans in his administration—such as Dulles and C. Douglas Dillon, who was appointed Treasury chief—part of the youthful president-elect’s “strategy of reassurance.” The Harvard historian played a unique role in Kennedy’s life: special assistant to the president, political adviser, court chronicler, and liaison to the liberal and intellectual circles with which JFK had a complicated and often prickly relationship. “Here’s Arthur,” JFK wryly remarked one evening, as his adviser joined a casual staff gathering in the Oval Office. “He used to be a liberal. Maybe he can explain why they do these crazy things.” The bow-tied, bespectacled scholar seemed an unlikely member of the New Frontier inner circle, where handsome men of action—the kind who could throw a long, tight spiral and skipper a sailboat—dominated. But Kennedy had a respectful if sometimes teasing relationship with Schlesinger, often using him as a sounding board for new ideas and appointments that he was considering, as well as a voice of conscience. 

When Schlesinger communicated to Kennedy liberals’ growing concerns about his political appointments, the president told him he understood, “but they shouldn’t worry. What matters is the program.” JFK assured his adviser that his policies would be solidly liberal, no matter who held positions in his administration. Besides, said Kennedy, he had given men like Dulles only a temporary reprieve—they would be gone soon enough. “We’ll have to go with this for a year or so. Then I would like to bring in some new people.” But Kennedy was not naïve about the workings of Washington power. After a thoughtful pause, he added, “I suppose it may be hard to get rid of these people once they are in.”

Kennedy already knew the man he wanted to replace Dulles—tall, brainy Richard M. Bissell Jr., the Groton- and Yale-educated chief of clandestine operations for the CIA. Bissell, a popular member of the Georgetown set, had managed to survive the political fallout from the U-2 disaster, even though he was in charge of the spy-in-the-sky program. With his impressive academic credentials, which included a degree from the London School of Economics, and his grasp of the latest surveillance technology, Bissell struck JFK as a man of the future. 

In February, soon after Kennedy’s inauguration, Dulles organized a well lubricated mixer for his top CIA men and Kennedy’s White House team at the Alibi Club, his favorite Washington watering hole. The venerable gentlemen’s club—located in an old brick town house that had changed little since the days of its founding, in the muttonchop era of President Chester A. Arthur—catered to an exclusive membership list, including Supreme Court justices, Joint Chiefs chairmen, and former presidents. After breaking the ice with “a pleasant three cocktail dinner,” as one guest described it, the CIA men got up, one at a time, to explain their mysterious roles to the White House aides. Dulles himself was used to dominating these occasions. But on this evening, it was Bissell who took the spotlight. Dulles’s deputy introduced himself by saying, “I’m your basic man eating shark,” an opening “with just the right mix of bravado and self-mockery to charm the New Frontiersmen,” as historian Evan Thomas observed. 

The president made no secret of his plan to shake up the CIA and to replace Dulles with his number two man. Kennedy’s father had served on the foreign intelligence advisory board that had urged Eisenhower to overhaul the management of the spy agency. Joseph P. Kennedy had made his son fully aware of Dulles’s dangerously unsupervised management style. After the November election, a member of Kennedy’s transition team, aware of his low opinion of the CIA’s leadership, asked him, “There must be someone you really trust within the intelligence community. Who is that?” Kennedy could think of only one man. “Richard Bissell,” he answered. 

But Allen Dulles had no intention of relinquishing power anytime soon, not even to one of his right-hand men like Bissell. To Dulles, the Kennedy transition was just one more seasonal Washington cycle that had to be finessed. In the days leading up to Kennedy’s inauguration, the press was filled with stories about all the fresh new faces in Washington. But many of the Kennedy appointments had closer ties to the Dulles old guard than they did to the new president. 

Among them was McGeorge Bundy, the owlish Harvard dean whom Kennedy appointed national security adviser. The long ties between Dulles and the Boston Brahmin Bundy family had been fortified when the CIA director rescued Mac Bundy’s brother, CIA officer Bill Bundy, from Joe McCarthy’s pyre. Mac Bundy regarded Dulles as a benevolent uncle, maintaining a warm correspondence with him that lasted until the end of the elder man’s life. When Bundy became dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953—at age thirty-four, the youngest in the school’s history—he used his post to identify future prospects for the CIA among the student body’s best and brightest. Dulles could be assured that with Mac Bundy in the White House—and with his brother Bill moving to Kennedy’s Defense Department, where the press dubbed him “the Pentagon’s secretary of state”—the CIA director had eyes and ears in two of the most important command posts in the Kennedy administration. 

Kennedy’s New Frontier was laced throughout with other Dulles loyalists, especially in the foreign service and national security agencies. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower, had a long partnership with Dulles, going back to their wartime intrigues in Operation Sunrise. Kennedy’s choice for secretary of state, Dean Rusk, was well known to the Dulles brothers from their membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation, where Rusk served as president and Foster as a trustee. Rusk’s State Department continued to be filled with Dulles men and women, including Eleanor Dulles herself, who remained at the German affairs desk. Even Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, had worked for the CIA in the early 1950s, specializing in psychological warfare. The “doyenne of decorum” had also served as an assistant to Dulles’s close ally, Ambassador Clare Booth Luce, in the U.S. embassy in Rome. 

Dulles was confident enough that the Dulles era would continue under JFK that he made boasts to that effect on the Washington dinner party circuit, within full earshot of Kennedy loyalists. Shortly after Kennedy took office, the painter William Walton, a close friend of JFK and Jackie, found himself at a gathering at Walter Lippmann’s house where Dulles was a fellow guest. “After dinner, the men sat around awhile in an old-fashioned way, and Dulles started boasting that he was still carrying out his brother Foster’s foreign policy. He said, you know, that’s a much better policy. I’ve chosen to follow that one.” Walton, who loathed the CIA boss, couldn’t believe Dulles’s audacity. The spymaster knew that Walton was one of Kennedy’s inner circle, but he felt no need to hold his tongue. Dulles was clearly sending the new president a message—and Kennedy’s close friend duly delivered it. Early the next morning, Walton phoned JFK at the White House and reported what Dulles had told Lippmann and his guests. “God damn it!” swore Kennedy. “Did he really say that?” 

“The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Kennedy declared in his inaugural address. But, in fact, the Dulles old guard was deeply reluctant to give up power to the New Frontier team. In fact, the power struggle between the new president and his CIA director started before Kennedy was even sworn in, when Dulles took advantage of the transition period to carry out a brazen act of insubordination. 

Patrice Lumumba was fleeing for his life. Sworn in less than six months earlier as the Congo’s first democratically elected leader, following the end of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule, Lumumba was now on the run from the CIA backed Congolese military forces that had deposed him. Lumumba had broken free from house arrest in the capital, Leopoldville, on the evening of November 27, 1960. He was now making his way through a tropical downpour across the countryside to Stanleyville, a bastion of loyal nationalism some 750 miles to the east, where he hoped to raise an army and reclaim his office. Lumumba was driven in a new blue Peugeot, with his wife, Pauline Opango, and their two-year old son, Roland, part of a three-car convoy that included other high officials from his toppled government. 

The election of Lumumba in June 1960 had electrified the Congo, a nation that had been enslaved and plundered by its Belgian rulers for over three quarters of a century. In the late nineteenth century, King Leopold II had carved an empire out of this benighted African territory through a system of forced labor so vicious that Joseph Conrad modeled the colonial nightmare in his novel Heart of Darkness on it, calling Leopold’s rape of the Congo “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” The hands chopped from the arms of Congolese men who refused to work under their colonial masters’ yoke became a world symbol of Belgium’s vile rule. After Leopold, the looting of Congo continued, with rubber and ivory being replaced by gold, diamonds, copper, and tin as the objects of Western desire. Global mining companies turned the mineral-rich African nation into their private jewelry box, with huge fortunes amassed in Brussels, London, and New York. 

But Patrice Lumumba’s election threatened this long reign of greed. Lumumba, a slender, graceful man with glasses and a trim mustache and goatee, looked more like the postal clerk he had once been (one of the few civil service jobs open to Africans under Belgian rule) than a fiery nationalist leader. But he spoke with a heartfelt eloquence that dazzled his followers and alarmed his enemies.

On June 30, the Congo’s independence was formally celebrated in the flag draped National Palace in Leopoldville. King Baudouin of Belgium, a young monarch who never fully took to his role, and would become known as “the sad king,” delivered a fatuous speech, praising his royal predecessors for bestowing the “fabric of civilization” on the primitive nation. The handsome king, who wore a white colonial uniform and round spectacles that gave him the wide-eyed look of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, seemed oblivious to the country’s shameful past. It fell to Lumumba, who followed the king to the microphone, to set him straight. The Congo’s colonial history, said the new prime minister, was “much too painful to be forgotten.” Lumumba spoke passionately about his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage forced upon us”—years that were “filled with tears, fire and blood.” But he ended on a hopeful note, vowing, “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.” 

Lumumba’s ardent remarks lifted up the Congolese people, who danced in the streets of the capital to celebrate their freedom. But King Baudouin and the other Western representatives who attended the independence ceremony were insulted by the prime minister’s frank remarks. Lumumba had “marred the ceremonies,” sniffed the New York Times correspondent. 

After Lumumba’s Independence Day speech, national security officials in Washington and Brussels—who were already monitoring the rise of the charismatic Congolese leader—began regarding him as a serious threat to Western interests in the region. More than his defiant rhetoric, it was Lumumba’s refusal to be bought off by the multinational corporations controlling the Congo’s wealth that undoubtedly sealed his fate. In speeches to his followers, Lumumba opened a door on the corrupt backroom dealings that continued to dominate African capitals in the neocolonial era. The United States, he declared, was rubbing its hands over the Congo’s uranium deposits—the same deposits that supplied the uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking to dinner guests at a political event in October 1960, Lumumba said that he could have made millions of dollars if he had been willing to “mortgage the national sovereignty.” 

Dulles, Doug Dillon (then serving as a State Department undersecretary), and William Burden, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, led the charge within the Eisenhower administration to first demonize and then dispose of Lumumba. All three men had financial interests in the Congo. The Dillon family’s investment bank handled the Congo’s bond issues. Dulles’s old law firm represented the American Metal Company (later AMAX), a mining giant with holdings in the Congo, and Dulles was friendly with the company’s chairman, Harold Hochschild, and his brother and successor, Walter, who served in the OSS during the war. Ambassador Burden was a company director, and Frank Taylor Ostrander Jr., a former U.S. intelligence official, served the Hochschild brothers as a political adviser. [The Halliburton's of their time DC]

Corporate executives with major stakes in Africa were able to mingle and confer with U.S. national security officials at prestigious organizations like the Manhattan-based Africa-America Institute. The institute, which Harold Hochschild helped launch in 1953, sponsored the American education of future generations of African leaders, a goal the CIA found strategically valuable enough to help fund the group. Years later, after the Africa-America Institute was exposed as a CIA front, Hochschild appeared chagrined when the subject came up with his son, Adam. The younger Hochschild co-founded Mother Jones magazine and later authored King Leopold’s Ghost, a powerful indictment of the Belgian reign of terror in the Congo. After the CIA ties to the institute were exposed, Hochschild fils later recalled, “Father seemed uncomfortable. He defended the link, saying that in its early years there was nowhere else the institute could have gotten enough money for its work. But he was clearly embarrassed that the whole thing had to be kept secret.” 

The Eisenhower administration’s increasingly militant policy toward Lumumba took shape over cocktails in clublike environments such as the Africa/America Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. The men driving the policy had little feel for the suffering or longing of the Congolese people. Ambassador Burden was a Vanderbilt heir—a big, paunchy, high-society boozer who was stuffed full of the imbecilities and prejudices of his caste; he was not fond of Jews, and he treated his legions of nameless servants as if they were indentured. Not particularly bright, he represented what his granddaughter, Wendy, would later call the “dead end gene pool.” Everything was “marvelous,” in Burden’s world. He said it “the way a character in a Fitzgerald novel would,” Wendy Burden recalled in a family memoir. “Mah-velous. He said it about a hundred times a day, as if it were the only adjective that could aptly describes the talents of a chef, or the plate of Belon oysters before him, or the Chateau Petrus he was drinking, or how he felt about the overthrow of the Libyan government.” 

Burden, who had acquired his ambassadorship by contributing heavily to the 1956 Eisenhower campaign, spent his days in Brussels attending diplomatic receptions, where he soaked up the finest Champagnes along with the racial prejudices of Belgium’s shriveling empire. It was the ambassador who first raised alarms about the rising Patrice Lumumba, whom the Belgians only yesterday were calling “a dirty monkey” but now were labeling “Satan.” Burden began sending agitated cables to Dulles in Washington well before Lumumba’s election, suggesting that the growing aspirations of the Congolese people were Soviet-inspired and urging that strong measures be used to put down African unrest. “Dear Allan [sic],” Burden wrote in a November 1959 cable, misspelling his chum’s name, “Have your organization and the Department of Defense done much work recently in studying the type of rioting which is occurring and might occur in the various countries of Africa and the degree to which new weapons, such as some of the newer gases, might enable such difficulties to be controlled?” By the following summer, Burden was cabling Washington “to destroy Lumumba government” as a threat to “our vital interests in Congo.” 

Dulles quickly embraced the idea that Lumumba was a diabolical agent of Communist subversion. In truth, Lumumba had less of a connection to Moscow than any other emerging African leader. He explicitly tried to keep his struggling nation out of the superpower vortex, vowing that the Congo would “never be a satellite of Russia or of the United States.” 

“We want no part of the Cold War,” Lumumba declared. “We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.” But in the Dulles worldview, there was no such thing as neutrality. And anyone who professed such notions belonged to the enemy camp. At a July 22, 1960, National Security Council meeting in the Eisenhower White House—just three weeks after Lumumba’s independence day speech—Dulles denounced the Congolese leader as “a Castro or worse. . . . It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists.” 

Doug Dillon strongly backed Dulles’s distraught view of Lumumba as a Soviet accomplice. It was an alarmist view calculated to convince Eisenhower that the African leader had to be terminated. As it turned out, the president required little persuasion. By the summer of 1960, Ike was sick, tired, and cranky—and he had little patience or understanding for Third World freedom struggles. Conferring with the British foreign minister Lord Home, Eisenhower quipped that he hoped “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles.” At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower’s lethal order. “I was surprised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled.” [So there you have it people,if you had any doubt of Eisenhower's character,this combined with the true story of his handling of the German people after WW2 CLINCHES IT...racist murderer DC]

Over the next several months, the CIA, working with its allies in Belgian intelligence, engineered a military coup led by a cocky, ruthless, twenty-nine year-old colonel named Joseph Mobutu that forced Lumumba out of office and placed him under house arrest. But that was not enough for the CIA. Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles told an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.” 

Washington ascribed a kind of witchcraft-like power to Lumumba. Dulles marveled at the man’s political survival skills, and Dillon was amazed at his powers of persuasion. “He had this tremendous ability to stir up a crowd or a group,” said Dillon. “And if he could have gotten out and started to talk to a battalion of the Congolese Army, he probably would have had them in the palm of his hand in five minutes.” 

To prevent that from happening, the CIA recruited two cutthroats from the European criminal underworld, whom they code-named QJ-WIN and WIROGUE. These Tweedledum and Tweedledee assassins were such loathsome mercenaries that even their CIA handlers found them “unsavory.” ROGUE was the kind of morally unhinged man “who would try anything once, at least,” said his agency supervisors, untroubled by the “pangs of conscience.” While ROGUE went about trying to organize an “execution squad” to kill Lumumba, WIN focused on penetrating the protective ring of UN troops that encircled the house where the Congolese leader was in custody. QJ-WIN had been supplied with a tube of poison toothpaste, which had been delivered to the CIA station in Leopoldville by Sidney Gottlieb, the agency’s wizard of toxins. Dr. Ewen Cameron, of the notorious Allan Institute, had analyzed Lumumba at the CIA’s request and determined that he must brush his teeth regularly, since they looked gleaming white in photos. Therefore, Ewen assured Dulles, chemically altered dental products were the key to getting rid of Lumumba. 

In the end, the CIA did not go through with the toothpaste plot, apparently deciding that poisoning a popular leader while he was under UN protective custody in his own house would be too flagrant a deed—one that, if traced back to the agency, would lead to unpleasant international repercussions. It would be wiser, the agency decided, to deliver Lumumba to his murderous political rivals in the Congo and let them do the job. And so Lumumba fled house arrest—or was allowed to escape—miraculously slipping past not only the UN troops that were guarding him but Mobutu’s hostile forces, and making his dash for Stanleyville. 

As Lumumba’s convoy made its way along muddy and bumpy roads, he was pursued by Congolese troops, led by Captain Gilbert Pongo, Mobutu’s notorious security chief. Pongo buzzed after Lumumba’s party in a helicopter that had been provided courtesy of Clare Timberlake, the dapper, mustachioed U.S. ambassador who worked closely with the CIA delegation in the Congo. Lumumba’s flight was slowed whenever his convoy drove through villages, where he was thronged by the local people and urged to deliver speeches. When he spoke, he gave voice to their dreams. “Our program is clear: complete independence, Congo for the Congolese,” he told a group huddled around a fire one night. “Fourteen million Congolese want work, a better future for their children. They want to be citizens with full political rights, they want a new life.” 

When Lumumba’s military pursuers drew too near, villagers delayed their advance by putting up roadblocks and tearing down bridges. On the evening of December 1, Lumumba’s group reached the small village of Lodi, on the west bank of the Sankuru River. This wide, muddy stretch of the river was the last serious obstacle that lay between the group and sanctuary in Stanleyville. The other side of the river was a bastion of pro-Lumumba nationalism. There was only one canoe on the riverbank. Lumumba and a few of his top aides crossed first. As they disembarked from the dugout, they heard a commotion on the other side of the river. Mobutu’s soldiers had caught up with the group left behind, including Lumumba’s wife and toddler.

Lumumba’s compatriots begged him not to return across the river, telling him “the life of the whole nation is at stake.” But he could not stand to hear the cries of his wife. “When one struggles for one’s country,” he said as he got back into the canoe, “one has to expect a tragic end.” As Lumumba’s canoe glided back to the other side of the river, the soldiers waded into the water and grabbed him. Lumumba tried winning over Mobutu’s men. For a while, his words seemed to work their magic—the soldiers were ready to join the cause of freedom and march with him to Stanleyville. But then Captain Pongo intervened, reminding his soldiers of the dire consequences that would befall them and their families if they did not do their duty. They turned in an instant and began beating Lumumba and even his little son. 

Lumumba was hustled onto Pongo’s helicopter and flown back to Leopoldville, where he emerged in the glare of TV news cameras, only to be subjected to another vicious round of beating by Mobutu’s thugs, while the cameras rolled. Throughout it all, Lumumba maintained the serene dignity of the martyr that he soon would become. “On Lumumba’s dazed face was the look of a man who did not yet believe that fate could be against justice for his people,” remarked Andrée Blouin, the beautiful “Black Pasionaria” of the Congolese independence struggle and chief of protocol in Lumumba’s government. “His white shirt was now spotted with blood, but his head was still erect. He personified the best of the race that would never again be slaves."

Over the next several weeks, Lumumba’s fate became the focus of a tumultuous international drama, as the symbol of African freedom languished in a military prison south of Leopoldville. World leaders—including Khrushchev, Nasser, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah—issued fervent pleas for his release, with the Soviet leader promising that the “colonialists will be thrown out of the Congo once and for all.” Lumumba’s followers prayed that he could survive until the inauguration of Kennedy, whose election the Congolese leader had praised. 

But in Leopoldville, U.S. and Belgian agents were feverishly maneuvering to ensure that no such release took place. The man at the center of this intrigue was Lawrence R. Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, a Harvard man who had been handpicked for the spy service by his dean, Mac Bundy. Larry Devlin’s aggressive campaign against Lumumba had won him the admiration of the agency’s top command, including Dulles himself. At the end of November, when Mobutu’s troops were in pursuit of Lumumba, Devlin had flown to Rome to meet with Dick Bissell, whom Dulles had put in charge of the Lumumba assassination. The CIA was still determined to carry out Eisenhower’s termination order. But Devlin and his CIA superiors knew that time was running short. 

U.S. intelligence officials continued to fret about the Congo situation, even after Lumumba’s capture. With Mobutu’s rule still shaky and Congolese politics in chaos, Devlin realized that Lumumba’s imprisonment could not be ensured indefinitely. In fact, by the second week of January 1961, when Lumumba’s jailers briefly mutinied and threatened to free him, his captivity seemed less secure than ever. 

Meanwhile, Dulles and his Congo team were acutely aware that the presidential transition under way in Washington also put their Lumumba operation in jeopardy. Kennedy, whose inauguration was scheduled for January 20, had already signaled that he would shift U.S. policy in favor of African nationalists like Lumumba. In late December, after returning from a five-week tour of the Congo and other African countries, a Democratic fact-finding delegation that included JFK’s brother Edward M. Kennedy predicted that the new administration would align itself with the continent’s “movement for freedom and self-determination” and expressed strong sympathy for Lumumba’s plight. Ted Kennedy later went further, calling for the release of Lumumba and suggesting his brother agreed with this position. 

The raging battle over Lumumba’s future broke into the U.S. press, with the CIA’s media assets predicting drastic consequences if the Congolese leader returned to power. As the Congo crisis reached its climax, a new correspondent for The New York Times showed up in Leopoldville with a distinctly anti Lumumba bias. Paul Hofmann was a diminutive, sophisticated Austrian with a colorful past. During the war, he served in Rome as a top aide to the notorious Nazi general Kurt Malzer, who was later convicted of the mass murder of Italian partisans. At some point, Hofmann became an informer for the Allies, and after the war he became closely associated with Jim Angleton. The Angleton family helped place Hofmann in the Rome bureau of The New York Times, where he continued to be of use to his friends in U.S. intelligence, translating reports from confidential sources inside the Vatican and passing them along to Angleton. Hofmann became one of the Times’s leading foreign correspondents, eventually taking over the newspaper’s Rome bureau and parachuting from time to time into international hot spots like the Congo. 

The New York Times coverage of the Congo crisis had always been slanted against Lumumba, with columns and commentaries labeling him “inexperienced and irresponsible” and a “virtual dictator.” But Hofmann’s Congo coverage was so virulent in its bias that it seemed as if he were acting as a “psywar” conduit for U.S. intelligence. In article after article, during the critical Congo end game, Hofmann portrayed Lumumba as a dangerous bogeyman, a “wily” conspirator in some pieces and a mentally unbalanced buffoon in others (“the weirdest character in a sort of Alice in Tropical Wonderland,” as the Times man wrote). Even behind bars, Lumumba continued to work his dark mischief, Hofmann told his readers, plotting the murders of whites and bringing a flow of Soviet arms into the country, all while living the life of luxury in military prison “with three houseboys at his service.” The message behind Hofmann’s relentless barrage was clear: despite the “crocodile tears” cried by the Soviet Union over Lumumba’s plight, no man as treacherous as this deserved mercy.

In its explosive 1975 report on CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, the Church Committee absolved the agency of responsibility for Lumumba’s murder. “It does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing,” concluded the Senate panel. This became a convenient myth, one that is still routinely repeated in the press. But the truth is far less comforting. 

As a new wave of historical research has determined, the CIA ensured Lumumba’s violent end by making certain that he was delivered into the hands of his mortal enemies. Among his tormentors in the final hours of his life were CIA-funded goons. Devlin, the CIA’s man in the Congo, later tried to portray himself as a blissfully ignorant player in the Lumumba affair, and indeed as a man who found assassination morally repugnant. But as former congressional aide and scholar Stephen Weissman has observed, “The CIA was not the innocent bystander, and its Congo operatives not the paragons of morally sensitive professionalism they claimed to be. In particular, Devlin was a key participant in the Congo government’s decision to approve Lumumba’s fatal rendition.” 

In fact, Devlin appears to have been more a driver of the action leading to Lumumba’s death than a participant. On January 17, 1961—three days before Kennedy’s inauguration—Lumumba was taken from his jail cell and hustled onto a Belgian chartered plane. Congolese authorities took this action under strong pressure from Devlin, who was the kingmaker behind the Mobutu regime. With Devlin’s full knowledge, Lumumba was then flown to Katanga, a mineralrich province that had broken away from the Congo and was run by violent enemies of Lumumba. The CIA station chief later acknowledged that Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga amounted to a death sentence. “I think there was a general assumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that his goose was cooked,” Devlin told the Church Committee years later. 

Devlin knew of Lumumba’s imminent transfer by January 14, three days ahead of time. But he did nothing to inform Washington until January 17, when Lumumba was already well on the way to his doom. Devlin knew that cabling Washington risked tipping off Africa policy makers in the incoming Kennedy administration, who likely would have intervened to save Lumumba. By keeping quiet, Devlin sealed Lumumba’s fate. 

Larry Devlin was no rogue agent—he was an up-and-coming intelligence officer whose Congo exploits had won glowing marks back at CIA headquarters. The Congo station chief’s decision to keep Lumumba’s fate quiet until it was too late to do anything about it was clearly made in consultation with his supervisors. Devlin suffered no agency reprimands for his actions in the Congo, and, in fact, his intelligence career continued to thrive after Lumumba’s demise. Before retiring from the CIA in 1974, to pursue a new career in the Congo’s lucrative diamond industry, Devlin rose to become chief of the CIA’s Africa Division. 

Patrice Lumumba suffered a terrible martyrdom during his final hours on earth. He was beaten bloody during the flight to Katanga, and clumps of hair were torn from his head. When the plane landed, he was seized by armed guards sent by Moise Tshombe, Katanga’s ruler, and subjected to another round of abuse. As he suffered the rain of blows, Lumumba maintained a resigned silence. He was then dragged to a jeep and driven to a remote farmhouse, where a group of men connected to U.S. and Belgian intelligence beat him to death, an orgy of sadism that stretched over several hours. According to one account, even Tshombe and his ministers appeared at one point to contribute to Lumumba’s suffering, kicking and hitting what remained of his nearly lifeless body. 

Despite the agency’s evasions, CIA officer John Stockwell, who was stationed in the Congo in the tumultuous aftermath of the Lumumba assassination, had no doubt who was responsible for the African leader’s death. “Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” Stockwell concluded. Years after Lumumba’s death, Stockwell fell into conversation with one of his more peculiar CIA colleagues, a “glistening bald” man whom Stockwell anointed “Goldfinger.” The man regaled Stockwell with a story of the evening when he had driven around the capital of Katanga, with Lumumba’s battered corpse in the trunk, “trying to decide what to do with it.” 

After Kennedy’s inauguration, the CIA continued to keep Lumumba’s death under wraps. On January 26, Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo. The CIA director said nothing about Lumumba’s assassination, though his fate was well known by then within the agency. In early February, Devlin and Ambassador Timberlake were called back to Washington to participate in discussions about Congo policy with the new Kennedy team. The old Congo hands were alarmed by the administration’s new position paper, which envisioned disarming Mobutu and freeing Lumumba. Devlin considered JFK’s admiration for rising African nationalism naïve. Timberlake, meeting with Kennedy in the White House, argued that the Congolese people were too primitive for a functioning democracy. Neither Timberlake nor Devlin took the opportunity to inform Kennedy or his staff that any discussion about Lumumba’s future was a moot point. 

The Kennedy White House remained in the dark about Lumumba for a full month after his murder. When JFK finally heard of the leader’s death, the news came not from Dulles but from UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson.[Something very wrong with this picture DC] 

Jacques Lowe, the young photographer who had been unobtrusively documenting the Kennedy story from the earliest days of his presidential run, was in the Oval Office when JFK received the phone call from Stevenson. Lowe, a German Jew who had survived the war as a child by making himself unseen, deftly inserted himself into the ongoing Kennedy family drama, taking black and-white pictures of John and Robert and their clan that would become iconic in their simple intimacy. After JFK’s victory, the president-elect asked Lowe to “stick around and record my administration. Don’t worry,” he added, “I’ll make it worth your while.” 

Kennedy made good on his promise. The photos Lowe was allowed to take during the intense rush of JFK’s brief presidency were windows into its troubled soul. None was more powerful than the picture that the young photographer snapped at the moment when Kennedy was told of Lumumba’s fate. The photo is one of the most searing documents of the Kennedy presidency. In the close-up shot, JFK looks physically stricken as he absorbs the news on the phone, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hand clasped to his face. It was an image of such anguish that it seemed to come from some harrowing time deep in his presidency instead of in its earliest bloom. The picture contains all of the sorrows that were to come. 

Lowe later recalled the moment: “I was alone with the president; his hand went to his head in utter despair. ‘Oh, no,’ I heard him groan . . . Lumumba was considered a trouble-maker and a leftist by many Americans. But Kennedy’s attitude toward black Africa was that many who were considered leftists were in fact nationalists and patriots. . . . He felt that Africa presented an opportunity for the West, and speaking as an American, unhindered by a colonial heritage, he had made friends in Africa. . . . The call therefore left him heartbroken, for he knew that the murder would be a prelude to chaos . . . it was a poignant moment.” [How can anyone who only wants his freedom be considered a trouble maker.We have forgot our own roots, reconsider just who were the majority of the people in the early days of this country,certainly not Europe's favorite sons and daughters DC]

When the killing of Lumumba was finally announced, furious street protests swept the world, from New Delhi to Warsaw to Tokyo. Lumumba’s fellow leaders in the Third World—including Egypt’s Nasser and Nkrumah of Ghana, who had been a mentor—were particularly outraged by his murder, lashing out at the West and at the UN for failing to protect him. Brazilian delegates to the UN expressed “horror and repulsion” over Lumumba’s slaying. But, as much of the world mourned, the Western press continued its snide coverage of Lumumba, exhuming the martyred leader only to subject him to more abuse. Time magazine snickered at the traditional way his widow, Pauline, chose to mourn her husband, marching bare-breasted through the streets of Leopoldville in a funeral procession. Meanwhile, The New York Times continued to demean Lumumba, sometimes resorting to the most shopworn neocolonial stereotypes of the era. “Lumumba . . . combined the skills of the late Senator McCarthy with the brashness of a ward heeler and the magic touch of an African witch doctor,” wrote Henry Tanner in The New York Times Magazine. “Then there was his name—musical, easily pronounced in all languages and yet exotic, African sounding like the drums in the jungle.” [Talking ill of the death,very manly of him,in all it's wrong ways and a embarrassment to the species D.C]

After her husband’s funeral procession, Pauline Lumumba crumpled to the floor in the dark corner of a friend’s house, too spent to cry anymore. She raised her arms in the air and let them hang there, as if in surrender. Her husband’s murderers did not even have the decency to give her his body, Pauline’s brother told reporters. As little Roland Lumumba hovered anxiously over his mother, the room was filled with the wails of women: “Our strong leader is gone—our great father is no more.” 

In his final letter to his wife, Patrice Lumumba vowed, “Neither brutality, nor cruelty nor torture will ever bring me to ask for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head unbowed.” It was an oath that Lumumba had kept throughout his ordeal. Lumumba also told his wife, “History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations. . . . Africa will write its own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history.” 

This promise did not come true for the Congo. The mourners at Lumumba’s wake knew how profound a loss it was, and what it meant for their nation. “There is nothing for us to do now,” muttered Lumumba’s brother-in-law. “He is gone. There is no one to take his place.” 

With one of Africa’s brightest lights extinguished, the Congo slid into an endless nightmare of tyranny and corruption. Propped up by the United States, Mobutu began a thirty-two-year dictatorship that looted the country of its wealth and left the nation in ruins. In his rampant thievery, Mobutu modeled himself on King Leopold. So smug was the dictator in his ironfisted rule that he declared Lumumba a national hero, a sick joke that only he could afford to enjoy. 

The CIA officials responsible for Lumumba’s murder also had a change of heart about the man who had once haunted their days. In 1962, shortly after Dulles’s departure from the CIA, he remarked, “I think we overrated the Soviet danger, let’s say, in the Congo.”[you think asshole? DC] And Devlin, for his part, insisted he had never thought Lumumba’s assassination was essential to U.S. security: “I didn’t regard Lumumba as the kind of person who was going to bring on World War III,” he later told the Church Committee. These expressions of remorse—if they can be called that—came far too late for the man who was the hope of the Congo.

Part III 

15 

Contempt 

On Monday April 17, 1961, as over fourteen hundred CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles waded ashore at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs—an operation that would quickly become the biggest debacle of Allen Dulles’s career—the CIA director was sunning himself about a thousand miles away at a Puerto Rico resort. Dulles, who had flown down to San Juan that weekend, was the featured speaker at a Young Presidents’ Organization conference, a global network of chief executives under age forty that had CIA affiliations. The gathering was held at La Concha, a new oceanfront luxury hotel that epitomized the Caribbean cool of the tropical modernism movement. The hotel’s signature restaurant was shaped like a giant seashell, with wavy gaps to let in the sunshine and ocean breeze. Dulles spent the weekend swimming and playing golf with the young executives. 

On Monday morning, when Dulles strode onstage to deliver his remarks, he looked like a man without a worry in the world. The CIA director’s speech— which followed a panel discussion featuring Margaret Mead and Dr. Benjamin Spock on the subject of “Are We Letting Our Children Down?”—was a plea for globe-trotting American businessmen, like those gathered in the conference hall, to join the clandestine war against Communism. Afterward, there was more time to relax by the pool. The spymaster had brought Clover with him on the trip, completing the carefree picture. They seemed to all the world to be just another well-to-do American couple enjoying a long weekend in the Caribbean sun. But by that evening, as Dulles and his wife flew home, the Bay of Pigs operation was on the verge of collapse, and with it, the spymaster’s long, storied career.

Dick Bissell, whom Dulles had put in charge of the invasion, sent one of the top men in the Cuba task force to pick him up at the airport, thinking that the CIA director would want to be briefed immediately on the growing calamity. Richard Drain, chief of operations for the Bay of Pigs expedition, rolled onto the runway at Baltimore’s Friendship Airport in his well-traveled, CIA-issued Chevrolet as Dulles’s small plane taxied to a stop. The CIA chief emerged from the plane with his wife and a young aide, wearing a dinner jacket and the relaxed smile of a man of leisure. Drain stepped forward and offered his hand. 

“I’m Dick Drain. I was sent to brief you, sir.” 

“Oh yes, Dick, how are you?” 

Drain drew Dulles away from the others. 

“Well, how is it going?” asked Dulles. 

“Not very well, sir.” 

“Oh, is that so?” Dulles wore an oddly bemused look, as if the unfolding tragedy was too remote to affect him. 

Back at Quarters Eye, the CIA headquarters in downtown Washington, battle-hardened men were on the verge of hysteria. Bissell, who prided himself on his cool performance under pressure, seemed frozen. On the brink of failure, the Cuba operation lacked the kind of muscular leadership that could rescue the men pinned down by Castro’s forces. Drain was hoping that Dulles would save the day. But he found the Old Man’s unflappability disturbing. 

Clover and the young aide were bundled into the Chevrolet, and Dulles and Drain drove back to Washington in the director’s Cadillac. “It’s a fast-breaking situation,” Drain told him. “We’re hanging on by our fingernails.” 

Dulles puffed quietly on his pipe as his deputy steered the car onto the highway heading to the capital. 

“Today’s air strike was killed,” Drain told him—a stunning piece of news, since Dulles knew that the operation was damned unless President Kennedy agreed to escalate the action and provide the embattled anti-Castro brigade with U.S. air cover. 

“Why did they do that?” Dulles asked softly. There was no anger or outrage in his voice. 

The emotion all belonged to Drain. “If you’re asking my guess, my guess is this thing is all going to hell.” 

By the disastrous end of the operation, when Castro’s forces had killed more than a hundred of the invaders and taken the rest prisoner, Drain would be so wrung out that he vomited. Like the rest of the CIA planning team, Drain had worked closely with the exile leaders who were trapped on the desolate stretch of sand and shrubbery, and they took the men’s fate personally. But Dulles’s mind seemed elsewhere as he and Drain drove to the director’s Georgetown residence. They rode in silence for a long time, until Drain let out a final burst of emotion. 

“If it isn’t presumptuous of me, sir, I wish your brother was still alive.” Drain had served as the CIA liaison to Foster in the final months of his life. If he thought that invoking the memory of Dulles’s late brother would light a fire under the spymaster, Drain was wrong. Dulles simply nodded and stared ahead at the road. By the time they reached the house on Q Street, Drain was deeply uncomfortable in his boss’s presence and eager to flee back to his CIA command post. But Dulles insisted that he come inside for a drink. 

When the two men settled into armchairs in Dulles’s library with tumblers of Scotch in hand, Drain thought the chief would finally grill him on the details of the failing operation. Instead, the evening only became more surreal. 

“Dick, you served in Greece, didn’t you?” Dulles inquired. “I have to go to the White House tomorrow to a reception for [Greek Prime Minister Constantine] Karamanlis. Can you refresh my memory about him?” 

The stunned CIA officer strung together some kind of reply and made his exit shortly after. 

For years after the Bay of Pigs, Washington insiders and scholars tried to unravel the mystery of Dulles’s AWOL behavior during the critical CIA operation. Some explained that his absence was part of his modus operandi—he was in the habit of leaving Washington on the eve of critical missions to make it seem as if nothing significant was about to occur. Dulles himself airily dismissed his strangely timed Puerto Rico trip. He had planned the Young Presidents speaking engagement months before, he explained, and if he had canceled at the last minute, it would have created suspicions. Besides, he added, “I knew I could get back with the speed of aircraft; it was only a question of six or eight hours.” But the CIA’s own official history of the Cuba fiasco, prepared in the late 1970s and early ’80s, concluded that Dulles’s absence was “inexcusable.” Dulles, the report added, “was the one man who might have persuaded the president to permit the D-Day air strike.” 

Some of the sharpest criticisms of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came from within the CIA itself. Dick Drain was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles, when he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA historian who prepared the voluminous report on the Bay of Pigs. Drain was a gung ho officer who fit the agency profile, right down to membership in Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society (Class of ’43). But years after he picked up Dulles at the Baltimore airport, Drain vented about the agency’s handling of the doomed Cuba enterprise. He was astounded by the poor quality of the staff assigned to the high-stakes Bay of Pigs operation, Drain told Pfeiffer, despite Dulles’s insistence that it would be run by the agency’s best and brightest. “Allen Dulles, always meaning what he said, would say repeatedly, ‘Now I want the very best people assigned to this project. There is nothing more important that we are doing than this. . . . I want people pulled out of tours overseas if necessary, this thing must be manned.’” 

But in truth, said Drain, the Bay of Pigs operation drew agency castoffs. “We would tend to get the people that the [CIA] division chiefs found ‘excess’— which normally meant found insufficient. With many notable exceptions, we did not get the very best people available.” 

Even he himself, Drain admitted, was not qualified to play a leading role in the operation. “I don’t mean to be unduly immodest [sic], but really I didn’t have any qualifications for this job except I was there and unemployed—had no Spanish language whatsoever, and my entire exposure had been punching cows in Arizona in 1940. That doesn’t really bring you up much on Latin America and Latinos, and any of that. I had never been on amphibious operations, and if that was characteristic of my qualifications, it really characterized the whole damn operation—about which, it seemed to me, there was a good deal of well-meaning hypocrisy.” 

Drain’s criticisms of the enterprise echoed those in an earlier CIA report, the damning internal investigation carried out by the agency’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, in the months immediately following the disaster. The Kirkpatrick Report, one of the most surprisingly honest self-evaluations ever produced within the CIA, found that despite Dulles’s insistence on “high-quality personnel,” the Bay of Pigs operation was staffed largely by the agency’s losers. According to CIA files, seventeen of the forty-two officers assigned to the operation were ranked in the lowest third of the agency, and nine were ranked in the lowest tenth. The IG’s report concluded that Dulles had allowed his division chiefs to dump “their disposal cases” on the Cuba project. 

Robert Amory Jr., the CIA’s highly respected chief of analysis, was one of those who was inexplicably kept away from the Bay of Pigs operation, despite his extensive experience with beach landings as an Army Corps of Engineers officer in the South Pacific during World War II. Amory—who had literally written the book on the subject, Surf and Sand, a regimental history of his twenty-six amphibious operations—was stunned by Dulles and Bissell’s decision to keep him on the sidelines. The CIA men sent to Miami to work with the exile leaders and to Guatemala to help train the brigadistas were “a bunch of guys who were otherwise not needed,” Amory later recalled. “They were a strange bunch of people with German experience, Arabic experience, and other things like that. And most of them had no knowledge of Spanish . . . and absolutely no sense or feel about the political sensitivities of these [Cuban exiles]. . . . I think we could have had an A team, instead of being a C-minus team.” 

The Kirkpatrick Report detailed a number of other glaring errors made by Dulles, Bissell, and their Bay of Pigs team. When plans for the Cuba invasion grew more ambitious and began leaking to the press as early as November 1960, the report stated, the CIA should have terminated its role in the mission since it had outgrown the agency’s covert capability. “When the project became blown to every newspaper reader,” the report noted acerbically, “the agency should have informed higher authority that it was no longer operating in its charter.” The criticisms went on and on, each one more devastating than the last. “As the project grew, the agency reduced the exiled leaders to the status of puppets. . . . The project was badly organized. . . . The agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep [the president and his] policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions essential for success.” 

Kirkpatrick, who prepared his devastating report with the help of three investigators, flatly rejected the main CIA alibi for the failed mission—that Kennedy was to blame by blocking the agency’s last-minute requests for air strikes. The invasion was “doomed” from the start by the CIA’s poor planning, the inspector general concluded. Even if the air strikes had allowed the invaders to move inland from the shore, his report stated, the “men would eventually have been crushed by Castro’s combined military resources strengthened by Soviet Bloc–supplied military materiel.” 

Perhaps the most devastating revelation about the CIA operation emerged years later, in 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting held by its Cuba task force on November 15, 1960, one week after Kennedy’s election. The group, which was deliberating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion, came to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measures that Castro had implemented, the CIA task force admitted, their invasion plan was “now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint [CIA/Department of Defense] action.” In other words, the CIA realized that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless its exile brigade was reinforced by the power of the U.S. military. But the CIA never shared this sobering assessment with the president.

Nor did Dulles and Bissell share with Kennedy their other “magic bullet” for success in Cuba—the agency’s ongoing plot with the Mafia to assassinate Castro, which had been authorized by Eisenhower. With Cuba’s revolutionary government decapitated, CIA officials were certain that the regime would soon topple. But the Cuban leader had learned from the annals of imperial history and had wisely taken precautions against such plots. He would thwart his enemies for decades to come, as he grew from a young firebrand to a gray-bearded legend. 

Dulles and Bissell knew that Kennedy was deeply torn over the Cuba invasion plan. His denunciations of Western imperialism had raised high hopes throughout the hemisphere that the days of heavy-handed Yanqui interference were coming to an end. “Kennedy’s election has given rise to an enormous expectancy throughout Latin America,” Schlesinger noted in his journal in early February 1961. “They see him as another FDR; they expect great things from him.” But Kennedy had also campaigned for a strong, though undefined, response to Castro. Eisenhower’s final words of advice to him were to take out the Cuban leader—and he left behind an invasion plan and assassination plot to do just that. As William Bundy observed, the old general had handed Kennedy “a grenade with the pin pulled”—if he didn’t use it, it could blow up in his face, with serious political consequences. 

Kennedy agonized over giving final authorization for the Bay of Pigs plan to the very end. He kept downsizing the operation, to make it as little “noisy” as possible. “What the president really wanted, it seems, was for the CIA to pull off the neat trick of invading Cuba without actually invading it; an immaculate invasion, as it were . . . without all the messy business along the way,” observed historian Jim Rasenberger. 

Dulles kept accommodating the anxious Kennedy, convinced that once the brigadistas hit the beaches, JFK would be forced to do anything necessary for success—even if that meant getting very noisy and messy. The wily CIA chief set a trap for Kennedy, allowing the president to believe that his “immaculate invasion” could succeed, even though Dulles knew that only U.S. soldiers and planes could ensure that. 

Years after the Bay of Pigs, historians—including the CIA’s own Jack Pfeiffer—painted a portrait of Dulles as a spymaster in decline, bumbling and disengaged and maybe too advanced in years, at age sixty-eight, for the rigors of his job. Only a spy chief with a shaky grasp on the tiller could have overlooked the deep flaws embedded in the Bay of Pigs strategy, it was stated. 

But, as usual, there was method to Dulles’s seeming carelessness. It is now clear that the CIA’s Bay of Pigs expedition was not simply doomed to fail, it was meant to fail. And its failure was designed to trigger the real action—an all-out, U.S. military invasion of the island. Dulles plunged ahead with his hopeless, paramilitary mission—an expedition that he had staffed with “C-minus” officers and expendable Cuban “puppets”—because he was serenely confident that, in the heat of battle, Kennedy would be forced to send the Marines crashing ashore. Dulles was banking on the young, untested commander in chief to cave in to pressure from the Washington war machine, just as other presidents had bent to the spymaster’s will. 

It was Dick Bissell, the man in charge of the high-stakes operation, who stood to lose the most when the motley brigade of Cuban patriots and cutthroats inevitably bogged down on the beaches. That was perfectly fine with Dulles, who had been content all along for Bissell to take the lead on the Bay of Pigs— and also the heat. Bissell supported Dulles’s decision to fly off to Puerto Rico on the eve of the mission. The ambitious deputy director was eager to run his own show. JFK had put out the word that Bissell was going to replace Dulles by July, and the supremely confident Bissell thought it was time to show what he could do. “I was prepared to run it as a single-handed operation,” he later said. “I was impatient if Dulles raised too many questions.” 

Dulles was only too pleased to accommodate his rising deputy. As the mission went to hell, the CIA chief would be far from the Washington inferno. By the time Dulles returned home from his Puerto Rico retreat, he would look like one of the grown-ups riding to the rescue. The spymaster and the Pentagon brass would make the new president see that he had no choice: he had to escalate the fighting in Cuba and march all the way to Havana. Afterward, as the dust settled, if Bissell suffered an unfortunate career reversal because his illconceived escapade had to be salvaged by the big boys, well, so be it. After all, he was the face of the Cuba mission, just as Dulles had made him the front man for the risky U-2 enterprise and the assassination operations against foreign leaders. 

Years later, Bob Amory would acknowledge that JFK was indeed “a little bit trapped” by the CIA on the Bay of Pigs, though Amory himself had nothing to do with it. But if Dulles thought he could force Kennedy to carry out his Cuba plan, he had seriously underestimated the young man in the White House. 

Around midnight on Tuesday, April 18, in the midst of the unfolding fiasco, some of the principal advocates for a bigger war in Cuba made one final assault on Kennedy, gathering with him in the Oval Office after the annual congressional party in the East Room. Among those pressing the case for escalation were Bissell and two longtime Pentagon allies of Dulles, Joint Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and Navy chief Arleigh Burke. Dulles was absent, still keeping his distance from the mess and hoping that Bissell would take the fall for it. The CIA director was placing his confidence in Lemnitzer and Burke, hoping that the two blunt-spoken, highly decorated warriors could strong-arm Kennedy into unleashing the U.S. military. The president was still in formal white-tie-and-black-tails attire from the East Room party, and the military men were in their full dress uniforms. But there was nothing polite or decorative about the intense discussion in the president’s office. 

Admiral Burke was especially gruff with Kennedy, treating him as if he were a weak-kneed ensign. Without informing the president, Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba, “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.” It was one of many extraordinary acts of Pentagon and CIA insubordination that plagued the Kennedy presidency from the very beginning. Now the Navy chief was browbeating Kennedy into taking the first steps toward a full-scale war with Castro. 

“Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” growled “31- Knot” Burke, who had become legendary for his speed and daring as a destroyer squadron commander in the South Pacific during the war, while JFK was a mere PT boat captain. But by this point in the unfolding disaster, Kennedy was not inclined to take any more advice from his national security wise men, even if they were World War II idols. “What if Castro’s forces return fire and hit the destroyer?” Kennedy sensibly asked. 

“Then we’ll knock the hell out of them!” Burke bellowed.

Now Kennedy began to show some of his own icy, if more restrained, temper. He had made it clear all along that he did not want the Bay of Pigs to blow up into an international crisis with the United States in the middle—and here was his Navy chief urging just such a course of action. “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” he firmly repeated one more time. 

“Hell, Mr. President,” the admiral shot back, “but we are involved!” 

But Kennedy stood his ground. As he had repeatedly warned them, there would be no air strikes, no Marine landings—and the fate of the Bay of Pigs operation was sealed. 

“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later 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.” 

JFK was even more vehement when he spoke with another old friend, Paul “Red” Fay Jr., whom Kennedy installed as undersecretary of the Navy. “Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don’t think is in the best interests of the country,” he vented. “We’re not going to plunge into irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in the country puts so-called national pride above national reason.” 

As the last of the brigadistas were rounded up by Castro’s troops in the swamps surrounding the Bay of Pigs, Dulles seemed shell-shocked. He had never suffered a humiliation like this in his career. Seeking consolation, Dulles made a Thursday night dinner date with his old protégé, Dick Nixon. The spymaster was acutely aware that if Nixon had been the one sitting in the White House, the events in Cuba would have taken a much different course. When he finally arrived at the Washington residence that Nixon still maintained, over an hour late, Dulles did not seem himself. It looked to Nixon like he was under “great emotional stress.” The CIA chief shuffled in wearing slippers—a sign that he was in the midst of another agonizing gout attack, the recurring affliction that seemed to strike whenever Dulles was entangled in a high-stress operation. After asking for a drink, the Old Man collapsed into a chair and exhaled, “This has been the worst day of my life.” 

If Dulles thought he could escape Kennedy’s wrath by making Bissell the scapegoat, he was deeply mistaken. Both CIA officials would eventually be ousted, but JFK placed most of the blame squarely on the top man. The CIA chief later swore that he never “sold” the president on the Bay of Pigs scheme. “One ought never to sell anybody a bill of goods,” he told an interviewer for the JFK Presidential Library. But Kennedy knew the truth. Dulles had lied to his face in the Oval Office about the chances for the operation’s success. “I stood right here at Ike’s desk,” Dulles told JFK on the eve of the invasion, “and I told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed—and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one.” 

Kennedy and Dulles had not gotten off to a good start with each other during the first months of the new presidency. The minor rifts and strains began accumulating from the very beginning. Still wedded to the ancien régime, Dulles never hung an official portrait of President Kennedy in the CIA headquarters. The CIA director immediately created an atmosphere of distrust between his agency and the White House, telling his deputies to make sure that they retrieved any sensitive documents they showed to Kennedy’s staff, so they didn’t wind up in White House files. Dulles “didn’t really feel comfortable with” Kennedy, observed Bob Amory. 

The spymaster regarded the young New Frontiersmen Kennedy brought into his administration as if they were an alien force. In February 1961, Adam Yarmolinksy, one of the young Ivy League–educated “whiz kids” assembled by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to modernize the management of the Pentagon, scheduled an appointment with Dulles. Before the meeting, the spymaster requested a report on Yarmolinsky from CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, as if he were meeting a foreign official. Dulles was briefed about Yarmolinsky’s liberal inclinations by Houston, who then phoned the director’s office with additional observations about the young Kennedy official. “Mr. Houston says [Yarmolinksy] is an extremely bright fellow,” reported the Dulles aide who took the phone call, “although not particularly personally attractive. He is of Russian-Jewish background.” 

Dulles insisted on personally handling all of the agency’s briefings at the White House, but JFK—who was more widely traveled and sophisticated about global affairs than his age would indicate—did not think much of the CIA chief’s presentations. He found Dulles patronizing and uninformative. According to White House aide Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy “was not very impressed with Dulles’s briefings. He did not think they were in much depth or told him anything he couldn’t read in the newspapers.” 

But if relations between Kennedy and Dulles were strained before the Bay of Pigs, afterward they were all but nonexistent. Kennedy made it clear that he no longer wanted to be briefed by Dulles, so the agency began sending him briefing booklets called the President’s Intelligence Checklist, filled with short summaries of world developments. Kennedy clearly preferred this method, firing off follow-up questions to the agency, along with requests to see source materials, such as the complete text of speeches by foreign leaders and the unabridged versions of CIA reports. 

In public, the president took full blame for the Cuba fiasco. And Kennedy remained personally courteous in his face-to-face dealings with Dulles. “There was never any recrimination on the president’s part,” Dulles later recalled. “I might well have lost to some extent in the measure of confidence he placed on me—that’s inevitable in things of this kind, I think, but I may say in his personal attitude toward me, in the many meetings we had, he never let that appear.” 

But behind the scenes, Dulles waged a vigorous battle with Kennedy to control the media spin on the Bay of Pigs and to hold on to his command of the CIA. The intelligence chief took immediate steps to rally his corporate base of support. On May 1, Dulles convened a private meeting of CEOs to discuss “current problems confronting business enterprise in Latin America and specific ways of meeting them.” The gathering at New York’s Metropolitan Club—which Dulles emphasized was “strictly off the record”—gave the spymaster and his corporate clientele an opportunity to reevaluate their strategy in the post–Bay of Pigs climate. 

Dulles’s corporate circle encouraged his aggressive political tactics by sending him supportive messages. Charles Hilles Jr., executive vice president of ITT, was among those who wrote Dulles to buck him up after the Cuban catastrophe. “I have the greatest admiration for your calmness and fortitude, and for your devotion to the country’s good,” wrote Hilles on May 4, “and I sense that I am one of an overwhelming majority.” The following month, a conservative New York corporate attorney named Watson “Watty” Washburn, known as a tennis wizard in his youth and later as the attorney who defended P. G. Wodehouse against the IRS, offered Dulles more militant encouragement. Washburn urged Dulles to slough off his earlier failure and organize a new invasion of Cuba to liberate the Bay of Pigs captives from Castro’s prison on the Isle of Pines. “This would be mere child’s play as a military operation,” assured Washburn, “and would qualify as an humanitarian enterprise rather than ‘imperialism.’”

If Dulles had lost the battle at the Bay of Pigs, he was determined to win the war of ideas over the failed operation. He began his psywar campaign by sending an all-station cable to CIA personnel with his version of the Cuba disaster. According to Ralph McGehee, a twenty-five-year CIA veteran serving in Vietnam at the time, Dulles’s cable to his troops “implied that had events taken their planned course, we would have been victorious in [the] invasion of Cuba.” The Dulles message, which the Old Man continued to promote for the rest of his life, was emphatically clear: the mission had been doomed by Kennedy’s failure of nerve, or, as he put it more diplomatically in his unpublished article for Harper’s, by the president’s lack of “determination to succeed.” 

Years after the Bay of Pigs, Dulles was still spinning reporters, scholars, and anyone else who showed an interest in the fading story. In April 1965, when a Harvard Business School student named L. Paul Bremer III—who would find his own place in the annals of American disasters as President George W. Bush’s proconsul in Iraq—sent Dulles his dissertation on the Bay of Pigs, the spymaster sought to correct the young man’s impression that it was a CIA failure. It was Kennedy’s “final decision to eliminate the air action” that had killed the expedition, Dulles wrote Bremer. “I can assure you that it would never have been mounted . . . if it had been even suspected that this vital element of the plan would be eliminated.” 

Dulles’s spin on the Bay of Pigs began appearing in the press as soon as the smoke cleared from the invasion. His version received prominent play in a September 1961 Fortune magazine article titled “Cuba: The Record Set Straight.” The article was written by Fortune staff writer Charles Murphy, a journalist so close to Dulles that the spymaster used him as a ghostwriter. The previous year, Murphy had fawningly agreed to write a Dulles memoir, telling the CIA chief “you have honored me with your invitation to me to lend a hand with your book, and I am looking forward to the association.” Much of Murphy’s article in Fortune sounded like it was dictated directly by Dulles, shifting blame from the CIA to the White House. Murphy later claimed that Admiral Burke had been his source, but the Kennedy brothers suspected that Dulles’s deputy, General Charles Cabell, was also involved. 

Kennedy was furious about the Fortune article, and he had the White House prepare a point-by-point rebuttal for publisher Henry Luce. The media-savvy president knew that he was confronting a formidable opponent in the war of ideas over Cuba. At his first press conference following the Bay of Pigs, JFK put the Washington press corps on alert, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised if information wasn’t poured into you” from “interested agencies.” 

If the president could not match Dulles’s wide network of media assets, he brought his own impressive skills to the public relations war with the CIA. Kennedy was adept at massaging influential journalists like New York Times Washington columnist James “Scotty” Reston. While the Bay of Pigs disaster was still unfolding, JFK invited Reston to lunch at the White House, confiding to him, “I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on. . . . I have never worked with him and therefore I can’t estimate his meaning when he tells me things. . . . Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures. . . . It’s a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with the CIA.” 

Word quickly got back to CIA headquarters that if Kennedy was taking the blame in public for the Bay of Pigs, he was privately stabbing Dulles and the agency with his sharp invective, vowing to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” 

Kennedy deployed two of his most passionately loyal White House aides, Sorensen and Schlesinger, in the war of words with Dulles’s empire. Both men brought a cutting eloquence to the political duel. The week after the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger, who had adamantly opposed the operation, observed, “We not only look like imperialists . . . we look like stupid, ineffectual imperialists. . . . Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell brought down in a day what Kennedy had been laboring patiently and successfully to build up in three months.” 

Dulles knew that JFK was maneuvering to dump him, but he made it clear that he would not go without a fight. On May 23, Schlesinger discussed the CIA director’s fate with Dulles’s mole in the White House, Mac Bundy. Bundy, no doubt channeling his headstrong patron, told Schlesinger that “there would be serious difficulties about procuring the resignation of Allen Dulles.” According to Bundy, Dulles believed that “his only mistake was in not having persuaded the president that he must send in the Marines.” 

As JFK’s national security adviser, Bundy was in a delicate position, trying to earn the confidence of the president whom he had just begun serving, while at the same time subtly advocating for Dulles. In the midst of the Bay of Pigs crisis, Bundy had tried to turn Bissell into the scapegoat. He told Schlesinger that Dulles “actually had more misgivings about the project than he had ever expressed to the president, and that he had not done so out of loyalty to Bissell.” Bundy added that “he personally would not be able to accept Dick’s estimates of a situation like this again.” Bundy, who had endorsed the Bay of Pigs plan, was clearly acting on Dulles’s behalf when he threw Bissell under the bus. But he failed to halt the White House momentum that was building for Dulles’s termination. 

The battle over Dulles’s future as CIA director came to a head during the presidential investigation of the Bay of Pigs debacle. A few days after the failed invasion, Kennedy appointed General Maxwell Taylor to chair the official inquiry. Taylor, who would later become JFK’s military adviser, was closely aligned with Dulles. Fletcher Prouty, an astute observer of Dulles’s far-flung Washington network, later called Taylor another key “CIA man at the White House.” Dulles, who was appointed to the Taylor Committee along with his ally Admiral Burke, must have thought he had the Bay of Pigs panel tightly wired— just the way he had controlled the blue-ribbon CIA oversight committees during the Eisenhower era. 

But Max Taylor also felt a sense of loyalty to Kennedy, who had championed the handsome, ramrod-straight general when Taylor broke with the Eisenhower/Dulles policy of massive retaliation in favor of a more nuanced strategy he called “flexible response.” JFK, who was influenced by Taylor’s 1959 book, The Uncertain Trumpet, called the scholarly Taylor “my kind of general.” As chair of the investigation, Taylor maintained a delicate balance, striving diplomatically to avoid putting too much blame on the CIA or the Pentagon. But Taylor’s “strongest tilts,” in the estimation of CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, “were toward deflecting criticism of the White House.” 

Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy, whom Pfeiffer archly observed “crossed all lines as the president’s alter ego,” used his position on the Taylor Committee to make sure his brother would be protected. The young, sharp-elbowed attorney general proved to be a tougher advocate for the White House than Dulles and Arleigh Burke were for their respective institutions. RFK deftly blocked the two Kennedy antagonists from focusing blame on the president. As the committee completed its report, Dulles and Burke were reduced to lobbying Taylor to at least insert a footnote stating that if Kennedy had approved air coverage of the landing, “it could well have caused a chain reaction of success throughout Cuba, with resultant defection of some of [Castro’s] Militia, the uprising of the populace and eventual success of the operation.” But this hypothetical scenario was a pipe dream that only Dulles and Burke were smoking. 

Nearly two decades later, Pfeiffer’s Bay of Pigs history still reflected agency resentment at how JFK’s brother outmaneuvered the CIA and Pentagon during the Taylor investigation. “At the conclusion of the testimony of the witnesses,” Pfeiffer wrote, “it was clear that Burke and Dulles . . . were headed for the elephants’ burial ground—thanks to Robert Kennedy’s denigration of them and their Agencies and, in no small part in the case of Dulles to his abysmal performance as a witness.” By the end of the investigation, wrote Pfeiffer, the outplayed Dulles and Burke “were nattering at each other” over how much of the responsibility for the disaster the Navy should share with the CIA. 

If the Taylor Committee, which presented its findings to Kennedy on May 16, badly damaged Dulles, the Kirkpatrick Report sealed his fate. Tall, handsome, athletic, and charming, Lyman Kirkpatrick had been one of the agency’s rising stars. A graduate of Deerfield and Princeton, he served with the OSS and as an intelligence adviser to General Omar Bradley during the war. A streak of daring ran through the Kirkpatrick family. His sister, Helen, was an intrepid war correspondent, riding with the tanks of the Free French Forces to liberate Paris. Photos of the attractive reporter in a combat helmet and tailored uniform gave her dispatches for the Chicago Daily News a glamorous flair. After the war, Lyman Kirkpatrick joined the CIA in its infancy and made his way quickly up the ranks, becoming CIA chief Beetle Smith’s right-hand man. Kirkpatrick appeared to be on a fast track to the top of the agency, as covert action chief and then perhaps director. 

But in 1952, he was stricken by polio while on assignment in Asia. After a long hospitalization—including a nightmarish ordeal at Walter Reed Hospital, where Dulles had pulled strings to get him admitted—Kirkpatrick returned to the CIA. He was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, but he was determined to resume his career. Dulles, who had just taken over the CIA, appointed Kirkpatrick inspector general—an unpopular post since it involved monitoring the agency’s internal affairs. By accepting the job, Kirkpatrick was acknowledging that his hopes for the top office were gone. But he demonstrated integrity as IG, recommending that the CIA employees who were responsible for the 1953 death of M.K.ULTRA victim Frank Olson be punished, although they never were. Kirkpatrick also went on record within the agency as opposing the assassination of Lumumba. 

Kirkpatrick, who had worked with Joe Kennedy on Eisenhower’s intelligence advisory board, belonged to the pro-Kennedy faction inside the CIA. Kirkpatrick and JFK were on friendly terms. The president, who knew how important swimming exercises had been for the polio-afflicted Franklin Roosevelt, invited Kirkpatrick to use the White House pool, where Kennedy swam to ease his own back ailments. It was Kirkpatrick who noticed that there was no official portrait of President Kennedy on display at CIA headquarters, and after Dulles had left the agency, the inspector general arranged for one finally to be hung. 

Kirkpatrick was a lifelong CIA man, and he owed his resurrected career to Dulles. So the Old Man felt deeply betrayed when Kirkpatrick handed him and his deputy, Charles Cabell, copies of the highly critical Bay of Pigs autopsy. A furious Dulles denounced the report as a “hatchet job.” Dulles and Cabell “were both exceedingly shocked and upset, irritated and annoyed and mad and everything else,” Kirkpatrick recalled. 

Agency loyalists like Sam Halpern began spreading the word that Kirkpatrick was acting out of acrimony. The report was “basically Kirk’s vendetta against Bissell,” said Halpern years later, still promoting the agency line. “He had been a real rising star. Once he had polio, he got sidetracked and became a bitter man.” But, in truth, Kirkpatrick was a man of conscience. “When you speak honestly about what people did wrong, you’re going to step on toes,” said Kirkpatrick’s son, Lyman Jr., a retired Army intelligence colonel. “But that was his job.” 

Dulles succeeded in suppressing the Kirkpatrick Report; it would remain locked away until the CIA was finally compelled to release it in 1998. But as word spread in Washington circles about the harsh report, it added to the antiKennedy passions flaring within the CIA. 

The Bay of Pigs debacle produced a “stuttering rage” among CIA officers aligned with Dulles, according to CIA veteran Joseph B. Smith—especially among those on the Cuba task force. “I had the feeling all those agents there felt almost that the world had ended,” Smith remembered. In August, months after the failed venture, when longtime veteran Ralph McGehee returned from Vietnam to agency headquarters, he, too, found the CIA in turmoil. Rumors spread that Kennedy was going to exact his revenge by slashing the CIA workforce through a massive “reduction in force,” code-named the “701 program” by the agency. 

“It seemed to us that the RIF program was aimed more at the CIA than other agencies,” McGehee observed. “This was a tension-filled, dismal time. . . . The halls seemed filled with the strained, anxious looks of the soon-to-be unemployed.” 

When Kennedy’s ax did fall, McGehee was stunned by the carnage. “About one of every five was fired. The tension became too much for some. On several occasions, one of my former office mates came to the office howling drunk and worked his way onto the 701 list.” 

The anti-Kennedy rage inside CIA headquarters also reverberated at the Pentagon. “Pulling out the rug [on the Bay of Pigs invaders],” fumed Joint Chiefs chairman Lemnitzer, was “unbelievable . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” Years later, the name Kennedy still made “31-Knot” Burke boil over. “Mr. Kennedy,” the admiral told an oral historian from the U.S. Naval Institute, “was a very bad president. . . . He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation.” The Kennedy team, he added, “didn’t realize the power of the United States or how to use the power of the United States. It was a game to them. . . . They were inexperienced people.” [Listen to this crazy power drunk bastard,no wonder we have the issues we have with this type thinking in Washington DC]

If Kennedy’s national security mandarins were filled with contempt for him, the feeling was clearly mutual. On the heels of the Bay of Pigs, when Lemnitzer urged militant action in other hot spots such as Laos, the president brushed him off. He disliked even being in the same room with the men who had led him astray on Cuba. JFK “dismissed [Lemnitzer and the others] as a bunch of old men,” Schlesinger recalled years later. “He thought Lemnitzer was a dope.” 

Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was disturbed by JFK’s growing estrangement from the military and the CIA. “Of course, Johnson was a great admirer of the military,” recalled Jack Bell, a White House reporter for the Associated Press. “He didn’t believe that Kennedy was paying enough attention to the military leaders.” 

Chatting with Bell one day, LBJ told the reporter, “You don’t hardly ever see the chiefs of staff around [the White House] anymore.” As Johnson was painfully aware, he was not part of JFK’s inner circle either—“he just sat around with his thumb in his mouth,” as Bell put it. 

It was Bobby, the tough kid brother reviled by Johnson, who was the president’s indispensable partner. “Every time they have a conference down there [at the White House], don’t kid anybody about who was the top adviser,” Johnson bitterly told Bell. “It isn’t McNamara, the chiefs of staff, or anybody else like that. Bobby is first in and last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.” 

It was Cuba that created the first fracture between Kennedy and his national security chain of command. But while the Bay of Pigs was still dominating the front pages, the CIA mucked its way into another international crisis that required the president’s urgent attention. The Cuba invasion has all but erased this second crisis from history. But the strange events that occurred in Paris in April 1961 reinforced the disturbing feeling that President Kennedy was not in control of his own government.

Paris was in turmoil. At dawn on Saturday morning, April 22, a group of retired French generals had seized power in Algiers to block President Charles de Gaulle from settling the long, bloody war for Algerian independence. Rumors quickly spread that the coup plotters were coming next for de Gaulle himself, and that the skies over Paris would soon be filled with battle-hardened paratroopers and French Foreign Legionnaires from Algeria. Gripped by the dying convulsions of its colonial reign, France braced for a calamitous showdown. 

The threat to French democracy was actually even more immediate than feared. On Saturday evening, two units of paratroopers totaling over two thousand men huddled in the Forest of Orleans and the Forest of Rambouillet, not much more than an hour outside Paris. The rebellious paratroopers were poised for the final command to join up with tank units from Rambouillet and converge on the capital, with the aim of seizing the Élysée Palace and other key government posts. By Sunday, panic was sweeping through Paris. All air traffic was halted over the area, the Metro was shut down, and cinemas were dark. Only the cafés remained open, where Parisians crowded anxiously to swap the latest gossip. 

News that the coup was being led by the widely admired Maurice Challe, a former air force chief and commander of French forces in Algeria, stunned the government in Paris, from de Gaulle down. Challe, a squat, quiet man, was a World War II hero and, so it had seemed, a loyal Gaullist. But the savage passions of the war in Algeria had deeply affected Challe and left him vulnerable to the persuasions of more zealous French officers. He had promised Algeria’s French settlers and pro-French Muslims that they would not be abandoned, and he felt a soldierly responsibility to stand by his oath, as well as by the memory of the French servicemen who had lost their lives in the war. In his radio broadcast to the people of France, the coup leader explained that he was taking his stand against de Gaulle’s “government of capitulation . . . so that our dead shall not have died for nothing.” 

De Gaulle quickly concluded that Challe must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press. Shortly before his resignation from the French military, Challe had served as NATO commander in chief, and he had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters. Challe and American security officials shared a deep disaffection with de Gaulle. The stubborn, seventy-year-old pillar of French nationalism was viewed as a growing obstacle to U.S. ambitions for NATO because he refused to incorporate French troops under allied command and insisted on building a separate nuclear force beyond Washington’s control. De Gaulle’s enemies in Paris and Washington were also convinced that the French president’s awkward steps toward granting Algerian independence threatened to create a “Soviet base” in strategic, oil-rich North Africa. 

In panic-gripped Paris, reports of U.S. involvement in the coup filled newspapers across the political spectrum. Geneviève Tabouis, a columnist for Paris-Jour, zeroed in directly on Dulles as the main culprit in an article headlined “The Strategy of Allen Dulles.” Other news reports revealed that Jacques Soustelle—a former governor-general of Algeria who joined the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS), a notorious anti–de Gaulle terrorist group—had a luncheon meeting with Richard Bissell in Washington the previous December. 

De Gaulle’s foreign ministry was the source of some of the most provocative charges in the press, including the allegation that CIA agents sought funding for the Challe coup from multinational corporations, such as Belgian mining companies operating in the Congo. Ministry officials also alleged that Americans with ties to extremist groups had surfaced in Paris during the coup drama, including one identified as a “political counselor for the Luce [media] group,” who was heard to say, “An operation is being prepared in Algiers to put a stop to communism, and we will not fail as we did in Cuba.” 

Stories about the CIA’s French intrigues soon began spreading to the American press. A Paris correspondent for The Washington Post reported that Challe had launched his revolt “because he was convinced he had unqualified American support”—assurances, Challe was led to believe, “emanating from President Kennedy himself.” Who gave these assurances, the Post reporter asked his French sources? The Pentagon, the CIA? “It’s the same thing,” he was told. 

Dulles was forced to issue a strong denial of CIA involvement in the putsch. “Any reports or allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency or any of its personnel had anything to do with the generals’ revolt were completely false,” the spymaster declared, blaming Moscow for spreading the charges. 

C. L. Sulzberger, the CIA-friendly New York Times columnist, took up the agency’s defense, echoing Dulles’s indignant denial. “To set the record straight,” Sulzberger wrote, sounding like an agency official, “our Government behaved with discretion, wisdom and propriety during the [French] insurrection. This applies to all branches, [including] the CIA.” Years later, investigative reporter Carl Bernstein exposed the ties between Sulzberger and the CIA. “Young Cy Sulzberger had some uses,” a CIA official told Bernstein. “He was very eager, he loved to cooperate.” (Bernstein conveniently left unexamined the long history of cooperation between the CIA and his own former employer, The Washington Post.) 

But The New York Times’s Scotty Reston was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House. Echoing the charges circulating in the French press, Reston reported that the CIA was indeed “involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.” Reston communicated the rising fury in JFK’s inner circle over the CIA’s rogue behavior, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the French escapade: “All this has increased the feeling in the White House that the CIA has gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence-gathering agency and has become the advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the Administration.” 

Allen Dulles was once again making his own policy, this time in France. There was a long history of acrimony between Dulles and de Gaulle, dating back to World War II and the complex internal politics of the French Resistance. As OSS chief in Switzerland, Dulles favored a far right faction of the Resistance that was opposed to de Gaulle. In his war memoirs, de Gaulle accused Dulles of being part of “a scheme” that was determined to “silence or set aside” the French general. Pierre de Bénouville, a right-wing Resistance leader on Dulles’s OSS payroll, was later accused of betraying Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s dashing representative in the French underground, to the Gestapo. After he was captured, Moulin was subjected to brutal torture before being beaten to death—by the notorious war criminal Klaus Barbie, according to some accounts. 

After de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, he sought to purge the French government of its CIA-connected elements. Dulles had made heavy inroads into France’s political, cultural, and intelligence circles in the postwar years. According to some French reports, during his visits to Paris the spymaster would set himself up at a suite in the Ritz Hotel, where he would dispense bags full of cash to friendly politicians, journalists, and other influential figures. Some were wined and dined and enticed with beautiful Parisian call girls. 

De Gaulle was particularly determined to shut down the secret “stay-behind army” that Dulles had organized in France—a network of anti-Communist militants with access to buried arms caches who were originally recruited to resist a potential Soviet invasion but were now aligned with the rebellious generals and other groups plotting to overthrow French democracy. De Gaulle ordered his young security adviser, Constantin Melnik, to shut down the murky, stay-behind network of fascists, spooks, and criminals, which Melnik agreed was “very dangerous for the security of France.” But Melnik, who was trained at the RAND Corporation, a leading think tank for the U.S. national security complex, was another admirer of Dulles, and the stay-behind underground continued to operate in France. Melnik—who was the son of a White Russian general and the grandson of Czar Nicolas II’s personal physician, who was executed along with the imperial family—was as passionately anti-Soviet as his U.S. security colleagues. 

In May 1958, when de Gaulle returned to power in Paris after a twelve-year absence, Dulles flew to Paris for a face-to-face meeting with the legendary Frenchman to see if their differences could be resolved. Dulles had great confidence in his personal powers of persuasion. But the proud de Gaulle refused to see the spymaster, handing him off to one of his close associates, Michel Debré. A formal dinner was organized for Dulles and Jim Hunt, the CIA station chief in Paris, which was also attended by Melnik. Dulles seemed unfazed by de Gaulle’s slight. But, as French journalist Frédéric Charpier later commented, “Upon returning to the Ritz Hotel, Dulles drew some lessons from the evening, which confirmed his fears. De Gaulle promised to be a tough and hostile partner who was sure to put an end to the laissez-faire attitude which up until then had characterized the [French government].”

World leaders defied Allen Dulles at their peril—even leaders like Charles de Gaulle, whose nation’s warm, fraternal relations with the United States dated back to the American Revolution. After Dulles flew home to Washington, the CIA’s reports on de Gaulle took a sharper edge. At a National Security Council meeting convened by Eisenhower in September 1958, gloomy prognostications were made about the French leader’s ability to settle the Algerian crisis to America’s satisfaction. The possibility of overthrowing de Gaulle and replacing him with someone more in tune with U.S. interests was openly discussed, but the idea was discarded at that point as too risky. 

However, by the time Kennedy took office in January 1961, the CIA was primed for a power switch in Paris. On January 26, Dulles sent a report to the new president on the French situation that seemed to be preparing Kennedy for de Gaulle’s imminent elimination, without giving any hint of the CIA’s own involvement in the plot. “A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France,” Dulles informed JFK. “The Army and the Air Force are staunchly opposed to de Gaulle,” the spymaster continued, exaggerating the extent of the military opposition, as if to present the demise of the French president as a fait accompli. “At least 80 percent of the officers are violently against him. They haven’t forgotten that in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on his promise, and they hate him for that. De Gaulle surely won’t last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year—he will be either deposed or assassinated.” Dulles clearly knew much more, but he wasn’t sharing it with Kennedy. 

When the coup against de Gaulle began three months later, Kennedy was still in the dark. It was a tumultuous time for the young administration. As he continued to wrestle with fallout from the Bay of Pigs crisis, JFK was suddenly besieged with howls of outrage from a major ally, accusing his own security services of seditious activity. It was a stinging embarrassment for the new American president, who was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add to the insult, the coup had been triggered by de Gaulle’s efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end—a goal that JFK himself had ardently championed. The CIA’s support for the coup was one more defiant display of contempt—a back of the hand aimed not only at de Gaulle but at Kennedy. 

JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But, according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official U.S. involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum—the American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.” 

This admission of presidential impotence, which Alphand reported to Paris, was a startling moment in U.S. foreign relations, though it remains largely unknown today. Kennedy then underlined how deeply estranged he was from his own security machinery by taking the extraordinary step of asking Alphand for the French government’s help to track down the U.S. officials behind the coup, promising to fully punish them. “[Kennedy] would be quite ready to take all necessary measures in the interest of good Franco-American relations, whatever the rank or functions of [the] incriminated people,” Alphand cabled French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville. 

To solidify his support for de Gaulle, Kennedy ordered U.S. ambassador James Gavin to offer the French leader “any help” he might need—clearly indicating that U.S. troops would even fire on rebel forces from Algeria if they tried to land at American military bases in France. De Gaulle proudly declined the offer as “well-intentioned, but inappropriate”—perhaps horrified at the prospect of American GIs killing French soldiers on his nation’s soil. But Kennedy did arrange for U.S. base commanders to take steps to camouflage landing sites, in case rebel planes attempted to use them. 

In the wake of the crises in Cuba and France provoked by his own security officials, Kennedy began to display a new boldness. JFK’s assertiveness surprised CIA officials, who had apparently counted on Kennedy to be sidelined during the French coup. Agency officials assured coup leaders that the president would be too “absorbed in the Cuban affair” to act decisively against the plot. But JFK did react quickly to the French crisis, putting on high alert Ambassador Gavin, a decorated paratrooper commander in World War II who could be counted on to keep NATO forces in line. The president also dispatched his French-speaking press spokesman, Pierre Salinger, to Paris to communicate directly with Élysée Palace officials. 

As Paris officials knew, the new American president already had something of a prickly relationship with de Gaulle, but he had strong feelings for France— and they made sure to absolve JFK of personal responsibility for the coup in their leaks to the press. French press accounts referred to the CIA as a “reactionary state-within-a-state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control. 

After JFK’s death, Alphand spoke fondly of the bonds between Kennedy and France. “He thought that harmonious relations between the U.S. and France were a fundamental element of world equilibrium. He knew France as a boy. He came to France for his holidays—the south of France—and he knew France also through his wife. Jacqueline made many, many trips to Paris. I know that Jacqueline helped him very much to understand France. She loves France—she has French blood—she speaks our language very well and she asked him to read the memoirs of General de Gaulle.” 

Kennedy’s strong show of support for de Gaulle undoubtedly helped fortify French resolve against the rebellious generals. In the midst of the crisis, the American president issued a public message to de Gaulle, telling him, “In this grave hour for France, I want you to know of my continuing friendship and support as well as that of the American people.” But it was de Gaulle himself, and the French people, who turned the tide against the coup. 

By Sunday, the second day of the coup, a dark foreboding had settled over Paris. “I am surprised that you are still alive,” the president of France’s National Assembly bluntly told de Gaulle that morning. “If I were Challe, I would have already swooped down on Paris; the army here will move out of the way rather than shoot. . . . If I were in the position Challe put himself in, as soon as I burst in, I would have you executed with a bullet in the back, here in the stairwell, and say you were trying to flee.” De Gaulle himself realized that if Challe did airlift his troops from Algiers to France, “there was not much to stop them.” 

But at eight o’clock that evening, a defiant de Gaulle went on the air, as nearly all of France gathered around the TV, and rallied his nation with the most inspiring address of his long public career. He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. But he had put on his soldier’s uniform for the occasion, and his voice was full of passion. De Gaulle began by denouncing the rebellious generals. The nation had been betrayed “by men whose duty, honor and raison d’être it was to serve and to obey.” Now it was the duty of every French citizen to protect the nation from these military traitors. “In the name of France,” de Gaulle shouted, thumping the table in front of him, “I order that all means—I repeat all means—be employed to block the road everywhere to those men!” 

De Gaulle’s final words were a battle cry. “Françaises, Français! Aidezmoi!” And all over France, millions of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general strike was organized to protest the putsch. Led primarily by the left, including labor unions and the Communist Party, the mass protest won broad political support. Over ten million people joined the nationwide demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands marching in the streets of Paris, carrying banners proclaiming “Peace in Algeria” and shouting, “Fascism will not pass!” Even police officers associations expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests, as did the Roman Catholic Confederation, which denounced the “criminal acts” of the coup leaders, warning that they “threaten to plunge the country into civil war.” 

Hundreds of people rushed to the nation’s airfields and prepared to block the runways with their vehicles if Challe’s planes tried to land. Others gathered outside government ministries in Paris to guard them against attack. André Malraux, the great novelist turned minister of culture, threaded his way through one such crowd, handing out helmets and uniforms. Meanwhile, at the huge Renault factory on the outskirts of Paris, workers took control of the sprawling complex and formed militias, demanding weapons from the government so that they could fend off rebel assaults. 

“In many ways, France, and particularly Paris, relived its great revolutionary past Sunday night and Monday—the past of the revolutionary barricades, of vigilance committees and of workers’ councils,” reported The New York Times. De Gaulle’s ringing address to the nation and the massive public response had a sobering effect on the French military. Challe’s support quickly began melting away, even—humiliatingly—within the ranks of his own military branch, the air force. Pilots flew their planes out of Algeria, and others feigned mechanical troubles, depriving Challe’s troops of the air transport they needed to descend on Paris.

Meanwhile, de Gaulle moved quickly to arrest military officers in France who were involved in the coup. Police swooped down on the Paris apartment of an army captain who was plotting pro-putsch street riots, and de Gaulle’s minister of the interior seized the general in charge of the rebel forces that were gathered in the forests outside Paris. Deprived of their leader, the insurrectionary units sheepishly began to disperse. 

By Tuesday night, Challe knew that the coup had failed. The next day, he surrendered and was flown to Paris. Challe emerged from the plane “carrying his own suitcase, looking crumpled and insignificant in civilian clothes,” according to Time. “He stumbled at the foot of the landing steps, [falling] heavily on his hands and knees.” It was an ignominious homecoming for the man who had fully believed that, with U.S. support, he was to replace the great de Gaulle. Challe expected to face a firing squad, but de Gaulle’s military tribunal proved surprisingly merciful, sentencing the fifty-five-year-old general to fifteen years in prison. 

After the failed coup, de Gaulle launched a new purge of his security forces. He ousted General Paul Grossin, the powerful chief of SDECE, the French secret service, and he shut down its armed unit, the 11th Choc (Shock Battalion), which he suspected of being a breeding ground for the coup. Grossin, who was closely aligned with the CIA, had told Frank Wisner over lunch that the return of de Gaulle to power was equivalent to the Communists taking over in Paris. 

The 11th Choc had grown into a dangerously unhinged killing unit, targeting representatives of the Algerian independence movement and their European supporters, even on the streets of France. Those branded enemies of the French empire were gunned down, blown up, or poisoned by SDECE’s action arm. Aided by ex-Nazi agents of Reinhard Gehlen’s organization, the 11th Choc’s assassination campaign reached the point where “liquidations [were] an almost daily routine,” according to Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a veteran SDECE agent who served as the liaison to the CIA. 

Shortly after pushing out Grossin, de Gaulle also jettisoned his security adviser, Constantin Melnik, Dulles’s close ally. Late into his life, Melnik continued to insist that the CIA was always a friend to de Gaulle—which would have come as a surprise to the French president. Writing in his 1999 memoir, Politically Incorrect, Melnik flatly declared, “I can testify that . . . despite suspicious yelping by Gaullist camp followers . . . the CIA always was a faithful ally of General de Gaulle, even of his often torturous Algerian policies.” After de Gaulle dumped Melnik, Dulles—who by then had also been fired— immediately offered to hire him for a new private intelligence agency he was planning in the Third World. But Melnik declined, instead pursuing a career in French publishing and politics. 

For the rest of his ten-year presidency, which ended with his retirement from politics in 1969, de Gaulle continued to take strong countermeasures against forces he regarded as seditious threats. In 1962, he expelled CIA station chief Alfred Ulmer, a gung ho veteran of Dulles’s Cold War battlegrounds. In 1967, de Gaulle evicted NATO from France to regain “full sovereignty [over] French territory” after discovering that the military alliance was encouraging Western European secret services to interfere in France’s domestic politics. 

Following the Algiers putsch, de Gaulle remained an assassination target— particularly during the explosive months before and after he finally recognized Algerian independence in July 1962. The most dramatic attempt on his life was staged the next month by the OAS—an ambush made famous in the Frederick Forsyth novel and movie The Day of the Jackal. As de Gaulle’s black Citroën sped along the Avenue de la Libération in Paris, with the president and his wife in the rear seat, a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the vehicle. Two of the president’s motorcycle bodyguards were killed—and the bullet-riddled Citroën skidded sharply. But de Gaulle was fortunate to have a skilled and loyal security team, and his chauffeur was able to pull the car out of its spin and speed to safety, despite all four tires’ being shot out. The president and his wife, who kept their heads down throughout the fusillade, escaped unharmed. 

The French president demonstrated that he was willing to fight fire with fire. According to de Vosjoli, de Gaulle loyalists in SDECE even recruited their own secret assassins—including a particularly violent group of Vietnamese exiles— who blew up cafés in Algeria frequented by enemies of de Gaulle and kidnapped, tortured, and murdered other OAS combatants deemed a threat to the president. Democracy in France in the early 1960s was sustained as the result of a vicious underground war that the old French general was willing to fight with equal ferocity. 

Because of the severe security measures he took, Charles de Gaulle survived his tumultuous presidency. He died of a heart attack the year after he left office, just short of his eightieth birthday, slumping over quietly in his armchair after watching the evening news. 

President Kennedy met only once with de Gaulle, on his state visit to Paris at the end of May 1961, a month after the failed coup. The president and First Lady were feted at a banquet in Élysée Palace, where the old general—dazzled by Jackie—leaned down closely to hear every breathy word she spoke to him, in fluent French. During the three-day visit, the two heads of state discussed many pressing issues, from Laos to Berlin to Cuba. But Kennedy and de Gaulle never broached the touchy subject of the coup, much less the CIA’s involvement in it. As French journalist Vincent Jauvert later observed, “Why wake up old demons who had barely fallen asleep?” 

Kennedy knew that he would have to resume wrestling with those demons as soon as he returned home. He would have to decide how deeply to purge his own security agencies, as de Gaulle had already begun to do in France. Kennedy knew there would be steep political costs involved in taking on the CIA and Pentagon. But, as Walter Lippmann had told Schlesinger, “Kennedy will not begin to be President until he starts to break with Eisenhower.” Continuity in Washington was no longer the new president’s concern. Shaken by the traumatic events in Cuba and France, JFK was ready to remake his government. 

A few weeks after the Bay of Pigs and the foiled French coup, JFK asked Jackie to invite Dulles for drinks or tea at the White House. Charlie Wrightsman and his wife were also dropping by, and Kennedy wanted to make a point. The Florida tycoon had self-righteously told Kennedy that he was not going to be seeing his old friend Dulles during his trip to Washington—his way of snubbing the spymaster for bungling the job in Cuba. The president was “disgusted” by Wrightsman’s disloyalty to Dulles, according to Jackie, so he went out of his way to include the disgraced CIA leader in the White House’s get-together. By now, enough time had elapsed since the disasters of April, and with Dulles on his way out, Kennedy was feeling magnanimous toward the Old Man. 

“[Jack] was so loyal always to people in, you know, trouble,” the First Lady later recalled. “And he made a special effort to come back from [the Oval Office] and sit around with Jayne and Charlie Wrightsman, just to show Charlie what he thought of Allen Dulles. And, I mean, it made all the difference to Allen Dulles. I was with him about five [or ten] minutes before Jack got there. He just looked like, I don’t know, Cardinal Mindszenty on trial,” she said, referring to the Hungarian prelate who was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of treason by a Soviet-run show trial. “You know, just a shell of what he was. And Jack came and talked—put his arm around him. . . . Well, wasn’t that nice? It was just to show Charlie Wrightsman. But it shows something about Jack. I mean, he knew [that] Dulles had obviously botched everything up. [But], you know, he had a tenderness for the man.” 

But “poor Allen Dulles,” as Jackie took to referring to him, was likely untouched by the president’s gesture. The CIA director’s resentment of Kennedy was growing by the day, as his fingers slowly lost their grip on power. Feeling the young man’s arm wrapped paternally around his shoulder would have chilled Dulles, not warmed him. The spymaster had served every president since Woodrow Wilson. And now, here he was, being comforted by this weak pretty boy who did not belong in the same company as the great men who preceded him. It was appalling that he, Allen Dulles, should be consoled by such a man. 

Dulles himself kept his fury carefully concealed, his most loyal aides and political allies freely vented their feelings against the Kennedy White House on the Old Man’s behalf. Howard Hunt, who worked as the CIA’s political liaison with the volatile Cuban exile community on the Bay of Pigs, called Dulles and Bissell “scapegoats to expiate administration guilt.” Hunt, whose anti-Communist passions equaled those of his militant Cuban compadres, was deeply moved by the way his boss comported himself during his slow fadeout at the CIA. “As a member of Dulles’s staff,” Hunt remembered, “I lunched in the Director’s mess, seeing him return from each [Taylor] Committee session more drawn and gray. But on taking his place at the head of the table, Mr. Dulles’s demeanor changed into hearty cheerfulness—a joke here, a baseball bet there, came from this remarkable man whose long career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images.” 

The summer following the Bay of Pigs, Prescott Bush—the CIA’s man in the Senate—and his wife, Dorothy, invited Dulles to dinner at their Washington home. The spymaster showed up with John McCone in tow—the Republican businessman and former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Kennedy had just privately tapped as Dulles’s replacement. Bush, who was still unaware that Dulles had been officially deposed, was surprised to see McCone, “whom,” he later recalled in a letter to Clover, “we had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen’s. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came the next day.” The dinner conversation around the Bush family table that night was awkward. “We tried to make a pleasant evening of it,” Bush wrote, “but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedy’s [sic] that brot [sic] about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.” 

On November 28, 1961, Dulles was given his formal send-off at the CIA, in a ceremony held at the agency’s brand-new headquarters, a vast, modernist complex carved out of the woods in Langley, Virginia. It was a day of clashing emotions for Dulles. The gleaming new puzzle palace, which Dulles had commissioned, was seen by many as a monument to his long reign—but he would never occupy the director’s suite. Now some agency wits were snidely christening the Langley edifice “The Allen Dulles Memorial Mausoleum.” 

President Kennedy was gracious in his farewell remarks, as he bestowed the agency’s highest honor—the National Security Medal—on Dulles. “I regard Allen Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country,” he told the crowd gathered in a sterile, fluorescent-lit theater, including a somber-faced Clover and Eleanor Dulles, and an equally stern-looking General Lemnitzer and J. Edgar Hoover, who almost certainly were wondering when they would be next to go. “I know of no man,” the president continued, “who brings a greater sense of personal commitment to his work—who has less pride in office—than he has.” 

This last piece of flattery was particularly overblown, as Kennedy well knew, because there were few men in his administration brimming with as much self admiration as Allen Dulles. The departing CIA director had made sure that invitations to his medal ceremony were sent out to a who’s who list of Fortune 500 executives, including the chiefs of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Chase Manhattan, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, IBM, CBS, and Time-Life. He kept copies of all the flowery farewells that poured in from the corporate world, including letters from 20th Century Fox movie mogul Spyros Skouras, and conglomerate tycoon J. Peter Grace, who wrote, “It is almost unbelievable that one family could produce two men of the caliber of yours and your late, sorely missed, brother.”

But, after the ceremony, Dulles looked a bit lost and forlorn as he waved to Kennedy’s departing helicopter from the front steps of the headquarters he would never occupy. The following day was even more melancholy for Dulles as JFK swore in McCone at the old CIA building on E Street. Clover dropped him off at the ceremony in the family car, since Dulles was no longer entitled to a CIA limousine and driver. “Clover, I’ll be home later in a taxi,” the Old Man told his wife as he climbed out of the car. He was overheard by Lawrence “Red” White, the agency’s efficient, nuts-and-bolts administrator, who insisted that Dulles be driven home in an official car. Dulles made a show of protesting but accepted the kind gesture—one of the few bright spots in what colleagues described as a very dark day for the espionage legend. “His morale,” White recalled, “was pretty low on his last day as DCI [Director of Central Intelligence].”

Retired at home in Georgetown, the old spymaster’s funereal mood did not lift as Kennedy proceeded to rid his administration of remnants of the fallen Dulles dynasty. First to go were the Dulles deputies most closely associated with the Bay of Pigs, Dick Bissell and Charles Cabell. Then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, his brother’s vigilant watchman, tracked down Eleanor Dulles, who was still working quietly on German affairs in Foggy Bottom, and had Secretary of State Rusk fire her. “I don’t want any more of the Dulles family around,” the attorney general was heard to say. Eleanor took it hard. “It was silly, I suppose,” she later remarked. “I was 66 years old, and a lot of my friends asked why I should want to go on working. Well, I had psychological and financial reasons. My job at State was a valuable thing to cling to. Besides, I had debts. I had put two children through college, and I needed a salary.” 

Over at the Pentagon, JFK had already begun to purge Dulles Cold Warriors like Arleigh Burke, who was drummed out of the Navy in August. Next to go was Lemnitzer, who was replaced as Joint Chiefs chairman by Maxwell Taylor in November, the same month Dulles himself was shown the door. 

Kennedy took further steps to signal that the Dulles era was over and that the CIA would no longer be allowed to run wild; he placed overseas agents under the control of U.S. ambassadors and shifted responsibility for future paramilitary operations like the Bay of Pigs to the Pentagon. It was the Kennedy brothers, not the Dulles brothers, who now ran Washington. 

Dulles found it hard to adjust to life on the political sidelines. “He had a very difficult time to decompress,” said Jim Angleton, his longtime acolyte. But it soon became clear that the Dulles dynasty was not entirely dismantled. 

In truth, the Kennedy purge had left the ranks of Dulles loyalists at the CIA largely untouched. Top Dulles men like Angleton and Helms remained on the job. And the Old Man’s shadow knights never abandoned their king. They continued to call on him in Georgetown, with Angleton visiting two or three times a week. They consulted with him on agency affairs, as if he were still DCI, and not John McCone. They collaborated with him on plans for books and film projects. They continued to kneel before Allen Dulles, their banished commander, and kiss his ring. And soon, Dulles began to emerge from his gloomy refuge, ready for action. By mid-January 1962, the “retired” spymaster was writing an old comrade, “As you know, I am not much of a believer in either retirement or long vacations.” The house on Q Street was already on its way to becoming the seat of a government in exile. Dulles had been deposed, but his reign continued.

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