Part 10: The Devil's Chessboard...Rome on the Potomac...The Parting Glass

The Devil's Chessboard
By Davis Talbot
16 

Rome on the Potomac 

By the evening of June 16, 1962, when bow-tied Arthur Schlesinger Jr. went tumbling fully clothed into the swimming pool at Hickory Hill, Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s estate in suburban Virginia, the dunking of party guests had become a New Frontier ritual. Dinner parties at Hickory Hill, where dogs and children ran wild through the house and across the rolling lawns, were already a colorful part of Washington society lore. Invitations to Bobby and Ethel’s backyard fests signaled insider status in the youthful Kennedy court. Judy Garland sang; Harry Belafonte did the twist; national heroes like astronaut John Glenn faced bold, new challenges. On this particular evening, Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the earth, was dared by the rambunctious Ethel to sit with her at dinner—on a plank that had been laid precariously across the pool. The astronaut succeeded in staying dry, but Ethel ended up in the pool when Schlesinger and another guest began mischievously bouncing up and down on the wobbly board. Later, as Schlesinger chivalrously leaned down to help Ethel out of the water, a prankster bumped him and the respected Harvard historian went headlong into the pool, taking the attorney general’s wife down with him. 

The raucous antics of the Kennedy crowd were greeted by much of the Washington establishment as a welcome relief from the fusty Eisenhower regime. The Kennedy brothers and their team brought such relentless vigor to their jobs, they were allowed to blow off steam in their off-hours. There had been no scolding in the press, for instance, the year before when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the president’s fun-loving baby brother, had emerged from his own swimming pool baptism at Hickory Hill, “a huge, dripping mass in a now hopelessly rumpled dinner jacket,” as Schlesinger recalled. 

But by June 1962, the Kennedy administration was deeply embattled, from within and without. And the Kennedy circle’s unrestrained merrymaking now was regarded as unseemly in some quarters. Drew Pearson noted in his column that “Southern congressmen were especially interested in the fact that Ethel Kennedy, sister-in-law of the president, twisted with Harry Belafonte, well known Negro singer.” Meanwhile, Schlesinger’s swimming pool high jinks were splashed across the front page of the anti-Kennedy New York Herald Tribune. As JFK’s main link to the liberal intelligentsia and left wing of the Democratic Party, the White House adviser had become an especially tempting political target. 

Henry J. Taylor, a syndicated newspaper columnist, led the press campaign against Schlesinger, taking advantage of the embarrassing publicity over his Hickory Hill water sports to level other charges against Kennedy’s court philosopher. Taylor accused Schlesinger of violating the White House code of ethics by moonlighting as a freelance writer, churning out political essays for publications like The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post, and doing movie reviews for a chic new glossy magazine called Show. 

It turned out that the White House had no such ban against outside freelancing and that Kennedy, an ardent movie lover, thoroughly enjoyed Schlesinger’s reviews. One night, when Roger Vadim’s arty vampire movie Blood and Roses was being screened in the White House projection room, a bored Kennedy got up halfway through the feature and told Schlesinger he would be content to read his review. Before he left, the president shared some of his own rather sophisticated movie opinions with Schlesinger, urging him to do a comparative review of the Italian film Girl with a Suitcase and A Cold Wind in August, an obscure independent feature. He then declared his disappointment with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and expressed his regret “that Hollywood had no guts any longer and could not do a sharp or interesting film.” 

Taylor’s attack on Schlesinger—in which he warned of the liberal historian’s pernicious influence on Kennedy policy—spread to other media outlets, including Time magazine, which poked fun at Schlesinger’s Hickory Hill frivolity and, taking the opposite tack from Taylor, questioned whether he really did much of anything as “special assistant” to President Kennedy. Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, FDR’s legendary adviser and a longtime Washington power broker, didn’t like the beating that Schlesinger was getting in the press and he phoned his young friend at the White House. “I scent a manhunt,” Corcoran told Schlesinger. “The play they gave to the swimming pool story was the tip-off. They are out to get you.” The Cork warned Schlesinger that he had heard Republicans were spreading a vicious story that they had found someone claiming to be an old Harvard classmate of Schlesinger, and “he will swear that he knew you then as a member of the Communist Party.” 

In the midst of the media furor, Schlesinger felt tempted to offer Kennedy his resignation. Late one afternoon, when Schlesinger went to see the president in the Oval Office on another matter, JFK asked him how he was holding up. “It’s been a bad couple of days,” he told Kennedy. The president responded in a “kindly way,” Schlesinger noted in his journal. “Don’t worry about it,” JFK told his downcast adviser. “Everyone knows that Henry Taylor is a jerk. All they are doing is shooting at me through you.” 

The media attack on Schlesinger bore the fingerprints of the Dulles group. Though he’d been out of office for half a year, Dulles’s influence remained strong in the press—particularly with Luce publications like Time. Henry Taylor, too, had ties to the Dulles brothers, having served in Foster’s diplomatic corps as ambassador to Switzerland before becoming a syndicated columnist for United Features. 

On first glance, Schlesinger seemed like an unlikely target for the Dulles network, since he, too, had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the intelligence chief, dating back to World War II, when the young historian was one of many intellectuals recruited by the OSS. As an OSS analyst stationed in London and Paris during the war, Schlesinger held strongly anti-Communist views; after the war, Schlesinger became a leading architect of Cold War liberalism, joining the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign that was secretly funded by the CIA and endorsing efforts to root out Communist Party influence in the labor movement, cultural arena, and academic circles. 

Schlesinger was a passionate believer in New Deal liberalism, which he saw as the only way to civilize capitalism. And he was an equally ardent anti Communist, viewing the anti-Red crusade as a way to protect the American left, by ridding it of the Stalinist contamination that had seeped into Democratic Party circles during FDR’s necessary wartime alliance with Moscow. Schlesinger believed that it was vital to purge these Communist Party influences, even though the CP’s well-organized shock troops were behind many of the political and labor victories of the New Deal period, in order to fend off attacks from the right that sought to label liberalism as a paler version of Marxist-Leninism.

In 1949, Schlesinger endorsed a crude effort by Luce’s Life magazine— which the young, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian sometimes wrote for—to develop a blacklist of celebrities that the magazine described as “Dupes and Fellow Travelers” of the Communist Party. Along with the predictable stalwarts of the Far Left, Life listed such liberal luminaries as Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Aaron Copeland, and Leonard Bernstein. Schlesinger gave the Life magazine blacklist his stamp of approval, calling it “a convenient way of checking the more obvious Communist-controlled groups.” 

Though Schlesinger was an avid New Dealer, he was also a pampered product of the American elite—the son of esteemed Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., a graduate of exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy at fifteen, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard at twenty, and, at twenty-seven, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful work The Age of Jackson. Raised in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge, where the likes of James Thurber, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, and Samuel Eliot Morison circulated through his family home, young Schlesinger “never stopped seeming like the brightest student in the class,” as The New York Times observed. 

Critics like C. Wright Mills and revisionist historian William Appleman Williams charged that Schlesinger—coddled by the East Coast establishment and subsidized by CIA front groups—clung to a one-sided view of the Cold War, placing sole responsibility for the tense, global standoff on Moscow. Russia was not merely seeking a protective buffer when it took control of Eastern Europe following the epic destruction of World War II, Schlesinger insisted; in his view, the Soviet Union was a “messianic state” whose “ideology compelled a steady expansion of Communist power.” Even after the collapse of Stalin’s regime, Schlesinger saw no significant modification in this implacable Soviet expansionism. 

Not surprisingly, Schlesinger maintained friendly, if somewhat remote, relations with Allen Dulles throughout the 1950s. The Cold War consensus that dominated Democratic as well as Republican circles made for unlikely alliances; Schlesinger counted a number of top CIA officials among his friends, including Helms, Wisner, and Bissell, and he often joined them on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Washington Post publisher Philip Graham and columnist Joe Alsop hosted the parties where the disparate Dulles and Kennedy entourages all intermingled. 

Schlesinger had his differences with the CIA crowd, going back to his OSS days. He had been offended by “the notion of American spooks” like Dulles and Wisner “cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen. . . . There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices had made the allied victory possible.” During the Eisenhower-Dulles years, Schlesinger found much more that was “aesthetically displeasing” about the Republican reign. “The Dulles brothers,” sniffed Schlesinger’s first wife, Marian, years later, “were self-righteous and egomaniacal.” By the time Kennedy took office, Marian Schlesinger, a product of the same Cambridge background as her husband, regarded Allen Dulles as “passé.” 

But in the name of Cold War fraternity, Schlesinger was willing to make his own political compromises—even with men like Allen Dulles, whose Wall Street Republicanism and bullying foreign interventionism represented everything the historian opposed. Schlesinger made an effort to maintain cordial relations with the CIA chief, keeping up a friendly correspondence with Dulles that lasted late into the Old Man’s life. Schlesinger wrote a favorable review of Germany’s Underground, Dulles’s 1947 book on anti-Hitler wartime intrigues, which elicited a warm thank-you note from the spook. Over dinner at Phil Graham’s house in March 1958, they discussed Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s epic lament about the fragility of love and the human spirit in the grinding machinery of twentieth-century Russian history. CIA officials believed that the novel, which had been banned in the USSR, had “great propaganda value,” and they were planning to sneak copies into Pasternak’s homeland, though the author himself came to regret the political exploitation of his book. 

On November 29, 1961, as Dulles was ushered out the door at the CIA, Schlesinger wrote to him again, telling the spy chief that it had been a “privilege” to work with him and urging him to write his memoirs: “You have had a fascinating life, and you owe it to your fellow countrymen to put it down on paper.” Dulles responded warmly two weeks later, telling the historian that he was mulling over a couple of book ideas “and may seek your wise counsel.”

Nobody in Washington was better positioned than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to observe the growing split in Kennedy’s government. He had played a leading role in the formation of the Cold War consensus that had held together Washington’s opposing political camps. But that consensus began to shatter early in the Kennedy presidency, and Schlesinger found himself maintaining a delicate balancing act, with one foot on each side of the divide. In the months following the Bay of Pigs crisis, the cracks continued to lace their way through the administration, as JFK resisted the belligerent advice from his national security advisers and tried to maneuver his way around the minefields of Cuba, Laos, Berlin, and Vietnam. Kennedy drew more ire from his warlords—including men like Lemnitzer and Air Force chief Curtis LeMay, whom JFK considered mentally unbalanced—when he brusquely dismissed their persistent pleading for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and instead pursued a test ban treaty aimed at slowing down the race toward doomsday. 

Following the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger found his relations with the CIA crowd strained, but he still was invited to their dinner parties, and his Langley friends—like Helms, Ray Cline, and Cord Meyer—continued to keep him apprised of the agency’s mood. Meanwhile, Kennedy, despite his occasional bemusement at Schlesinger’s ivory-tower liberalism, increasingly drew the historian into his inner sanctum. Schlesinger earned points with JFK, not only by giving him the correct advice on the Bay of Pigs—“a great mistake’’—but by resisting the temptation to crow about his wisdom to the press following the disaster, as some administration officials had done. 

Kennedy soon began seeking the historian’s advice on everything from nuclear policy to the handling of prickly liberal critics like Alfred Kazin, whom Kennedy sought to charm, on Schlesinger’s advice, by inviting him for lunch at the White House in August 1961. Kennedy was nervous about meeting the formidable New York intellectual, suggesting that Jackie be invited too—“she knows all those obscure French writers.” When Kazin arrived at the White House, JFK was at his dazzling best, offering fascinating insights into everyone from Malraux to Khrushchev, but he still fell short with the scholar, who later described the president as “slick, cool and devoid of vision.” When Schlesinger reminded him that left-wing intellectuals said the same thing about FDR, Kazin replied that he was one of those who did. “And I still believe today that I was absolutely right!” Kazin declared. 

Schlesinger, however, was the type of intellectual who saw nothing wrong about entering the inner circle of power to serve a Roosevelt or a Kennedy. He derided those cloistered academics who remained on the sidelines, speculating about the twists and turns of history but never actually participating in their times. In the beginning of his presidency, Kennedy was a bit nervous about having a bestselling historian on his White House staff. Coming across Schlesinger pounding away at his typewriter one day in his remote East Wing office, JFK smiled, “Now Arthur, cut it out. When the time comes, I’ll write The Age of Kennedy.” But after the Bay of Pigs, feeling increasingly besieged within his own administration, Kennedy embraced Schlesinger’s role as court chronicler. The president encouraged Schlesinger to begin taking notes at White House meetings. “You can be damn sure that the CIA has its records and the Joint Chiefs theirs,” JFK told him. “We’d better make sure we have a record over here.” 

Schlesinger’s journal entries, letters, and memos provide a fascinating and invaluable inside look at the increasingly acrimonious civil war that would tear apart Kennedy’s government. Critics often denounced Schlesinger as a toady to power, and there is no doubt that he fell under the spell of Camelot, sharing intimate weekends with the first couple at Hyannis Port and drinking champagne with the Kennedys on board their sailboats off Cape Cod and on the Potomac. During the Bay of Pigs debacle, Schlesinger took a particularly strong blast from the left, with C. Wright Mills denouncing “Kennedy and company” for “returning us to barbarism,” and singling out JFK’s in-house historian, whom Mills charged had “disgraced us intellectually and morally.” 

But critics like Mills were not privy to the internal battles that raged within the Kennedy administration. In reality, Kennedy and trusted advisers like Schlesinger were determined to check the forces of “barbarism,” not to succumb to them—and their efforts set off a powerful backlash within the president’s own bureaucracy. The struggle fought between JFK and the national security elite, as Kennedy attempted to lead the country out of the Cold War, was largely invisible to the American people. Nor was it fully understood by observers like Mills, who died of a heart attack at forty-five in March 1962, before the Kennedy court drama reached its violent climax. Schlesinger himself did not entirely grasp the forces at play as he recorded the daily turmoil of the Kennedy presidency. But the picture that clearly emerges from reading his insightful journals and memos decades later is one of a government at war with itself. 

The relationship between Kennedy and Schlesinger took a back-and-forth course, as the two men began to reevaluate America’s Cold War policies. Sometimes it was the president whose thinking was boldest, other times it was his adviser who pushed Kennedy to be more courageous. The president’s subtle grasp of U.S.-Soviet dynamics had the effect of making Schlesinger’s own Cold War philosophy less rigid and more sophisticated. By 1963, Kennedy would come to the conclusion that “the hardliners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another”—an observation that struck Schlesinger as wise. Kennedy liked to surround himself with intelligent men, but he was usually the most perceptive man in the room. He had a way of raising the thinking of his “best and brightest” to a higher level.

When it came to domestic politics, JFK was a shrewd strategist, and he thrashed out decisions by reviewing them with longtime political confidants and war horses, like his brother Bobby and special assistant Kenny O’Donnell. But Kennedy also realized that his political pragmatism could sometimes compromise his vision. So he often relied on New Frontier true believers like Schlesinger to be his voices of conscience and liberal touchstones. At other times, JFK used Schlesinger almost as a comic foil. 

One day, Schlesinger urged Kennedy to replace Dean Rusk, a bland mouthpiece of Council on Foreign Relations conventional wisdom, with a more stimulating secretary of state. Kennedy glanced up at his adviser from a paper on his desk that he was perusing. “That’s a great idea, Arthur,” he said. After Schlesinger left his office, JFK turned to O’Donnell, who had been quietly taking in the bold pitch for revitalizing the State Department, and laughed. “Arthur has a lot of good ideas,” the president told O’Donnell. 

Schlesinger himself sometimes questioned his relevance within the Kennedy administration. “I have the feeling that the president somewhat discounts my views,” the White House aide wrote in his journal in September 1962, “primarily because he regards me as a claimant agency for standardized liberalism, partly also because he considers me to be, after all, an intellectual and insufficiently practical and realistic.” 

But by 1963, the president himself was telling his brother and Phil Graham that he was seriously considering replacing Rusk with Robert McNamara, who had proven a smart and reliable ally in Kennedy’s battles with the Pentagon’s warlords. 

Arthur had a lot of good ideas, and though he was careful not to overstep his bounds, he was unfailingly articulate and often persistent in the way he espoused them. His insights and suggestions had a way of working themselves into the recesses of Kennedy’s mind. The president had been an avid reader of history since he was a boy, and here on his staff was someone who could raise the big historical questions at the very moment that the administration was making history. No wonder academic colleagues like Richard Rovere got somewhat carried away and compared Schlesinger’s role in the Kennedy White House to that of Voltaire and Aristotle in the courts of Frederick and Alexander the Great. No prominent intellectual had held such a post of freewheeling influence in U.S. presidential history. 

Schlesinger’s most intrepid moment in the Kennedy presidency would come after the Bay of Pigs, when he boldly schemed to bring the CIA under presidential control, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower had been able to do. It took courage for Schlesinger to confront his old friends at the spy agency, some of whom denounced him as a traitor. The battle to take charge of the CIA would become the most fateful drama of the Kennedy presidency. 

Schlesinger began lobbying Kennedy to play a big role in reorganizing the CIA even before the smoke had cleared from the Cuba debacle. He wanted to make sure that the current tempest over the agency did not simply fade away, resulting once again in a blue-ribbon oversight committee controlled by “Dulles stooges,” as he put it. In an April 21, 1961, memo to the president Schlesinger wrote, “It is important, in my judgment, to take CIA away from the Club.” Schlesinger was not enthusiastic about Kennedy’s choice of General Taylor to oversee the White House’s Bay of Pigs postmortem, regarding the general as “very pleasant [but] a man of limited interests and imagination.” Nor was Taylor the sort of crusading official who would follow through on Kennedy’s angry impulse to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” The general, Schlesinger noted, “is quite cautious and does not seem disposed toward drastic reorganization of the intelligence services.” 

But it was Schlesinger whom Kennedy tapped to develop an ambitious CIA reorganization plan, while Taylor was limited to the Bay of Pigs inquest. The historian was able to convince JFK of his qualifications for the job, reminding him, “I served in the OSS during the war, and I have been a CIA consultant for a good deal of the period since; so that, while I am far from a professional in this field, I am a relatively experienced amateur.” 

Schlesinger threw himself into the CIA study with scholarly dedication, amassing a thick file that contained detailed critiques of the organization by Washington liberals like George McGovern and agency whistle-blowers, one of whom wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency is sick.” Schlesinger also compiled disparaging essays and investigative features about the Dulles reign from the liberal press, including The Nation and The New Republic. These were not the sources typically used when the CIA was subjected to reviews by handpicked friends of Dulles. 

The White House adviser completed his memo for revamping the CIA on June 30. He acknowledged that his proposal “implies a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” The basic problem with the CIA, as Schlesinger saw it, was that it was out of control. Under his plan, all future covert operations would be closely supervised by a Joint Intelligence Board composed of representatives from the White House and State Department. In addition, the CIA would be divided into two separate organizations: one for clandestine action, and one for the collection and analysis of intelligence. Furthermore, the agency’s name—a tainted reminder of the Dulles era—would be replaced by “some blameless title,” Schlesinger suggested, like the National Information Service. Kennedy had already made it clear that he was in strong favor of this last recommendation. If he couldn’t raze Dulles’s mausoleum to the ground, he would at least give it a new name. 

No stranger to Washington politicking, Schlesinger attempted to rally support for his plan before submitting it to the president, sending copies to Washington power attorney Clark Clifford, veteran diplomat Chip Bohlen, and JFK’s trusted aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. By the time the final draft was sent to Kennedy, it was a more complicated and unwieldy document than Schlesinger originally intended. When the Dulles forces, including Taylor himself and the CIA’s congressional allies, immediately mounted a stubborn resistance to the new plan, Kennedy realized that overhauling the U.S. intelligence complex was going to be a much trickier political process than he had hoped. Taylor argued forcefully against the Schlesinger plan, telling JFK “this is not the time for surgery, so far as the CIA is concerned, that it would damage the morale of the employees too much.” Taylor also opposed changing the agency’s name, for the same reason. 

On the morning of July 15, Bobby took Schlesinger aside at the White House and told him that the CIA reorganization was on hold until a replacement for Dulles was found. Undismayed, Schlesinger leaped immediately into the hunt for a new director. The president had briefly considered Bobby for the job but realized that his abrasive younger brother would be too politically charged a selection. Besides, RFK was already beginning each morning by dropping by CIA headquarters in Langley on his way to work in Washington so that he could keep an eye on the agency for the president. JFK even raised the possibility of putting Schlesinger in Dulles’s chair. “I imagine that the president was joking,” Schlesinger noted simply in his journal. 

Fowler Hamilton soon emerged as the leading candidate for the CIA post. Hamilton had solid credentials as a successful Wall Street lawyer, former prosecutor in FDR’s Justice Department, and a bombing analyst with the Army Air Force during World War II. Schlesinger gave the choice his blessing, telling JFK that Hamilton was a “sober, intelligent, hard-headed lawyer” who “would do the job well.” But there was something about Hamilton that set off the Dulles crowd—perhaps it was simply because he was not one of them. Or it might have been connected to the fact that Hamilton had run the war frauds unit for President Roosevelt and knew too much about the Dulles brothers. 

In any case, CIA opposition to Hamilton was so strong that Kennedy decided to abandon him, selecting instead an Eisenhower administration fixture—former AEC chairman, Republican counselor, and military industrialist John McCone. 

Now it was Schlesinger’s turn to erupt. Putting an Eisenhower retread in charge of the CIA would be a disastrous move, he warned Kennedy. It would send the wrong signal at the exact moment when the agency needed to be turned upside down. “McCone, for all his administrative qualities, is a man of crude and undiscriminating political views (or to put it more precisely, political emotions),” Schlesinger told the president in a memo. “He sees the world in terms of a set of emotion-charged stereotypes.” But Schlesinger failed to block the announcement of McCone’s appointment in September. Afterward, writing in his journal, Schlesinger tried to cheer himself up, but without much success. “The possibly consoling thought is that the President has a habit of designating ‘liberals’ to do ‘conservative’ things, and vice versa. . . . I am sure JFK knows what he is doing, and possibly my concern here will turn out to be as unwarranted as my concern last December over the appointment of Doug Dillon [as Treasury secretary], but I doubt it.” 

In October, still puzzling over McCone’s selection, Schlesinger brought up the subject again with Kennedy in the Oval Office. He asked the president if he knew McCone well. Kennedy admitted that he was not very familiar with his new appointee, but he seemed undisturbed by the prospect of working with him. Kennedy then began to vent about his outgoing CIA chief. “He was very critical of Dulles,” Schlesinger later noted, “and implied that, after Dulles, anyone would do.” 

If Kennedy thought that he was getting, in McCone, a respectable Republican front man who would readily do his bidding at the CIA, he was sorely disappointed. In May 1962, Schlesinger fell into conversation at a French embassy party with his friend, banker-diplomat W. Averell Harriman, the old Democratic Party wise man who had served as FDR’s ambassador to Moscow and was now serving JFK as a globe-trotting ambassador at large. Harriman gave Schlesinger an astringent evaluation of the new McCone regime, which he saw as little changed from the Dulles days. This was clear, Harriman confided, from looking at the policy maneuvers around Laos, the Southeast Asia sideshow in which Kennedy was determined not to get embroiled. JFK’s policy of neutrality was being “systematically sabotaged by the military and the CIA,” Harriman warned. “McCone and the people in the CIA want the president to have a setback. They want to justify the [intervention] position CIA took five years ago. They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.” 

Harriman, a veteran of Washington infighting, then advised Schlesinger how the White House should handle the CIA and military seditionists in its midst. “General George Marshall once told me that, when you change a policy, you must change the men too. The CIA has the same men—on the desk and in the field—who were responsible for the disasters of the past, and naturally they do things to prove they were right. Every big thing the CIA has tried in the Far East has been catastrophic . . . and the men responsible for these catastrophes are still there.” Kennedy’s purge of the CIA, Harriman made clear, had not been sweeping enough.

The president had lopped off the heads of the top three men at the CIA, but Dulles’s loyal deputies—like Helms and Angleton—were still running the show at Langley. And McCone, a CIA outsider who largely shared the former regime’s views, was more or less content to go along with the old Dulles policies. “McCone has no business in the New Frontier,” Harriman told Schlesinger in March 1963. Dulles’s successor “doesn’t believe in the administration,” said Harriman, and “was full of mischievous ideas and projects.” 

Two years into McCone’s tenure as CIA director, syndicated newspaper columnist Henry Taylor published a surprisingly critical piece about the intelligence agency, calling it a “sick elephant” and urging it to “quit stalking through foreign political backrooms and . . . building its own empire.” A few days later, Dulles wrote his old colleague a letter, letting Taylor know that he viewed his column as a personal betrayal and as “a direct attack on me [since] most of what you say [about the agency] happened while I was Director.” Taylor quickly replied with a long, groveling telegram, pleading that nothing he had written—or ever would write—was critical of the spy agency under Dulles’s leadership. “Certainly you must know that any attack on you by me is inconceivable. . . . No one has served this country with greater distinction, selflessness and success than you.” But Dulles made it clear to Taylor that he was still running the show at the CIA, so any distinction the columnist tried to draw between his tenure and McCone’s was false. “Since my retirement,” Dulles told Taylor, “there have been few important policy changes, and I am wholly in support of its new chief and of its recent work.” 

This is precisely what Schlesinger was afraid of when McCone took over the CIA in November 1961: that the Dulles era would continue undisturbed. That month, as Kennedy’s special assistant contemplated the new administration’s progress, he could not help falling into a glum mood. Recent conversations with liberal friends and colleagues, he wrote in his journal, “made me face up to the fact that there is no such thing as the New Frontier. We came in last January after a campaign which promised the American people a new beginning but we have really done damn little in the way of bold, new initiatives. JFK has given marvelous speeches, but they are almost too marvelous. The words kindle splendid hopes; but the reality remains as dismal as ever.” 

Schlesinger grew anxious whenever he began to sense that the old “Eisenhower-Dulles continuities” were “beginning to reassert themselves.” He yearned for Kennedy to break free from the political past, to “ignore the wisdom of the Establishment and accept the implications of his own campaign and his own instincts.” The liberal counselor’s wishes were soon to become true. 

By 1962, President Kennedy was challenging the bastions of American power on several fronts, including the corporate elite’s control of the economy. The steel industry crisis that erupted that spring laid bare the growing tensions between JFK and the Fortune 500 circle. On April 6, after yearlong negotiations between steel companies and unions—which involved the personal participation of the president himself—a deal was announced that prevented the rise of steel prices. The steel agreement—which was based on labor concessions that Kennedy administration officials had helped wring from the unions—was a major victory for JFK. The three-way pact hammered out by industry, labor, and government ensured stability throughout the economy, since rising prices in the core industry had been the biggest inflationary factor in the postwar period. “Every time steel prices jump, your pocketbook jumps—with pain,” Estes Kefauver, chairman of the Senate antitrust and monopoly subcommittee, told American consumers in 1959. 

But just four days after the Kennedy-engineered steel pact was signed, U.S. Steel chairman Roger Blough scheduled a meeting at the White House and stunned the president by informing him that he was going to announce a 3.5 percent price increase, effective at midnight—a move that would trigger price jumps at other steel companies and send inflationary ripples throughout the economy. 

Kennedy was furious at Blough’s double cross, which he correctly saw as a direct challenge to his ability to manage the economy. “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” said JFK at the height of the steel industry crisis, “but I never believed it until now”—a remark that he was happy to have leaked to Newsweek. 

While the president saw Blough as a backstabber, Luce’s Fortune magazine regarded the steel mogul as a capitalist hero, declaring him a “business statesman” who was fighting not just for his own company but on behalf of the entire corporate sector by defying the president’s authority. Blough’s company occupied a central position in the country’s corporate pantheon, which was reflected in the U.S. Steel board of directors. Blough himself was well connected within the power elite—including to Dulles, with whom he served in organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Lafayette Fellowship Foundation (part of the Ford Foundation). 

Kennedy understood that if Blough and the other colluding steel executives prevailed, his leadership would be severely undermined, not only at home but abroad. He had staked his reputation with organized labor and American consumers on the deal—and now he was faced with “the most painfully embarrassing predicament of his career,” in the view of his White House advisers. A steel industry victory would make it clear to the entire world who ran America. 

Determined to protect his presidency, over the next three days JFK unleashed the full powers of the federal government in an all-out effort to crush the steel industry rebellion. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy announced a grand jury probe of steel price-fixing, which he followed by issuing subpoenas for the personal and corporate records of steel executives and by sending FBI agents to raid their offices. “We were going to go for broke: their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing,” JFK’s brother and political enforcer later recalled. “I picked up all their records and I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices the next day. We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . All of [the steel executives] were hit with meetings the next morning by agents.” Meanwhile, Robert McNamara’s Defense Department announced that it was reviewing its steel purchasing practices, making it clear that it would favor companies that did not follow U.S. Steel’s price hike. 

Kennedy’s strong-arm tactics produced quick results. On April 12, Inland Steel—a smaller but still significant company—caved under the pressure, announcing that it would not raise prices. Bethlehem Steel soon followed, and by the next day U.S. Steel itself waved the white flag. 

In victory, JFK adopted a genial and magnanimous posture. Over dinner at the White House on May 3, Schlesinger asked Kennedy what he had said to Blough when the U.S. Steel chairman surrendered. “I told him that his men could keep their horses for the summer plowing,” smiled JFK. 

But the resentment from the steel showdown never faded away. Corporate executives continued to snipe at the president, spreading the word that his administration had destroyed “business confidence” by bringing the steel industry to heel. Senator Barry Goldwater, the voice of the rising Republican right, escalated the rhetoric, calling Kennedy’s bare-knuckled tactics against the steel barons “a display of naked political power never seen before in this nation. . . . We have passed within the shadow of police-state methods.” 

Chatting with Schlesinger in the Oval Office on June 4, Kennedy said, “I understand better every day why Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business.” JFK vowed that he was not going to appease his big business critics by taking what O’Donnell described as “an asskissing posture.” To counter the corporate assault on his presidency, said Kennedy, “we have to put out the picture of a small group of men turning against the government and the economy because the government would not surrender to them. That is the real issue.” 

Schlesinger discovered that some of the corporate sniping against the president came from within his own administration. While dining at Joe Alsop’s in late July, the watering hole where Schlesinger kept in touch with the CIA crowd, the White House adviser was disgusted to hear McCone fulminate against Kennedy’s economic policy, which the former industrialist regarded as too pro-labor. “I have rarely seen a man more completely out of sympathy” with the administration’s economic direction, Schlesinger observed in his journal. The CIA director’s “formula for economic stimulus,” wrote Schlesinger, “is to kick labor in the teeth.” 

As he continued to wrestle with the disgruntled corporate community into the fall, Kennedy longed to make the battle over the economy the centerpiece of his presidency, telling Schlesinger that he “only wished there were no Cold War so he could debate the future of America with the businessmen.” This is a remarkable and all but overlooked statement, indicating—once again— Kennedy’s visionary thinking. 

A year after the April 1962 steel blowup, Kennedy tried to make light of the controversy as he addressed a Democratic fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Told that the steel industry was presenting former president Eisenhower with its annual public service award in another banquet hall at the same hotel, JFK grinned mischievously. “I was their man of the year last year,” he told the Democratic crowd. “They wanted to come down to the White House to give me their award, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let them do it.”

Beset by the rising tensions in his government, Kennedy would bring up the awkward subject of assassination from time to time. In public, as on this occasion, he used it as a comedic device. But in private, with old friends like Red Fay, he mused about it in a more somber vein. 

The climate of conflict surrounding the Kennedy presidency had a way of evoking the grim topic. Outraged by the president’s strong stand against the steel industry, Henry Luce invoked the fate of Julius Caesar in a harsh editorial in Fortune, warning JFK that he should “beware the ides of April.” But Kennedy never backed down from his ongoing duel with the steel industry. In October 1963, just weeks before his assassination, JFK’s Justice Department filed  charges against U.S. Steel and other steel companies, based on Bobby’s earlier grand jury probe of the industry. To the end of his life, Kennedy made it clear that there would be no “ass-kissing” for those corporate powers that tried to undermine his presidency. 

After Dulles was ousted by JFK in late 1961, the Old Man’s crowd had quickly closed ranks around him. The Luces immediately offered Dulles succor, inviting Clover and him to spend the New Year holiday at their winter home in Phoenix. Clare Boothe Luce often used the Arizona estate, with its cactus garden and mesmerizing view of Camelback Mountain, to recover from her own bouts of melancholy, dropping LSD with eccentric friends like Gerald Heard, a gay Anglo-Irish writer, devotee of Eastern mysticism, and psychedelic pioneer. Clover found the Luces’ desert refuge a soothing respite from the Washington vortex, but, as she wrote Mary Bancroft from Phoenix, she knew that Allen didn’t share her sentiments: “I do feel an immense relief of burden by Shark’s being out, which he himself doesn’t feel.” 

Dulles’s growing sense of resentment toward Kennedy was shared by the Luces, who had known JFK since he was a young Navy ensign. Joe Kennedy had courted Henry Luce’s support for his son during the 1960 presidential race, dropping by the magazine mogul’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a lobster dinner on the final night of the Democratic Convention, and afterward watching TV together as JFK accepted his party’s nomination. “It was a memorable moment in my life,” Luce recalled. “It’s quite a thing to sit with an old friend and watch his son accept the nomination for the president of the United States.” 

Luce was not the type to let sentiment cloud his political judgment, however, and he remained loyal to the Republican ticket. But Life magazine, his influential flagship publication, gave Nixon a tepid endorsement, leaving the door open for Kennedy. Luce admired JFK’s intellect and cultural sophistication. But he questioned whether he would be a sufficiently aggressive foe of Communism. After finishing their lobster dinner that night, in fact, Luce had warned Joe Kennedy that he would not stand for it if JFK proved too much of a compromiser in the White House. “If he shows any signs of weakness in general toward the anti-Communist cause, or to put it more positively, any weakness in defending and advancing the cause of the free world, why then we’ll certainly be against him,” Luce told the Kennedy paterfamilias. 

The Luce honeymoon with the Kennedy administration had been short-lived. After the Bay of Pigs, Luce’s coverage of the presidency turned increasingly negative. By the spring of 1963, JFK was so exasperated with the relentless drumbeat of criticism from the Time-Life headquarters in New York that he invited the Luces to lunch at the White House to see if he could somehow sweeten the power couple’s disposition. When the press lord launched into a lengthy diatribe on Cuba, demanding that Kennedy invade the island, the president suggested that Luce was a “warmonger” and the afternoon came to an unpleasant conclusion, with the Luces marching out of the White House before dessert was served. Shortly afterward, Luce convened a remarkable war council of his top editors at Time-Life, where he declared that if the Kennedy administration was not bold enough to overthrow Castro, his corporation would take on the task. Luce and his wife were already funding raids on Cuba, with the quiet support of the CIA. Now Luce would escalate his crusade against the Castro regime, in direct defiance of Kennedy. 

Like the Time-Life building in Manhattan, Dulles’s brick house on Q Street was a boiling center of anti-Kennedy opposition. The actively “retired” spymaster maintained a busy appointments calendar, meeting not only with retired CIA old boys like Frank Wisner and Charles Cabell, but with a steady stream of top-rank, active-duty agency officials such as Angleton, Helms, Cord Meyer, and Desmond Fitzgerald. More surprisingly, Dulles also conferred with midlevel officials and operational officers such as Howard Hunt, James Hunt (a key deputy of Angleton, and no relation to Howard), and Thomas Karamessines (Helms’s right-hand man). McCone, too, routinely checked in with his predecessor, dining with him and sending him cordial notes. 

Though Howard Hunt did not occupy the same social strata as Dulles, the two men were bonded in bitterness: they both felt they had been made scapegoats for Kennedy’s failure of nerve at the Bay of Pigs. The retired spymaster sent Hunt his photograph, and Hunt gave him a copy of his angry Cuba memoir. “I wrote this book as an antidote to the despondency that seized me in the wake of the Cuba project,” Hunt explained in an August 1962 letter, “and I hope it may give you some diversion now.” Serving Dulles, Hunt wrote in an earlier letter, was “an honor I shall always cherish.” 

Fearing that his role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco would stall his CIA career under Kennedy, Hunt sought Dulles’s help in starting a new career in the private security field. “It occurs to me that one of your many business contacts might have use for me abroad, particularly if something of my background were known,” Hunt wrote Dulles in August. 

Dulles, who told Helms, “I have always thought well of Hunt,” and that he was “disposed” to help him, agreed to get together with Hunt in September. Afterward, Hunt decided to stay in the CIA, while moonlighting as a ghostwriter for Dulles. Hunt was a prolific author and had been churning out spy novels under various noms de plume since World War II. Dulles—who produced four books in retirement, including a war memoir, an intelligence handbook, and two volumes of espionage adventures—also worked on his literary projects with a young former CIA employee named Howard Roman, whose wife, Jane, was employed in Angleton’s deeply submerged counterintelligence unit. 

The CIA continued to provide a variety of services large and small for the former director, in addition to supplying him with ghostwriters and research materials. Shef Edwards, the agency’s internal security chief, even stepped in to help Dulles renew his District of Columbia driver’s license in early 1963 so that he could keep cruising the streets of Washington in his aging 1955 Pontiac sedan. Amassing wealth and luxuries had never been important to Dulles, but he did expect to be served and pampered, and the CIA continued to oblige him. 

Dulles also stayed in touch with his extensive network of friends and supporters in the U.S. military, who continued to invite him to speak at defense seminars and to play golf on military bases. He lunched with his fellow Bay of Pigs casualty, Arleigh Burke, at the Metropolitan Club. After Kennedy forced him out of the Navy, Burke quickly found another perch in Washington’s farflung national security complex, becoming chairman of the newly created Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University (now the Center for Strategic and International Studies) that he co-founded with David Abshire, a platform he used to publicly air his grievances with the Kennedy administration. Burke made dark allegations about the White House’s “dictatorial” tendencies, charging that his Georgetown offices were the target of a suspicious 1963 break-in. 

Rising Republican politicians also sought out the retired spy chief, including a young Illinois congressman named Donald Rumsfeld, who, decades later, would achieve notoriety for his own national security reign. Rumsfeld arranged for Dulles to speak about the CIA and Cuba to the 88th Congressional Club in March 1963, an event the ambitious congressman declared a “tremendous success.” 

Cuba remained the source of greatest friction within the Kennedy government. In October 1962, these tensions came close to exploding during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when virtually the entire national security circle around the president urged him to take aggressive actions that would have triggered a nuclear conflagration. JFK’s lonely stand—which was supported only by his brother and McNamara within his inner council—was a virtuoso act of leadership. As the world held its breath, the president painstakingly worked out a face-saving deal with Khrushchev that convinced the Soviet premier to withdraw his nuclear missiles from the island. 

Kennedy achieved the compromise by agreeing to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, which the Soviet Union found equally menacing. In fact, the president had been trying to get the obsolete Jupiter missiles demobilized for over a year but had been stymied by State Department foot-dragging—just one more example of the intransigence and insubordination that bedeviled his administration. JFK was furious when he learned that his original order to remove the Jupiter rockets from Turkey had been ignored. “The President believed he was President, and that, his wishes having been made clear, they would be followed and the missiles removed,” Bobby Kennedy later wrote in Thirteen Days, his memoir about the missile crisis. The President believed he was President . . . it was a striking turn of phrase, one that captured JFK’s uncertain grasp on the wheel of power. 

The searing experience of teetering on the nuclear edge had the effect of creating a survivors’ bond between Kennedy and Khrushchev. JFK came to respect the Soviet leader’s earthy wisdom and his surprising eloquence on behalf of peace. “At the climax of events around Cuba, there began to be a smell of burning in the air,” Khrushchev evocatively began a speech he gave a few weeks after the missile crisis, in which he denounced the “militarists” who had sought a nuclear confrontation. Kennedy read aloud part of the speech to Schlesinger, adding, “Khrushchev certainly has some good writers!” 

The feelings of respect were mutual. The Soviet leader later said he came to greatly admire JFK during the missile crisis. “He didn’t let himself become frightened, nor did he become reckless,” Khrushchev commented. “He showed real wisdom and statesmanship when he turned his back on right-wing forces in the United States who were trying to goad him into taking military action in Cuba.” 

Kennedy’s sincerity in the quest for peace continued to impress Khrushchev the following June, when the U.S. leader gave an electrifying oration at American University, in which he soundly rejected the bellicose assumptions of the Cold War. The address, which would go down in history as the Peace Speech, carried echoes of Khrushchev’s own heartfelt pleas to Kennedy at the height of the Cuban crisis, when he had told JFK that the Russian people were neither “barbarians” nor “lunatics” and they loved life as much as the American people. At American University, Kennedy invoked the same sentiments, in the poetic cadence of speechwriter Sorensen. “We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” 

JFK reinforced his pathbreaking speech by dispatching Averell Harriman to Moscow the following month to hammer out a limited nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev—the first diplomatic breakthrough in the struggle to control the weapons race. When the triumphant Harriman returned home, his Georgetown neighbors poured into the street outside his brick town house on P Street to celebrate his achievement. One young woman, who was carrying a baby in her arms, told the old diplomat, “I brought him because what you did in Moscow will make it possible for him to look ahead to a full and happy life.” The crusty millionaire was touched by the effusive neighborhood welcome. Harriman told Schlesinger that by picking him for the mission—instead of one of the usual Cold War envoys—Kennedy had “persuaded Khrushchev that we really wanted an agreement” and were not simply “going through the motions.” Khrushchev had a fondness for Harriman, whom he called “my friend, the imperialist.” 

JFK once confided to his friend Bill Walton, “I am almost a ‘peace-at-any price’ president.” It was a wry reference to the insult that Barry Goldwater, positioning himself for the 1964 presidential race, had begun flinging at political opponents he deemed insufficiently hawkish. By 1963, the military and espionage officials in Kennedy’s government were all too aware of their commander in chief’s dedication to peace—a growing commitment to détente with the Communist world that, in the minds of the national security high command, demonstrated JFK’s naïveté and weakness and put the country at risk. The leadership ranks in the Pentagon and the CIA were convinced that the Cuban Missile Crisis had been the ideal opportunity for Kennedy to finally knock out the Castro regime by launching a full-scale military invasion or even a nuclear broadside. The peaceful resolution of the crisis left Kennedy’s warriors in an ugly mood. Daniel Ellsberg, who later became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, observed the seething fury among uniformed officers when he was serving as a young defense analyst: “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles. Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup—I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” 

The anti-Kennedy feelings were particularly virulent in the Air Force, which was under the command of cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, who had made his savage mark on history with the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II. The president and the general regarded each other with barely concealed disgust. Twenty-five years after JFK’s death, LeMay and his top Air Force generals were still brooding about Kennedy when they sat down to be interviewed for an official Air Force oral history project. “The Kennedy administration,” LeMay growled, “thought that being as strong as we were was provocative to the Russians and likely to start a war. We in the Air Force, and I personally, believed the exact opposite.” 

LeMay and his generals continued to angrily replay the “lost opportunity” of the Cuban Missile Crisis: it was the moment “we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba,” LeMay declared. “We walked Khrushchev up to the brink of nuclear war, he looked over the edge, and had no stomach for it,” said General David Burchinal, who served as LeMay’s deputy during the crisis. “We would have written our own book at that time, but our politicians did not understand what happens when you have such a degree of superiority as we had, or they simply didn’t know how to use it. They were busily engaged in saving face for the Soviets and making concessions, giving up the . . . Jupiters deployed overseas—when all we had to do was write our own ticket.” [What an arrogant prick DC]

By spring 1963, after two years of turbulence, it was clear that Kennedy was searching for a way to defuse Cuba as an international flashpoint. Abiding by his missile crisis agreement with Khrushchev, the president began to crack down on the anti-Castro raids operating out of Florida and to withdraw funding from the militant exile groups. In April, the leader of the Miami-based Cuban Revolutionary Council, the umbrella organization that tied together the antiCastro movement, announced his resignation, accusing the administration of cutting a deal with Moscow to “coexist” with Castro. It was now clear that— despite his pronouncements of solidarity with Cuban “freedom fighters”— Kennedy was not serious about overthrowing the Havana regime. This marked the fateful turning point when the rabid, CIA-sponsored activity that had been aimed at Castro shifted its focus to Kennedy. 

As Kennedy de-escalated the U.S. campaign against Havana, the violent anti-Castro network of spooks, political extremists, paramilitary adventurers, and assassins went underground. The scheming in hotbeds of exile activity like Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas grew more vicious in the spring and early summer of 1963. Mysterious characters with blood in their eyes began to make their appearance on history’s stage. 

One day, Dulles called his former lover, Clare Luce, to warn her about the Kennedy administration’s crackdown on the maritime raids she was helping to finance. “He said to get out of that boat business—he was well aware of it, by the way—because the neutrality act has now been reasserted and it was against the law to aid or abet the Cubans in any attempts to free their country.”

Dulles’s old friend, Bill Pawley, the right-wing Miami entrepreneur who had long collaborated on secret CIA missions, was also warned about his involvement in the exile raids. But he remained defiant, hatching a plot so ambitious that he claimed it would bring down Kennedy himself. In April, Pawley wrote a long letter to his political comrade, Dick Nixon, declaring, “All of the Cubans and most Americans in this part of the country believe that to remove Castro, you must first remove Kennedy, and that is not going to be easy.” Pawley’s plan was to assemble a rogue’s crew of Mafia hit men and Cuban desperadoes and to set sail on his sixty-five-foot yacht, the Flying Tiger II, for the waters off Cuba, accompanied by a reporter and photographer from Life magazine to document the daring mission. Once ashore in Cuba, the raiders were to rendezvous with two Soviet military officers based on the island who wanted to defect, bringing them back to the United States with explosive evidence that Khrushchev had double-crossed Kennedy and had never withdrawn his missiles. The mission went nowhere: there were no missiles or Soviet defectors, and the raiders themselves disappeared, presumably into the jaws of Castro’s security forces. 

Years later, two of the mercenaries who had slithered through Miami’s anti Castro underworld in the early 1960s claimed that the Pawley raid had really been a cover for yet another CIA-Mafia assassination attempt on Castro. The plotting against the Cuban leader continued to flourish, even after the CIA assured the Kennedy administration that it had terminated its alliance with the Mafia. Two emissaries from the CIA informed Bobby Kennedy of the assassination plots at a meeting in his Justice Department office in May 1962. The attorney general, who had built his law enforcement reputation as an aggressive mob hunter, listened to the CIA men with barely contained fury. “I trust that if you ever do business with organized crime again—with gangsters— you will let the attorney general know,” he said with icy sarcasm. The CIA officials assured Bobby that the Eisenhower-approved plots had been shut down —but, in truth, they would continue, without the Kennedys’ knowledge, throughout their administration and for many years after. 

The displays of disrespect for President Kennedy’s authority grew more glaring in the clubs and suites of Washington’s permanent government. By the spring of 1963, JFK was painfully aware of the profound miscalculation he had made by appointing Eisenhower-Dulles holdovers and “designating conservatives to do liberal things”—particularly in the case of John McCone. In March, the president’s secret White House recording system picked up a heated conversation between the Kennedy brothers about their increasingly disloyal CIA director. McCone, Bobby informed his brother, was going around Washington feeding anti-Kennedy information to the press. “He’s a real bastard, that John McCone,” responded JFK. “Well, he was useful at a time,” observed Bobby. “Yeah,” replied the president ruefully, “but, boy, it’s really evaporated.” 

Meanwhile, Dulles—who had made a show of harmony with the White House early in his retirement, telling friends he would continue to consult with the president—no longer felt a need to keep up the pretense. He became increasingly outspoken in his remarks about Kennedy, despite the earlier reticence he had displayed “for the good of the country.” In June, after delivering a lecture in Cold Spring Harbor, near his Long Island home, Dulles told reporters that he “doubted” he would ever be willing to work again for the Kennedy administration. He also made clear that the president was not serious about ousting Castro. “I don’t know of anything that can be done about Cuba—short of intervention,” he said. “Once a Communist regime gets fastened in a country and the military regime is built up, it’s hard to get that [regime] changed.” 

In October 1963, Dulles went public with his most direct criticism of the Kennedy administration in a militant address that he titled “The Art of Persuasion: America’s Role in the Ideological Struggle.” In it, Dulles ridiculed the administration’s “yearning to be ‘loved’ by the rest of the world. . . . No country that wishes to be really popular should aspire to or accept the role of leadership.” The United States was “too rich and too powerful” to be loved, Dulles declared—and that’s the way it must remain. 

“I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us,” he continued. “They should realize that we propose to remain strong economically and militarily, that we have firm principles and a steady foreign policy and will not compromise with communism or appease it.” Here it was, at last, Dulles’s critique of the Kennedy presidency, in stark relief. JFK was an appeaser, a weak leader who wanted to be loved by our friends and enemies, when the man in the White House should be feared and respected. 

Dulles maintained a busy schedule throughout 1963—speaking, traveling, and meeting with an intriguing mix of intelligence colleagues, high-powered friends, and, at least on one occasion, a member of the anti-Castro demimonde. The pages from Dulles’s crowded 1963 calendar that were later released by the CIA contain numerous gaps and blackouts. But, even with the curious blanks, his appointments book has the look of belonging to an active espionage professional who was still fully engaged in a subterranean life. Dulles’s calendar pages and other declassified documents give provocative hints about the retired spy chief’s life, including the identities of some of the obscure characters with whom he was associating. Here was a man, say these pages, to whom people still looked to get things done. 

In the summer of 1963, Peter Dale Scott, a young English literature professor at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, found himself in the thick of anti-Kennedy ferment. Scott, the son of distinguished Canadian poet F. R. Scott, a mentor of Leonard Cohen, had served as a Canadian diplomat to Poland, and much of his social life when he arrived in Berkeley revolved around passionately anti-Soviet Polish émigrés. One day, a former Polish army colonel who had befriended Scott invited him to a dinner party at the Palo Alto home of W. Glenn Campbell, the intellectual entrepreneur who built Stanford’s Hoover Institution into a leading center of the conservative resurgence in America. At Campbell’s home that evening, the conversation among the sixteen or so guests soon grew heated as it turned to the man in the White House. “In those days, I was not very active politically, but I was amazed, even shocked, at how reactionary the conversation became around the dinner table,” Scott later recalled. “Most of the talk focused on the danger presented to the nation by its aberrant president, John F. Kennedy. His failure to dispose of Castro, especially during the missile crisis, may have been one of the chief complaints, but it was by no means the only one. The complaints threatened to drag on forever, until one man spoke up with authority. I’m not sure, but he may even have stood up to do so.” 

The striking figure who commanded the group’s attention was a Russian Orthodox priest in a dark cassock with a crucifix around his neck. He spoke quietly, but with confidence, assuring the group that they had no need to worry. “The Old Man will take care of it,” he said simply. 

At the time, Scott assumed the priest was referring to old Joe Kennedy, who presumably could be counted on to set his son straight. But by 1963, the Kennedy patriarch was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a massive stroke in December 1961 that left him severely debilitated. It was not until years later that Scott realized the Russian priest was more likely referring to someone else. By then, the Berkeley professor was a respected dean of the JFK assassination research community and had devoted years to studying the political forces surrounding the president’s murder. In conversation with a fellow Kennedy researcher one day, Scott was reminded of the nickname by which Allen Dulles was affectionately known in intelligence circles: the Old Man. 

On that summer evening in 1963, the Russian émigré priest spoke with the calm assurance of a man who knew something the other dinner guests did not. The Old Man will take care of it. That was enough to calm the heated discussion around the table. The Old Man will take care of the Kennedy problem. 

Among the peculiar figures with whom Dulles met in the spring and summer of 1963 was a militant anti-Castro exile named Paulino Sierra Martinez, whose background and affiliations were so murky that even the CIA labeled him “a mystery man” in a memo dated November 20. According to an internal CIA document, Sierra arranged to meet with Dulles and retired Army general Lucius D. Clay in Washington on April 15, 1963. Dulles and Clay were unusual company for a man who, not long before, had been working as a judo instructor in Miami while studying for his law examinations. 

Like Dulles, General Clay occupied positions in the top ranks of the American establishment. After serving as the U.S. military governor in postwar Germany, Clay had worked with Dulles in Cold War propaganda projects like the Crusade for Freedom, returning to Germany in 1961 as an adviser to President Kennedy during the Berlin Wall crisis. Clay dangerously escalated the crisis without the president’s authorization by threatening to knock down the recently erected wall with U.S. Army tanks. It took all of the Kennedy brothers’ back-channel diplomatic skills to defuse the confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. A disgusted Clay later accused Kennedy of losing his “nerve.” By 1963, Clay had given up military service for a corporate career, taking a senior partner position with Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment firm, as well as board seats at General Motors and other major companies. 

Paulino Sierra Martinez was not the type of man with whom Dulles or Clay normally dined at the Army and Navy Club or the Metropolitan Club. The son of a Cuban police sergeant, Sierra had worked his way up in Havana society, landing a job in dictator Fulgencio Batista’s foreign ministry. But some of his intimates suspected that Sierra’s government post was a cover for his true profession, as a Batista assassin. Fleeing Castro’s Cuba, Sierra settled first in Miami, but after passing his U.S. bar exams, he went to work in the legal department of the Chicago-based Union Tank Car Company, a railroad freight company that had been built by the Rockefeller family. It was in Chicago that Sierra suddenly emerged as a mysterious player in the confusing and conflict ridden Cuban exile movement. 

In May 1963, following his Washington meeting with Dulles and Clay, Sierra —who was virtually unknown in anti-Castro circles—convened a meeting of Cuban exile leaders at the Royalton Hotel in Miami. The leaders were skeptical about the tall, well-dressed man from Chicago, with the long, homely face that put some people in mind of Lincoln. But the anti-Castro movement was in disarray following Kennedy’s withdrawal of support, and Sierra arrived in Miami with an enticing proposal—and the promise of big money to go along with it. 

Sierra told the group that he represented an alliance of major U.S. corporations that wanted to regain their lost investments in Cuba. He did not name the companies, but on other occasions he dropped such Fortune 500 brand names as United Fruit, U.S. Steel, DuPont, and Standard Oil. Sierra claimed that these corporations were willing to put up as much as $30 million if the fractured anti-Castro movement could reassemble itself and mount an invasion of the island. He explained that such an operation would not have Washington’s official approval but would be supported by officers within the U.S. military, who would help provide weapons and training bases. 

Freely spreading money around, Sierra attracted enough support from within the anti-Castro network to form a coalition he ambitiously titled the Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile. He crisscrossed the country, drumming up support for the new organization and going on a weapons-buying spree. The sources of Sierra’s funds, which were passed to him through Union Tank Car, remained something of a mystery, although an article in The Miami News indicated that at least some of his money was coming from organized crime lords who were intent on winning back their Havana gambling casinos and prostitution franchises, which before Castro had been a source of enormous underworld profits. 

Law enforcement agencies began tracking Sierra as he pursued his shady agenda, but in June the FBI terminated its investigation after concluding that he was involved in nothing more than a “con job.” The Chicago office of the Secret Service, however, suspected that Sierra was a more sinister figure. By November 1963, Chicago—like Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas—had become a nest of anti-Kennedy intrigue. On November 2, local Secret Service officials foiled a well-organized assassination plot against President Kennedy. After landing at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that day, Kennedy was scheduled to ride in a motorcade to Soldier Field for the annual Army-Navy football game. But the motorcade was canceled after the Secret Service exposed a plot to ambush the president from a tall warehouse building as his limousine slowed for a hairpin turn. The plot, which involved a sniper team composed of a disgruntled ex-marine who worked in the building and at least two Cuban marksmen, bore a disturbing resemblance to the series of events that would claim Kennedy’s life twenty days later in Dallas. 

The Secret Service could not connect Sierra to the Chicago assassination plot, but his name did come up in relation to another troubling report. On November 21, the day before JFK’s assassination, a serious threat against the president was made by an outspoken anti-Kennedy Cuban exile leader named Homer Echevarria. While negotiating an illegal arms purchase, Echevarria reportedly said that he had “plenty of money” and would conclude the deal “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.” Sources told the Secret Service that the Echevarria weapons purchase was being financed by Sierra with mob money. After the president’s assassination, the Secret Service planned to pursue an investigation into Echevarria’s threat and the Sierra arms deal, but the agency’s probe was shut down by the FBI after President Johnson gave the bureau responsibility for the case. 

Following Kennedy’s death, Paulino Sierra Martinez faded from the front lines of the anti-Castro campaign. Accused by Union Tank Car’s legal counsel of wasting the Junta’s funds, he was eventually replaced as head of the organization. But according to relatives of Sierra, he continued to pursue his underground war against Castro and other left-wing leaders in Latin America. Tough-looking men carrying concealed rifles showed up from time to time at Sierra’s Chicago apartment—men whom one of his children described as “father’s banditos.” Sierra, who frequently packed his own gun, even when taking his young granddaughter to the zoo one day, continued to travel widely well into the 1970s, including to Chile, where he briefly relocated during the CIA-orchestrated unrest that led to the violent overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973.

Although Sierra never discussed his hidden life with his son, Paul Sierra became convinced that his father was involved with U.S. intelligence. “I think that personally, Father’s patriotism and hatred for the Communists made him go a little overboard,” the younger man concluded. 

More than a dozen years after the Secret Service’s abortive effort to find out more about Paulino Sierra Martinez, the House Select Committee on Assassinations—which reopened the JFK case in the 1970s—again raised questions about Sierra. The sprawling congressional investigation ultimately concluded that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, but it was unable to pin down the identities of those involved or the source of their funds. Committee investigators were intrigued by Sierra’s unsavory connections, including to three sketchy characters who showed up with Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas home of Silvia Odio, the daughter of a prominent anti-Castro activist, in September 1963. But, in the end, lacking the time and resources to fully pursue its leads, the congressional panel was forced to acknowledge that the “relevance to the assassination” of Sierra’s activities “remained undetermined.” 

At least the House Select Committee on Assassinations tried to shed some light on Sierra and his auspices. The first official inquest into President Kennedy’s assassination—conducted by the Warren Commission in 1964—made no serious effort to examine anti-Castro militants like Sierra and their connections to the CIA and organized crime. Despite the Secret Service’s suspicions about Sierra, his name appears nowhere in the Warren Report’s twenty-six volumes. Allen Dulles, a prominent member of the Warren Commission, could have revealed what he knew about Sierra. But Dulles never brought up Sierra’s name—nor did he ever inform fellow commission members that he had met with someone whom the Secret Service regarded as a person of interest in the Kennedy assassination. 

It remains one of the many enduring mysteries of the Kennedy case. Why did Dulles meet with Paulino Sierra Martinez in April 1963? What brought together the former CIA director and an obscure, Mafia-connected, anti-Castro conspirator with a penchant for violent action? As Dulles was keenly aware, organizing a paramilitary operation against the Cuban government was, by the spring of 1963, a violation of Kennedy administration policy and of federal law. By meeting with a character like Sierra, Dulles made it abundantly clear how little regard he had for the president’s authority—and perhaps for his life.

17

The Parting Glass 

In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy flew to Europe for what would be the final overseas trip of his life. Although he had left Washington, the forces of political tumult set loose by his presidency followed him abroad. These forces came swirling together in Rome during JFK’s official visit to the ancient imperial capital, where tour guides still pointed out the stone steps on which Julius Caesar’s blood was spilled. 

On the sultry evening of July 1, Kennedy was feted by Italian president Antonio Segni at the Quirinale Palace, the official residence of popes, kings, and chiefs of state since the sixteenth century. At the formal banquet—watched over by the extravagantly uniformed Corazzieri honor guard, in their torso-hugging white tunics and gold helmets with flowing horsetails—Segni paid tribute during his toast to Kennedy’s recent Peace Speech at American University. Kennedy’s “dynamic” quest for peace, declared Segni, was a welcome break from the “static” era of nuclear deadlock. After Segni concluded his welcoming remarks, JFK stood up and reiterated his peace message, telling the assembled dignitaries that “war is not inevitable, and that an effective end to the arms race would offer greater security than its indefinite continuation.” Invoking Italy’s volatile political history, Kennedy then warned of “the siren temptation of those with seemingly swift and easy answers on the far right and the far left.” It was up to those who advocated “social justice and progress and human rights,” said Kennedy, to make the more difficult ideals of democracy a reality for people all over the world. 

Kennedy’s Italian itinerary, which included an audience with the new pope, Paul VI, at the Vatican and a side trip to Naples, was the finale to a triumphant European tour that was highlighted by a sentimental stopover in Ireland and his resounding challenge to Soviet tyranny at the Berlin Wall (“Ich bin ein Berliner . . .”). The crowds in Rome that greeted Kennedy’s motorcade were comparatively sparse, as the presidential limousine and its police motorcycle squadron made the long and winding trip to the Quirinale along the boulevards and narrow streets of the capital. The Eternal City could be blasé about visiting dignitaries, and the summer heat was sweltering. Yet underneath the city’s unruffled exterior ran a shiver of excitement about the visiting American president who cut such a bella figura—particularly in contrast to Italy’s aging, white-haired leaders. Even L’Unità, the Italian Communist Party newspaper, appreciatively noted JFK’s tall, tan good looks and his stylish blue-gray suit and purple tie. 

But as the young American president was taking the spotlight at the Quirinale, the forces aligned against him were converging in Rome. Behind the elaborate festivities at the palace that night was an intense Italian political drama, one with international ramifications. Since the mid-1950s, Italy had been hotly debating l’apertura a sinistra—“the opening to the left”—a political deal that would peel away the Socialist Party from its traditional Communist Party allies and result in a left-center coalition with the ruling Christian Democrats. Pietro Nenni, the wily, seventy-two-year-old political survivor who headed the Socialist Party, had been diligently trying to maneuver his party away from its alliance with the Italian Communists ever since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Nenni hoped that with a forward-looking new president in the White House, the United States—which had quietly dominated Italian politics since World War II —would finally give its blessing to the apertura. 

The Eisenhower administration had flatly opposed the opening to the left, seeing a Socialist partnership with the Christian Democrats as a slippery slope that would lead to a Communist-dominated government in Rome. Eisenhower officials worried that if the Socialists were allowed into Italy’s government, they would try to steer Rome on a neutral course between Washington and Moscow. The CIA—which had a proprietary sensibility about Italy, dating back to its well-funded, covert campaign to thwart a Communist Party victory in the country’s 1948 elections—engaged in its usual schemes, along with its allies in the Italian intelligence services, to block the apertura. The agency’s anti-left strategy in Italy was spearheaded by Jim Angleton who, with his deep personal roots in the country, had turned Rome into a key Cold War battleground. The Eisenhower administration’s resistance to the apertura was further enforced by Clare Booth Luce, Ike’s ambassador to Rome. 

It was Arthur Schlesinger who convinced President Kennedy to break with Eisenhower policy and support Italy’s opening to the left. “My impression is that [Nenni] has honestly broken with the Communists,” the White House aide informed Kennedy in a March 1962 memo. Schlesinger had his own sentimental attachment to Italy, dating back to his boyhood when his father offered sanctuary in Harvard’s history department to anti-Mussolini exile Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian Socialist politician and historian. 

Angleton was so furious about the new tilt in favor of Nenni’s Socialists that he began telling people that Schlesinger was a Soviet agent. Meanwhile, former ambassador Luce lobbied frantically against the apertura, dashing off a long, somewhat incoherent letter to JFK in February 1963, filled with random observations about the growing threat from the left in Rome. “Italy’s pro-West government has had one foot on the Moscow banana peel for seventeen years,” she observed. If the “pro-Communist Socialists” were brought into power, “the Italian Communist Party will negotiate Italy’s future with the U.S.S.R.” Luce concluded by warning the president not to fall into a left-wing trap during his visit to Rome. “In the present climate, there is a real possibility you may be very embarrassed by the enthusiastic reception you will get from the Communists! I can see the banners now: ‘Vivo [sic] Kennedy e Khrushchev!’” 

Frustrated by the stubborn bureaucratic resistance that Kennedy was receiving from within his own government to his shifting policy on Italy, Schlesinger sent the president an angry memo in January 1963. “Lest you think you run the U.S. government, the [Italy] matter is still under debate,” the White House aide acidly remarked. 

But President Kennedy eventually ignored the political pushback and embraced Italy’s apertura. He became so enamored of the idea of building a strong center-left coalition to anchor Italy’s turbulent politics that he arranged for United Auto Workers leaders Walter and Victor Reuther, to whom he had strong political ties, to help fund Nenni’s party. JFK’s trip to Rome gave him the opportunity to officially anoint the opening to the left. 

After dinner at the Quirinale, Kennedy used the rest of the evening to quietly communicate his views to the leading Italian political figures gathered at the event. As the president strolled along the gravel paths of the lush palace garden, he was approached by various politicians and officials, including Palmiro Togliatti, the head of Italy’s potent Communist Party, with whom he exchanged a few words. When an Italian news photographer snapped a shot of the two men in conversation, Kennedy later asked him for the film, concerned about the impact that the photo might have in Italy’s fraught political climate. Amazingly, the photographer obliged the American president.

In a far corner of the garden, a low wooden platform bathed in spotlights had been set up for the president to hold private audiences with Italy’s dignitaries. The longest conversation that Kennedy held that evening was with the old Socialist warrior, Pietro Nenni. As the two men huddled together on the little stage, their faces nearly touching, they were a study in contrasts: Kennedy tall, youthful, and glamorous; Nenni, diminutive, bespectacled, and balding. But Nenni clearly felt he had found a political soul mate in Kennedy. The previous year, Nenni had tweaked the U.S. foreign policy establishment with an essay in Foreign Affairs, in which he defended his party’s neutralist stand in the Cold War and attacked Western imperialism, charging U.S. and European governments with backing “Fascist-type dictatorships” in the Third World. “They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in shoring up rotten situations doomed in any case to crumble,” wrote the Italian. “They have opened doors to Communists instead of supporting democratic and socialist forces that would be capable of directing the impulse to freedom of the colonial peoples.” Now, as a long line of other Italian politicians waited impatiently to speak with Kennedy, Nenni was engaged in rapt conversation with an American president who had voiced the same sentiments. 

When his audience with Kennedy finally came to an end, Nenni was “absolutely enraptured and happy as he could be,” according to a U.S. embassy official who was there. Stepping off the platform, the old man wrapped his arms around his wife and murmured something into her ear. As they walked away, Nenni wiped tears from his eyes. Later, Nenni’s wife told a group of American diplomats attending the Quirinale event that her husband had been “enchanted” by JFK. The Socialist leader was convinced that his political dream was about to come true: after years of determined U.S. resistance, Italy’s democratic left was at last to become part of the government. 

The president, too, thought his trip to Rome was a “considerable success,” telling Schlesinger on his return to Washington that he had a “good talk” with Nenni and adding, “So far as I could see, everyone in Italy is for an opening to the left.” 

But Allen Dulles and his old cohorts in the CIA’s Rome station did not share the president’s enthusiasm for the Italian political developments, and they boldly communicated their dissent to Christian Democratic officials. This is a remarkable and, until now, unreported story, one that sheds new light on the growing fissures in the Kennedy administration. Shortly after JFK flew home from Italy, Dino John Pionzio, the CIA’s leading operator in Italy at the time, huddled with Sereno Freato, the administrative secretary of Aldo Moro—a rising star in the Christian Democratic Party who would soon become Italy’s prime minister. Pionzio, a Skull and Bones member at Yale (Class of 1950) and zealous Cold Warrior, was adamantly opposed to the opening to the left. The CIA man wanted to know what Moro had discussed with Kennedy a few days earlier during an afternoon stroll that JFK and the Italian politician had taken through the Quirinale garden. To his great dismay, Pionzio was told that Moro and Kennedy had agreed the apertura should go forward. 

Dulles and the CIA felt they had a proprietary relationship with the Christian Democrats, ever since those early Cold War days when the agency began funneling money to the Italian party. Dulles himself had confirmed this arrangement when he was CIA director, during a secret meeting with Moro that was held in Freato’s Rome office. Following this meeting, the Christian Democratic Party became the beneficiary of CIA funds that arrived promptly on a monthly schedule. By the early 1960s, the party was receiving 60 million lire a month (about $100,000) from the spy agency. In the beginning, it was Freato who collected the cash in a large suitcase, a duty that later fell to other administrative secretaries of the party. These monthly CIA payoffs to the party were in addition to the under-the-table contributions made to the Christian Democrats during various political campaigns. 

Pionzio’s meeting with Freato put the Christian Democrats on notice: their budding alliance with the Socialists did not enjoy full support in Washington, particularly in national security circles. Afterward, Moro, who had received conflicting messages from Kennedy and the CIA within a matter of days, could be forgiven if he was confused about who was actually running the U.S. government. The CIA’s attempt to subvert the apertura was one more flagrant example of how the agency sought to undermine the Kennedy presidency, as well as Italian democracy. 

In November 1963, Aldo Moro finally formed a coalition government with the Socialists, despite the less-than-enthusiastic reaction from the Christian Democrats’ patrons in the CIA. Socialist leaders hoped that the historic center left partnership would lead to a new golden age of social progress for Italy. But their dreams were not fulfilled. Even before JFK’s assassination on November 22, the die-hard opponents of the apertura in the CIA and Italian intelligence services were actively conspiring to sabotage the deal. When William K. Harvey arrived in Italy in summer 1963 to take over the Rome CIA station, the offensive against democracy, in Italy and the United States, took a dark turn.

Bill Harvey was an odd choice for Rome station chief. He spoke no Italian and he had no affinity for the Italian people or interest in their history and culture. A gruff, bulbous man with a frog-like voice, he was born and raised in a small Indiana town and had none of the cosmopolitan polish of his Ivy League–bred CIA colleagues. Harvey began his intelligence career as an FBI gumshoe, but his hard-drinking habits did not go down well in J. Edgar Hoover’s stern nanny culture, and he jumped ship for the newly formed CIA in 1947. The bluntspoken, pistol-packing Harvey was not a good fit with the CIA either, but the agency would find ways to put him to use. Dulles and Helms thought he had a “cop” mentality. Harvey, in turn, dismissed the CIA’s upper echelons as “Fifth Avenue cowboys” and “fucking namby-pambies.” He was no hayseed, he felt obliged to remind colleagues—he had been raised by a single mother who became a full professor at Indiana State University, and he had a law degree. He liked to rattle the agency’s Ivy League types during meetings by pulling out one of the many guns he owned, spinning the cylinder and checking the load, as if he were about to use it. 

From his days as an FBI Red-hunter, when he tracked down Communists and fellow travelers in Washington, Harvey became convinced that high society was riddled with traitors. Harvey’s class resentments no doubt played a role when he became the first CIA official to sniff out Kim Philby, the witty, urbane, Cambridge-educated double agent who was stationed in Washington from 1949 to 1951. At one of Philby’s liquor-soaked parties, Guy Burgess—the most flamboyant member of the Cambridge spy ring—drew a lewd, crotch-baring caricature of Harvey’s wife, Libby, a boozy Indiana gal who never fit into the CIA social set. A drunken Harvey threw himself at Burgess and had to be pulled away by Angleton. It was the Indiana “cop” who saw through Philby, not Angleton, who remained forever beguiled by his British friend. Angleton and Harvey were the odd couple of CIA counterintelligence—“the poet and the cop,” as one observer called them. They would alternately clash and connive together throughout their careers. 

Harvey’s star rose at the agency after he exposed Philby, and he was dispatched to the Cold War front lines in Germany, where he ran the CIA’s Berlin station during the 1950s. His reputation continued to grow as he constantly searched for new ways to take the battle to the Soviet enemy. While in Germany, Harvey worked closely with Reinhard Gehlen’s notorious organization, and Gehlen came to consider him a “very esteemed [and] really reliable friend.” 

The Berlin spy tunnel—an underground surveillance project that wormed its way into the city’s Russian sector, permitting the CIA to eavesdrop on enemy communications—was Harvey’s most dramatic coup. Dulles, who always had a soft spot for espionage theatrics, called Harvey’s tunnel “one of the most daring and valuable operations ever,” even though the Soviets quickly discovered the subterranean project and began using it to feed disinformation to the Americans. Despite Harvey’s crude ways and his penchant for intemperate action, Dulles, who needed action heroes to boost the agency’s image, helped turn him into a CIA legend, awarding him the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s highest accolade. 

Dulles brought Harvey back to Washington in 1959. By then he had a second wife, Clara Grace (“CG”) Harvey, a big, vivacious woman who had enjoyed her own successful career in the U.S. military and CIA. One of CG Harvey’s secret assignments involved accompanying former Nazi rocket scientists, including Werner von Braun, and their families on flights to the United States, where they were put to work on U.S. missile and space projects. When Bill and CG—whom he called “Mommy”—returned home, they brought with them their adopted daughter, Sally, whom they had found as an infant when she was left in a cardboard shoe box on the doorstep of their West Berlin home. Back in Washington, Harvey had high ambitions: he wanted to run the agency’s Soviet division, a top post that he thought he had earned by his aggressive performance in Germany. But the CIA elite, who continued to think of him as a cop, steered him into rougher assignments. 

Dulles named Harvey chief of the agency’s Division D, the unit in charge of signals intelligence—gathering information through various means of electronic eavesdropping, which the CIA shared with the National Security Agency. But Division D also seemed to have more mysterious functions. In October 1960, according to one agency document, Harvey made a trip to Europe that was largely intended for him to recruit criminal underworld figures for secret CIA missions. Among those he sought out were safecrackers and break-in specialists. Harvey would soon be dealing with men whose skills were of a more violent nature. 

In November 1961, Harvey was put in charge of the top secret CIA operation to kill Castro, code-named ZR/RIFLE. He quickly nudged aside Bob Maheu, the independent contractor the CIA had originally hired to run its murder racket in the Caribbean, and began working directly with Mafia ambassador at large, Johnny Rosselli. 

The dumpy, baggy-panted cop and the dapper, silver-haired gangster with the tailored suits formed a tight, if unlikely, bond. Harvey invited Rosselli to dinner at his family’s spacious Chevy Chase home, where little Sally took to calling him “Uncle Johnny.” The two men had secret, martini-fueled rendezvous in the Miami area, where the CIA maintained its largest station, JM/WAVE, and operated a bustling network of paramilitary training bases as well as safe houses in the posh Coral Gables and Key Biscayne neighborhoods. Harvey provided Rosselli with vials of poison and stockpiles of guns to pass along to the Mafia’s hired killers in Cuba. Nothing ever came of the two men’s Cuba schemes, and Castro continued to thrive. But Harvey never lost faith in his Mafia partner. Regardless of his criminal background, Rosselli was a man of “integrity as far as I was concerned,” Harvey would tell Senate investigators years later, a man who was always loyal and dependable “in his dealings with me.” 

“I loved Rosselli,” CG Harvey said during an interview at her Indianapolis retirement home in 1999, the year before she died. “My husband always used to say that if I had to ride shotgun, that’s the guy I would take with me. Much better than any of the law enforcement people. Rosselli was the kind of guy that if he gave you his desires and friendship, well he was going to stick by you. And he definitely was Mafia, and he definitely was a crook, and he definitely had pulled off all kinds of stunts with the Mafia. But he was a patriot, he believed in the United States. And he knew my husband was a patriot, and that’s what drew him to Bill.” 

In 1962, Helms—who, along with Angleton, had replaced the “retired” Dulles as Harvey’s main patrons at the agency—promoted the agency tough guy, naming him head of the CIA’s entire Cuba operation, Task Force W. Helms and Harvey kept much of the operation, including their assassination efforts against Castro, a secret from President Kennedy as well as from CIA director McCone. Harvey grew deeply contemptuous of the Kennedy brothers, whom he regarded as rich boys who were playing with the nation’s security. He concluded that their subversion program aimed at overthrowing Castro’s regime, code-named Operation Mongoose, was all for show. Harvey thought so little of the man JFK put in charge of Mongoose, Air Force officer Edward Lansdale, that he would lift his ass in the middle of their meetings and let loose a fart or pull out a knife and begin to trim his nails. 

Harvey came to hate Bobby Kennedy—the CIA overseer who was constantly nipping at his heels—most of all. RFK browbeat Harvey so severely during one White House meeting on Cuba that Max Taylor later told the attorney general, “You could sack a town and enjoy it.” Harvey took to calling RFK “that fucker” and began suggesting that some of the attorney general’s actions bordered on treason. 

“Bobby Kennedy and my husband were absolute enemies, just pure enemies,” recalled CG Harvey in her retirement home, channeling Bill Harvey’s deep resentments years later. “[Bobby] was an idiot . . . and he had no confidence in himself, because his brother put him in a job that he really wasn’t capable of handling. It made for a lot of stress for the people who were working in law enforcement.” 

The tension between the two men finally exploded in October 1962, when Harvey schemed with the Pentagon to send a series of raiding parties into Cuba at the height of the missile crisis to pave the way for the U.S. military invasion that administration hard-liners hoped was imminent. RFK was outraged by Harvey’s reckless behavior in the midst of the hair-trigger nuclear crisis. “You were dealing with people’s lives,” the younger Kennedy brother later exclaimed, “and then you’re going to go off with a half-assed operation such as this?” 

Harvey’s protectors acted quickly before Bobby Kennedy could ax him. Helms realized that he would have to relieve Harvey of the Cuba command and hustle him out of Washington. Giving him Rome was Angleton’s idea. Angleton thought the CIA station there had gone soft and was not doing enough to snoop on Soviet skullduggery in the Eternal City and not working hard enough to block the opening to the left. Harvey’s ruthlessness had not played well with the Kennedys in Washington, but it was just what Angleton wanted in Rome.

Helms and Angleton did not tell McCone about Harvey’s new assignment until it was a fait accompli. They knew that McCone was “something of a snob and a puritan,” in the words of an aide—the kind of executive who liked to keep his hands clean—and the down-and-dirty Harvey “just wasn’t his cup of tea.” 

Many imperial agents of America would have regarded Rome as a dream assignment. But Harvey and his wife never took to Italy; they “were very fond of Germany, and they didn’t like anything about Rome,” according to one CIA officer. Bill despised the Italian people, whom he called “goddam wops.” CG complained about being constantly cheated by the locals whenever she went to the market, and she couldn’t get used to navigating through the narrow cobblestone streets in the family’s hulking Ford station wagon. Once, when CG was driving Sally and the daughter of another CIA officer along the ancient Appian Way on their way to the beach, she snarled, “I just don’t understand why they don’t bulldoze all this and make it a freeway.” Like her husband, who would sit with his back to the wall whenever he dined out in Rome, his .38 revolver within easy reach, CG also felt besieged by enemies. She claimed that people in a “Communist compound” near the Harveys’ villa would throw rats over the wall into their garden, forcing CG to chase the scurrying vermin out of the family dining room. 

According to CG, one of her husband’s less savory tasks was procuring prostitutes for President Kennedy while he was in Rome. “When Jack was in Rome visiting the Embassy, my husband had to assign two men, along with the [Secret] Service men who were protecting him. And these two men were required to get Italian prostitutes into Jack’s bed, two at a time. . . . I mean [the Kennedys] were a lousy group of people, I mean they were really scum.” Despite JFK’s reputation for sexual adventurism, it is highly unlikely that the president would have relied on a notoriously anti-Kennedy CIA officer whom his brother loathed and distrusted to act as his pimp. Nor had Harvey even taken command of the Rome operation by the time of Kennedy’s visit. It was, in fact, Harvey who seemed to indulge in a reckless sex life in Rome. Rumors about his sexual indiscretions circulated throughout the Rome station, including a story that Harvey had impregnated his young secretary. 

While stationed in Rome, the Harveys were quartered in a lovely, fawn colored villa on Janiculum Hill owned by the American Academy. Galileo once stargazed in the villa’s gardens. But Bill and CG had little interest in ancient history. They spent a lot of time and money redecorating the house, “in poor taste,” observed Harvey’s deputy, F. Mark Wyatt. If the Harveys were the stereotypical Ugly Americans, Wyatt and his wife, Ann, were ideal representatives of the United States. The Wyatts, who had fallen in love in Rome after the war when they were both young CIA agents, were enchanted by the city and spoke Italian fluently. Ann Wyatt took her three young children on rambling tours of Rome, tracking down works by Caravaggio and other masters in galleries and churches and stumbling upon one of the sets where Cleopatra was being filmed at the time. One night, the Wyatts bumped into Marcello Mastroianni in a restaurant and brought home his autograph. 

Mark Wyatt, who enjoyed good relations with local officials, was supposed to act as a buffer between the brusque Harvey and the CIA’s counterparts in Italian intelligence. But Harvey soon bulled his way into the china shop and began throwing his bulk around. Italy’s military intelligence unit, SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate, or Defense Information Service), had a long, subservient relationship with the CIA, providing the Americans with the results of their spying on Italian political figures and partnering with the United States on Operation Gladio, the secret “stay-behind army” program to resist leftwing advances in Europe. 

But now Harvey pushed SIFAR officials to take even more aggressive actions. The CIA station chief urged Colonel Renzo Rocca, a top SIFAR counterespionage chief, to sabotage the center-left partnership that had gained decisive momentum with Kennedy’s visit. Harvey pushed Rocca to use his “action squads” to carry out bombings of Christian Democratic Party offices and newspapers—terrorist acts that were to be blamed on the left. 

Wyatt was no shrinking violet when it came to covert action. He had served as a CIA bagman during the 1948 elections in Italy, handing over suitcases filled with cash to Italian officials in the luxurious Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps. Later, Wyatt was one of the main liaison agents between the CIA and Operation Gladio, frequently visiting the secret Gladio headquarters on the island of Sardinia. Nor was Wyatt one of those delicate desk heroes who had never risked his life. He had grown up in the farm country around Sacramento, picking fruit after school for his father’s cannery. During the war, while serving as a young Navy officer in the South Pacific, Wyatt’s ship was attacked by Japanese submarines and kamikaze planes, and he had seen men blown to bloody mist before his eyes. 

But Wyatt had his limits when it came to carrying out Harvey’s orders. Not only did Bill Harvey see nothing wrong with violating Italian sovereignty, but he saw murder as a legitimate political tool. One day, Wyatt was stunned to hear his boss propose recruiting Mafia hit men to kill Italian Communist officials. When Wyatt objected to his extreme suggestions, Harvey would fly into a rage. During one angry showdown between the two men, Harvey pulled a gun on Wyatt. 

Harvey’s secret efforts to subvert Italy’s center-left government reached a climax in 1964, when General Giovanni de Lorenzo—former SIFAR director and chief of the carabinieri, Italy’s paramilitary police—threatened to overthrow the government and arrest hundreds of leftist politicians unless Socialist officials agreed to abandon their reform proposals and accept a weaker role in the coalition government. The elderly Nenni, who had suffered exile and imprisonment under Mussolini’s regime, harbored deep anxieties about a fascist revival in Italy, and he quickly gave in to General de Lorenzo’s demands. Wyatt later insisted that he had no involvement in the coup plot. But de Lorenzo was widely considered a stooge of the CIA, and there is little doubt that Harvey played a role in the brusque and successful effort to intimidate Italian democracy. By then, Kennedy was dead and could not protect Italy’s fragile political experiment as he had intervened against the French military putsch in 1961. When Nenni anxiously asked Schlesinger, who visited Rome in the spring of 1964, whether the new American president, Lyndon Johnson, could be counted on to continue JFK’s Italy policies, Schlesinger had to give the old man the “chilling” truth. 

Mark Wyatt was attending a meeting at the Gladio base in Sardinia with Bill Harvey when he heard that President Kennedy had been shot at high noon in Dallas. When the telex arrived, in the early evening local time, Wyatt found Harvey collapsed in bed, following a late-afternoon round of martinis. After Wyatt managed to rouse him, the CIA station chief blurted out some provocative remarks about the events in Dallas that deeply disturbed Wyatt for the rest of his life. According to his three children, Wyatt, who died in 2006, at eighty-six, would always suspect that Harvey had some prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination or was in some way involved. 

“My dad would sometimes talk about Harvey in the context of the Kennedy assassination,” said Wyatt’s son Tom. “He talked about the connection between Harvey and the Mafia—not just his involvement with Johnny Rosselli, but with the Mafia in Italy. Those connections in Italy worried my father a lot.” Wyatt’s suspicions about his Rome boss were so strong that his daughter, Susan, encouraged him to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “My father really believed in CIA —he really wanted to believe in it, and he was loyal to it, despite all its flaws,” Susan recalled. “And he really didn’t want to do things that would hurt it.” 

But Wyatt continued to be haunted by Harvey and the Kennedy assassination late into his life. In 1998, when a French investigative journalist named Fabrizio Calvi came to interview Wyatt about Operation Gladio at his retirement home on California’s Lake Tahoe, the former CIA official felt compelled to raise the subject, out of the blue, as Calvi was leaving. “As he was walking me out to my car, Wyatt suddenly said, ‘You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963,’” Calvi recently recalled. “Excuse me?” said the stunned French journalist, who realized that Harvey’s presence in Dallas that month was extremely noteworthy. 

Wyatt explained that he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination, and when he asked his boss why he was going there, Harvey answered vaguely, saying something like, “I’m here to see what’s happening.” When Calvi tried to pursue the conversation, Wyatt cut it off as abruptly as he had started it and said good-bye. Calvi himself forgot about Wyatt’s remarks until years later.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963,” House Assassinations Committee investigator Dan Hardway, who was assigned by the panel to probe possible CIA connections to JFK’s murder, observed years later. “We considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections—to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run, to other prime CIA suspects like David Phillips. We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination.” (More recent legal efforts by the author to obtain Harvey’s travel records from the CIA also proved fruitless, despite the 1992 JFK Records Act, which required all federal agencies to release documents related to the Kennedy assassination.) 

CIA officials later talked about Harvey’s stint in Rome as a sad exile for a once-illustrious agent—a drunken last stand before his shameful exit from the agency. But that’s not how Harvey himself—or his deputy—regarded his Rome interlude. Harvey still saw himself at the center of action, crawling through the criminal underworld, stockpiling weapons, conspiring with Italian security officials—in short, doing whatever was necessary for the cause of freedom. As for Wyatt, he saw his boss as a dangerous character, rather than a figure of pathos—a man who he would always suspect played a deeply sinister role in American history. 

If Rome was filled with the greatest amount of political intrigue during JFK’s final tour of Europe, then his four-day stopover in Ireland in late June 1963 brimmed over with the greatest emotion for Kennedy. There was no compelling political reason for the president to visit the Emerald Isle, as Kenny O’Donnell, his fellow Boston Irishman but tough-minded adviser, told him. “It would be a waste of time,” O’Donnell said. “You’ve got all the Irish votes in this country you’ll ever get. If you go to Ireland, people will say it’s just a pleasure trip.” 

But to Kennedy—exhausted from the constant barrage of Cold War crises abroad and the turmoil within his own administration—that sounded exactly like what he wanted: a pleasure trip to Ireland. 

For Kennedy—whose eight great-grandparents had all left Ireland for Boston, part of the heartbreaking depopulation of the island under British colonial rule—returning to Ireland was both a homecoming and a farewell. The first U.S. president to visit Ireland—and an Irish American one at that—JFK was embraced by the Irish people as one of their own as he traveled throughout the island, visiting his ancestral homes and drinking tea and eating cold salmon sandwiches with his few remaining Irish relatives. The young and old poured into the streets in Dublin and Galway and Cork and Limerick, cheering and frantically waving little American flags. Women with tears in their eyes held up rosary beads and shouted, “God bless you,” as his open presidential limousine crept slowly along the weathered stone streets, with a beaming JFK standing tall in the back of the vehicle. Schoolchildren sang “Danny Boy” and “The Boys of Wexford,” his favorite Irish songs. On jam-packed O’Connell Street in downtown Dublin, a group of nuns broke into a jig for Kennedy. 

The Secret Service had warned local officials that Kennedy should be kept at a safe distance from the exuberant crowds because the jostling could injure his fragile back. But Kennedy himself ignored his guards, wading into packs of people, who grabbed at him and embraced him and clapped him on the back. Instead of exhausting him, the trip clearly rejuvenated Kennedy. When the president first arrived at the U.S. embassy in Dublin, where he and his entourage were staying, he looked “very tired . . . and he seemed in a very thoughtful mood,” according to Dorothy Tubridy, a longtime Irish friend of the Kennedy family. “But as each day went on, he became happier and more relaxed.” 

“From the time he stepped off that plane [at Shannon Airport], it was love at first sight,” Dave Powers, Kennedy’s other indispensable Boston Irishman, later recalled. “He fell in love with Ireland, more and more after four days. And the Irish people fell in love with him . . . because he was one of theirs. He knew it, and they knew it. . . . He was president of the United States, and he was one of their own.” 

Ireland was still poor, still divided by religion and British rule, still exporting its sons and daughters across the ocean as laborers and hired help. But here was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a shining symbol of Irish resilience and success, returned to them at last. “Here he was, a good-looking man, marvelous teeth, lots of hair, beautiful wife and children, quick intellect—an Irishman and a Catholic,” recalled a Dublin journalist who covered JFK’s majestic visit. “He could have been any of our cousins.” 

The trip brought out Kennedy’s fine, dry wit. He seemed to get looser at each public event. “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things—a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty,” JFK told a crowd in the port town of New Ross, from where Patrick Kennedy had shipped out one hundred years before, only to die after ten years of backbreaking labor in his new homeland, leaving four young children behind. But JFK had the Irish gift for turning sorrow into laughter. “If he hadn’t left, I’d be working over there at the Albatross Company,” he said, pointing in the direction of a local fertilizer business, as the crowd broke into uproarious laughter. “Or,” Kennedy continued, after a practiced pause, “perhaps for John V. Kelley”—a local pub owner, which brought new howls from the audience. 

In Wexford, Kennedy told the crowd, “There is an impression in Washington that there are no Kennedys left in Ireland, that they are all in Washington, so I wonder if there are any Kennedys in this audience.” A few hands fluttered in the air. “Well,” smiled JFK, “I am glad to see a few cousins who didn’t catch the boat.” 

But Kennedy was also deeply aware of Ireland’s sense of loss and the sweet tragedy of life, and he beguiled crowds with verses of Irish poetry, snippets of Gaelic—the unconquered language—and quotations from the island’s literary heroes. JFK had done his homework before the trip, reading and memorizing and dipping deeply into Ireland’s cultural heritage. He knew that words were the key to the nation’s heart. In February, as he was preparing for his Ireland trip, Kennedy had even invited the Clancy Brothers, the popular Irish singers, to perform for him at the White House. The folk group ended all of their concerts with a traditional drinking song called “The Parting Glass”—an achingly beautiful tune that captured all of the Irish farewells down through the years. 

As Kennedy toured the green island, he carried within him that unique Irish sensibility, that deep knowingness of the inevitability, and the nobility, of defeat —and the implacable will to carry on, in defiance of one’s fate. “He never would have been President had he not been Irish,” Jackie Kennedy later wrote to Éamon de Valera, the eighty-year-old Irish president and legendary rebel leader who had hosted JFK during his visit. “All the history of your people is a long one of overcoming obstacles. He felt that burden on him as a young Irishman in Boston—and he had so many obstacles in his life—his religion, his health, his youth. He fought against each one from the time he was a boy, and by always striving, he ended as President. He was so conscious of his heritage—and so proud of it.” 

Reminiscing about his Ireland trip later with O’Donnell and Powers, JFK said that the emotional highlight for him had been his visit to Arbour Hill, hallowed ground for the Irish people. It was here where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, who had been executed by the British at Kilmainham Jail, were laid to rest. Kennedy, who placed a wreath on their graves, was the first foreign head of state to honor the martyrs of Irish nationalism. It was a poignant moment, as the Irish Army Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” and a sad folk song called “Flowers of the Forest,” with the young Irish American president standing silently next to frail, half-blind de Valera, who as a young rebel leader had also faced the hangman’s noose at Kilmainham Jail. 

Kennedy was fascinated by the story of little Ireland’s rising against the mighty British Empire, and he grilled de Valera during the trip about his role in the rebellion. How did de Valera escape the fate of his fellow rebel leaders, JFK wanted to know? Only because he was born in New York, explained the Irish president, and the British—eager to cajole America into World War I—were reluctant to offend their essential allies. “But there were many times when the key in my jail cell was turned and I thought my turn had come,” the old man told Kennedy. 

After laying the wreath at Arbour Hill, JFK delivered a nationally televised speech before the Irish parliament. The speech made clear where Kennedy’s sympathies lay in Ireland’s long struggle for independence—a struggle that continued in Northern Ireland, where the British still held sway. The indomitable people of Ireland had inspired the world, Kennedy told the assembly. “For every nation knows that Ireland was the first of the small countries in the twentieth century to win its struggle for independence.” By standing up to “foreign domination, Ireland is the example and the inspiration to those enduring endless years of oppression.” JFK, fresh from his stirring speech at the Berlin Wall, certainly had the peoples of Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe in mind. But there were also echoes in Kennedy’s liberationist rhetoric of his earlier speeches about the anti-colonial struggles of Vietnam and Algeria. 

As Schlesinger noted, Kennedy’s speeches stirred the forces of freedom around the world. In Ireland, his visit electrified a new generation struggling to free itself from the medieval domination of the Catholic Church and centuries of colonial backwardness. Later, working on his 1965 White House memoir, A Thousand Days, Schlesinger banged out a random observation on his typewriter that captured the unique global power of the Kennedy aura: “JFK accomplished an Americanization of the world far deeper & subtler than anything JFD [John Foster Dulles] ever dreamed of—not a world Americanized in the sense of adopting the platitudes & pomposities of free enterprise—but a world Americanized in the perceptions & rhythms of life. JFK conquered the drm of yth [sic]; he penetrated the world as jazz penetrated it, as Bogart and Salinger [JD] and Faulkner penetrated it; not the world of the chancelleries but the underground world of fantasy & hope.” 

But if Kennedy’s presidency gave rise to dreams, it also triggered fear and reaction. To the Cold War establishment and other bastions of the old guard, JFK was not a charismatic symbol of change, he was a stark threat. It was clear by this point in his embattled presidency why Kennedy was so enthralled by legends of the Irish martyrs. Their deaths were his own death foretold. As he prepared for his trip to Ireland, Kennedy had come under the spell of an Irish poem about a fallen leader from days of old named Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill, reciting its verses so often in the White House that they stuck in his staff members’ heads. The poem, by the early nineteenth-century Irish patriot and poet Thomas Davis, who himself died young, at age thirty, was a lament for a beloved, assassinated leader, poisoned by the treacherous agents of British villainy. 

Soft as woman’s was your voice, O’Neill! Bright your eye, 

O! why did you leave us, Eoghan? Why did you die? 

Your troubles are all over, you’re at rest with God on high,

 But we’re slaves, and we’re orphans, Eoghan!—why did you die? 

Kennedy’s trip to his ancestral homeland was a celebration, but also a mourning. A melancholy note hovered over the ceremonial events, a sense of past and future loss, even as Kennedy tried to keep spirits high. On his final day in Ireland, while bidding farewell to a crowd in Limerick, Kennedy promised that he would return “in the springtime”—the same promise made by millions of other young Irish men and women as they left their dearest ones for distant shores. 

Kennedy’s days in Ireland were the happiest of his presidency. “The trip meant more to him than any other in his life,” Jackie wrote to President de Valera after her husband’s death. “I will bring up my children to be as proud of being Irish as he was. . . . Whenever they see anything beautiful or good, they say, ‘That must be Irish.’” 

Jackie, who was pregnant at the time, had not been able to accompany JFK on the trip. But she wrote to de Valera as if they were connected by blood, as if she had known the old Irish leader for years. “I know we were all so blessed to have him as long as we did,” she ended the letter, “but I will never understand why God had to take him now.”

next
The Big Event

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.