The Devil's Chessboard
By David Talbot
21
“I Can’t Look and Won’t Look”
In December 1965, a year after the Warren Commission wrapped up its
business, Allen Dulles agreed to spend a few days on the Los Angeles campus of
the University of California, as a well-paid Regents Scholar lecturer. All he had
to do, for what was described as “a princely sum,” was to give a few talks and
rub elbows with students in casual settings. Dulles—looking forward to a
relaxing winter respite in the California sun—brought Clover with him.
By this point, however, a wide network of Warren Report critics had begun
to flourish—men and women from all walks of life, none of them famous
(except for Mark Lane, whose CIA-inspired bad press and bullish personality
had rendered him notorious). Among these critics of the official story were a
poultry farmer, sign salesman, small-town newspaper editor, philosophy
professor, legal secretary, civil liberties lawyer, United Nations research analyst,
and forensic pathologist. They spent untold hours poring over the most arcane
details of the Warren Report, analyzing photos taken during the fateful moments
in Dealey Plaza, and tracking down eyewitnesses. Their zeal for the truth would
make them the target of unrelenting media mockery, but they were doing the
work that the American press had shamefully failed to do—and in many cases,
they went about their unsung labors with great skill and discipline.
Among this band of loosely connected independent researchers was a
twenty-six-year-old UCLA graduate student in engineering and physics named
David Lifton. Lifton had not given the Kennedy investigation much thought—
assuming, like most Americans, that the distinguished Warren Commission
would get it right—until he happened to attend a Mark Lane lecture one evening
in September 1964, around the time the report was released. The grad student
went to the lecture on a lark. “For similar reasons I might have listened to an
eccentric lecturer that the earth was flat,” he later recalled. But as he took in
Lane’s lawyerly presentation that night at the Jan Hus Theater—inside a hulking,
old, red-brick church on New York’s Upper East Side—Lifton found it so
disturbing that it changed his life forever. Soon afterward, he threw himself into
the Kennedy case with an engineer’s passion for detail and precision.
Back in Los Angeles, Lifton plunked down $76 at a local bookstore to buy the entire, twenty-six-volume set of the Warren Report and spent a full year methodically working his way through its contents. He added another dimension to his understanding of the case by reading the best of the conspiracy literature that was starting to emerge, primarily in left-wing publications like The Nation and Liberation, and in more obscure sources like The Minority of One, a cerebral monthly published by a brilliant Auschwitz survivor named Menachem [M.S.] Arnoni that boasted such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling on its editorial board. Lifton further honed his analysis of the assassination by intellectually sparring with Wesley Liebeler—one of the few members of the Warren Commission legal staff to at least consider the possibility that their report was flawed—whom he found teaching law at UCLA.
By the time Allen Dulles arrived at UCLA, David Lifton was ready to do battle. Contacting the student who was acting as Dulles’s host, Lifton passed word that he would like to sit down with the spymaster for a private fifteen minute interview to discuss the Warren Report. Dulles refused to meet with Lifton alone but did agree to answer his questions in public at a student chat session scheduled for that evening in a dormitory lounge. The student host warned Lifton not to “badger” Dulles. Another Warren Report critic had tried to get the best of Dulles the previous night, the host told Lifton, and the wily old spook had made “mincemeat” of him.
That evening, when Lifton showed up at the Sierra Lounge in Hedrick Hall, he was wracked with anxiety. “I have never been more frightened in my life, in connection with speaking to anyone,” he later wrote Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer who had established himself as one of the foremost critics of the Warren Report. Dulles entered the lounge with Clover and the evening’s moderator. He lit up his trademark pipe and leaned back in his chair. Still alert at seventy-two, Dulles scanned the group of forty or so students sitting in chairs arranged in semicircles in front of him, quickly picking out the young man positioned front-row center who had obviously come to duel with him. Lifton had brought along an arsenal of evidence, including two hefty volumes of the Warren Report, a file box filled with documents, and photo exhibits of Dealey Plaza, including copies of the “kill-shot” frames from the Zapruder film. The engineering student had made a point of wearing his best suit, and his friends who accompanied him for moral support were similarly attired. “It was obvious,” he told Salandria, “we were not beatniks of any kind.”
After Dulles wittily deflected a question from a student about the CIA budget, the spymaster suddenly found himself confronted by the earnest, bespectacled student sitting directly in front of him. Lifton, not knowing how long he would be given the floor, leaped right to the heart of the matter, directly challenging the foundation of the Warren Report. “Mr. Dulles,” he began, “one of the most important conclusions of the Warren Commission goes something like this: ‘There was no evidence of a conspiracy—’”
“Wasn’t it, ‘We have found no evidence of conspiracy?’” interrupted Dulles. There was a twinkling charm to his manner, but he made clear that he was prepared to counter Lifton every step of the way.
Undeterred, Lifton plunged forward. Contrary to the commission’s conclusion, he asserted, there was ample evidence to suggest a conspiracy, not least of which was the Zapruder film, which graphically demonstrated that Kennedy’s head was “thrust violently back and to the left by the fatal shot.” Lifton knew his law of physics, and the conclusion was unavoidable to him. “This must imply someone was firing from the front.”
Dulles would have none of it. He calmly informed the gathering that he had “examined the film a thousand times” and that what Lifton was saying was simply not true.
At this point Lifton walked over to the evening’s honored guest and began showing him grisly blowups from the Zapruder film. “I know these are not the best reproductions,” said Lifton, but the images were clear enough. Nobody had ever directly confronted Dulles like this before, and the Old Man grew agitated as he glanced at the photos that Lifton had thrust onto his lap.
“Now what are you saying . . . just what are you saying?” Dulles sputtered.
“I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy,” Lifton responded.
“Look,” Dulles said, in lecture mode, “there isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating conspiracy. No one says anything like that. . . .”
But now it was Lifton’s turn to school Dulles. Actually, the engineering student informed Dulles, of the 121 witnesses in Dealey Plaza, dozens of them reported hearing or seeing evidence of gunfire from the grassy knoll. “People even saw and smelled smoke.”
“Look, what are you talking about?” fumed the now visibly angry Dulles. “Who saw smoke"?
Lifton began giving the names of witnesses, citing the research done by Harold Feldman, a freelance writer for scientific journals.
“Just who is Harold Feldman?” Dulles scornfully demanded. Lifton informed him that he frequently wrote for The Nation.
This elicited an explosion of derision from Dulles. “The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” If Dulles assumed the group of students would join in his mocking laughter, he quickly discovered that he was alone. “It is to the everlasting credit of the students,” Lifton later remarked, “that even if they did not understand the full meaning of the dialogue that was taking place, they did sense the obscenity of that laugh, that it was an attempt to intellectually smear, in disguise, and not one student laughed. Allen Dulles laughed all alone.”
Dulles tried to retrieve the upper hand by making his antagonist look like an obsessive “time hog,” as Lifton put it. “Look,” the distinguished guest said to the group, “I don’t know if you’re really all interested in this, and if you’re not, we’d just as well . . .” But the students emphatically assured him that they were very interested. “No, no,” they insisted, “keep going.”
So with a shrug, Dulles was forced back into the ring. But having failed to knock out Lifton with his display of contempt, he seemed at a loss how to continue the battle. “I can’t see a blasted thing here,” the old spy angrily muttered, taking another look at the hideous photos in his lap. “You can’t say the head goes back. . . . I can’t see it going back . . . it does not go back . . . you can’t say that . . . you haven’t shown it.” [This ass must have thought everyone was blind,because even a casual observer who has never seen the film,can see the last fatal shot caused the presidents head to heave back violently D.C]
But—after passing the photos around the room—Lifton had the final word. “Each student can look and see for himself,” he told Dulles.
After the heated exchange between Lifton and Dulles, the evening began to wind down. Dulles was given the opportunity to restore some of his dignity when a starstruck student asked a question that allowed him to discourse at length on Cold War spycraft. Then Dulles bade good night to the students, and he and Clover retired to their campus quarters. As Dulles withdrew, dozens of students gathered around Lifton, peppering him with questions about the assassination, and for the next two hours he gave a presentation based on the pile of evidence that he had brought with him. “It was really a neat night,” he reported to Salandria. “I really felt tonight as if I’d won.”
But talking about that evening nearly fifty years later, Lifton conveyed a darker feeling about his encounter with Dulles. He had the sense he was in the presence of “evil” that night, recalled Lifton—who by then was a man in his seventies, like Dulles at the time of their UCLA duel. “It was the way he looked, his eyes. He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary.”
David Lifton was the only person who ever gave Allen Dulles a taste of what it would have been like for him to be put on the witness stand. No doubt Dulles would have reacted the same way if he had ever been cross-examined. First, he would have tried charm to disarm his prosecutor, then scorn, and finally an eruption of fury—perhaps accompanied by vague threats, as he did with Lifton, when he suggested that the grad student should submit to an FBI interrogation, if he had anything new to report.
Dulles’s performance at UCLA offered a glimpse of how vulnerable the spymaster was underneath all his bluster, and how quickly he might have cracked if he had been subjected to a rigorous examination. But with the failure of Congress and the legal system, as well as the media, to investigate the assassination more closely, it was up to freelance crusaders like Lifton to hold Dulles and his accomplices accountable.
Dulles would be forced to spend the rest of his life grappling with the charges leveled by these headstrong men and women, trying to discredit their books, sabotage their public appearances, and—in some cases—to destroy their reputations. He had written Jerry Ford in February 1965, telling him he was “happy to note” that attacks on the Warren Report “have dwindled to a whimper.” But it was wishful thinking. The whimper of criticism was about to become a roar.
Sometime in the winter of 1965–66, after Dulles’s showdown at UCLA, he suffered a mild stroke. But he soon rebounded and Clover despaired that she would ever persuade him to slow down. In February 1966, she wrote Mary Bancroft, asking her advice for how to convince “Allen to take some care.” He insisted on keeping up his busy social schedule, Clover complained, even when he wasn’t feeling well. “He quite often gets a chill and as I give him electric pads, hot water bottles, etc., he says he will be getting up in a minute. This morning he said he didn’t feel well, he had done too much (two dinners in the same evening, one from 5:30 to 7:30 where he spoke, the other purely social) and that he wouldn’t go out to lunch at the Club. But of course he went and the chill came next. I try to wash my hands of it all when I see I do no good, but when I think of how awful for him and for everybody if his next stroke was worse, then I start once again, thinking of how to present the prospect of taking some care of himself.”
The two women knew that Dulles would not scale back until his health failed him. He was “The Shark,” propelling himself relentlessly forward. If he slowed down, it would mean the end of him. He dined with old CIA friends like the Angletons and hosted overseas guests like Dame Rebecca West and her husband, Henry Andrews, when they visited Washington. He hopped up to New York for meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations with longtime associates like Bill Bundy and Hamilton Armstrong. And in November 1966, he even sat for Heinz Warneke, a German-born sculptor best known for his depictions of animals, who produced a bas-relief of Dulles for the lobby of CIA headquarters.
That same year, Dulles published a rose-colored memoir of his World War II spy days, The Secret Surrender, and with the help of former CIA comrade Tracy Barnes, he tried to turn the book into a Hollywood movie. But the project never went beyond the Tinseltown wheel-spinning stage, demonstrating that when it came to dealing with the movie industry labyrinth, even espionage wizards were sometimes at a loss. Or perhaps trying to turn SS General Wolff into a screen hero proved too much even for Hollywood’s imagination.
Much of Dulles’s time during his golden years was absorbed by the growing controversy surrounding the Warren Report. He knew that his legacy was tied to the credibility of the investigation and he took the lead in defending the report, while encouraging other commission pillars to also engage in the propaganda battle. By 1966, Dulles and his commission colleagues found themselves besieged by skeptical reporters and filmmakers, as bestselling books like Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash ripped holes in the Warren Report, soon to be followed by Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, which was excerpted in the deeply middle American Saturday Evening Post. Thompson’s book would even land the Haverford philosophy professor-turned-private-eye an editorial consultancy with Luce’s Life magazine, which had earlier played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault.
Dulles was particularly disturbed by Inquest, a methodical dissection of the report’s weaknesses that had begun as Epstein’s master’s thesis at Cornell. To their later regret, some commission staff members had cooperated with Epstein’s research, which gave the book more credibility than other attacks on the Warren Report. In July 1966, Dick Goodwin lauded the book in The Washington Post and used his review to call for a reopening of the investigation—a bombshell that marked the first time a member of Kennedy’s inner circle had issued such a call. Alarmed by the steady erosion of support for the Warren Report, Dulles anxiously conferred with Lee Rankin and Arlen Specter, the future senator from Pennsylvania who had been one of the commission’s more ambitious young attorneys, concocting the infamous “magic bullet” theory to reinforce the lone gunman story line. As the groundswell for a new investigation grew, Dulles realized that a major counteroffensive needed to be mounted. Once again, he rallied his media allies, like U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence —whom Dulles described to Rankin as “an old and close friend of mine”—who published a ringing defense of the Warren Report by Specter in October.
The propaganda campaign on behalf of the Warren Report was primarily run out of the CIA by Dulles stalwarts like Angleton and Ray Rocca. A 1967 CIA document, later released under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that growing criticism of the report was “a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.” In response, the agency sought to provide friendly journalists with “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” One way that its media assets could impugn conspiracy theorists, the CIA suggested, was to portray them as Soviet dupes. “Communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence,” declared another agency document.
As part of the campaign to smear Warren Report critics, Dulles compiled dirt on Mark Lane, whom he considered a particularly “terrible nuisance” because of his growing media visibility and his influence overseas, where he was often invited to speak. Dulles received one report from an unidentified source that amounted to a sludge pile of salacious unsubstantiated rumors about Lane. “I have been told that his wife was—even is—a member of the Communist Party and I have also been told that Lane is not divorced from his wife as some people claim.” A district attorney in Queens “has in his possession pictures,” the report continued, “showing Lane engaged in ‘obscene acts’ with minors (girls—not boys—groups of girls). I have not seen these pictures personally but know those who have. Lane has the most unsavoury possible reputation.”
Dulles’s informer also offered some crude observations about the lawyer’s race, ethnicity, and mental status. “He is supposedly Jewish—but there are those who claim he is half Negro or at least has Negro blood. He is very dark complexioned, wears horn-rimmed glasses and he’s always in a hurry. My own personal opinion is that he is deranged.”
According to Lane, the CIA went beyond spreading ugly gossip about him, subjecting him to relentless surveillance and harassment. As his public profile started to grow, the agency pressured TV and radio programs to cancel interviews with him. When he traveled to foreign countries to speak about the Kennedy assassination, the agency sent bulletins to the U.S. embassies there announcing that Lane’s local appearances had been canceled.
Dulles assiduously avoided direct confrontations with his articulate nemesis. In August 1966, when he was asked to debate Lane by the producer of a TV public affairs program in New York City called The Open Mind, Dulles declined. Perhaps the Old Man figured that if a UCLA student could rattle him in a casual campus forum, he would be seriously outmatched in a televised duel with an aggressive legal warrior like Lane. Dulles also rejected an invitation to be interviewed for a British documentary in which Lane was involved. The spymaster preferred more nimble surrogates like the Warren Commission staff attorneys to do his fighting for him.
As time went by, even friends of Dulles began to air their doubts to him about the Warren Report. His European friends grew particularly skeptical, but some of his intimates closer to home—including Mary Bancroft—also started challenging Dulles’s explanation of the assassination. After feeding Dulles with tattletale reports about “the quite fiendish” Lane throughout the Warren Commission inquiry, Bancroft—a weather vane of shifting opinion in her Upper East Side circle—started to consider whether the outspoken critic might be right after all. “After listening to him, even I begin to wonder!” Mary wrote Dulles in July 1964. By 1966, Dulles’s longtime confidante had gone over to the other side, much to his chagrin. That November, after Mary sent Clover a letter about the commission’s many failings, Allen wrote back, telling her, “I imagine that we will have to agree to disagree about the Warren Report. . . . I respect your views and I doubt whether I can have any great influence on them, but I may make a try when we next get together.”
By 1967, polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. That same year, against the backdrop of growing public skepticism, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison launched the first (and what will likely be the only) criminal investigation related to the Kennedy assassination. “At the beginning of the investigation,” Garrison later wrote, “I had only a hunch that the federal intelligence community had somehow been involved in the assassination, but I did not know which branch or branches. As time passed and more leads turned up, however, the evidence began pointing more and more to the CIA.”
In February 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Dulles to testify before an Orleans Parish grand jury—which undoubtedly came as a cold slap for a man long accustomed to being invited to speak before gatherings of the Brookings Institution, Princeton alumni association, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, and other august forums. As Garrison and his investigators examined the work of the Warren Commission, they discovered that “leads pointing to the CIA had been covered up neatly by [the panel’s] point man for intelligence issues, former CIA director Allen Dulles. Everything kept coming back to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the CIA.” The New Orleans district attorney wanted to question Dulles under oath about the CIA’s connections to Oswald and to local figures in the Kennedy case, like David Ferrie and Guy Banister, whose paths had crisscrossed intriguingly with that of the accused assassin.
The Garrison investigation set off alarm bells in CIA headquarters. It soon became clear, however, that the authority of a crusading district attorney was no match for the U.S. intelligence establishment. Days after Garrison sent off the Dulles subpoena to the nation’s capital, he received a letter from the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., who tersely informed the DA that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Dulles. Meanwhile, the CIA—which, by then, was led by Helms—mounted an aggressive counterattack on the district attorney. Subpoenas like the one sent to Dulles were simply ignored, government records were destroyed, Garrison’s office was infiltrated by spies, and agency assets in the media worked to turn the DA into a crackpot in the public eye. Even the private investigator Garrison hired to sweep his office for electronic bugs turned out to be a CIA operative. After Dulles was subpoenaed by Garrison, the security specialist—Gordon Novel—phoned the spymaster to slip him inside information about the DA’s strategy.
In the end, Garrison’s powerful enemies managed to turn the tables on him, and the New Orleans prosecutor himself became the target of an investigation, on trumped-up federal corruption charges. “This is what happens to you,” he observed years later, “when you do not go along with the new government’s ratification of the coup.”
Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of the Warren Report, Dulles could count on the unwavering support of the Washington establishment and the corporate media. An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstep allegiance to the official story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research. “I hope you had a chance to view the four-part series on the Warren Commission,” wrote Small, referring to his TV network’s massive apologia for the Warren Report. “We are very proud of them and I hope you found them a proper display of what television journalism can do.” Dulles commended Small for a job well done, although he noted that he had missed the third installment. After reviewing transcripts of the entire series that Small had obligingly provided him, Dulles assured the CBS news executive, “If I have any nitpicking to pass on to you, I shall do so as soon as I have read them.” The spymaster was always happy to offer guidance to his media friends, down to the smallest details.
Even the prominent group of men who had served President Kennedy were loath to break ranks with the establishment on the Warren Report. Dark talk of conspiracy had begun circulating within the Kennedy ranks immediately after Dallas, but with the exception of Dick Goodwin, no one dared to voice these suspicions in public.
Arthur Schlesinger was cast adrift by Kennedy’s murder. The scholar had thrived in Kennedy’s court, where his intellectual and political aspirations intersected. Working in the Kennedy White House not only gave Schlesinger a voice in global affairs, it offered the decidedly unglamorous intellectual a chance to rub elbows with everyone from French novelist and cultural minister André Malraux to Hollywood siren Angie Dickinson. He gossiped over lunch with the sultry actress about Frank Sinatra, who had been deeply wounded when he was jettisoned from the Kennedy circle because of his association with the mob. Schlesinger was sipping midday cocktails with publishing queen Kay Graham and her Newsweek editors, who had flown him to New York to advise them on a magazine makeover, when the devastating news from Dallas was announced.
Schlesinger soon realized that he was odd man out in the anti-intellectual Johnson administration. More than a month after the assassination, Schlesinger confided woefully in his journal, he still had not received “a single communication from the new president—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion, not even the photographs or swimming or cocktail invitations which have gone to other members of the Kennedy staff.”
The entire mood of the White House suddenly shifted under Schlesinger’s feet. “LBJ differs from JFK in a number of ways—most notably, perhaps, in his absence of intellectual curiosity,” Schlesinger observed. “He has the senatorial habit of knowing only what is necessary to know for the moment and then forgetting it as soon as the moment has passed. . . . LBJ lacks the supreme FDR-JFK gift of keeping a great many things in his mind at the same time, remembering them all, and demanding always to know new things.” On January 27, 1964, two months into Johnson’s presidency, Schlesinger submitted his resignation. “It was accepted with alacrity,” he duly noted.
Schlesinger’s early resignation from the Johnson administration—which came seven months before Bobby Kennedy’s own departure, to run for the Senate—solidified his position of trust within the Kennedy enclave. The historian was the recipient of murmured confidences, from Bobby, Jackie, and members of their entourage. Schlesinger heard disturbing reports about the events in Dallas. RFK told him that he was wracked with suspicions about what had happened to his brother. Even CIA director McCone thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” Kennedy confided to Schlesinger. Meanwhile, Air Force general Godfrey McHugh, who had served as JFK’s military aide in Dallas, gave Schlesinger a harrowing account of “that ghastly afternoon” when they bumped into each other at a French embassy party in June. McHugh had found LBJ huddled in the bathroom of his private quarters on Air Force One before the plane took off from Dallas. The panic-stricken Johnson was “convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the next to go.”
Schlesinger took an interest in the first wave of Kennedy conspiracy articles that began appearing in the press, sending RFK a piece titled “Seeds of Doubt” from the December 21, 1963, issue of The New Republic. Nobody was more aware than Schlesinger of the explosive tensions that had surged within the Kennedy presidency. “Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the historian would acknowledge late in his life. And, as he knew from his futile efforts to reform the CIA, the Kennedy White House perhaps had even less control over the spy agency. But despite Schlesinger’s inside knowledge of the Washington power struggle during the Kennedy years—and his ability to see through such shoddy work as the Warren Report—the historian did nothing to explore the truth about Dallas.
In the years after the assassination, Schlesinger secured his reputation as the official historian of Kennedy’s Camelot with his epic, Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the abbreviated presidency, A Thousand Days. The 1965 bestseller— which carefully avoided the dark, unanswered questions about Kennedy’s murder—burnished the historian’s intellectual celebrity and opened new doors for him on the cocktail party circuit. His bold-faced name popped up in New York gossip columns, including a sighting at a raucous Norman Mailer party in January 1967, highlighted by a trapeze apparatus that the more daring guests used to go flying through the air. “Any party with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and me in it can’t be a failure,” chirped Monique van Vooren, a Belgian-born actress who was once the va-va-voom girl of the moment.
Schlesinger was frequently invited to appear on talk shows, and that year he found himself at a Los Angeles TV station where he was the guest of local news personality Stan Bohrman. After the show, Bohrman asked Schlesinger whether he would be willing to meet backstage with Ray Marcus, a respected Warren Report critic. Marcus, who had concluded that the official report was “the most massively fraudulent document ever foisted on a free society,” thought it was urgent that former Kennedy officials like Schlesinger examine his photographic evidence. He was certain that it would convince the New Frontiersmen that there had been a conspiracy. But when Schlesinger set eyes on Marcus’s display— which included the Zapruder film infamous Frame 313 kill shot—he visibly paled. “I can’t look and won’t look,” Schlesinger said, turning his head and walking briskly away from Marcus. This was a perfect summation of the prevalent attitude among the Kennedy crowd. It was best not to linger on the horrors of Dallas.
Despite the bad blood between Kennedy and the CIA, Schlesinger managed to maintain affable relations with the spy set after Dallas. As he had throughout his career, Schlesinger kept up a friendly, chatty correspondence with Dulles. In December 1964, Schlesinger even commiserated with the spymaster over Hugh Trevor-Roper’s “disgraceful piece” in the London Sunday Times, in which the eminent Oxford historian denounced the Warren Report as “suspect” and “slovenly.” After Dulles thanked him for the letter, Schlesinger wrote again in January, informing Dulles that British political scientist (and dependable Cold War pundit) Denis Brogan was working on a “detailed dissection of Trevor Roper” for the CIA-funded Encounter magazine. “Perhaps if you are feeling up to it,” Schlesinger warmly signed off, “I could come by and see you one of these afternoons.” Schlesinger’s courtship of Dulles in the midst of the Trevor-Roper controversy was oddly sycophantic, especially considering the fact that Schlesinger himself shared some of the British historian’s doubts about the Warren Report.
The cordial relationship between Schlesinger and Dulles suffered a bit of strain in the summer of 1965 when Life magazine ran an account of the Bay of Pigs that was excerpted from A Thousand Days. In his book, Schlesinger put the onus for the disaster on the CIA, which—he accurately wrote—had maneuvered Kennedy into the sand trap. Dulles found the Life article—along with a similar one that Look magazine excerpted from Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy —“deeply disturbing and highly misleading.” The Schlesinger and Sorensen broadsides on the Bay of Pigs spurred Dulles into action, but after wrestling with a long, belabored—and unbecomingly bitter—response for Harper’s, he decided it was best to take the high road. President Kennedy had done the honorable thing and taken responsibility for the fiasco, he told journalists calling for comment, and he would leave it at that. By November, Dulles had resumed amiable relations with Schlesinger, sending him condolences on the death of his father.
In October 1966, Schlesinger again rushed to Dulles’s defense when The Secret Surrender was harshly reviewed in The New York Review of Books by revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz, who suggested that the spymaster had helped kick off the Cold War by going around Stalin’s back to cut a deal with Nazi commanders in Italy. “I was so irritated by the wild Alperovitz review that I sent [the magazine] a letter,” Schlesinger wrote Dulles. In his letter to the Review, Schlesinger ridiculed the attempt to blame the Cold War “on poor old Allen Dulles. . . . Nothing the United States could have done in 1945 would have dispelled Stalin’s mistrust—short of the conversion of the United States into a Stalinist despotism.” When it came to fighting the cultural Cold War, Schlesinger and Dulles were still brothers in arms. [Schlesinger is the perfect example of the plague called compromise that to this day upholds the status quo in Washington wherein one's principles are never fixed,and always plyable in order to stay relevant within the power structure of the Military/Intelligence complex that controls Washington for their masters in finance DC]
It was not until many years later, long after Dulles was dead, that Schlesinger began to question his cozy relations with the Georgetown CIA crowd. By then, some of the skeletons in the CIA closet had come rattling out the door, when it was opened just a crack by post-Watergate congressional investigations. In 1978, seated at an awards banquet next to Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner—who was trying to at least straighten up the closet— Schlesinger listened wide-eyed as Turner regaled him with CIA horror stories. Many of the CIA director’s astonishing tales related to Jim Angleton, who— though deposed three years earlier—still cast a shadow over the agency. “Turner obviously regards Angleton as a madman and cannot understand a system under which he gained so much power,” Schlesinger later wrote in his journal.
In September 1991, Schlesinger found himself at the Sun Valley estate of Pamela Harriman—Averell widow—with fellow guest Dick Helms, with whom he had been friends ever since their days together in the OSS. Schlesinger characterized their relationship as a “rather wary friendship, since we both know that there are matters on which we deeply disagree but about which, for the sake of our friendship, we do not speak.” Still, he had socialized regularly with Helms over the years, sipping cocktails with him at the Wisners, swapping information with him over lunch during the Kennedy years, and later, during the 1970s, playing tennis and enjoying barbecues in the backyard of Dick and Cynthia Helms’s comfortable home near Washington’s Battery Kemble Park. One evening, Schlesinger’s son Andrew accompanied him to a Helms barbecue. “I remember feeling kind of weird about [being there] . . . but my father thought he was the most honorable of the CIA people.”
By 1991, however, Schlesinger had begun to question his assessment of Helms. He had recently read a series of articles about the CIA’s brainwashing experiments on Canadian medical patients, in which Helms had played a central role. “It is a terrible story of CIA recklessness and arrogance, compounded by an unwillingness to assume responsibility that went to the point of destroying incriminating documents,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal. “Helms was a central figure both in recommending the experiments and in getting rid of the evidence.”
Now Schlesinger found himself relaxing in Idaho’s alpine splendor with the man who had been convicted of one felony—lying to Congress—and undeniably should have been prosecuted for more. But the historian held his tongue. “In view of my long truce with Dick Helms and my liking for him, I certainly did not bring up the [CIA medical experiments]. But I did wonder a bit at one’s capacity to continue liking people who have been involved in wicked things. Bill Casey [Reagan’s CIA director and another old OSS comrade] is another example, though my friendship with Helms is considerably closer; [Henry] Kissinger, I guess, still another. Is this deplorable weakness? Or commendable tolerance?”
It’s a measure of Schlesinger’s decency that he could raise these painful, introspective questions. And it’s a sign of his weakness that he could never break with these “wicked” men. In the 1990s, Schlesinger found himself dragged back into the Kennedy assassination swamp, with the release of Oliver Stone’s explosive 1991 movie, JFK, a fictional retelling of Garrison’s ill-fated investigation that proposed Kennedy was the victim of reactionary forces in his own government. On Halloween evening that year, Stone himself showed up at the door of Schlesinger’s New York apartment. The filmmaker had ignited a media uproar (stoked, in part, by the CIA’s reliable press allies), and Stone—looking for support in the Kennedy camp—was reaching out for Schlesinger’s support. The historian found the director “a charming, earnest man, but, I surmise, scarred into paranoia by his experience [as a soldier] in Vietnam and dangerously susceptible to conspiracy theories.”
In truth, Schlesinger had long been racked by his own doubts about the Warren Report. His second wife, Alexandra, firmly believed that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, but to her endless frustration, Schlesinger evaded the tough question by declaring himself an “agnostic” on the subject. As his son Andrew later observed, the historian simply didn’t have the “emotional resources” to confront the sordid facts surrounding the assassination.
Near the end of his life, when Schlesinger was weakened by Parkinson’s disease and withering away, Andrew asked him if there was one book he never wrote but wished that he had. His father got “a little agitated,” recalled Andrew. “He said he wished he’d written a book about the CIA. He felt the CIA was terribly corrupting our democracy. He emotionally was saying [this]. He believed until the end that the CIA was undermining our democracy.”
The grief that clung to Bobby did not make him a remote figure in his New York office. He had a gentler aura after his brother’s death, and he created a sense of warm camaraderie among his staff. Aides felt they could challenge him, joke with him, and he responded in kind, with his dry and lightly teasing sense of humor. “The senator dearly loved Angie Cabrera and [his New York staff],” remembered RFK aide Peter Edelman. “He loved them very dearly; he just enjoyed being around them. . . . It was kind of a one big happy family thing.”
Cabrera would accompany Bobby to political rallies in Spanish Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Kennedy’s commitment to community development and empowerment made him an increasingly popular figure. Cabrera, whose parents had emigrated from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn Heights and who had worked as an executive secretary for the governor of Puerto Rico, helped connect RFK to his Hispanic constituents. In 1967, Bobby and Ethel invited her to fly with them to the island, where he was scheduled to speak in the old Spanish colonial city of San Germán. Kennedy was stunned by the size and exuberance of the crowds that greeted him in Puerto Rico. Everywhere he went people celebrated him as if he were their best and brightest hope. He was the second coming of his brother.
One day, that same year, while working in the New York office, Cabrera barged through Bobby’s door with a timely item of business. She caught him as he was finishing what seemed like an intense phone call. “As I walked in, he thought I might have heard,” Cabrera later recounted. “Actually I didn’t hear what he said and I had no idea who he was talking to. But he thought that I did, and he trusted me. After he hung up the phone, he turned to me and said, ‘There’s something more to this. I’ve got to pursue who really killed my brother.’”
In the hours and days immediately following his brother’s assassination, Bobby had frenetically chased every lead he could think of, quickly concluding that JFK was the victim of a plot that had spun out of the CIA’s anti-Castro operation. But after this initial burst of clarity, Bobby soon sank into a fog of despair, unable to develop a clear plan of action. His depression came, of course, from the devastating loss of his beloved brother—the northern star on whom he had fixed his life’s course. But Bobby was also filled with despair because there was no clear way to respond to his brother’s murder. His mortal enemy Lyndon Johnson was in charge of the government and his own power as attorney general was dwindling so quickly that J. Edgar Hoover—another bitter opponent—no longer bothered responding to his phone calls. Meanwhile, Kennedy antagonists such as Hoover and Dulles were in control of the official murder investigation. If RFK tried to circumvent the system and take his suspicions directly to the American people, he risked sparking an explosive civil crisis.
The astute writer and political activist M. S. Arnoni, in fact, drew such a chilling scenario in a December 1963 article he published in The Minority of One, a publication to which Kennedy’s Senate office subscribed: “To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.”
And so, for the most part, Bobby Kennedy maintained a pained silence on the subject of his brother’s assassination. In private, he dismissed the Warren Report as a public relations exercise. But he knew that if he attacked the report in public, it would set off a political uproar that he was in no position to exploit.When the report was released in late September 1964, Bobby was on the Senate campaign trail in New York. He tried to avoid commenting at length on the report by canceling his campaign appearances that morning. He was obliged to issue a brief statement, giving the inquiry his perfunctory blessing, but adding, “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” It was an impossible balancing act that Bobby would strain to make work for the rest of his life.
The CIA used Kennedy’s silence to bolster the Warren Report. “Note that Robert Kennedy . . . would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy,” the CIA instructed friendly journalists in its 1967 memo on how to rebut critics of the report.
But by 1967, emboldened by the growing campaign to reopen the JFK case and Jim Garrison’s investigation, Bobby began to refocus on Dallas. Before, he had deflected friends’ efforts to discuss their suspicions about the case, but now he tentatively began probing the agonizing wound. After seeing Garrison’s face on a magazine cover at an airport newsstand, the senator turned to his press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, and asked him to begin reading all of the assassination literature he could find—“so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” Meanwhile, Kennedy sent his trusted friend and longtime investigator, former FBI agent Walter Sheridan, to New Orleans to size up Garrison’s operation. The buttoned-down ex-G-man took an immediate disliking to the flamboyant DA and reported back to Bobby that Garrison was a fraud. Sheridan’s take on Garrison—which was reflected in the harsh NBC News special that Sheridan helped produce in June—foiled Garrison’s efforts to build an investigative alliance with RFK.
The Garrison camp implored Kennedy to speak out about the conspiracy, arguing that such a public stand might even protect his own life by putting the conspirators on notice. But RFK preferred to play such deeply crucial matters close to the chest. He would reopen the case on his own terms, Kennedy confided to his closest aides—suggesting that day would come only if he won the executive powers of the White House[That explains his assassination DC]
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“One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious,” said RFK’s Senate aide, Adam Walinsky. “Serious people, when faced with something like that—you don’t speculate out loud about it. . . . He had an acute understanding of how difficult that kind of investigation is, even if you had all the power of the presidency.” On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. He was motivated, he said, by his desire to "end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities” and to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country.” Kennedy left unstated another reason for his White House run—to finally close the case that still tormented his family and the nation.
RFK launched his presidential campaign in the same chandeliered room in the Old Senate Office Building where his brother had declared his bid for the White House eight years earlier. But a more somber mood hung over Bobby’s announcement. Not only was the country—and RFK’s own party—more torn by war and racial divisions than in 1960, but there was an acute sense that his own life might be at stake. After Richard Nixon and several aides sat watching Kennedy announce his presidential run on a hotel room television, the TV was turned off, and Nixon sat silently looking at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he shook his head and said, “Something bad is going to come of this.” He pointed at the dark screen. “God knows where this is going to lead.” A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy—who had begged him not to run—fell into a bleak conversation with Schlesinger at a New York party. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” she said. “The same thing that happened to Jack.”
Robert Kennedy—the father of ten children, with an eleventh on the way— was terribly aware of the risk he was taking. But, notwithstanding the youthful euphoria around Senator Eugene McCarthy’s “children’s crusade” for president, there was no political figure in America besides Bobby who had the ability to win the White House and heal the country. Kennedy spent many days—and long, anguished nights—wrestling with his decision. At one point, he sought the advice of Walter Lippmann, one of the last of his breed of Washington wise men. “Well, if you believe that Johnson’s reelection would be a catastrophe for the country—and I entirely agree with you on this,” said the sage, “then, if this comes about, the question you must live with is whether you did everything you could do to avert this catastrophe.”
Kennedy’s mere entry into the race was enough to panic LBJ into abandoning his reelection bid. But there still was Johnson’s surrogate—Vice President Hubert Humphrey—to contend with, as well as the specter of Nixon, rising from the ashes. Entering the campaign late, Kennedy threw himself into the primary race with raw determination, knowing that he was fighting an uphill battle against the Democratic Party establishment as well as competing with McCarthy for the antiwar vote. Bobby waded, virtually unprotected, into frenzied crowds on every stop of his campaign; his presidential race was perhaps the bravest, and most reckless, in American history. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told political reporter Jack Newfield. RFK was so moved by something Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that he copied it down and carried it with him: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Bobby’s courage gave strength to those around him, to those ambitious, idealistic men who had served his brother and were now following RFK on his perilous path. His heroism inspired their own. Men like Schlesinger, who could not bring himself to break from the establishment without a Kennedy leading the way; and Kenny O’Donnell, who had begun drinking himself to death, instead of telling the world what he had seen that day in Dealey Plaza with his own eyes; and even Robert McNamara, who had allowed himself to be debased by his allegiance to Johnson and the folly of his war. They now rallied around this new Kennedy crusade, and they were better men for doing so. They joined the battle for America’s soul, as if it were their own.
JFK’s assassins knew that Robert Kennedy was the only man who could bring them to justice. They had sought to keep him close after Dallas, with Dulles showering his condolences on the Kennedy family. “You have been much in my thoughts and Jackie, Ethel and you have my deep respect and admiration,” the spymaster wrote RFK in January 1964. He made sure that Bobby—as well as his parents and siblings—received complete, bound sets of the Warren Report. He fell all over himself, with unctuous eagerness, to respond to queries from RFK, including Bobby’s request that he sit for an interview with the Kennedy Library. In his oral history for the library, Dulles further disgraced himself and the memory of John F. Kennedy by singing false praises of the slain president.
But when Robert Kennedy announced his run for the presidency, he became a wild card, an uncontrollable threat. The danger grew as Kennedy got closer to his goal of winning the Democratic nomination. The June 4 California primary would be the make-or-break moment of his campaign. If he won the Golden State, the pundits declared, his momentum would be unstoppable.
"Oh, God, not again.” That was the collective moan that erupted from deep within the crowd at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy’s victory, as he lay mortally wounded on the grimy floor of the hotel pantry. As in Dallas, official reports immediately pinned sole responsibility for the shooting on a troubled loner, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. The accused assassin was undeniably involved in the assault on Kennedy as the senator and his entourage made their way through the crowded, dimly lit hotel pantry on the way to a press briefing room. But numerous eyewitnesses— including one of the men who subdued Sirhan—insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy. Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot—which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain—was fired from behind. Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman. “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” Noguchi would flatly state in his 1983 memoir.
Then there was Sirhan himself. Like Oswald, he did not claim credit for the assassination. In fact, from the moment he was taken into custody, he seemed utterly perplexed by the tragedy in which he found himself playing the starring role. The dazed Sirhan had no memory of attacking Kennedy. He struck many observers, including hypnosis experts who interviewed him, as a “Manchurian candidate”—an individual highly susceptible to mind control programming.
A security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar who guided Kennedy into the pantry later fell under suspicion. He was seen pulling his gun as the chaos erupted that night in the cramped passageway. But investigators quickly cleared Cesar, and his gun was never tested. Over the years, Cesar’s possible role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy has been debated by researchers and lawyers associated with the case. Some—like Sirhan’s current legal team—declare that Cesar, if not the actual assassin, played a role in the plot, perhaps helping set up Kennedy as a target.
Others, like investigative journalist Dan Moldea—author of a book on the RFK assassination—insist on the innocence of Cesar, who is still alive. “Gene Cesar is an innocent man who has been wrongly accused in the Robert Kennedy murder case, and any claim to the contrary is simply not true,” Moldea e-mailed the author in 2015, adding that he now acts as the reclusive Cesar’s spokesman and has his power of attorney.
John Meier—a former executive in Howard Hughes’s Las Vegas organization—has tied Cesar to CIA contractor Bob Maheu, who was hired by Hughes to run his Vegas operation in the 1960s. Meier claims he was introduced to Cesar in Las Vegas before the RFK assassination by Jack Hooper, Maheu’s security chief. Meier also stated that after Kennedy’s murder, he was warned by Maheu and Hooper never to mention Cesar’s name or his connection to Maheu.
But Maheu strongly denied the accusations. “Everything about [Meier] was a lie,” he snarled during an interview at his Las Vegas home before his death in 2008. “He was a 14-carat phony.” Cesar, too, has rejected Meier’s accusations, with Moldea—speaking on behalf of the former security guard—dismissing them as “just more garbage being peddled by Meier.”
Maheu pointed out that Meier was accused of evading taxes on money he allegedly skimmed from Hughes mining deals and was convicted on a related charge of forgery. But it was Maheu himself who was the biggest crook in his Nevada organization, Hughes told the press after fleeing Las Vegas in 1970. Maheu was “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch [who] stole me blind,” fumed the eccentric billionaire. While running Hughes’s gambling casinos, Maheu had made sweetheart deals with mobsters and allowed the CIA to pay off politicians with Hughes cash and to exploit Hughes’s corporate empire as a front for spy activities. While Maheu was being paid over $500,000 a year by Hughes as his Las Vegas overseer, he still treated the CIA like his top client.
Maheu never concealed his hatred for the Kennedys. He even accused JFK of homicide during his testimony before the Church Committee, for withholding air support from the Bay of Pigs invaders. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “those volunteers who got off the boats that day were murdered.” But Maheu denied playing a role in the Kennedy assassinations.
As with his brother’s death, the investigation into Robert Kennedy’s murder would become clouded with murky agendas. There were hints of CIA involvement, Mafia corruption—and once again glaring displays of official negligence. Sirhan Sirhan’s prosecution was a streamlined process, with the defendant often seeming like a confused bystander at his own trial. Just like the JFK inquest, the outcome was never in doubt. Sirhan has spent the bulk of his life in prison, with his periodic requests for a retrial routinely denied.
Allen Dulles, who turned seventy-five in April 1968, kept up a busy schedule all that year, despite Clover and Mary’s concerns about his health. Dulles continued attending meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations intelligence study group and the Princeton Board of Trustees; there were luncheons at the Alibi Club, embassy parties and regular get-togethers with old CIA comrades like Angleton, Jim Hunt, and Howard Roman. And he continued to appear as a special guest on radio and TV shows.
Not even the civil unrest in Washington ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that April seemed to faze Dulles. After King's assassination, his followers took their fallen leader’s Poor People’s Campaign to the nation’s capital, erecting a protest encampment on the National Mall that they christened Resurrection City. On June 24—after more than one thousand police officers swept into the camp, dispersing the protesters—riots again broke out in the streets of the capital, prompting officials to call out the National Guard and declare a curfew. But Dulles did not let the disturbances affect his social life. “Lest you worry at the news of a curfew in Washington,” Dulles wrote the following day to Clover, who was visiting Allen Jr. and Joan in Switzerland at the time, “you can rest assured that everything remains quiet here.” Dulles had invited their old friend, Helen Magruder—the widow of OSS deputy director, Brigadier General John Magruder—for dinner at Q Street. After supper, he wrote, “We were able to get a taxi shortly, and Helen returned home in safety.”
That afternoon, Dulles continued, he planned to go to a CIA social gathering with Jim Hunt and his wife. “I am afraid I will have to pass up [family friend] Marion Glover’s afternoon affair, as I cannot get to both,” he told Clover. There was always too much for Dulles to do in his leisure years.
That same month, Dulles found time to sit down and write a condolence letter to the brother of another murdered Kennedy. “Dear Ted,” he wrote the last Kennedy brother, “I join with a multitude of others in expressing to you my deep sorrow. I had the opportunity of working with Bobby on many occasions and had great respect for his dynamic approach to our national problems and for his vigor and forthrightness in dealing with them. His death is a great loss to the country and especially to those like yourself who were so close to him. I send you my profound sympathy.” Once again, Dulles’s flawless civility is chilling to behold.
Ted Kennedy responded warmly to Dulles’s letter, in a way that the spymaster must have found reassuring. “Joan and I want you to know how grateful we are for your message,” the senator wrote on his personal stationery. “At a time of sadness, nothing is more helpful than hearing from a friend. . . . I hope we will see each other soon.” It was clear that there would be no trouble from the youngest Kennedy brother.
On July 8, according to his day calendar, Dulles made time to meet with Dr. Stephen Chowe, an American University professor who was an expert in Chinese and Russian brainwashing techniques. Dulles had known Chowe, a former CIA researcher, for some time. The mind control expert had reached out to Dulles in June, arranging a time to discuss his latest work on “political psychology.” Then, on July 13, 1968—a few days after his meeting with Chowe —Dulles met with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s pharmaceutical wizard, who was involved in the agency’s assassination and MKULTRA mind control programs. These meetings on the Dulles calendar are particularly intriguing, coming just weeks after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the arrest of Sirhan Sirhan—a man who appeared to be in a hypnotic or narcotic state when he was taken into custody and, to some mind control experts, seemed to fit the mold of an MKULTRA subject.
That summer, Dulles also continued to keep a close watch on Jim Garrison’s investigation. In July, Angleton deputy Ray Rocca phoned Dulles to discuss an article about the New Orleans prosecutor by Edward Jay Epstein in The New Yorker. In September, CIA mole Gordon Novel called Dulles to give him another inside report on the Garrison probe.
The Old Man’s main social event of the fall season was the Washington fête in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen’s U.S. sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler’s old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre—Gehlen’s former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany’s top intelligence liaison in Washington.
That fall, Dulles eagerly anticipated the long-delayed presidential election of Richard Nixon, the Dulles brothers’ former disciple. He got involved in the Nixon campaign, joining fund-raising committees and contributing his own money. On Halloween, Nixon sent Dulles a telegram, thanking him for his support and appointing him vice chairman of the “Eisenhower Team” for the Nixon-Agnew ticket. The Old Man had visions of returning to the center of official Washington, perhaps with a prominent appointment in the new Nixon administration.
But Clover and others close to him knew the truth—he was slowly fading away. At times, in the midst of his frenetic schedule, Dulles would suddenly seem lost. “Uncle Allen would go off to lunch at the Metropolitan Club or Alibi Club and forget how to get home,” said his cousin, Eleanor Elliott. “Sometimes he would just get lost in the neighborhood, and people who recognized him would bring him back. Clover was so worried.”
In December—working with Howard Roman, his longtime collaborator— Dulles finished editing a collection of espionage yarns, Great Spy Stories, featuring selections by masters of the genre such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. In the book’s foreword, Dulles offered his final observations on the stealthy profession to which he had dedicated himself. In the past, he wrote, “the spy was generally thought of as a rather sneaky and socially unacceptable figure.” But World War II and the Cold War, he observed, had turned spies into dashing heroes. “The spy has the muscle and the daring to take the place of the discarded hero of yore. He is the new-model musketeer.” None of the blood and sorrow that had flowed all around him had left a mark on Dulles. He continued to have the highest esteem for himself and his “craft.” As he neared the end of his life, there was no self-reflection, only more tale spinning for a public that could not get enough of the cool romance of 007. [A grade A asshole to the end DC]
Soon after finishing the book, Dulles came down with a bad case of the flu, which confined him to bed. By Christmas Eve, the infection had settled in his chest and turned to pneumonia, and Dulles was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital. Over the following month, he struggled to recover, rallying at one point to write a congratulatory note to Nixon on his inauguration. But on January 29, 1969, Dulles died of complications from his illness.
Even after his death, the secret organism that Dulles had created continued to pulse. A team led by Angleton swept into the Old Man’s home office, while Clover lay in bed upstairs, and rifled through his files. CIA technicians installed secure phone lines to handle the flood of condolence calls. An effusive eulogy was crafted for his memorial service at Georgetown Presbyterian Church. The soft-spoken church minister, who was used to writing his own funeral orations, balked at reading the bombastic address that had been written by longtime Dulles ghostwriter Charles Murphy, with input from Angleton and Jim Hunt. But the Dulles team quickly set the cleric straight. “This is a special occasion,” the minister was informed by an official-sounding caller the night before the funeral. “The address has been written by the CIA.”
The next day, the minister stood up in his church—whose pews were filled with the solemn ranks of CIA spooks and political dignitaries—and recited the eulogy as instructed. “It is as a splendid watchman that many of us saw him,” he declared, “a famous and trusted figure in clear outline on the American ramparts, seeing that the nation could not be surprised in its sleep or be overcome in the night.
“It fell to Allen Dulles to perfect a new kind of protection,” continued the preacher, not knowing how ironic the words he spoke were. “For us, as for him, patriotism sets no bounds on . . . the defense of freedom and liberty.”
Dulles’s funeral oration was a celebration of the lawless era that he had inaugurated. Under Dulles, America’s intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force—at home and abroad—violating citizens’ privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will. His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system’s “splendid watchmen.” Dulles had personally shaped and inspired some of these watchmen, including Helms and Angleton—as well as the power players of future administrations, like William Casey, President Reagan’s defiantly lawbreaking CIA director, and Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands. And though they never met, Dulles also provided a template for Bush regent Dick Cheney’s executive absolutism and extreme security measures in the name of national defense. These men, too, firmly believed that “patriotism set no bounds” on their power.
Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles’s work —playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could only have dreamed about—with little understanding of the debt they owe to the founding father of modern American intelligence. Dead for nearly half a century, Dulles’s shadow still darkens the land.
Those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles. “His Monument Is Around Us,” reads the inscription underneath the bas-relief sculpture. The words sound like a curse on the men and women who work in the citadel of national security, and on all those they serve.
When Angleton’s successors cracked open his legendary safes and vaults, out spilled the sordid secrets of a lifetime of service to Allen Dulles. Among the trove of classified documents and exotic souvenirs were two Bushmen bows and some arrows—which the CIA safecrackers wisely tested right away for poison, knowing Angleton’s reputation. The safecracking team was also horrified to find files relating to both Kennedy assassinations and stomach-turning photos taken of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, which were promptly burned. These, too, were mementoes of Angleton’s years of faithful service to Dulles.
But as he crept toward death in 1987, Angleton was less bound by the loyalty oaths of the past, and he began to talk about his career with a surprisingly raw clarity. By then, his lungs were cancer-ridden from a lifetime of incessant smoking, and his sunken cheeks and receding eyes gave him the look of a fallen saint. The Catholic Angleton had always needed to believe in the holiness of his mission. And now, as he faced the final judgment, he felt compelled to make confessions, of sorts, to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.
These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”
He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day —Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”
https://ia802902.us.archive.org/33/items/DavidTalbotTheDevilsChessboard2015/David%20Talbot%20-%20The%20Devil%27s%20Chessboard%20-%202015.pdf
Back in Los Angeles, Lifton plunked down $76 at a local bookstore to buy the entire, twenty-six-volume set of the Warren Report and spent a full year methodically working his way through its contents. He added another dimension to his understanding of the case by reading the best of the conspiracy literature that was starting to emerge, primarily in left-wing publications like The Nation and Liberation, and in more obscure sources like The Minority of One, a cerebral monthly published by a brilliant Auschwitz survivor named Menachem [M.S.] Arnoni that boasted such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling on its editorial board. Lifton further honed his analysis of the assassination by intellectually sparring with Wesley Liebeler—one of the few members of the Warren Commission legal staff to at least consider the possibility that their report was flawed—whom he found teaching law at UCLA.
By the time Allen Dulles arrived at UCLA, David Lifton was ready to do battle. Contacting the student who was acting as Dulles’s host, Lifton passed word that he would like to sit down with the spymaster for a private fifteen minute interview to discuss the Warren Report. Dulles refused to meet with Lifton alone but did agree to answer his questions in public at a student chat session scheduled for that evening in a dormitory lounge. The student host warned Lifton not to “badger” Dulles. Another Warren Report critic had tried to get the best of Dulles the previous night, the host told Lifton, and the wily old spook had made “mincemeat” of him.
That evening, when Lifton showed up at the Sierra Lounge in Hedrick Hall, he was wracked with anxiety. “I have never been more frightened in my life, in connection with speaking to anyone,” he later wrote Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer who had established himself as one of the foremost critics of the Warren Report. Dulles entered the lounge with Clover and the evening’s moderator. He lit up his trademark pipe and leaned back in his chair. Still alert at seventy-two, Dulles scanned the group of forty or so students sitting in chairs arranged in semicircles in front of him, quickly picking out the young man positioned front-row center who had obviously come to duel with him. Lifton had brought along an arsenal of evidence, including two hefty volumes of the Warren Report, a file box filled with documents, and photo exhibits of Dealey Plaza, including copies of the “kill-shot” frames from the Zapruder film. The engineering student had made a point of wearing his best suit, and his friends who accompanied him for moral support were similarly attired. “It was obvious,” he told Salandria, “we were not beatniks of any kind.”
After Dulles wittily deflected a question from a student about the CIA budget, the spymaster suddenly found himself confronted by the earnest, bespectacled student sitting directly in front of him. Lifton, not knowing how long he would be given the floor, leaped right to the heart of the matter, directly challenging the foundation of the Warren Report. “Mr. Dulles,” he began, “one of the most important conclusions of the Warren Commission goes something like this: ‘There was no evidence of a conspiracy—’”
“Wasn’t it, ‘We have found no evidence of conspiracy?’” interrupted Dulles. There was a twinkling charm to his manner, but he made clear that he was prepared to counter Lifton every step of the way.
Undeterred, Lifton plunged forward. Contrary to the commission’s conclusion, he asserted, there was ample evidence to suggest a conspiracy, not least of which was the Zapruder film, which graphically demonstrated that Kennedy’s head was “thrust violently back and to the left by the fatal shot.” Lifton knew his law of physics, and the conclusion was unavoidable to him. “This must imply someone was firing from the front.”
Dulles would have none of it. He calmly informed the gathering that he had “examined the film a thousand times” and that what Lifton was saying was simply not true.
At this point Lifton walked over to the evening’s honored guest and began showing him grisly blowups from the Zapruder film. “I know these are not the best reproductions,” said Lifton, but the images were clear enough. Nobody had ever directly confronted Dulles like this before, and the Old Man grew agitated as he glanced at the photos that Lifton had thrust onto his lap.
“Now what are you saying . . . just what are you saying?” Dulles sputtered.
“I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy,” Lifton responded.
“Look,” Dulles said, in lecture mode, “there isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating conspiracy. No one says anything like that. . . .”
But now it was Lifton’s turn to school Dulles. Actually, the engineering student informed Dulles, of the 121 witnesses in Dealey Plaza, dozens of them reported hearing or seeing evidence of gunfire from the grassy knoll. “People even saw and smelled smoke.”
“Look, what are you talking about?” fumed the now visibly angry Dulles. “Who saw smoke"?
Lifton began giving the names of witnesses, citing the research done by Harold Feldman, a freelance writer for scientific journals.
“Just who is Harold Feldman?” Dulles scornfully demanded. Lifton informed him that he frequently wrote for The Nation.
This elicited an explosion of derision from Dulles. “The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” If Dulles assumed the group of students would join in his mocking laughter, he quickly discovered that he was alone. “It is to the everlasting credit of the students,” Lifton later remarked, “that even if they did not understand the full meaning of the dialogue that was taking place, they did sense the obscenity of that laugh, that it was an attempt to intellectually smear, in disguise, and not one student laughed. Allen Dulles laughed all alone.”
Dulles tried to retrieve the upper hand by making his antagonist look like an obsessive “time hog,” as Lifton put it. “Look,” the distinguished guest said to the group, “I don’t know if you’re really all interested in this, and if you’re not, we’d just as well . . .” But the students emphatically assured him that they were very interested. “No, no,” they insisted, “keep going.”
So with a shrug, Dulles was forced back into the ring. But having failed to knock out Lifton with his display of contempt, he seemed at a loss how to continue the battle. “I can’t see a blasted thing here,” the old spy angrily muttered, taking another look at the hideous photos in his lap. “You can’t say the head goes back. . . . I can’t see it going back . . . it does not go back . . . you can’t say that . . . you haven’t shown it.” [This ass must have thought everyone was blind,because even a casual observer who has never seen the film,can see the last fatal shot caused the presidents head to heave back violently D.C]
But—after passing the photos around the room—Lifton had the final word. “Each student can look and see for himself,” he told Dulles.
After the heated exchange between Lifton and Dulles, the evening began to wind down. Dulles was given the opportunity to restore some of his dignity when a starstruck student asked a question that allowed him to discourse at length on Cold War spycraft. Then Dulles bade good night to the students, and he and Clover retired to their campus quarters. As Dulles withdrew, dozens of students gathered around Lifton, peppering him with questions about the assassination, and for the next two hours he gave a presentation based on the pile of evidence that he had brought with him. “It was really a neat night,” he reported to Salandria. “I really felt tonight as if I’d won.”
But talking about that evening nearly fifty years later, Lifton conveyed a darker feeling about his encounter with Dulles. He had the sense he was in the presence of “evil” that night, recalled Lifton—who by then was a man in his seventies, like Dulles at the time of their UCLA duel. “It was the way he looked, his eyes. He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary.”
David Lifton was the only person who ever gave Allen Dulles a taste of what it would have been like for him to be put on the witness stand. No doubt Dulles would have reacted the same way if he had ever been cross-examined. First, he would have tried charm to disarm his prosecutor, then scorn, and finally an eruption of fury—perhaps accompanied by vague threats, as he did with Lifton, when he suggested that the grad student should submit to an FBI interrogation, if he had anything new to report.
Dulles’s performance at UCLA offered a glimpse of how vulnerable the spymaster was underneath all his bluster, and how quickly he might have cracked if he had been subjected to a rigorous examination. But with the failure of Congress and the legal system, as well as the media, to investigate the assassination more closely, it was up to freelance crusaders like Lifton to hold Dulles and his accomplices accountable.
Dulles would be forced to spend the rest of his life grappling with the charges leveled by these headstrong men and women, trying to discredit their books, sabotage their public appearances, and—in some cases—to destroy their reputations. He had written Jerry Ford in February 1965, telling him he was “happy to note” that attacks on the Warren Report “have dwindled to a whimper.” But it was wishful thinking. The whimper of criticism was about to become a roar.
Sometime in the winter of 1965–66, after Dulles’s showdown at UCLA, he suffered a mild stroke. But he soon rebounded and Clover despaired that she would ever persuade him to slow down. In February 1966, she wrote Mary Bancroft, asking her advice for how to convince “Allen to take some care.” He insisted on keeping up his busy social schedule, Clover complained, even when he wasn’t feeling well. “He quite often gets a chill and as I give him electric pads, hot water bottles, etc., he says he will be getting up in a minute. This morning he said he didn’t feel well, he had done too much (two dinners in the same evening, one from 5:30 to 7:30 where he spoke, the other purely social) and that he wouldn’t go out to lunch at the Club. But of course he went and the chill came next. I try to wash my hands of it all when I see I do no good, but when I think of how awful for him and for everybody if his next stroke was worse, then I start once again, thinking of how to present the prospect of taking some care of himself.”
The two women knew that Dulles would not scale back until his health failed him. He was “The Shark,” propelling himself relentlessly forward. If he slowed down, it would mean the end of him. He dined with old CIA friends like the Angletons and hosted overseas guests like Dame Rebecca West and her husband, Henry Andrews, when they visited Washington. He hopped up to New York for meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations with longtime associates like Bill Bundy and Hamilton Armstrong. And in November 1966, he even sat for Heinz Warneke, a German-born sculptor best known for his depictions of animals, who produced a bas-relief of Dulles for the lobby of CIA headquarters.
That same year, Dulles published a rose-colored memoir of his World War II spy days, The Secret Surrender, and with the help of former CIA comrade Tracy Barnes, he tried to turn the book into a Hollywood movie. But the project never went beyond the Tinseltown wheel-spinning stage, demonstrating that when it came to dealing with the movie industry labyrinth, even espionage wizards were sometimes at a loss. Or perhaps trying to turn SS General Wolff into a screen hero proved too much even for Hollywood’s imagination.
Much of Dulles’s time during his golden years was absorbed by the growing controversy surrounding the Warren Report. He knew that his legacy was tied to the credibility of the investigation and he took the lead in defending the report, while encouraging other commission pillars to also engage in the propaganda battle. By 1966, Dulles and his commission colleagues found themselves besieged by skeptical reporters and filmmakers, as bestselling books like Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash ripped holes in the Warren Report, soon to be followed by Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, which was excerpted in the deeply middle American Saturday Evening Post. Thompson’s book would even land the Haverford philosophy professor-turned-private-eye an editorial consultancy with Luce’s Life magazine, which had earlier played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault.
Dulles was particularly disturbed by Inquest, a methodical dissection of the report’s weaknesses that had begun as Epstein’s master’s thesis at Cornell. To their later regret, some commission staff members had cooperated with Epstein’s research, which gave the book more credibility than other attacks on the Warren Report. In July 1966, Dick Goodwin lauded the book in The Washington Post and used his review to call for a reopening of the investigation—a bombshell that marked the first time a member of Kennedy’s inner circle had issued such a call. Alarmed by the steady erosion of support for the Warren Report, Dulles anxiously conferred with Lee Rankin and Arlen Specter, the future senator from Pennsylvania who had been one of the commission’s more ambitious young attorneys, concocting the infamous “magic bullet” theory to reinforce the lone gunman story line. As the groundswell for a new investigation grew, Dulles realized that a major counteroffensive needed to be mounted. Once again, he rallied his media allies, like U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence —whom Dulles described to Rankin as “an old and close friend of mine”—who published a ringing defense of the Warren Report by Specter in October.
The propaganda campaign on behalf of the Warren Report was primarily run out of the CIA by Dulles stalwarts like Angleton and Ray Rocca. A 1967 CIA document, later released under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that growing criticism of the report was “a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.” In response, the agency sought to provide friendly journalists with “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” One way that its media assets could impugn conspiracy theorists, the CIA suggested, was to portray them as Soviet dupes. “Communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence,” declared another agency document.
As part of the campaign to smear Warren Report critics, Dulles compiled dirt on Mark Lane, whom he considered a particularly “terrible nuisance” because of his growing media visibility and his influence overseas, where he was often invited to speak. Dulles received one report from an unidentified source that amounted to a sludge pile of salacious unsubstantiated rumors about Lane. “I have been told that his wife was—even is—a member of the Communist Party and I have also been told that Lane is not divorced from his wife as some people claim.” A district attorney in Queens “has in his possession pictures,” the report continued, “showing Lane engaged in ‘obscene acts’ with minors (girls—not boys—groups of girls). I have not seen these pictures personally but know those who have. Lane has the most unsavoury possible reputation.”
Dulles’s informer also offered some crude observations about the lawyer’s race, ethnicity, and mental status. “He is supposedly Jewish—but there are those who claim he is half Negro or at least has Negro blood. He is very dark complexioned, wears horn-rimmed glasses and he’s always in a hurry. My own personal opinion is that he is deranged.”
According to Lane, the CIA went beyond spreading ugly gossip about him, subjecting him to relentless surveillance and harassment. As his public profile started to grow, the agency pressured TV and radio programs to cancel interviews with him. When he traveled to foreign countries to speak about the Kennedy assassination, the agency sent bulletins to the U.S. embassies there announcing that Lane’s local appearances had been canceled.
Dulles assiduously avoided direct confrontations with his articulate nemesis. In August 1966, when he was asked to debate Lane by the producer of a TV public affairs program in New York City called The Open Mind, Dulles declined. Perhaps the Old Man figured that if a UCLA student could rattle him in a casual campus forum, he would be seriously outmatched in a televised duel with an aggressive legal warrior like Lane. Dulles also rejected an invitation to be interviewed for a British documentary in which Lane was involved. The spymaster preferred more nimble surrogates like the Warren Commission staff attorneys to do his fighting for him.
As time went by, even friends of Dulles began to air their doubts to him about the Warren Report. His European friends grew particularly skeptical, but some of his intimates closer to home—including Mary Bancroft—also started challenging Dulles’s explanation of the assassination. After feeding Dulles with tattletale reports about “the quite fiendish” Lane throughout the Warren Commission inquiry, Bancroft—a weather vane of shifting opinion in her Upper East Side circle—started to consider whether the outspoken critic might be right after all. “After listening to him, even I begin to wonder!” Mary wrote Dulles in July 1964. By 1966, Dulles’s longtime confidante had gone over to the other side, much to his chagrin. That November, after Mary sent Clover a letter about the commission’s many failings, Allen wrote back, telling her, “I imagine that we will have to agree to disagree about the Warren Report. . . . I respect your views and I doubt whether I can have any great influence on them, but I may make a try when we next get together.”
By 1967, polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. That same year, against the backdrop of growing public skepticism, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison launched the first (and what will likely be the only) criminal investigation related to the Kennedy assassination. “At the beginning of the investigation,” Garrison later wrote, “I had only a hunch that the federal intelligence community had somehow been involved in the assassination, but I did not know which branch or branches. As time passed and more leads turned up, however, the evidence began pointing more and more to the CIA.”
In February 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Dulles to testify before an Orleans Parish grand jury—which undoubtedly came as a cold slap for a man long accustomed to being invited to speak before gatherings of the Brookings Institution, Princeton alumni association, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, and other august forums. As Garrison and his investigators examined the work of the Warren Commission, they discovered that “leads pointing to the CIA had been covered up neatly by [the panel’s] point man for intelligence issues, former CIA director Allen Dulles. Everything kept coming back to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the CIA.” The New Orleans district attorney wanted to question Dulles under oath about the CIA’s connections to Oswald and to local figures in the Kennedy case, like David Ferrie and Guy Banister, whose paths had crisscrossed intriguingly with that of the accused assassin.
The Garrison investigation set off alarm bells in CIA headquarters. It soon became clear, however, that the authority of a crusading district attorney was no match for the U.S. intelligence establishment. Days after Garrison sent off the Dulles subpoena to the nation’s capital, he received a letter from the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., who tersely informed the DA that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Dulles. Meanwhile, the CIA—which, by then, was led by Helms—mounted an aggressive counterattack on the district attorney. Subpoenas like the one sent to Dulles were simply ignored, government records were destroyed, Garrison’s office was infiltrated by spies, and agency assets in the media worked to turn the DA into a crackpot in the public eye. Even the private investigator Garrison hired to sweep his office for electronic bugs turned out to be a CIA operative. After Dulles was subpoenaed by Garrison, the security specialist—Gordon Novel—phoned the spymaster to slip him inside information about the DA’s strategy.
In the end, Garrison’s powerful enemies managed to turn the tables on him, and the New Orleans prosecutor himself became the target of an investigation, on trumped-up federal corruption charges. “This is what happens to you,” he observed years later, “when you do not go along with the new government’s ratification of the coup.”
Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of the Warren Report, Dulles could count on the unwavering support of the Washington establishment and the corporate media. An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstep allegiance to the official story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research. “I hope you had a chance to view the four-part series on the Warren Commission,” wrote Small, referring to his TV network’s massive apologia for the Warren Report. “We are very proud of them and I hope you found them a proper display of what television journalism can do.” Dulles commended Small for a job well done, although he noted that he had missed the third installment. After reviewing transcripts of the entire series that Small had obligingly provided him, Dulles assured the CBS news executive, “If I have any nitpicking to pass on to you, I shall do so as soon as I have read them.” The spymaster was always happy to offer guidance to his media friends, down to the smallest details.
Even the prominent group of men who had served President Kennedy were loath to break ranks with the establishment on the Warren Report. Dark talk of conspiracy had begun circulating within the Kennedy ranks immediately after Dallas, but with the exception of Dick Goodwin, no one dared to voice these suspicions in public.
Arthur Schlesinger was cast adrift by Kennedy’s murder. The scholar had thrived in Kennedy’s court, where his intellectual and political aspirations intersected. Working in the Kennedy White House not only gave Schlesinger a voice in global affairs, it offered the decidedly unglamorous intellectual a chance to rub elbows with everyone from French novelist and cultural minister André Malraux to Hollywood siren Angie Dickinson. He gossiped over lunch with the sultry actress about Frank Sinatra, who had been deeply wounded when he was jettisoned from the Kennedy circle because of his association with the mob. Schlesinger was sipping midday cocktails with publishing queen Kay Graham and her Newsweek editors, who had flown him to New York to advise them on a magazine makeover, when the devastating news from Dallas was announced.
Schlesinger soon realized that he was odd man out in the anti-intellectual Johnson administration. More than a month after the assassination, Schlesinger confided woefully in his journal, he still had not received “a single communication from the new president—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion, not even the photographs or swimming or cocktail invitations which have gone to other members of the Kennedy staff.”
The entire mood of the White House suddenly shifted under Schlesinger’s feet. “LBJ differs from JFK in a number of ways—most notably, perhaps, in his absence of intellectual curiosity,” Schlesinger observed. “He has the senatorial habit of knowing only what is necessary to know for the moment and then forgetting it as soon as the moment has passed. . . . LBJ lacks the supreme FDR-JFK gift of keeping a great many things in his mind at the same time, remembering them all, and demanding always to know new things.” On January 27, 1964, two months into Johnson’s presidency, Schlesinger submitted his resignation. “It was accepted with alacrity,” he duly noted.
Schlesinger’s early resignation from the Johnson administration—which came seven months before Bobby Kennedy’s own departure, to run for the Senate—solidified his position of trust within the Kennedy enclave. The historian was the recipient of murmured confidences, from Bobby, Jackie, and members of their entourage. Schlesinger heard disturbing reports about the events in Dallas. RFK told him that he was wracked with suspicions about what had happened to his brother. Even CIA director McCone thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” Kennedy confided to Schlesinger. Meanwhile, Air Force general Godfrey McHugh, who had served as JFK’s military aide in Dallas, gave Schlesinger a harrowing account of “that ghastly afternoon” when they bumped into each other at a French embassy party in June. McHugh had found LBJ huddled in the bathroom of his private quarters on Air Force One before the plane took off from Dallas. The panic-stricken Johnson was “convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the next to go.”
Schlesinger took an interest in the first wave of Kennedy conspiracy articles that began appearing in the press, sending RFK a piece titled “Seeds of Doubt” from the December 21, 1963, issue of The New Republic. Nobody was more aware than Schlesinger of the explosive tensions that had surged within the Kennedy presidency. “Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the historian would acknowledge late in his life. And, as he knew from his futile efforts to reform the CIA, the Kennedy White House perhaps had even less control over the spy agency. But despite Schlesinger’s inside knowledge of the Washington power struggle during the Kennedy years—and his ability to see through such shoddy work as the Warren Report—the historian did nothing to explore the truth about Dallas.
In the years after the assassination, Schlesinger secured his reputation as the official historian of Kennedy’s Camelot with his epic, Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the abbreviated presidency, A Thousand Days. The 1965 bestseller— which carefully avoided the dark, unanswered questions about Kennedy’s murder—burnished the historian’s intellectual celebrity and opened new doors for him on the cocktail party circuit. His bold-faced name popped up in New York gossip columns, including a sighting at a raucous Norman Mailer party in January 1967, highlighted by a trapeze apparatus that the more daring guests used to go flying through the air. “Any party with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and me in it can’t be a failure,” chirped Monique van Vooren, a Belgian-born actress who was once the va-va-voom girl of the moment.
Schlesinger was frequently invited to appear on talk shows, and that year he found himself at a Los Angeles TV station where he was the guest of local news personality Stan Bohrman. After the show, Bohrman asked Schlesinger whether he would be willing to meet backstage with Ray Marcus, a respected Warren Report critic. Marcus, who had concluded that the official report was “the most massively fraudulent document ever foisted on a free society,” thought it was urgent that former Kennedy officials like Schlesinger examine his photographic evidence. He was certain that it would convince the New Frontiersmen that there had been a conspiracy. But when Schlesinger set eyes on Marcus’s display— which included the Zapruder film infamous Frame 313 kill shot—he visibly paled. “I can’t look and won’t look,” Schlesinger said, turning his head and walking briskly away from Marcus. This was a perfect summation of the prevalent attitude among the Kennedy crowd. It was best not to linger on the horrors of Dallas.
Despite the bad blood between Kennedy and the CIA, Schlesinger managed to maintain affable relations with the spy set after Dallas. As he had throughout his career, Schlesinger kept up a friendly, chatty correspondence with Dulles. In December 1964, Schlesinger even commiserated with the spymaster over Hugh Trevor-Roper’s “disgraceful piece” in the London Sunday Times, in which the eminent Oxford historian denounced the Warren Report as “suspect” and “slovenly.” After Dulles thanked him for the letter, Schlesinger wrote again in January, informing Dulles that British political scientist (and dependable Cold War pundit) Denis Brogan was working on a “detailed dissection of Trevor Roper” for the CIA-funded Encounter magazine. “Perhaps if you are feeling up to it,” Schlesinger warmly signed off, “I could come by and see you one of these afternoons.” Schlesinger’s courtship of Dulles in the midst of the Trevor-Roper controversy was oddly sycophantic, especially considering the fact that Schlesinger himself shared some of the British historian’s doubts about the Warren Report.
The cordial relationship between Schlesinger and Dulles suffered a bit of strain in the summer of 1965 when Life magazine ran an account of the Bay of Pigs that was excerpted from A Thousand Days. In his book, Schlesinger put the onus for the disaster on the CIA, which—he accurately wrote—had maneuvered Kennedy into the sand trap. Dulles found the Life article—along with a similar one that Look magazine excerpted from Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy —“deeply disturbing and highly misleading.” The Schlesinger and Sorensen broadsides on the Bay of Pigs spurred Dulles into action, but after wrestling with a long, belabored—and unbecomingly bitter—response for Harper’s, he decided it was best to take the high road. President Kennedy had done the honorable thing and taken responsibility for the fiasco, he told journalists calling for comment, and he would leave it at that. By November, Dulles had resumed amiable relations with Schlesinger, sending him condolences on the death of his father.
In October 1966, Schlesinger again rushed to Dulles’s defense when The Secret Surrender was harshly reviewed in The New York Review of Books by revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz, who suggested that the spymaster had helped kick off the Cold War by going around Stalin’s back to cut a deal with Nazi commanders in Italy. “I was so irritated by the wild Alperovitz review that I sent [the magazine] a letter,” Schlesinger wrote Dulles. In his letter to the Review, Schlesinger ridiculed the attempt to blame the Cold War “on poor old Allen Dulles. . . . Nothing the United States could have done in 1945 would have dispelled Stalin’s mistrust—short of the conversion of the United States into a Stalinist despotism.” When it came to fighting the cultural Cold War, Schlesinger and Dulles were still brothers in arms. [Schlesinger is the perfect example of the plague called compromise that to this day upholds the status quo in Washington wherein one's principles are never fixed,and always plyable in order to stay relevant within the power structure of the Military/Intelligence complex that controls Washington for their masters in finance DC]
It was not until many years later, long after Dulles was dead, that Schlesinger began to question his cozy relations with the Georgetown CIA crowd. By then, some of the skeletons in the CIA closet had come rattling out the door, when it was opened just a crack by post-Watergate congressional investigations. In 1978, seated at an awards banquet next to Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner—who was trying to at least straighten up the closet— Schlesinger listened wide-eyed as Turner regaled him with CIA horror stories. Many of the CIA director’s astonishing tales related to Jim Angleton, who— though deposed three years earlier—still cast a shadow over the agency. “Turner obviously regards Angleton as a madman and cannot understand a system under which he gained so much power,” Schlesinger later wrote in his journal.
In September 1991, Schlesinger found himself at the Sun Valley estate of Pamela Harriman—Averell widow—with fellow guest Dick Helms, with whom he had been friends ever since their days together in the OSS. Schlesinger characterized their relationship as a “rather wary friendship, since we both know that there are matters on which we deeply disagree but about which, for the sake of our friendship, we do not speak.” Still, he had socialized regularly with Helms over the years, sipping cocktails with him at the Wisners, swapping information with him over lunch during the Kennedy years, and later, during the 1970s, playing tennis and enjoying barbecues in the backyard of Dick and Cynthia Helms’s comfortable home near Washington’s Battery Kemble Park. One evening, Schlesinger’s son Andrew accompanied him to a Helms barbecue. “I remember feeling kind of weird about [being there] . . . but my father thought he was the most honorable of the CIA people.”
By 1991, however, Schlesinger had begun to question his assessment of Helms. He had recently read a series of articles about the CIA’s brainwashing experiments on Canadian medical patients, in which Helms had played a central role. “It is a terrible story of CIA recklessness and arrogance, compounded by an unwillingness to assume responsibility that went to the point of destroying incriminating documents,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal. “Helms was a central figure both in recommending the experiments and in getting rid of the evidence.”
Now Schlesinger found himself relaxing in Idaho’s alpine splendor with the man who had been convicted of one felony—lying to Congress—and undeniably should have been prosecuted for more. But the historian held his tongue. “In view of my long truce with Dick Helms and my liking for him, I certainly did not bring up the [CIA medical experiments]. But I did wonder a bit at one’s capacity to continue liking people who have been involved in wicked things. Bill Casey [Reagan’s CIA director and another old OSS comrade] is another example, though my friendship with Helms is considerably closer; [Henry] Kissinger, I guess, still another. Is this deplorable weakness? Or commendable tolerance?”
It’s a measure of Schlesinger’s decency that he could raise these painful, introspective questions. And it’s a sign of his weakness that he could never break with these “wicked” men. In the 1990s, Schlesinger found himself dragged back into the Kennedy assassination swamp, with the release of Oliver Stone’s explosive 1991 movie, JFK, a fictional retelling of Garrison’s ill-fated investigation that proposed Kennedy was the victim of reactionary forces in his own government. On Halloween evening that year, Stone himself showed up at the door of Schlesinger’s New York apartment. The filmmaker had ignited a media uproar (stoked, in part, by the CIA’s reliable press allies), and Stone—looking for support in the Kennedy camp—was reaching out for Schlesinger’s support. The historian found the director “a charming, earnest man, but, I surmise, scarred into paranoia by his experience [as a soldier] in Vietnam and dangerously susceptible to conspiracy theories.”
In truth, Schlesinger had long been racked by his own doubts about the Warren Report. His second wife, Alexandra, firmly believed that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, but to her endless frustration, Schlesinger evaded the tough question by declaring himself an “agnostic” on the subject. As his son Andrew later observed, the historian simply didn’t have the “emotional resources” to confront the sordid facts surrounding the assassination.
Near the end of his life, when Schlesinger was weakened by Parkinson’s disease and withering away, Andrew asked him if there was one book he never wrote but wished that he had. His father got “a little agitated,” recalled Andrew. “He said he wished he’d written a book about the CIA. He felt the CIA was terribly corrupting our democracy. He emotionally was saying [this]. He believed until the end that the CIA was undermining our democracy.”
22
End Game
It was always difficult for Angelina Cabrera, the woman who managed Senator
Robert F. Kennedy’s New York office, to grab a few minutes of his time. As the
freshman senator from New York during the volcanic ’60s and the inheritor of
his brother’s heavy legacy, Bobby was always in demand, always on the move,
always in the middle of the growing debate over the Vietnam War and the fight
for social justice. Cabrera was respectful of the time that the senator needed to
himself behind his closed office door. And she was keenly aware of the shadow
that always seemed to loom over him. “He was sad most of the time,” she
recalled years later. “He was preoccupied most of the time about something—
probably his brother. I had the thought that he would not make it. I was praying
for him.” The grief that clung to Bobby did not make him a remote figure in his New York office. He had a gentler aura after his brother’s death, and he created a sense of warm camaraderie among his staff. Aides felt they could challenge him, joke with him, and he responded in kind, with his dry and lightly teasing sense of humor. “The senator dearly loved Angie Cabrera and [his New York staff],” remembered RFK aide Peter Edelman. “He loved them very dearly; he just enjoyed being around them. . . . It was kind of a one big happy family thing.”
Cabrera would accompany Bobby to political rallies in Spanish Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Kennedy’s commitment to community development and empowerment made him an increasingly popular figure. Cabrera, whose parents had emigrated from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn Heights and who had worked as an executive secretary for the governor of Puerto Rico, helped connect RFK to his Hispanic constituents. In 1967, Bobby and Ethel invited her to fly with them to the island, where he was scheduled to speak in the old Spanish colonial city of San Germán. Kennedy was stunned by the size and exuberance of the crowds that greeted him in Puerto Rico. Everywhere he went people celebrated him as if he were their best and brightest hope. He was the second coming of his brother.
One day, that same year, while working in the New York office, Cabrera barged through Bobby’s door with a timely item of business. She caught him as he was finishing what seemed like an intense phone call. “As I walked in, he thought I might have heard,” Cabrera later recounted. “Actually I didn’t hear what he said and I had no idea who he was talking to. But he thought that I did, and he trusted me. After he hung up the phone, he turned to me and said, ‘There’s something more to this. I’ve got to pursue who really killed my brother.’”
In the hours and days immediately following his brother’s assassination, Bobby had frenetically chased every lead he could think of, quickly concluding that JFK was the victim of a plot that had spun out of the CIA’s anti-Castro operation. But after this initial burst of clarity, Bobby soon sank into a fog of despair, unable to develop a clear plan of action. His depression came, of course, from the devastating loss of his beloved brother—the northern star on whom he had fixed his life’s course. But Bobby was also filled with despair because there was no clear way to respond to his brother’s murder. His mortal enemy Lyndon Johnson was in charge of the government and his own power as attorney general was dwindling so quickly that J. Edgar Hoover—another bitter opponent—no longer bothered responding to his phone calls. Meanwhile, Kennedy antagonists such as Hoover and Dulles were in control of the official murder investigation. If RFK tried to circumvent the system and take his suspicions directly to the American people, he risked sparking an explosive civil crisis.
The astute writer and political activist M. S. Arnoni, in fact, drew such a chilling scenario in a December 1963 article he published in The Minority of One, a publication to which Kennedy’s Senate office subscribed: “To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.”
And so, for the most part, Bobby Kennedy maintained a pained silence on the subject of his brother’s assassination. In private, he dismissed the Warren Report as a public relations exercise. But he knew that if he attacked the report in public, it would set off a political uproar that he was in no position to exploit.When the report was released in late September 1964, Bobby was on the Senate campaign trail in New York. He tried to avoid commenting at length on the report by canceling his campaign appearances that morning. He was obliged to issue a brief statement, giving the inquiry his perfunctory blessing, but adding, “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” It was an impossible balancing act that Bobby would strain to make work for the rest of his life.
The CIA used Kennedy’s silence to bolster the Warren Report. “Note that Robert Kennedy . . . would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy,” the CIA instructed friendly journalists in its 1967 memo on how to rebut critics of the report.
But by 1967, emboldened by the growing campaign to reopen the JFK case and Jim Garrison’s investigation, Bobby began to refocus on Dallas. Before, he had deflected friends’ efforts to discuss their suspicions about the case, but now he tentatively began probing the agonizing wound. After seeing Garrison’s face on a magazine cover at an airport newsstand, the senator turned to his press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, and asked him to begin reading all of the assassination literature he could find—“so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” Meanwhile, Kennedy sent his trusted friend and longtime investigator, former FBI agent Walter Sheridan, to New Orleans to size up Garrison’s operation. The buttoned-down ex-G-man took an immediate disliking to the flamboyant DA and reported back to Bobby that Garrison was a fraud. Sheridan’s take on Garrison—which was reflected in the harsh NBC News special that Sheridan helped produce in June—foiled Garrison’s efforts to build an investigative alliance with RFK.
The Garrison camp implored Kennedy to speak out about the conspiracy, arguing that such a public stand might even protect his own life by putting the conspirators on notice. But RFK preferred to play such deeply crucial matters close to the chest. He would reopen the case on his own terms, Kennedy confided to his closest aides—suggesting that day would come only if he won the executive powers of the White House[That explains his assassination DC]
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“One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious,” said RFK’s Senate aide, Adam Walinsky. “Serious people, when faced with something like that—you don’t speculate out loud about it. . . . He had an acute understanding of how difficult that kind of investigation is, even if you had all the power of the presidency.” On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. He was motivated, he said, by his desire to "end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities” and to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country.” Kennedy left unstated another reason for his White House run—to finally close the case that still tormented his family and the nation.
RFK launched his presidential campaign in the same chandeliered room in the Old Senate Office Building where his brother had declared his bid for the White House eight years earlier. But a more somber mood hung over Bobby’s announcement. Not only was the country—and RFK’s own party—more torn by war and racial divisions than in 1960, but there was an acute sense that his own life might be at stake. After Richard Nixon and several aides sat watching Kennedy announce his presidential run on a hotel room television, the TV was turned off, and Nixon sat silently looking at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he shook his head and said, “Something bad is going to come of this.” He pointed at the dark screen. “God knows where this is going to lead.” A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy—who had begged him not to run—fell into a bleak conversation with Schlesinger at a New York party. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” she said. “The same thing that happened to Jack.”
Robert Kennedy—the father of ten children, with an eleventh on the way— was terribly aware of the risk he was taking. But, notwithstanding the youthful euphoria around Senator Eugene McCarthy’s “children’s crusade” for president, there was no political figure in America besides Bobby who had the ability to win the White House and heal the country. Kennedy spent many days—and long, anguished nights—wrestling with his decision. At one point, he sought the advice of Walter Lippmann, one of the last of his breed of Washington wise men. “Well, if you believe that Johnson’s reelection would be a catastrophe for the country—and I entirely agree with you on this,” said the sage, “then, if this comes about, the question you must live with is whether you did everything you could do to avert this catastrophe.”
Kennedy’s mere entry into the race was enough to panic LBJ into abandoning his reelection bid. But there still was Johnson’s surrogate—Vice President Hubert Humphrey—to contend with, as well as the specter of Nixon, rising from the ashes. Entering the campaign late, Kennedy threw himself into the primary race with raw determination, knowing that he was fighting an uphill battle against the Democratic Party establishment as well as competing with McCarthy for the antiwar vote. Bobby waded, virtually unprotected, into frenzied crowds on every stop of his campaign; his presidential race was perhaps the bravest, and most reckless, in American history. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told political reporter Jack Newfield. RFK was so moved by something Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that he copied it down and carried it with him: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Bobby’s courage gave strength to those around him, to those ambitious, idealistic men who had served his brother and were now following RFK on his perilous path. His heroism inspired their own. Men like Schlesinger, who could not bring himself to break from the establishment without a Kennedy leading the way; and Kenny O’Donnell, who had begun drinking himself to death, instead of telling the world what he had seen that day in Dealey Plaza with his own eyes; and even Robert McNamara, who had allowed himself to be debased by his allegiance to Johnson and the folly of his war. They now rallied around this new Kennedy crusade, and they were better men for doing so. They joined the battle for America’s soul, as if it were their own.
JFK’s assassins knew that Robert Kennedy was the only man who could bring them to justice. They had sought to keep him close after Dallas, with Dulles showering his condolences on the Kennedy family. “You have been much in my thoughts and Jackie, Ethel and you have my deep respect and admiration,” the spymaster wrote RFK in January 1964. He made sure that Bobby—as well as his parents and siblings—received complete, bound sets of the Warren Report. He fell all over himself, with unctuous eagerness, to respond to queries from RFK, including Bobby’s request that he sit for an interview with the Kennedy Library. In his oral history for the library, Dulles further disgraced himself and the memory of John F. Kennedy by singing false praises of the slain president.
But when Robert Kennedy announced his run for the presidency, he became a wild card, an uncontrollable threat. The danger grew as Kennedy got closer to his goal of winning the Democratic nomination. The June 4 California primary would be the make-or-break moment of his campaign. If he won the Golden State, the pundits declared, his momentum would be unstoppable.
"Oh, God, not again.” That was the collective moan that erupted from deep within the crowd at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy’s victory, as he lay mortally wounded on the grimy floor of the hotel pantry. As in Dallas, official reports immediately pinned sole responsibility for the shooting on a troubled loner, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. The accused assassin was undeniably involved in the assault on Kennedy as the senator and his entourage made their way through the crowded, dimly lit hotel pantry on the way to a press briefing room. But numerous eyewitnesses— including one of the men who subdued Sirhan—insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy. Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot—which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain—was fired from behind. Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman. “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” Noguchi would flatly state in his 1983 memoir.
Then there was Sirhan himself. Like Oswald, he did not claim credit for the assassination. In fact, from the moment he was taken into custody, he seemed utterly perplexed by the tragedy in which he found himself playing the starring role. The dazed Sirhan had no memory of attacking Kennedy. He struck many observers, including hypnosis experts who interviewed him, as a “Manchurian candidate”—an individual highly susceptible to mind control programming.
A security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar who guided Kennedy into the pantry later fell under suspicion. He was seen pulling his gun as the chaos erupted that night in the cramped passageway. But investigators quickly cleared Cesar, and his gun was never tested. Over the years, Cesar’s possible role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy has been debated by researchers and lawyers associated with the case. Some—like Sirhan’s current legal team—declare that Cesar, if not the actual assassin, played a role in the plot, perhaps helping set up Kennedy as a target.
Others, like investigative journalist Dan Moldea—author of a book on the RFK assassination—insist on the innocence of Cesar, who is still alive. “Gene Cesar is an innocent man who has been wrongly accused in the Robert Kennedy murder case, and any claim to the contrary is simply not true,” Moldea e-mailed the author in 2015, adding that he now acts as the reclusive Cesar’s spokesman and has his power of attorney.
John Meier—a former executive in Howard Hughes’s Las Vegas organization—has tied Cesar to CIA contractor Bob Maheu, who was hired by Hughes to run his Vegas operation in the 1960s. Meier claims he was introduced to Cesar in Las Vegas before the RFK assassination by Jack Hooper, Maheu’s security chief. Meier also stated that after Kennedy’s murder, he was warned by Maheu and Hooper never to mention Cesar’s name or his connection to Maheu.
But Maheu strongly denied the accusations. “Everything about [Meier] was a lie,” he snarled during an interview at his Las Vegas home before his death in 2008. “He was a 14-carat phony.” Cesar, too, has rejected Meier’s accusations, with Moldea—speaking on behalf of the former security guard—dismissing them as “just more garbage being peddled by Meier.”
Maheu pointed out that Meier was accused of evading taxes on money he allegedly skimmed from Hughes mining deals and was convicted on a related charge of forgery. But it was Maheu himself who was the biggest crook in his Nevada organization, Hughes told the press after fleeing Las Vegas in 1970. Maheu was “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch [who] stole me blind,” fumed the eccentric billionaire. While running Hughes’s gambling casinos, Maheu had made sweetheart deals with mobsters and allowed the CIA to pay off politicians with Hughes cash and to exploit Hughes’s corporate empire as a front for spy activities. While Maheu was being paid over $500,000 a year by Hughes as his Las Vegas overseer, he still treated the CIA like his top client.
Maheu never concealed his hatred for the Kennedys. He even accused JFK of homicide during his testimony before the Church Committee, for withholding air support from the Bay of Pigs invaders. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “those volunteers who got off the boats that day were murdered.” But Maheu denied playing a role in the Kennedy assassinations.
As with his brother’s death, the investigation into Robert Kennedy’s murder would become clouded with murky agendas. There were hints of CIA involvement, Mafia corruption—and once again glaring displays of official negligence. Sirhan Sirhan’s prosecution was a streamlined process, with the defendant often seeming like a confused bystander at his own trial. Just like the JFK inquest, the outcome was never in doubt. Sirhan has spent the bulk of his life in prison, with his periodic requests for a retrial routinely denied.
Allen Dulles, who turned seventy-five in April 1968, kept up a busy schedule all that year, despite Clover and Mary’s concerns about his health. Dulles continued attending meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations intelligence study group and the Princeton Board of Trustees; there were luncheons at the Alibi Club, embassy parties and regular get-togethers with old CIA comrades like Angleton, Jim Hunt, and Howard Roman. And he continued to appear as a special guest on radio and TV shows.
Not even the civil unrest in Washington ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that April seemed to faze Dulles. After King's assassination, his followers took their fallen leader’s Poor People’s Campaign to the nation’s capital, erecting a protest encampment on the National Mall that they christened Resurrection City. On June 24—after more than one thousand police officers swept into the camp, dispersing the protesters—riots again broke out in the streets of the capital, prompting officials to call out the National Guard and declare a curfew. But Dulles did not let the disturbances affect his social life. “Lest you worry at the news of a curfew in Washington,” Dulles wrote the following day to Clover, who was visiting Allen Jr. and Joan in Switzerland at the time, “you can rest assured that everything remains quiet here.” Dulles had invited their old friend, Helen Magruder—the widow of OSS deputy director, Brigadier General John Magruder—for dinner at Q Street. After supper, he wrote, “We were able to get a taxi shortly, and Helen returned home in safety.”
That afternoon, Dulles continued, he planned to go to a CIA social gathering with Jim Hunt and his wife. “I am afraid I will have to pass up [family friend] Marion Glover’s afternoon affair, as I cannot get to both,” he told Clover. There was always too much for Dulles to do in his leisure years.
That same month, Dulles found time to sit down and write a condolence letter to the brother of another murdered Kennedy. “Dear Ted,” he wrote the last Kennedy brother, “I join with a multitude of others in expressing to you my deep sorrow. I had the opportunity of working with Bobby on many occasions and had great respect for his dynamic approach to our national problems and for his vigor and forthrightness in dealing with them. His death is a great loss to the country and especially to those like yourself who were so close to him. I send you my profound sympathy.” Once again, Dulles’s flawless civility is chilling to behold.
Ted Kennedy responded warmly to Dulles’s letter, in a way that the spymaster must have found reassuring. “Joan and I want you to know how grateful we are for your message,” the senator wrote on his personal stationery. “At a time of sadness, nothing is more helpful than hearing from a friend. . . . I hope we will see each other soon.” It was clear that there would be no trouble from the youngest Kennedy brother.
On July 8, according to his day calendar, Dulles made time to meet with Dr. Stephen Chowe, an American University professor who was an expert in Chinese and Russian brainwashing techniques. Dulles had known Chowe, a former CIA researcher, for some time. The mind control expert had reached out to Dulles in June, arranging a time to discuss his latest work on “political psychology.” Then, on July 13, 1968—a few days after his meeting with Chowe —Dulles met with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s pharmaceutical wizard, who was involved in the agency’s assassination and MKULTRA mind control programs. These meetings on the Dulles calendar are particularly intriguing, coming just weeks after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the arrest of Sirhan Sirhan—a man who appeared to be in a hypnotic or narcotic state when he was taken into custody and, to some mind control experts, seemed to fit the mold of an MKULTRA subject.
That summer, Dulles also continued to keep a close watch on Jim Garrison’s investigation. In July, Angleton deputy Ray Rocca phoned Dulles to discuss an article about the New Orleans prosecutor by Edward Jay Epstein in The New Yorker. In September, CIA mole Gordon Novel called Dulles to give him another inside report on the Garrison probe.
The Old Man’s main social event of the fall season was the Washington fête in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen’s U.S. sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler’s old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre—Gehlen’s former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany’s top intelligence liaison in Washington.
That fall, Dulles eagerly anticipated the long-delayed presidential election of Richard Nixon, the Dulles brothers’ former disciple. He got involved in the Nixon campaign, joining fund-raising committees and contributing his own money. On Halloween, Nixon sent Dulles a telegram, thanking him for his support and appointing him vice chairman of the “Eisenhower Team” for the Nixon-Agnew ticket. The Old Man had visions of returning to the center of official Washington, perhaps with a prominent appointment in the new Nixon administration.
But Clover and others close to him knew the truth—he was slowly fading away. At times, in the midst of his frenetic schedule, Dulles would suddenly seem lost. “Uncle Allen would go off to lunch at the Metropolitan Club or Alibi Club and forget how to get home,” said his cousin, Eleanor Elliott. “Sometimes he would just get lost in the neighborhood, and people who recognized him would bring him back. Clover was so worried.”
In December—working with Howard Roman, his longtime collaborator— Dulles finished editing a collection of espionage yarns, Great Spy Stories, featuring selections by masters of the genre such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. In the book’s foreword, Dulles offered his final observations on the stealthy profession to which he had dedicated himself. In the past, he wrote, “the spy was generally thought of as a rather sneaky and socially unacceptable figure.” But World War II and the Cold War, he observed, had turned spies into dashing heroes. “The spy has the muscle and the daring to take the place of the discarded hero of yore. He is the new-model musketeer.” None of the blood and sorrow that had flowed all around him had left a mark on Dulles. He continued to have the highest esteem for himself and his “craft.” As he neared the end of his life, there was no self-reflection, only more tale spinning for a public that could not get enough of the cool romance of 007. [A grade A asshole to the end DC]
Soon after finishing the book, Dulles came down with a bad case of the flu, which confined him to bed. By Christmas Eve, the infection had settled in his chest and turned to pneumonia, and Dulles was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital. Over the following month, he struggled to recover, rallying at one point to write a congratulatory note to Nixon on his inauguration. But on January 29, 1969, Dulles died of complications from his illness.
Even after his death, the secret organism that Dulles had created continued to pulse. A team led by Angleton swept into the Old Man’s home office, while Clover lay in bed upstairs, and rifled through his files. CIA technicians installed secure phone lines to handle the flood of condolence calls. An effusive eulogy was crafted for his memorial service at Georgetown Presbyterian Church. The soft-spoken church minister, who was used to writing his own funeral orations, balked at reading the bombastic address that had been written by longtime Dulles ghostwriter Charles Murphy, with input from Angleton and Jim Hunt. But the Dulles team quickly set the cleric straight. “This is a special occasion,” the minister was informed by an official-sounding caller the night before the funeral. “The address has been written by the CIA.”
The next day, the minister stood up in his church—whose pews were filled with the solemn ranks of CIA spooks and political dignitaries—and recited the eulogy as instructed. “It is as a splendid watchman that many of us saw him,” he declared, “a famous and trusted figure in clear outline on the American ramparts, seeing that the nation could not be surprised in its sleep or be overcome in the night.
“It fell to Allen Dulles to perfect a new kind of protection,” continued the preacher, not knowing how ironic the words he spoke were. “For us, as for him, patriotism sets no bounds on . . . the defense of freedom and liberty.”
Dulles’s funeral oration was a celebration of the lawless era that he had inaugurated. Under Dulles, America’s intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force—at home and abroad—violating citizens’ privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will. His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system’s “splendid watchmen.” Dulles had personally shaped and inspired some of these watchmen, including Helms and Angleton—as well as the power players of future administrations, like William Casey, President Reagan’s defiantly lawbreaking CIA director, and Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands. And though they never met, Dulles also provided a template for Bush regent Dick Cheney’s executive absolutism and extreme security measures in the name of national defense. These men, too, firmly believed that “patriotism set no bounds” on their power.
Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles’s work —playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could only have dreamed about—with little understanding of the debt they owe to the founding father of modern American intelligence. Dead for nearly half a century, Dulles’s shadow still darkens the land.
Those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles. “His Monument Is Around Us,” reads the inscription underneath the bas-relief sculpture. The words sound like a curse on the men and women who work in the citadel of national security, and on all those they serve.
Epilogue
After Dulles, James Angleton soldiered on for several more years in the CIA’s
counterintelligence department until his gloomy paranoia seemed to threaten the
gleaming efficiency of a new espionage era and, in 1975, he was forced to retire.
Angleton remained a loyal sentry of the Dulles legacy for many years. He had
carried the master’s ashes in a wooden urn at Dulles’s funeral. Their stories had
been long entwined, from the days of the Nazi ratlines in Rome through the
assassinations of the 1960s. Dulles was Angleton’s revered monarch, and he was
Dulles’s ghostly knight. When Angleton’s successors cracked open his legendary safes and vaults, out spilled the sordid secrets of a lifetime of service to Allen Dulles. Among the trove of classified documents and exotic souvenirs were two Bushmen bows and some arrows—which the CIA safecrackers wisely tested right away for poison, knowing Angleton’s reputation. The safecracking team was also horrified to find files relating to both Kennedy assassinations and stomach-turning photos taken of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, which were promptly burned. These, too, were mementoes of Angleton’s years of faithful service to Dulles.
But as he crept toward death in 1987, Angleton was less bound by the loyalty oaths of the past, and he began to talk about his career with a surprisingly raw clarity. By then, his lungs were cancer-ridden from a lifetime of incessant smoking, and his sunken cheeks and receding eyes gave him the look of a fallen saint. The Catholic Angleton had always needed to believe in the holiness of his mission. And now, as he faced the final judgment, he felt compelled to make confessions, of sorts, to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.
These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”
He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day —Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”
https://ia802902.us.archive.org/33/items/DavidTalbotTheDevilsChessboard2015/David%20Talbot%20-%20The%20Devil%27s%20Chessboard%20-%202015.pdf
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