by J. W Lateer
Although Bundy considered himself a Republican, for some reason he supported John F. Kennedy when JFK ran against Richard Nixon in 1960. As a result, he became acceptable to Kennedy and the latter appointed him as Special Assistant to the President for National Security. This position headed up the National Security Council. As the reader learns more and more about the secret National Security Council, it becomes obvious that, as head of the NSC, it could be said that Bundy became in some respects the boss of the President, although even the very bright JFK apparently didn’t realize this prior to assuming office. (If he did, he would never have appointed a Republican and a former Thomas A. Dewey staffer to such a powerful position in his administration).
But let us look at the bigger picture of how JFK went about picking his cabinet. If, as we are contending here, JFK’s cabinet was involved in his own murder, then there was an obvious problem in the way he picked it!
The discussion of JFK’s method in picking his cabinet must include, primarily, the way he picked Dean Rusk, his Secretary of State, Robert S. McNamara, his Secretary of Defense and C. Douglas Dillon, his Treasury Secretary. These were the most important cabinet positions.
In his book Kennedy, historian Theodore Sorensen offers an explanation:
“…Kennedy had no political or even personal tie with either Rusk (who had supported Stevenson for the nomination) or Republican McNamara and [he] knew Dillon had supported Nixon.” Per Sorensen, Pentagon Research Director Herbert York claimed that he was the earliest Kennedy supporter in the top ranks of the new Defense Department: all the others had favored Rockefeller, Symington, Johnson or Stevenson.
It is very important that historian Theodore Sorensen takes care to relate in a footnote an “allegation” that Joseph P. Kennedy was responsible for the nominations of Rusk and McNamara. This “allegation” carries the ring of truth. But why does Sorensen characterize this possibility as an allegation? The dictionary defines allegation as “a claim or assertion that someone has done something illegal or wrong…” In this one footnote, Sorensen betrays what he undoubtedly suspects: that Joseph P. Kennedy decided to fill his son’s administration with people who would carry out the agenda of JPK, even though these people might actually be mortal enemies of his son. That ugly fact is a fact that every historian realizes: that Kennedy senior would eagerly treat his own children and family as sacrificial lambs, sometimes with a barbarity which can only be paralleled in the dark recesses of human history. JPK was the pig that eats the piglets.
Even granting that J. P. Kennedy picked people at the top cabinet level, there were still at least 50 candidates which were hand-picked by JFK himself for lesser positions. In this process of selection, there were several persons or groups which were important. One was the Brookings Institute, a think tank. Another was Washington attorney and Democratic influence-peddler Clark Clifford. A third was Richard Neustadt, a top national expert on the subject of Public Administration and who had helped to create the National Security Council and the National Security State itself.
In this transition, there was a potential trap. Ike’s people might try to involve the incoming Kennedy people in things which would be, in reality, Republican programs or policies. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. , outgoing Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson tried to persuade a Kennedy person to go to Germany to discuss the issue of the U.S. gold supply. This idea was not accepted by JFK, who put Paul Nitze on that project instead. (We will see later that Robert Anderson was prominent in the LBJ phone calls in the week after the assassination and was a close associate of Judge Robert Morris).
With regard to a similar issue in the lame-duck period, however, Ike took action which Kennedy might not have taken himself: Ike terminated diplomatic relations with Cuba and thus beat JFK to that switch.
In describing the Ike-Kennedy transition, historian Schlesinger raises the specter of bankers, industrialists, lawyers, generals and foundation presidents, among whom JFK had few, if any, acquaintances. This is a prime example of why Schlesinger is regarded as a poor, if not dishonest historian. Rusk and McNamara were not “acquaintances” of JFK, but he picked both of them. JFK had been in Congress since 1946. He honeymooned with Jackie at Montego Bay in Jamaica in a resort which was a mecca for the rich and famous. To say he didn’t know any bankers, industrialists and generals is ridiculous. JFK had to know the big Wall Street bankers. He had to know who the top generals like Eisenhower, MacArthur, Omar Bradley, Lucius Clay, James Gavin and others.
No, the circumstances of the cabinet choices of JFK all point to the theory that his cabinet was foisted upon him in one way or another. And the theme seemed to be that Joseph P. Kennedy and his type wanted to put the wealthy class like the Rockefellers, the Dillons and the J. P. Morgan’s back in charge of the government, a position they hadn’t enjoyed since the administration of Herbert Hoover.
This force was christened “The Establishment” by a writer in 1955. Schlesinger specifically lists the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations as the front organizations of these establishment special interest groups.
Although it is just another wild, nonsensical claim, it should at least be mentioned that Schlesinger made a claim about the “Establishment.” He wrote “…it had not recovered from a 1957 [JFK] speech attacking French policy in Algeria which had shocked it to its core and even created the myth that Kennedy was anti-NATO, a cardinal Establishment sin.” To translate this comment for the reader, what Schlesinger is really saying here is that JFK’s policy on Algeria (in or around 1962) played a major role in his assassination. The issue of Algeria was not even on the radar in 1957 when compared to issues like Berlin and the gold outflow; and the issue of Algeria had absolutely no bearing on whether JFK was pro or anti-NATO. NATO was conceived as a defense against the Soviet Union, after all, not as a vehicle to influence the war in Algeria. This is just more Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. nonsense.
Kennedy is quoted by Schlesinger as saying that he didn’t care how a potential appointee voted (i.e. Republican or Democrat)! If true, this was to become (literally) a suicidal policy.
Schlesinger names Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy as the two leaders of the Establishment at the time of the JFK transition. Lovett would have a deciding role in JFK’s cabinet-level picks. Having refused any appointment for himself, Lovett recommended Robert S. McNamara for Secretary of Defense. Paul Nitze, a long-time Washington foreign policy insider, had chaired a task force on national security, so his voice was also heard in these discussions.
As mentioned above, Richard Neustadt was one of the nation’s leading experts on both the subject of Public Administration and also on the National Security State. He had been involved during the Truman Administration on questions involving the National Security State. Because of the “security” expertise of Richard Neustadt, the following question must be asked: did Neustadt (or McCloy, Nitze or others) consider the control of the Secret Service by the Department of the Treasury a factor in choosing an appropriate Secretary of the Treasury? Was there any concern on the part of an expert like Neustadt regarding the issue of whether the Secret Service would be well managed or adequately funded under one Treasury candidate versus another? The issue of the appropriate supervision of the Secret Service was discussed (belatedly) in detail before the Warren Commission after JFK was dead: too late by then!
Since there had not been a Presidential assassination since William McKinley, such an issue would not have been automatically in the forefront. But would an expert in national security such as Neustadt be aware of that aspect of security, that is, the physical security of the President and “the loyalty of the Palace Guard?” If Neustadt was not thinking of this issue, he surely should have been.
Returning to the topic of McGeorge Bundy, we find that he was appointed as National Security Advisor in 1961. He was considered one of Kennedy’s “wise men.” Bundy played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense de
cisions of the Kennedy administration and was retained by Lyndon B. Johnson for part of his tenure. Bundy was involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. From 1964 under Johnson, he was also Chairman of the 303 Committee, responsible for coordinating government covert operations. Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War during his tenure, believing it essential to contain Communism. He supported escalating United States involvement, including commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965. Studies of the memoranda and policy papers since those years have revealed that Bundy and other advisors well understood the risk but proceeded with these actions largely because of domestic politics, rather than believing that the U.S. had a realistic chance of victory in this war.
He left government in 1966 to serve as president of the Ford Foundation, serving in this position until 1979.
From 1979 to 1989, Bundy served as a professor of history at New York University. He helped found the group known as the “Gang of Four,” whose other members were Robert McNamara, George F. Kennan and Herbert Scoville; together they spoke and wrote about American nuclear policies. They published an influential article in Foreign Affairs in 1983, which proposed ending the U.S. policy of “first use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe”. During this period, Bundy wrote Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988). Their work has been credited with contributing to the SALT II treaty a decade later.
After serving at the Ford Foundation, in 1979 he returned to academia as professor of history at New York University, and later as scholar in residence at the Carnegie Corporation. Bundy was with the Carnegie Corporation from 1990 to 1996.
He died in 1996 of a heart attack.
Walt Whitman
Rostow
Although W.W. Rostow was not a member of the National Security Council at the moment of the assassination, he has to be included in a discussion of this topic for two reasons.
First, Rostow was the most influential advisor to both JFK and LBJ on the issue of foreign policy.
Second, the selection of Rostow as Deputy National Security Advisor under McGeorge Bundy was of great import in the saga of Otto Otepka. Since Rostow had served as an important fixture in the National Security Council, it is likely that he retained a great deal of influence in the NSC after he left to work for the State Department. Indeed, Otepka biographer William J. Gill implies (or his remarks could be interpreted) that Dean Rusk and W.W. Rostow were the kingpins in the assassination plot within the administration.
Walt Whitman Rostow (also known as Walt Rostow or W.W. Rostow) was born on October 7, 1916. He was an economist and a political theorist who served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966-69.
Prominent for his role in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch anti-communist, noted for a belief in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise, strongly supporting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Rostow is known for his book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), which was used in several fields of social science.
His older brother Eugene Rostow also held a number of high government foreign policy posts.
Rostow was born in New York City to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His parents Victor and Lillian Rostow, were active socialists, and named Walt after Walt Whitman. His brother Eugene, named for Eugene V. Debs, became a legal scholar, and his brother Ralph, after Ralph Waldo Emerson, a department store manager.
Rostow entered Yale University at age 15 on a full scholarship, graduated at 19, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1940. He also won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed a B.Litt. degree. In 1936, during the Edward VIII abdication crisis, he assisted broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who reported on the events for the NBC radio network. After completing his education, he started teaching economics at Columbia University.
During World War II, Rostow served in the wartime U.S. spy agency known as the OSS under William J. Donovan, known as “Wild Bill” Donovan to his friends. Among other tasks, he participated in selecting targets for U.S. bombing in Europe. Nicholas Katzenbach (who would become the Attorney General of the U.S.) at one time joked: “I finally understand the difference between Walt and me [...] I was the navigator who was shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guy picking my targets.”
In 1945, immediately after the war, Rostow became assistant chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division in the Department of State in Washington, D.C.. In 1946-1947, he returned to Oxford University in England as a professor of American History. In 1947, he became the assistant to the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe, and was involved in the development of the Marshall Plan.
Rostow went on to spend a year at Cambridge University in England as a professor in the field of American Studies. He was professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1950 to 1961, and a staff member of the Center for International Studies at MIT from 1951 to 1961. In 1954, he advised President Dwight Eisenhower on economic and foreign policy, and in 1958 he became a speechwriter for Ike. In August 1954, Rostow and fellow CIA-connected MIT economics professor Max F. Millikan convinced Eisenhower to massively increase U.S. foreign aid for development as part of a policy of spreading American-style capitalist economic growth in Asia and elsewhere, backed by the military.
While working as national security advisor, Rostow became involved in setting the United States’ posture towards Israel. Although he supported military and economic assistance to Israel, Rostow believed that increased public alignment between the two states could run counter to U.S. diplomatic and oil interests in the region. After reviewing the May 1967 report from the Atomic Energy Commission team that had inspected the Israeli nuclear facilities at Dimona along with other intelligence, Rostow informed President Johnson that, though the team found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, “there are enough unanswered questions to make us want to avoid getting locked in too closely with Israel.”
In 1960, Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, one of the major historical models of economic growth, which argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. This level of complex thinking was typical of Rostow. That’s why Rostow became such an iconic figure in U.S. planning in many areas. This became one of the important concepts in the theory of modernization in social evolutionism. Though complex, many dismissed this thesis because it would not realistically apply in places like Latin America or Africa south of the Sahara.
This theoretical work impressed presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who appointed Rostow as one of his political advisers, and sought his advice.. When Kennedy became president in 1961, he appointed Rostow as deputy to his national security assistant McGeorge Bundy. Later that year, Rostow became chairman of the U.S. Department of State’s policy planning council. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson promoted Rostow to Bundy’s job after Rostow wrote Johnson’s first State of the Union speech. As national security adviser, Rostow was responsible for developing the government’s policy in Vietnam, and was convinced that the war could be won. He became Johnson’s main war hawk and played an important role in bringing Johnson’s presidency to an unhappy end.
When Richard Nixon became president, Rostow left office, and over the next thirty years taught economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin with his wife Elspeth Rostow, who later became dean of the school. He wrote extensively in defense of free enterprise economics, particularly in developing nations.
Because Rostow possessed such an overwhelming intellect, he could not have remained in the JFK administration
and been unaware of the assassination plot. Indeed, just hours after the assassination, his brother Eugene Rostow called LBJ with a complete plan for a Warren Commission strategy. Some say that Eugene Rostow, in so doing, was working with a group who had put together the Warren Commission concept (implicitly in advance of the assassination). Otepka biographer William J. Gill writes darkly about Rostow’s character.
Dean
Rusk
On the issue of the National Security Council, the person next in importance after McGeorge Bundy was Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
David Dean Rusk was born February 9, 1909. He was the Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969. His term began under the Kennedy Administration and ended with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He was among the top three longest-serving Secretaries of State.
Dean Rusk was born in Cherokee County, Georgia. His parents were Robert Hugh Rusk and Frances Elizabeth Clotfelder. He was educated in Atlanta public schools and worked in a law office for two years before deciding to attend Davidson College, a Presbyterian school where he worked his way through for all four years and also played football, graduating in 1931 (Traditionally, everyone at Davidson could join the football squad as a freshman, at least in later years). Rusk married Virginia Foisie on June 9, 1937. The Rusks had three children.
Rusk became a cadet in ROTC and commanded a battalion of ROTC reserve cadets. Rusk was a very successful scholar. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England. While in the Rhodes Scholar program, he earned a BS and MA degree from St. John’s College in Oxford University. For his excellent scholarship, he received the Cecil Prize, a prestigious honor, in 1933. Rusk then went on to study at the University of Berlin and earned a law degree from the University of California-Berkely in 1940. This would be his fourth college degree, having studied in four renowned colleges and universities by the time he was 31. All this while also having played college football and commanded a ROTC battalion.
