The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  Stilwell was succeeded by conservative Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer and ambassador to China Patrick J. Hurley. Rusk was suggested [though never proven] as the author of a famous report entitled “the 1949 White Paper on China” which, per Gill, paved the way for the victory of Mao Tse-Tung.

  Rusk was ordered back to Washington where he became Assistant Chief in the Operations Division of the War Department’s General Staff. Rusk was a protégé of General George C. Marshall. Among other cohorts of Rusk were soon-to-be Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Under Secretary of the Army John J. McCloy. This close connection with Patterson and John J. McCloy is very telling. McCloy, of course, effectively ran the Warren Commission. Patterson worked closely during the WWII with James Forrestal. In the opinion of your author, this “Forrestal connection” included some people involved in the JFK assassination. This connection is presented in more detail in other chapters.

  After leaving the Army in February, 1946, Rusk became Assistant Chief of the Division of International Security Affairs. The new Secretary of State George C. Marshall named Rusk Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, a post just vacated by Alger Hiss. Hiss, of course, was later proven to be one of the rare actual Communists or former Communists in the State Department. Hiss was exposed in that role by Richard M. Nixon, then a member of the HUAC committee.

  In December, 1952, things were happening at the SISS. On December 16, Carlisle H. Humelsine, then Deputy Undersecretary of State in charge of security, was questioned by Jay Sourwine before SISS. Humelsine claimed to SISS that there had been a definite effort by the State Department to recruit American Communists for work at the U.N. So we see, (at that early date) when Joe McCarthy was at his zenith, SISS was already involved with trying to supervise or possibly even run the State Department, even after the election of a Republican President.

  Regarding Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S. cut off further weapons for him, and he quickly lost the South and West of China to Mao Tse-tung. Rusk likened the Communist takeover of China to the American Revolution. Credit for the White Paper on China went to Philip Jessup, a former Chairman of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Jessup was allegedly involved with five Communist fronts. Rusk, during this time, was the most important voice in advising President Truman to intervene in the Korean War. Also at this time, General MacArthur sensed something was wrong in Washington. MacArthur said, “There was a tendency towards temporizing rather than fighting it through.” (OOO p. 77).

  On November 6, 1950 in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur had discovered that 200,000 Chinese troops were massing just north of the Yalu River. MacArthur ordered the bridges across the Yalu River to be bombed. But according to the memoirs of Harry S. Truman called Years of Trial and Hope, Truman says he revoked MacArthur’s orders to bomb the bridges because Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk cited an agreement with Britain not to go near the Yalu River without consulting with them. Note the advocacy for Britain on the part of Dean Rusk. This was only the latest example of Rusk being involved with Britain, perhaps to the detriment of U.S. security.

  On April 11, Truman removed MacArthur from his command, and the memo to that effect delivered to MacArthur was, according to Look magazine, written by Dean Rusk. In December 1951, Rusk resigned from the State Department. After his resignation, Rusk went on to become President of the Rockefeller Foundation. Five months before Rusk resigned from State, his close advisor, Oliver Edmund Chubb, was proven to have close relationships with subversives. The month Chubb was declared a security risk by a State Department Board, SISS began a year-long investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations. In July, 1952, SISS issued its report which said that IPR had been “an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military Intelligence.”

  So we see that, as previously mentioned, the Institute of Pacific Relations was on the hot seat. This was despite the fact that both the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were funding IPR. As we have noted, to this day there is a dearth of available objective information about the Institute of Pacific Relations.

  The implication of the SISS versus IPR controversy, was that the British Commonwealth nations along with the Rockefeller interests were at that time considered too soft on Communism by the right-wing anti-Communists who were in control of Congress. At least that’s what they felt when it came to the issue of worldwide Communism. This could have logically arisen because of the natural British concern over the eventual fate of the British Empire vis a vis Communism.

  The Battle between Otepka and SISS Against

  Rusk and Robert Kennedy Intensifies

  At this time, Gill claims that there were Communists in the U.S. Government masquerading as Liberals. (For some reason author Gill capitalizes Liberal but conservative is left in the small case). SY (State Security) Director William O. Boswell who was one of Otto Otepka’s superiors, was quoted thus: “once… [Boswell] told Otepka that he intended to eradicate the “the McLeod image” from SY. McCleod, as described previously, was an Ike/McCarthy anti-Communist hatchet-man at State.

  Gill claims that, by 1961, it had become harder and harder to find real security risks in the government. (OOO p. 88). The obvious question here was, could it be because there were actually fewer security risks? Gill claims that this was due in large part to the paucity of new defectors from the American Communist Party. But the fact was, in 1961, the majority of members in the American Communist Party were paid FBI informants. The FBI, therefore, was the major funding source for the Communist Party at that time. Coming full circle back to SISS, all of this was bad news for people who had turned the Red Scare into cash in the bank such as Senator Thomas J. Dodd, permanently acting Chairman of SISS.

  The reader might wonder, why are we going so far afield from our effort to understand the assassination of JFK? It comes down to this: the whole direction of U.S. history from 1945 to 1963 was pointed to battling world Communism. And the front line players in this epic battle were people like the “China hands” which included both Dean Rusk and John Paton Davies, and Senators McCarthy, Thomas Dodd, James O. Eastland and Pat McCarran, founder of SISS. The three main anti-Communist Committees, HUAC, SISS and the McCarthy Committee were the springboards for such influential politicials as McCarthy and President Richard M. Nixon. And even more importantly, there were actual fingerprints of SISS, HUAC, SISS Chairmen James O. Eastland and Thomas Dodd all over the JFK assassinatin. Is that direct enough? (Stay tuned!)

  To comprehend the dynamics that drove the JFK assassination, one has to be aware of the continuous existential battle from 1945 to 1963 between the Congress and the Presidents. The most famous evidence for that internecine war is the warning by Ike about the “military-industrial complex.” That statement by Ike gives a clue as to what all of this is about. To many people intimately involved in the battle against Communism and the USSR, from the Ukraine to Taiwan, their backs were against the wall. Just imagine what it would have meant to the Vatican, for example, if the Soviet Communists had taken over Italy! And because of their strong and numerous Communist Party, Italy was one of those countries teetering on that dangerous brink, ready to fall into the abyss.

  So the battle between Otepka, Rostow, Rusk and SISS for the soul of the State Department raged literally right up until November 22, 1963. One has to gain insight into this epic struggle to appreciate the dynamics of the murder of JFK.

  More on Walter W.

  Rostow

  Early in 1960, the attempts to exile Otepka were begun by his superiors John W. Hanes (who also owned the Hanes underwear company) and SY Director William O. Boswell. After the 1960 elections the pressure against Otepka increased. Although denied clearance to work at the State Department, Walt Whitman Rostow was making an impact as a Presidential advisor at the White House. As an example of the way Rostow thought, he stated at one point “he does not believe that the United States has the right to preserve its own ‘nationhood’.” Rostow’s anti-nationhood bias was a product of the unique experiences in hi
s career.

  Walter W. Rostow had graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale, and studied in England as a Rhodes scholar. Rostow studied at the Balliol College within Oxford University which was considered the most liberal of all the Oxford Colleges. After Oxford, Walter Rostow returned to Yale for his PhD. During World War II, like Dean Rusk, W.W. Rostow capitalized on his Oxford background by serving with the OSS in Britain.

  Rostow returned to England in 1946 as a professor of American history. Then he went to Switzerland working directly for Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal went on to eventually hire Rostow’s brother Eugene Debs Rostow. Walter Rostow would come to the State Department in 1967. Ultimately, it was finally disclosed that Rostow was the originator of President Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal, which sought to allow the U.S. and the USSR to inspect each other’s attack potential from the air. This was exactly the type of moderate policy that SISS and the ultra-conservatives might consider an act of treason.

  Most of the steps taken by Kennedy and Johnson towards disarmament originated at the Pugwash conference. It was so-called because the first such meeting had been held at a place called Pugwash in Nova Scotia. The meetings were organized by Cyrus S. Eaton, a wealthy friend of Krushchev. The major initiatives from that conference were the the renunciation of a first-strike nuclear strategy, the ban on nuclear weapons in space and the 1963 Treaty of Moscow, also called the Limited Test Ban Treaty. SISS tried to interfere with this meeting, complaining that some of the attendees were Communists. (This was not surprising at a meeting of U.S. and Soviet officials).

  It was the Limited Test Ban Treaty that most rankled SISS. In 1961, Kennedy took his foreign policy advice from White House advisors Walter W. Rostow and McGeorge Bundy. But apparently, Rostow and Bundy had to rely on information and opinion from the State Department. After all, there could be no substitute for the all the nearly 9000 State Department employees spread around the world in U.S. Embassies and Consulates. In early 1961, Walter Rostow became the chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council. In the words of President Kennedy to Rostow when he sent Rostow from the White House to the State Department: “Over here in the White House we have to play with a very narrow range of choices. We are pretty much restricted to the ideas coming out of the bureaucracy. We can’t do long-range planning; it has to be done over there [at State] I want you to go over there and catch hold of the process at the level where it counts.” (OOO p. 88).

  As early as November 1961, there began the effort to remove Otto Otepka from his position as Deputy Director of the Office of Security. SISS and the Administration quickly became involved in a conflict about the administrative changes to SY. A journalist at the Hearst newspapers reported that there was an effort being made to abolish the jobs of 25 State Department Security officials.

  The Battle Between SISS and State Becomes War

  It was in the context of this reorganization that on November 16, 1961 Otto Otepka was first called to testify to SISS. Otepka was joined before SISS by Elmer Hipsley and Harris Huston, two veteran State Department security officials. One of the most crucial changes proposed by the top people at State Security was the transfer of the place where security and intelligence reports were processed at the State Department. The Evaluations department had for years been the initial recipients at State for the reports from the FBI, CIA and other Intelligence agencies. This duty would now lie in the Intelligence Research Bureau, which was not even a part of the Security Department at State, and was considered a dead-end. The good thing for Otepka in the proposed reorganizations was that he was put in charge of Evaluations. At around that time, Scott McLeod, the Eisenhower anti-Communist hatchet-man, died of a heart attack. The big issues at this time were the status of Otepka’s job, SISS, Jay Sourwine (Chief Counsel of SISS) and Ben Mandel, (head of research at SISS).

  Beginning in December, 1960, following an important conference between Robert Kennedy, Dean Rusk and Otepka, procedures at the State Department were adjusted in order to route close cases around Otepka so he would never see them. After that meeting with Rusk, Otepka and RFK, over a fourteen-month period, Dean Rusk would write up as many as 152 “security waivers.” which allowed hiring without the normal FBI background checks.

  During the entire Eisenhower administration, such peremptory emergency clearances were only granted five times. These were clearances of relatively high ranking officials. In February 1962, Otepka went to see Boswell, informed him about the waiver problem and Boswell replied that these were done “on the prerogatives of management.”

  On March 8, 1962, Boswell, Jones and Otepka all testified to SISS. Otepka revealed that some clearances had even been backdated. It came out later that all the 152 “waivers” had been personally authorized by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. In defense of Rusk, it should be said that Rusk would not have wanted to sneak practicing Communists into the State Department and certainly not suspected spies. So these 152 waivers were probably issued to speed along the hiring process. Gill claims that the problem of doing this meant once you hired someone, a subsequent background check would not matter because it was difficult to get rid of employees once they were on the job. This was possibly due to Civil Service protections and procedures.

  This again, reveals the real agenda of SISS and their ally Otto Otepka. If a subsequent background check turned up espionage or Communist Party membership, that person would very quickly be fired. What SISS and Otepka were really arguing was that post-hiring background checks would not be able to produce any hard evidence to exclude or dismiss the new hire.

  At this point we are reminded of author Gill’s condemnation of Blackstone and the common law. In the mentality of Otepka and SISS, the law didn’t guarantee valuable rights. The law (the entire law!) served only to shelter Communists. Their objections were often based on such things as a candidate having an aunt or uncle who was sympathetic to Communism, or a person bought a book at a bookstore which offered books about Lenin or Stalin.

  In any kind of fair process such as a hearing before the Civil Service Commission, the SISS-Otepka kind of guilt-by-association evidence would not hold up. And further, what SISS (along with Otepka) really wanted was a veto power, exercised by conservatives in Congress, or perhaps even private citizens over the hiring process for the State Department. Apparently this veto power could be based on liberal versus conservative politics. That, of course, is not the way our government was set up. Under the Constitution, the Congress passes laws and the Executive hires people for the executive branch alone, except for certain high offices where confirmation by the Senate is required.

  One could therefore ask the following question: if people like Dean Rusk were subject to confirmation by the Senate, why wasn’t the Senate able to weed out, in the confirmation process, officials who were destined to be found “soft” on Communism? Keep in mind, the entire Senate could not have been kept in the dark about the activities of SISS. The situation was undoubtedly the opposite. The Senate was obviously too divided or disorganized to carry out the political dirty work which individuals like McCarthy and Senator Dodd of SISS wanted them to do.

  In 1962, there was publicity in the print media about a “grand design” being promoted by Walter Rostow. The details of this design are not pertinent to the analysis of the Rusk vs. SISS confrontation. However, a statement and summary of the issue by Senator Everett Dirksen, a crucial SISS member, seems to sum up the concepts of Rostow best. “The core of Mr. Rostow’s proposal,” said Dirksen, “is an assumption that the Soviet Union and its Communist masters are ‘mellowing’; that Russia is becoming a mature state; that if we are only nice to the Soviets they will drop all their suspicions of the free world and peace will finally bloom.”

  There were some who were fearful that Robert Kennedy was quickly being educated about foreign policy so that he could attempt to micro-manage foreign relations. This would add to the already long RFK list, which included the micro-management of the murder plot
s against Castro, the prosecution or deportation of the Mafia, and the civil rights activity of the Justice Department in the South.

  There were allegations that, while traveling abroad, RFK personally decided to transfer Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia’s Sukarno. This was in early 1962. Some would say that in addition to foreign policy, RFK at that time was also planning to micro-manage the hiring and security clearance problem at the State Department. The reader should take note. It was apparently on or around this time that the polarization in the executive branch began.

  Author Gill, with justification, analyzes this divide as follows: a Rostow-Rusk agenda was pitted against the agenda, of the Kennedy brothers. Gill seems to emphasize, quite correctly, the fact that both Rusk and Rostow had studied for many years in such places as Britain, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. They had therefore absorbed an Anglophile and a one-world-government philosophy that would soon rear it’s ugly head in the form of the Vietnam War. Why did the Rusk-Rostow philosophy predominate?

  The answer to this question is an easy one. Why did Abe Lincoln appoint his political rivals to his cabinet as did President Obama in a later era? JFK would never have done that. JFK was much more high-handed than Abe Lincoln. Let’s face it. The Kennedys would change their colors like chameleons. They were apparently operating on the advice of the patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, who retained the ability to communicate even after his 1961 massive stroke.

  President Franklin Roosevelt finally gave up on the idea of Joseph P. Kennedy being part of the Roosevelt government. FDR felt that Kennedy was too unpredictable and inconsistent in his opinions to be trusted. Because of their lack of a true compass, the Kennedy administration was becoming a case of “putting out fires” everywhere; in place of action came reaction.