The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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