by David Talbot
President Kennedy met only once with de Gaulle, on his state visit to Paris at the end of May 1961, a month after the failed coup. The president and First Lady were feted at a banquet in Élysée Palace, where the old general—dazzled by Jackie—leaned down closely to hear every breathy word she spoke to him, in fluent French. During the three-day visit, the two heads of state discussed many pressing issues, from Laos to Berlin to Cuba. But Kennedy and de Gaulle never broached the touchy subject of the coup, much less the CIA’s involvement in it. As French journalist Vincent Jauvert later observed, “Why wake up old demons who had barely fallen asleep?”
Kennedy knew that he would have to resume wrestling with those demons as soon as he returned home. He would have to decide how deeply to purge his own security agencies, as de Gaulle had already begun to do in France. Kennedy knew there would be steep political costs involved in taking on the CIA and Pentagon. But, as Walter Lippmann had told Schlesinger, “Kennedy will not begin to be President until he starts to break with Eisenhower.” Continuity in Washington was no longer the new president’s concern. Shaken by the traumatic events in Cuba and France, JFK was ready to remake his government.
A few weeks after the Bay of Pigs and the foiled French coup, JFK asked Jackie to invite Dulles for drinks or tea at the White House. Charlie Wrightsman and his wife were also dropping by, and Kennedy wanted to make a point. The Florida tycoon had self-righteously told Kennedy that he was not going to be seeing his old friend Dulles during his trip to Washington—his way of snubbing the spymaster for bungling the job in Cuba. The president was “disgusted” by Wrightsman’s disloyalty to Dulles, according to Jackie, so he went out of his way to include the disgraced CIA leader in the White House’s get-together. By now, enough time had elapsed since the disasters of April, and with Dulles on his way out, Kennedy was feeling magnanimous toward the Old Man.
“[Jack] was so loyal always to people in, you know, trouble,” the First Lady later recalled. “And he made a special effort to come back from [the Oval Office] and sit around with Jayne and Charlie Wrightsman, just to show Charlie what he thought of Allen Dulles. And, I mean, it made all the difference to Allen Dulles. I was with him about five [or ten] minutes before Jack got there. He just looked like, I don’t know, Cardinal Mindszenty on trial,” she said, referring to the Hungarian prelate who was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of treason by a Soviet-run show trial. “You know, just a shell of what he was. And Jack came and talked—put his arm around him. . . . Well, wasn’t that nice? It was just to show Charlie Wrightsman. But it shows something about Jack. I mean, he knew [that] Dulles had obviously botched everything up. [But], you know, he had a tenderness for the man.”
But “poor Allen Dulles,” as Jackie took to referring to him, was likely untouched by the president’s gesture. The CIA director’s resentment of Kennedy was growing by the day, as his fingers slowly lost their grip on power. Feeling the young man’s arm wrapped paternally around his shoulder would have chilled Dulles, not warmed him. The spymaster had served every president since Woodrow Wilson. And now, here he was, being comforted by this weak pretty boy who did not belong in the same company as the great men who preceded him. It was appalling that he, Allen Dulles, should be consoled by such a man.
Though Dulles himself kept his fury carefully concealed, his most loyal aides and political allies freely vented their feelings against the Kennedy White House on the Old Man’s behalf. Howard Hunt, who worked as the CIA’s political liaison with the volatile Cuban exile community on the Bay of Pigs, called Dulles and Bissell “scapegoats to expiate administration guilt.” Hunt, whose anti-Communist passions equaled those of his militant Cuban compadres, was deeply moved by the way his boss comported himself during his slow fadeout at the CIA. “As a member of Dulles’s staff,” Hunt remembered, “I lunched in the Director’s mess, seeing him return from each [Taylor] Committee session more drawn and gray. But on taking his place at the head of the table, Mr. Dulles’s demeanor changed into hearty cheerfulness—a joke here, a baseball bet there, came from this remarkable man whose long career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images.”
The summer following the Bay of Pigs, Prescott Bush—the CIA’s man in the Senate—and his wife, Dorothy, invited Dulles to dinner at their Washington home. The spymaster showed up with John McCone in tow—the Republican businessman and former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Kennedy had just privately tapped as Dulles’s replacement. Bush, who was still unaware that Dulles had been officially deposed, was surprised to see McCone, “whom,” he later recalled in a letter to Clover, “we had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen’s. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came the next day.” The dinner conversation around the Bush family table that night was awkward. “We tried to make a pleasant evening of it,” Bush wrote, “but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedy’s [sic] that brot [sic] about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
On November 28, 1961, Dulles was given his formal send-off at the CIA, in a ceremony held at the agency’s brand-new headquarters, a vast, modernist complex carved out of the woods in Langley, Virginia. It was a day of clashing emotions for Dulles. The gleaming new puzzle palace, which Dulles had commissioned, was seen by many as a monument to his long reign—but he would never occupy the director’s suite. Now some agency wits were snidely christening the Langley edifice “The Allen Dulles Memorial Mausoleum.”
President Kennedy was gracious in his farewell remarks, as he bestowed the agency’s highest honor—the National Security Medal—on Dulles. “I regard Allen Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country,” he told the crowd gathered in a sterile, fluorescent-lit theater, including a somber-faced Clover and Eleanor Dulles, and an equally stern-looking General Lemnitzer and J. Edgar Hoover, who almost certainly were wondering when they would be next to go. “I know of no man,” the president continued, “who brings a greater sense of personal commitment to his work—who has less pride in office—than he has.”
This last piece of flattery was particularly overblown, as Kennedy well knew, because there were few men in his administration brimming with as much self-admiration as Allen Dulles. The departing CIA director had made sure that invitations to his medal ceremony were sent out to a who’s who list of Fortune 500 executives, including the chiefs of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Chase Manhattan, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, IBM, CBS, and Time-Life. He kept copies of all the flowery farewells that poured in from the corporate world, including letters from 20th Century Fox movie mogul Spyros Skouras, and conglomerate tycoon J. Peter Grace, who wrote, “It is almost unbelievable that one family could produce two men of the caliber of yours and your late, sorely missed, brother.”
But, after the ceremony, Dulles looked a bit lost and forlorn as he waved to Kennedy’s departing helicopter from the front steps of the headquarters he would never occupy. The following day was even more melancholy for Dulles as JFK swore in McCone at the old CIA building on E Street. Clover dropped him off at the ceremony in the family car, since Dulles was no longer entitled to a CIA limousine and driver. “Clover, I’ll be home later in a taxi,” the Old Man told his wife as he climbed out of the car. He was overheard by Lawrence “Red” White, the agency’s efficient, nuts-and-bolts administrator, who insisted that Dulles be driven home in an official car. Dulles made a show of protesting but accepted the kind gesture—one of the few bright spots in what colleagues described as a very dark day for the espionage legend. “His morale,” White recalled, “was pretty low on his last day as DCI [Director of Central Intelligence].”
Retired at home in Georgetown, the old spymaster’s funereal mood did not lift as Kennedy proceeded to rid his administration of remnants of the fallen Dull
es dynasty. First to go were the Dulles deputies most closely associated with the Bay of Pigs, Dick Bissell and Charles Cabell. Then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, his brother’s vigilant watchman, tracked down Eleanor Dulles, who was still working quietly on German affairs in Foggy Bottom, and had Secretary of State Rusk fire her. “I don’t want any more of the Dulles family around,” the attorney general was heard to say. Eleanor took it hard. “It was silly, I suppose,” she later remarked. “I was 66 years old, and a lot of my friends asked why I should want to go on working. Well, I had psychological and financial reasons. My job at State was a valuable thing to cling to. Besides, I had debts. I had put two children through college, and I needed a salary.”
Over at the Pentagon, JFK had already begun to purge Dulles Cold Warriors like Arleigh Burke, who was drummed out of the Navy in August. Next to go was Lemnitzer, who was replaced as Joint Chiefs chairman by Maxwell Taylor in November, the same month Dulles himself was shown the door.
Kennedy took further steps to signal that the Dulles era was over and that the CIA would no longer be allowed to run wild; he placed overseas agents under the control of U.S. ambassadors and shifted responsibility for future paramilitary operations like the Bay of Pigs to the Pentagon. It was the Kennedy brothers, not the Dulles brothers, who now ran Washington.
Dulles found it hard to adjust to life on the political sidelines. “He had a very difficult time to decompress,” said Jim Angleton, his longtime acolyte. But it soon became clear that the Dulles dynasty was not entirely dismantled.
In truth, the Kennedy purge had left the ranks of Dulles loyalists at the CIA largely untouched. Top Dulles men like Angleton and Helms remained on the job. And the Old Man’s shadow knights never abandoned their king. They continued to call on him in Georgetown, with Angleton visiting two or three times a week. They consulted with him on agency affairs, as if he were still DCI, and not John McCone. They collaborated with him on plans for books and film projects. They continued to kneel before Allen Dulles, their banished commander, and kiss his ring. And soon, Dulles began to emerge from his gloomy refuge, ready for action. By mid-January 1962, the “retired” spymaster was writing an old comrade, “As you know, I am not much of a believer in either retirement or long vacations.” The house on Q Street was already on its way to becoming the seat of a government in exile. Dulles had been deposed, but his reign continued.
16
Rome on the Potomac
By the evening of June 16, 1962, when bow-tied Arthur Schlesinger Jr. went tumbling fully clothed into the swimming pool at Hickory Hill, Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s estate in suburban Virginia, the dunking of party guests had become a New Frontier ritual. Dinner parties at Hickory Hill, where dogs and children ran wild through the house and across the rolling lawns, were already a colorful part of Washington society lore. Invitations to Bobby and Ethel’s backyard fests signaled insider status in the youthful Kennedy court. Judy Garland sang; Harry Belafonte did the twist; national heroes like astronaut John Glenn faced bold, new challenges. On this particular evening, Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the earth, was dared by the rambunctious Ethel to sit with her at dinner—on a plank that had been laid precariously across the pool. The astronaut succeeded in staying dry, but Ethel ended up in the pool when Schlesinger and another guest began mischievously bouncing up and down on the wobbly board. Later, as Schlesinger chivalrously leaned down to help Ethel out of the water, a prankster bumped him and the respected Harvard historian went headlong into the pool, taking the attorney general’s wife down with him.
The raucous antics of the Kennedy crowd were greeted by much of the Washington establishment as a welcome relief from the fusty Eisenhower regime. The Kennedy brothers and their team brought such relentless vigor to their jobs, they were allowed to blow off steam in their off-hours. There had been no scolding in the press, for instance, the year before when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the president’s fun-loving baby brother, had emerged from his own swimming pool baptism at Hickory Hill, “a huge, dripping mass in a now hopelessly rumpled dinner jacket,” as Schlesinger recalled.
But by June 1962, the Kennedy administration was deeply embattled, from within and without. And the Kennedy circle’s unrestrained merrymaking now was regarded as unseemly in some quarters. Drew Pearson noted in his column that “Southern congressmen were especially interested in the fact that Ethel Kennedy, sister-in-law of the president, twisted with Harry Belafonte, well-known Negro singer.” Meanwhile, Schlesinger’s swimming pool high jinks were splashed across the front page of the anti-Kennedy New York Herald Tribune. As JFK’s main link to the liberal intelligentsia and left wing of the Democratic Party, the White House adviser had become an especially tempting political target.
Henry J. Taylor, a syndicated newspaper columnist, led the press campaign against Schlesinger, taking advantage of the embarrassing publicity over his Hickory Hill water sports to level other charges against Kennedy’s court philosopher. Taylor accused Schlesinger of violating the White House code of ethics by moonlighting as a freelance writer, churning out political essays for publications like The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post, and doing movie reviews for a chic new glossy magazine called Show.
It turned out that the White House had no such ban against outside freelancing and that Kennedy, an ardent movie lover, thoroughly enjoyed Schlesinger’s reviews. One night, when Roger Vadim’s arty vampire movie Blood and Roses was being screened in the White House projection room, a bored Kennedy got up halfway through the feature and told Schlesinger he would be content to read his review. Before he left, the president shared some of his own rather sophisticated movie opinions with Schlesinger, urging him to do a comparative review of the Italian film Girl with a Suitcase and A Cold Wind in August, an obscure independent feature. He then declared his disappointment with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and expressed his regret “that Hollywood had no guts any longer and could not do a sharp or interesting film.”
Taylor’s attack on Schlesinger—in which he warned of the liberal historian’s pernicious influence on Kennedy policy—spread to other media outlets, including Time magazine, which poked fun at Schlesinger’s Hickory Hill frivolity and, taking the opposite tack from Taylor, questioned whether he really did much of anything as “special assistant” to President Kennedy. Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, FDR’s legendary adviser and a longtime Washington power broker, didn’t like the beating that Schlesinger was getting in the press and he phoned his young friend at the White House. “I scent a manhunt,” Corcoran told Schlesinger. “The play they gave to the swimming pool story was the tip-off. They are out to get you.” The Cork warned Schlesinger that he had heard Republicans were spreading a vicious story that they had found someone claiming to be an old Harvard classmate of Schlesinger, and “he will swear that he knew you then as a member of the Communist Party.”
In the midst of the media furor, Schlesinger felt tempted to offer Kennedy his resignation. Late one afternoon, when Schlesinger went to see the president in the Oval Office on another matter, JFK asked him how he was holding up. “It’s been a bad couple of days,” he told Kennedy. The president responded in a “kindly way,” Schlesinger noted in his journal. “Don’t worry about it,” JFK told his downcast adviser. “Everyone knows that Henry Taylor is a jerk. All they are doing is shooting at me through you.”
The media attack on Schlesinger bore the fingerprints of the Dulles group. Though he’d been out of office for half a year, Dulles’s influence remained strong in the press—particularly with Luce publications like Time. Henry Taylor, too, had ties to the Dulles brothers, having served in Foster’s diplomatic corps as ambassador to Switzerland before becoming a syndicated columnist for United Features.
On first glance, Schlesinger seemed like an unlikely target for the Dulles network, since he, too, had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the intelligence chief, dating back to World War II, when the young historian was one of many intellect
uals recruited by the OSS. As an OSS analyst stationed in London and Paris during the war, Schlesinger held strongly anti-Communist views; after the war, Schlesinger became a leading architect of Cold War liberalism, joining the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign that was secretly funded by the CIA and endorsing efforts to root out Communist Party influence in the labor movement, cultural arena, and academic circles.
Schlesinger was a passionate believer in New Deal liberalism, which he saw as the only way to civilize capitalism. And he was an equally ardent anti-Communist, viewing the anti-Red crusade as a way to protect the American left, by ridding it of the Stalinist contamination that had seeped into Democratic Party circles during FDR’s necessary wartime alliance with Moscow. Schlesinger believed that it was vital to purge these Communist Party influences, even though the CP’s well-organized shock troops were behind many of the political and labor victories of the New Deal period, in order to fend off attacks from the right that sought to label liberalism as a paler version of Marxist-Leninism.
In 1949, Schlesinger endorsed a crude effort by Luce’s Life magazine—which the young, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian sometimes wrote for—to develop a blacklist of celebrities that the magazine described as “Dupes and Fellow Travelers” of the Communist Party. Along with the predictable stalwarts of the Far Left, Life listed such liberal luminaries as Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Aaron Copeland, and Leonard Bernstein. Schlesinger gave the Life magazine blacklist his stamp of approval, calling it “a convenient way of checking the more obvious Communist-controlled groups.”
Though Schlesinger was an avid New Dealer, he was also a pampered product of the American elite—the son of esteemed Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., a graduate of exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy at fifteen, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard at twenty, and, at twenty-seven, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful work The Age of Jackson. Raised in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge, where the likes of James Thurber, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, and Samuel Eliot Morison circulated through his family home, young Schlesinger “never stopped seeming like the brightest student in the class,” as The New York Times observed.
