The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Critics like C. Wright Mills and revisionist historian William Appleman Williams charged that Schlesinger—coddled by the East Coast establishment and subsidized by CIA front groups—clung to a one-sided view of the Cold War, placing sole responsibility for the tense, global standoff on Moscow. Russia was not merely seeking a protective buffer when it took control of Eastern Europe following the epic destruction of World War II, Schlesinger insisted; in his view, the Soviet Union was a “messianic state” whose “ideology compelled a steady expansion of Communist power.” Even after the collapse of Stalin’s regime, Schlesinger saw no significant modification in this implacable Soviet expansionism.

  Not surprisingly, Schlesinger maintained friendly, if somewhat remote, relations with Allen Dulles throughout the 1950s. The Cold War consensus that dominated Democratic as well as Republican circles made for unlikely alliances; Schlesinger counted a number of top CIA officials among his friends, including Helms, Wisner, and Bissell, and he often joined them on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Washington Post publisher Philip Graham and columnist Joe Alsop hosted the parties where the disparate Dulles and Kennedy entourages all intermingled.

  Schlesinger had his differences with the CIA crowd, going back to his OSS days. He had been offended by “the notion of American spooks” like Dulles and Wisner “cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen. . . . There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices had made the allied victory possible.” During the Eisenhower-Dulles years, Schlesinger found much more that was “aesthetically displeasing” about the Republican reign. “The Dulles brothers,” sniffed Schlesinger’s first wife, Marian, years later, “were self-righteous and egomaniacal.” By the time Kennedy took office, Marian Schlesinger, a product of the same Cambridge background as her husband, regarded Allen Dulles as “passé.”

  But in the name of Cold War fraternity, Schlesinger was willing to make his own political compromises—even with men like Allen Dulles, whose Wall Street Republicanism and bullying foreign interventionism represented everything the historian opposed. Schlesinger made an effort to maintain cordial relations with the CIA chief, keeping up a friendly correspondence with Dulles that lasted late into the Old Man’s life. Schlesinger wrote a favorable review of Germany’s Underground, Dulles’s 1947 book on anti-Hitler wartime intrigues, which elicited a warm thank-you note from the spook. Over dinner at Phil Graham’s house in March 1958, they discussed Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s epic lament about the fragility of love and the human spirit in the grinding machinery of twentieth-century Russian history. CIA officials believed that the novel, which had been banned in the USSR, had “great propaganda value,” and they were planning to sneak copies into Pasternak’s homeland, though the author himself came to regret the political exploitation of his book.

  On November 29, 1961, as Dulles was ushered out the door at the CIA, Schlesinger wrote to him again, telling the spy chief that it had been a “privilege” to work with him and urging him to write his memoirs: “You have had a fascinating life, and you owe it to your fellow countrymen to put it down on paper.” Dulles responded warmly two weeks later, telling the historian that he was mulling over a couple of book ideas “and may seek your wise counsel.”

  Nobody in Washington was better positioned than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to observe the growing split in Kennedy’s government. He had played a leading role in the formation of the Cold War consensus that had held together Washington’s opposing political camps. But that consensus began to shatter early in the Kennedy presidency, and Schlesinger found himself maintaining a delicate balancing act, with one foot on each side of the divide. In the months following the Bay of Pigs crisis, the cracks continued to lace their way through the administration, as JFK resisted the belligerent advice from his national security advisers and tried to maneuver his way around the minefields of Cuba, Laos, Berlin, and Vietnam. Kennedy drew more ire from his warlords—including men like Lemnitzer and Air Force chief Curtis LeMay, whom JFK considered mentally unbalanced—when he brusquely dismissed their persistent pleading for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and instead pursued a test ban treaty aimed at slowing down the race toward doomsday.

  Following the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger found his relations with the CIA crowd strained, but he still was invited to their dinner parties, and his Langley friends—like Helms, Ray Cline, and Cord Meyer—continued to keep him apprised of the agency’s mood. Meanwhile, Kennedy, despite his occasional bemusement at Schlesinger’s ivory-tower liberalism, increasingly drew the historian into his inner sanctum. Schlesinger earned points with JFK, not only by giving him the correct advice on the Bay of Pigs—“a great mistake’’—but by resisting the temptation to crow about his wisdom to the press following the disaster, as some administration officials had done.

  Kennedy soon began seeking the historian’s advice on everything from nuclear policy to the handling of prickly liberal critics like Alfred Kazin, whom Kennedy sought to charm, on Schlesinger’s advice, by inviting him for lunch at the White House in August 1961. Kennedy was nervous about meeting the formidable New York intellectual, suggesting that Jackie be invited too—“she knows all those obscure French writers.” When Kazin arrived at the White House, JFK was at his dazzling best, offering fascinating insights into everyone from Malraux to Khrushchev, but he still fell short with the scholar, who later described the president as “slick, cool and devoid of vision.” When Schlesinger reminded him that left-wing intellectuals said the same thing about FDR, Kazin replied that he was one of those who did. “And I still believe today that I was absolutely right!” Kazin declared.

  Schlesinger, however, was the type of intellectual who saw nothing wrong about entering the inner circle of power to serve a Roosevelt or a Kennedy. He derided those cloistered academics who remained on the sidelines, speculating about the twists and turns of history but never actually participating in their times. In the beginning of his presidency, Kennedy was a bit nervous about having a bestselling historian on his White House staff. Coming across Schlesinger pounding away at his typewriter one day in his remote East Wing office, JFK smiled, “Now Arthur, cut it out. When the time comes, I’ll write The Age of Kennedy.” But after the Bay of Pigs, feeling increasingly besieged within his own administration, Kennedy embraced Schlesinger’s role as court chronicler. The president encouraged Schlesinger to begin taking notes at White House meetings. “You can be damn sure that the CIA has its records and the Joint Chiefs theirs,” JFK told him. “We’d better make sure we have a record over here.”

  Schlesinger’s journal entries, letters, and memos provide a fascinating and invaluable inside look at the increasingly acrimonious civil war that would tear apart Kennedy’s government. Critics often denounced Schlesinger as a toady to power, and there is no doubt that he fell under the spell of Camelot, sharing intimate weekends with the first couple at Hyannis Port and drinking champagne with the Kennedys on board their sailboats off Cape Cod and on the Potomac. During the Bay of Pigs debacle, Schlesinger took a particularly strong blast from the left, with C. Wright Mills denouncing “Kennedy and company” for “return[ing] us to barbarism,” and singling out JFK’s in-house historian, whom Mills charged had “disgraced us intellectually and morally.”

  But critics like Mills were not privy to the internal battles that raged within the Kennedy administration. In reality, Kennedy and trusted advisers like Schlesinger were determined to check the forces of “barbarism,” not to succumb to them—and their efforts set off a powerful backlash within the president’s own bureaucracy. The struggle fought between JFK and the national security elite, as Kennedy attempted to lead the country out of the Cold War, was largely invisible to the American people. Nor was it fully understood by observers like Mills, who died of a heart attack at forty-five in March 1962, before the Kennedy court drama reached its violent climax. Schlesinger himself did not en
tirely grasp the forces at play as he recorded the daily turmoil of the Kennedy presidency. But the picture that clearly emerges from reading his insightful journals and memos decades later is one of a government at war with itself.

  The relationship between Kennedy and Schlesinger took a back-and-forth course, as the two men began to reevaluate America’s Cold War policies. Sometimes it was the president whose thinking was boldest, other times it was his adviser who pushed Kennedy to be more courageous. The president’s subtle grasp of U.S.-Soviet dynamics had the effect of making Schlesinger’s own Cold War philosophy less rigid and more sophisticated. By 1963, Kennedy would come to the conclusion that “the hardliners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another”—an observation that struck Schlesinger as wise. Kennedy liked to surround himself with intelligent men, but he was usually the most perceptive man in the room. He had a way of raising the thinking of his “best and brightest” to a higher level.

  When it came to domestic politics, JFK was a shrewd strategist, and he thrashed out decisions by reviewing them with longtime political confidants and war horses, like his brother Bobby and special assistant Kenny O’Donnell. But Kennedy also realized that his political pragmatism could sometimes compromise his vision. So he often relied on New Frontier true believers like Schlesinger to be his voices of conscience and liberal touchstones. At other times, JFK used Schlesinger almost as a comic foil.

  One day, Schlesinger urged Kennedy to replace Dean Rusk, a bland mouthpiece of Council on Foreign Relations conventional wisdom, with a more stimulating secretary of state. Kennedy glanced up at his adviser from a paper on his desk that he was perusing. “That’s a great idea, Arthur,” he said. After Schlesinger left his office, JFK turned to O’Donnell, who had been quietly taking in the bold pitch for revitalizing the State Department, and laughed. “Arthur has a lot of good ideas,” the president told O’Donnell.

  Schlesinger himself sometimes questioned his relevance within the Kennedy administration. “I have the feeling that the president somewhat discounts my views,” the White House aide wrote in his journal in September 1962, “primarily because he regards me as a claimant agency for standardized liberalism, partly also because he considers me to be, after all, an intellectual and insufficiently practical and realistic.”

  But by 1963, the president himself was telling his brother and Phil Graham that he was seriously considering replacing Rusk with Robert McNamara, who had proven a smart and reliable ally in Kennedy’s battles with the Pentagon’s warlords.

  Arthur had a lot of good ideas, and though he was careful not to overstep his bounds, he was unfailingly articulate and often persistent in the way he espoused them. His insights and suggestions had a way of working themselves into the recesses of Kennedy’s mind. The president had been an avid reader of history since he was a boy, and here on his staff was someone who could raise the big historical questions at the very moment that the administration was making history. No wonder academic colleagues like Richard Rovere got somewhat carried away and compared Schlesinger’s role in the Kennedy White House to that of Voltaire and Aristotle in the courts of Frederick and Alexander the Great. No prominent intellectual had held such a post of freewheeling influence in U.S. presidential history.

  Schlesinger’s most intrepid moment in the Kennedy presidency would come after the Bay of Pigs, when he boldly schemed to bring the CIA under presidential control, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower had been able to do. It took courage for Schlesinger to confront his old friends at the spy agency, some of whom denounced him as a traitor. The battle to take charge of the CIA would become the most fateful drama of the Kennedy presidency.

  Schlesinger began lobbying Kennedy to play a big role in reorganizing the CIA even before the smoke had cleared from the Cuba debacle. He wanted to make sure that the current tempest over the agency did not simply fade away, resulting once again in a blue-ribbon oversight committee controlled by “Dulles stooges,” as he put it. In an April 21, 1961, memo to the president Schlesinger wrote, “It is important, in my judgment, to take CIA away from the Club.” Schlesinger was not enthusiastic about Kennedy’s choice of General Taylor to oversee the White House’s Bay of Pigs postmortem, regarding the general as “very pleasant [but] a man of limited interests and imagination.” Nor was Taylor the sort of crusading official who would follow through on Kennedy’s angry impulse to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” The general, Schlesinger noted, “is quite cautious and does not seem disposed toward drastic reorganization of the intelligence services.”

  But it was Schlesinger whom Kennedy tapped to develop an ambitious CIA reorganization plan, while Taylor was limited to the Bay of Pigs inquest. The historian was able to convince JFK of his qualifications for the job, reminding him, “I served in the OSS during the war, and I have been a CIA consultant for a good deal of the period since; so that, while I am far from a professional in this field, I am a relatively experienced amateur.”

  Schlesinger threw himself into the CIA study with scholarly dedication, amassing a thick file that contained detailed critiques of the organization by Washington liberals like George McGovern and agency whistle-blowers, one of whom wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency is sick.” Schlesinger also compiled disparaging essays and investigative features about the Dulles reign from the liberal press, including The Nation and The New Republic. These were not the sources typically used when the CIA was subjected to reviews by handpicked friends of Dulles.

  The White House adviser completed his memo for revamping the CIA on June 30. He acknowledged that his proposal “implies a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” The basic problem with the CIA, as Schlesinger saw it, was that it was out of control. Under his plan, all future covert operations would be closely supervised by a Joint Intelligence Board composed of representatives from the White House and State Department. In addition, the CIA would be divided into two separate organizations: one for clandestine action, and one for the collection and analysis of intelligence. Furthermore, the agency’s name—a tainted reminder of the Dulles era—would be replaced by “some blameless title,” Schlesinger suggested, like the National Information Service. Kennedy had already made it clear that he was in strong favor of this last recommendation. If he couldn’t raze Dulles’s mausoleum to the ground, he would at least give it a new name.

  No stranger to Washington politicking, Schlesinger attempted to rally support for his plan before submitting it to the president, sending copies to Washington power attorney Clark Clifford, veteran diplomat Chip Bohlen, and JFK’s trusted aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. By the time the final draft was sent to Kennedy, it was a more complicated and unwieldy document than Schlesinger originally intended. When the Dulles forces, including Taylor himself and the CIA’s congressional allies, immediately mounted a stubborn resistance to the new plan, Kennedy realized that overhauling the U.S. intelligence complex was going to be a much trickier political process than he had hoped. Taylor argued forcefully against the Schlesinger plan, telling JFK “this is not the time for surgery, so far as the CIA is concerned, that it would damage the morale of the employees too much.” Taylor also opposed changing the agency’s name, for the same reason.

  On the morning of July 15, Bobby took Schlesinger aside at the White House and told him that the CIA reorganization was on hold until a replacement for Dulles was found. Undismayed, Schlesinger leaped immediately into the hunt for a new director. The president had briefly considered Bobby for the job but realized that his abrasive younger brother would be too politically charged a selection. Besides, RFK was already beginning each morning by dropping by CIA headquarters in Langley on his way to work in Washington so that he could keep an eye on the agency for the president. JFK even raised the possibility of putting Schlesinger in Dulles’s chair. “I imagine that the president was joking,” Schlesinger noted simply in his journal.

  Fowler Hamilton soon emerged as the leading candidate for th
e CIA post. Hamilton had solid credentials as a successful Wall Street lawyer, former prosecutor in FDR’s Justice Department, and a bombing analyst with the Army Air Force during World War II. Schlesinger gave the choice his blessing, telling JFK that Hamilton was a “sober, intelligent, hard-headed lawyer” who “would do the job well.” But there was something about Hamilton that set off the Dulles crowd—perhaps it was simply because he was not one of them. Or it might have been connected to the fact that Hamilton had run the war frauds unit for President Roosevelt and knew too much about the Dulles brothers.

  In any case, CIA opposition to Hamilton was so strong that Kennedy decided to abandon him, selecting instead an Eisenhower administration fixture—former AEC chairman, Republican counselor, and military industrialist John McCone.

  Now it was Schlesinger’s turn to erupt. Putting an Eisenhower retread in charge of the CIA would be a disastrous move, he warned Kennedy. It would send the wrong signal at the exact moment when the agency needed to be turned upside down. “McCone, for all his administrative qualities, is a man of crude and undiscriminating political views (or to put it more precisely, political emotions),” Schlesinger told the president in a memo. “He sees the world in terms of a set of emotion-charged stereotypes.” But Schlesinger failed to block the announcement of McCone’s appointment in September. Afterward, writing in his journal, Schlesinger tried to cheer himself up, but without much success. “The possibly consoling thought is that the President has a habit of designating ‘liberals’ to do ‘conservative’ things, and vice versa. . . . I am sure JFK knows what he is doing, and possibly my concern here will turn out to be as unwarranted as my concern last December over the appointment of Doug Dillon [as Treasury secretary], but I doubt it.”