The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  So, Chancellor continued, did Dulles himself adhere to “moral standards” when he was director of the CIA? Dulles paused briefly, and a calculating look came over his face. Then he leaned confidently into the camera. “Yes, I did—and why? Because I don’t think—given the caliber of the men and women I had working for me—I didn’t want to ask them to do a thing that I wouldn’t do.” As if reading Chancellor’s mind, Dulles felt compelled to further defend his personal sense of morality. “All I can say,” he went on, “is . . . that . . . ah . . . I was a parson’s son, and I was brought up as a Presbyterian. Maybe as a Calvinist—maybe that made me a fatalist, I don’t know. But I hope I had a reasonable moral standard.”

  On occasion, Dulles did give journalists glimpses of the darker truth about the CIA, only to quickly pull the wool over their eyes. When Washington columnist Andrew Tully interviewed Dulles for his 1962 book, which promised the “inside story” on the CIA, he asked the espionage legend what his organization would do if a foreign agent threatened the security of the United States. “We’d kill him,” Dulles replied matter-of-factly. But then his face resumed its genial expression, and he assured Tully that his question was hypothetical and that he “could not possibly conceive” of such an unpleasant scenario actually occurring.

  When Cass Canfield asked Dulles to write a book drawing on his long career as a spook, Dulles was initially noncommittal, telling the publisher, “First of all, I shall have to persuade myself that I have the aptitude and the skills to do effective writing, as I am not much of a believer in ‘ghosts.’” It was another less than truthful statement, for Dulles always relied on others, including CIA employees and media assets, to write his books, magazine articles, and speeches. Despite Dulles’s retirement status, The Craft of Intelligence was an agency enterprise, drawing on the writing skills of Howard Hunt, Howard Roman, and friendly Fortune magazine reporter Charles Murphy, as well as the research and editing skills of top CIA analyst Sherman Kent and Dulles’s former right-hand man Frank Wisner, whose career came to an end in 1962 because of deepening mental problems. Dulles also drew on his extensive academic contacts for help, including W. Glenn Campbell at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who provided ready access to his extensive files on the Communist threat. Kent also suggested that Dulles “use your potent association with Princeton to good effect” and “con” Joseph Strayer, the longtime chair of Princeton’s history department, into drafting the section of Dulles’s book dealing with the medieval roots of espionage.

  Dulles was so deeply connected in the media world that the critical response to The Craft of Intelligence was all but assured when it was published in the fall of 1963. The Washington Post heralded what amounted to little more than a predictable Cold War screed as “one of the most fascinating books of our time.” The New York Times’s critic found a clever way to celebrate a book that revealed very little of Dulles’s actual spy craft, praising his “brilliantly selective candor.” The Times review provided other blurb-worthy quotes for the book, declaring, “There is material enough here on breathlessly high-level sleuthery to keep Helen MacInnes and Ian Fleming busy writing all kinds of thrillers”—an absurdly exaggerated comment, considering the book’s calculatedly tame contents.

  Dulles had enjoyed a warm relationship with New York Times executives and editors for many years. When Dulles was named CIA director, Times general manager Julius Ochs Adler—“Julie,” as Dulles affectionately called him—warmly congratulated his friend “Allie.” The Times executive told Dulles that his appointment was “the best news I have read in a long time.”

  If Dulles needed any assurance that he continued to be a power player after he left the CIA, the publication of The Craft of Intelligence delivered it. Hailed by the leading publications, the book became an immediate bestseller and won him speaking invitations before influential audiences up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as in California. Dulles was also invited to appear in Texas, where, between October 25 and 29, he met with old friends in Houston and Dallas and spoke before the Dallas Council on World Affairs.

  Dulles often used speaking engagements and vacations as covers for serious business, and his detour through Texas bears the markings of such a stratagem. His stopover in Texas stood out as an anomaly in a book tour otherwise dominated by appearances on the two coasts. The spymaster’s date book during his Texas trip typically left out as much as it revealed, with big gaps in his schedule throughout his stay there. But Dulles was wired into the Texas oil industry—for which his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had provided legal counsel for many years—as well as into the local political hierarchy, including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, the younger brother of his former CIA deputy, Charles, a fellow victim of JFK’s post–Bay of Pigs housecleaning. With Kennedy’s trip to Texas just weeks away, the president was a hot topic in these local circles.

  Dulles’s strongly critical views of the Kennedy presidency were ardently shared by the men in his Texas milieu, where JFK was widely viewed as a dangerously weak leader. E. M. (Ted) Dealey, the reactionary publisher of The Dallas Morning News, thought so little of Kennedy that he once berated him at a White House luncheon, in front of a group of visiting Texas publishers. “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government,” Dealey lectured Kennedy. “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters. We need a man on a horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding [your daughter] Caroline’s tricycle.”

  The cool-tempered Kennedy did not let his anger flash in public gatherings. But he fixed Dealey—the man whose family name was on the plaza where he would die—with a hard look. “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey,” replied Kennedy in his chilliest Boston staccato, “is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not. . . . Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected president by arriving at soft judgments.”

  The Texas oil crowd was also furious at Kennedy for moving to close their tax loopholes, particularly the oil depletion allowance, which threatened to cost the oilmen millions—perhaps billions—of dollars a year. This kind of government mischief would have been unthinkable during the Eisenhower-Dulles years. As vice president, Lyndon Johnson—Texas’s native son—was supposed to make sure that the man in the White House didn’t mess with their wealth. But by the fall of 1963, the once-powerful LBJ—former Senate majority leader and master of the backroom deal—was a fading figure in Washington, unable to take care of the oil tycoons who had paved his way to power. “He had promised to protect them,” said petroleum industry lawyer Ed Clark, “and he couldn’t deliver. He couldn’t deliver!”

  JFK had put Johnson on his 1960 ticket to win votes in the South. But, as the 1964 campaign approached, LBJ had lost so much clout below the Mason-Dixon Line—largely because of his subservient role in Kennedy’s liberal, pro–civil rights presidency—that he couldn’t even be counted on to deliver his home state. With the South looming like a lost cause for Kennedy, it was becoming more and more important to lock up states in the North and the West that he had lost to Nixon in 1960. Johnson began to seem like less of an attractive running mate than someone like Governor Pat Brown of California. On November 13, 1963, when Kennedy convened his first important strategy meeting for the ’64 race at the White House, neither Johnson nor any of his staff were invited. The increasingly panicked vice president took it as one more sign that the Kennedys were maneuvering to dump him from the upcoming Democratic ticket.

  If the Kennedys were indeed looking to get rid of Johnson, they were given the perfect opportunity by a growing Washington scandal that fall involving Bobby Baker, the Senate majority secretary who had long served as LBJ’s influence peddler, shakedown artist, errand boy, and pimp. In September, lurid stories about
Baker’s wide network of corruption began appearing in the press—including the campaign slush fund and Capitol Hill “party houses,” stocked with buxom young call girls who catered to every sexual whim, with which Baker bought the loyalty of Washington politicians. The titillating exposés soon led to Johnson, whom every capital insider knew was Baker’s puppeteer. Baker, who was referred to as Johnson’s “protégé” and “little Lyndon” in the press, resigned from his Senate office as the scandal intensified, hoping to protect the man he slavishly admired as “The Leader.” But the heat under Johnson only grew, and the vice president was convinced that it was his longtime tormentor, Bobby Kennedy, who was stoking the flames by quietly feeding damaging information to the press.

  Lyndon Johnson had entered the 1960 Democratic presidential sweepstakes with cocky self-assurance. He had run the U.S. Senate like it was his personal fiefdom from the moment he took over as majority leader in 1955. He was his party’s mover and shaker, the biggest wolf in the 1960 Democratic pack, and he felt confident that the nomination was his for the taking. Even as the Kennedy campaign—under Bobby’s wily management—outmaneuvered him at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles that July, LBJ vowed not to give in and accept the vice presidential position. “Hand on heart,” Johnson told his friends in Los Angeles, the omnipresent Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, “I wouldn’t be on [JFK’s] team if he got down on his knees.”

  Months later, on the VIP bus to Kennedy’s Inaugural Ball, Clare found herself seated next to Johnson, and she teased him about taking the number two spot. “Come clean, Lyndon,” she smiled wickedly. What did it feel like for the swaggering Texan to be in the rear position? The big man leaned close and whispered, “Clare, I looked it up. One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only one chance I got.” It was another example of LBJ’s coarse humor. But it also revealed something darker in the man. He undoubtedly was keenly aware of the presidential mortality rate.

  By 1963, however, it was Johnson who was the ghost, a once commanding figure whose future grew dimmer by the day—and he knew it. In March, Susan Mary Alsop, Joe’s convenient wife, told Schlesinger that LBJ had unburdened himself to her husband, while the columnist was dining “a trois with Lyndon and Ladybird.” According to Alsop’s wife, “Lyndon had been very dark and bitter about his frustrations and his prospects.” After recounting the confessional dinner in his journal, Schlesinger added his own observation about Johnson: “He really has faded astonishingly into the background and wanders unhappily around, a spectral and premature elder statesman.” Johnson began to even physically fade as the months went by, losing so much weight that his suits hung loosely off his shoulders and his eyes seemed to sink inside their sockets.

  In January 1963, after listening to Bobby Kennedy deliver an inspiring speech at the National Archives celebrating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh passed Schlesinger a note. “Poor Lyndon,” it said. When Schlesinger asked him what he meant, Rauh, a stalwart of the Democratic Party’s left wing, said, “Lyndon must know he is through. Bobby is going to be the next president.”

  The Kennedys had turned the swaggering Johnson into a useless figure. LBJ used one of his memorable barnyard metaphors to describe his plight. “Being vice president is like being a cut dog,” he told his old mentor, former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. He knew that he was the odd man out in the glamorous, Ivy League–groomed world of the New Frontier. “They’re trying to make a hick out of me,” he complained to The New York Times’s Scotty Reston. And, as usual, he focused his resentment on Bobby Kennedy, whom he blamed—not without reason—for isolating and diminishing him. “Bobby symbolized everything Johnson hated,” observed Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, who later worked in the Johnson White House. “He became the symbol of all the things Johnson wasn’t . . . with these characteristics of wealth and power and ease and Eastern elegance; with Johnson always looking at himself as the guy they thought was illiterate, rude, crude. They laughed at him behind his back. I think he felt all that.”

  It was a mortifying position for Lyndon Johnson—a pathologically ambitious man, with an ego that was as mountainous as it was fragile—to find himself in. And yet, it was only to get worse for the vice president as Kennedy prepared to visit Johnson’s home state in November. On November 14, the day after the White House strategy session on the 1964 campaign, the president privately confirmed that Johnson would not be on the ticket, while conversing with his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. JFK told her that he was planning major government reforms during his second term, and to accomplish this ambitious agenda he needed a vice president “who believes as I do.” Kennedy told Lincoln that he was leaning toward Terry Sanford, the young, moderate governor of swing state North Carolina. “But it will not be Lyndon,” he said.

  Dick Nixon, who had weathered his own “dump Nixon” movement as Eisenhower’s 1956 reelection campaign drew near, was keenly attuned to Johnson’s growing humiliation. Nixon was the first major national figure to voice Johnson’s agonizing fear—and with typical cunning, he chose to do it in LBJ’s backyard. Nixon showed up in Dallas on November 21, 1963, the day before JFK’s presidential party was due to arrive in the city. Nixon was there on business—to attend a meeting of the Pepsi-Cola Company, a client of his New York law firm—but he was happy to roil the political waters by sharing his prognostications with the local press. Lyndon Johnson had become a “political liability,” Nixon told Texas reporters, and if the upcoming presidential race looked close, he predicted that Kennedy would not hesitate to drop him.

  Nixon’s prediction, which was prominently displayed in The Dallas Morning News on November 22, was another blow to LBJ’s ego. But he had even bigger concerns. Later that morning, a Life investigative team was scheduled to convene in the magazine’s New York offices, to begin work on a deeper probe of Johnson’s involvement in the Bobby Baker corruption scandal. William Lambert, the investigative unit’s leader, was certain they were sitting on an explosive story that could bring down the vice president. “This guy looks like a bandit to me,” he told his boss, Life managing editor George Hunt. LBJ, he told Hunt, had used public office to amass a fortune, shaking down political favor-seekers for cash and consumer goods, even putting the squeeze on an insurance executive for an expensive Magnavox stereo console that Lady Bird coveted. As Bobby Baker later commented, Johnson was “always on the lookout for the odd nickel or dime.” In fact, that insurance executive—Don Reynolds—was scheduled to testify about Johnson’s tawdry influence-peddling practices at another meeting on November 22, in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee. The two meetings—one in New York, one in Washington—would have likely determined the political fate of Lyndon Baines Johnson, had they not been overshadowed by events in Dallas that day.

  Lyndon Johnson’s days might have been numbered as vice president, but he was not entirely abandoned in Washington. If LBJ was rapidly losing favor within the Kennedy administration, he had managed to retain the support of many key figures in the national security arena. Johnson had long been the dominant political figure in a state with a booming defense and aerospace industry, and he had long cultivated ties to generals and espionage officials.

  At the very beginning of Kennedy’s presidency, Johnson made a strange power grab, trying to get JFK to grant him extraordinary supervisory powers over the country’s entire national security apparatus, including the Defense Department, CIA, State Department, and the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. Kennedy did not even bother responding to Johnson’s maneuver, simply ignoring the executive order and accompanying letter that LBJ sent over to the Oval Office for his signature. But Johnson’s “executive order” power play was never forgotten in the White House. Even a friend of LBJ—longtime Democratic presidential adviser Jim Rowe—was “flabbergasted” after Johnson showed him the proposed order, calling it, “frankly, the most presumptuous document any Vice President ha
d ever sent to his President.” Despite the White House rebuff, LBJ continued to enjoy a special bond with national security hard-liners during Kennedy’s reign, often embracing their aggressive positions on Cuba and other hot spots, as well as leaking inside information about White House policy developments to his contacts at the Pentagon and CIA.

  Dulles was among those who maintained warm relations with the vice president, even as both men’s stars fell within the Kennedy court. In retirement, the spymaster continued to invite Johnson to Washington functions. And, in the summer of 1963, Johnson hosted Dulles at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, sixty miles west of Austin. Dulles’s visit to the LBJ Ranch did not appear in his calendar, but it was briefly noted in a syndicated news photo, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 15, that showed the vice president astride a horse, while a beaming Lady Bird and Dulles looked on. Considering how estranged both men were from Kennedy—and how notoriously conniving they were—the picture could only have produced a sense of puzzlement in the White House.

  Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that “someone would have talked.” This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting. The argument betrays a touchingly naïve media bias—a belief that the American press establishment itself, that great slumbering watchdog, could be counted on to solve such a monumental crime, one that sprung from the very system of governance of which corporate media is an essential part. The official version of the Kennedy assassination—despite its myriad improbabilities, which have only grown more inconceivable with time—remains firmly embedded in the media consciousness, as unquestioned as the law of gravity.