The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  The two women knew that Dulles would not scale back until his health failed him. He was “The Shark,” propelling himself relentlessly forward. If he slowed down, it would mean the end of him. He dined with old CIA friends like the Angletons and hosted overseas guests like Dame Rebecca West and her husband, Henry Andrews, when they visited Washington. He hopped up to New York for meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations with longtime associates like Bill Bundy and Hamilton Armstrong. And in November 1966, he even sat for Heinz Warneke, a German-born sculptor best known for his depictions of animals, who produced a bas-relief of Dulles for the lobby of CIA headquarters.

  That same year, Dulles published a rose-colored memoir of his World War II spy days, The Secret Surrender, and with the help of former CIA comrade Tracy Barnes, he tried to turn the book into a Hollywood movie. But the project never went beyond the Tinseltown wheel-spinning stage, demonstrating that when it came to dealing with the movie industry labyrinth, even espionage wizards were sometimes at a loss. Or perhaps trying to turn SS General Wolff into a screen hero proved too much even for Hollywood’s imagination.

  Much of Dulles’s time during his golden years was absorbed by the growing controversy surrounding the Warren Report. He knew that his legacy was tied to the credibility of the investigation and he took the lead in defending the report, while encouraging other commission pillars to also engage in the propaganda battle. By 1966, Dulles and his commission colleagues found themselves besieged by skeptical reporters and filmmakers, as bestselling books like Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash ripped holes in the Warren Report, soon to be followed by Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, which was excerpted in the deeply middle-American Saturday Evening Post. Thompson’s book would even land the Haverford philosophy professor-turned-private-eye an editorial consultancy with Luce’s Life magazine, which had earlier played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault.

  Dulles was particularly disturbed by Inquest, a methodical dissection of the report’s weaknesses that had begun as Epstein’s master’s thesis at Cornell. To their later regret, some commission staff members had cooperated with Epstein’s research, which gave the book more credibility than other attacks on the Warren Report. In July 1966, Dick Goodwin lauded the book in The Washington Post and used his review to call for a reopening of the investigation—a bombshell that marked the first time a member of Kennedy’s inner circle had issued such a call. Alarmed by the steady erosion of support for the Warren Report, Dulles anxiously conferred with Lee Rankin and Arlen Specter, the future senator from Pennsylvania who had been one of the commission’s more ambitious young attorneys, concocting the infamous “magic bullet” theory to reinforce the lone-gunman story line. As the groundswell for a new investigation grew, Dulles realized that a major counteroffensive needed to be mounted. Once again, he rallied his media allies, like U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence—whom Dulles described to Rankin as “an old and close friend of mine”—who published a ringing defense of the Warren Report by Specter in October.

  The propaganda campaign on behalf of the Warren Report was primarily run out of the CIA by Dulles stalwarts like Angleton and Ray Rocca. A 1967 CIA document, later released under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that growing criticism of the report was “a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.” In response, the agency sought to provide friendly journalists with “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” One way that its media assets could impugn conspiracy theorists, the CIA suggested, was to portray them as Soviet dupes. “Communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence,” declared another agency document.

  As part of the campaign to smear Warren Report critics, Dulles compiled dirt on Mark Lane, whom he considered a particularly “terrible nuisance” because of his growing media visibility and his influence overseas, where he was often invited to speak. Dulles received one report from an unidentified source that amounted to a sludge pile of salacious unsubstantiated rumors about Lane. “I have been told that his wife was—even is—a member of the Communist Party and I have also been told that Lane is not divorced from his wife as some people claim.” A district attorney in Queens “has in his possession pictures,” the report continued, “showing Lane engaged in ‘obscene acts’ with minors (girls—not boys—groups of girls). I have not seen these pictures personally but know those who have. Lane has the most unsavoury possible reputation.”

  Dulles’s informer also offered some crude observations about the lawyer’s race, ethnicity, and mental status. “He is supposedly Jewish—but there are those who claim he is half Negro or at least has Negro blood. He is very dark complexioned, wears horn-rimmed glasses and he’s always in a hurry. My own personal opinion is that he is deranged.”

  According to Lane, the CIA went beyond spreading ugly gossip about him, subjecting him to relentless surveillance and harassment. As his public profile started to grow, the agency pressured TV and radio programs to cancel interviews with him. When he traveled to foreign countries to speak about the Kennedy assassination, the agency sent bulletins to the U.S. embassies there announcing that Lane’s local appearances had been canceled.

  Dulles assiduously avoided direct confrontations with his articulate nemesis. In August 1966, when he was asked to debate Lane by the producer of a TV public affairs program in New York City called The Open Mind, Dulles declined. Perhaps the Old Man figured that if a UCLA student could rattle him in a casual campus forum, he would be seriously outmatched in a televised duel with an aggressive legal warrior like Lane. Dulles also rejected an invitation to be interviewed for a British documentary in which Lane was involved. The spymaster preferred more nimble surrogates like the Warren Commission staff attorneys to do his fighting for him.

  As time went by, even friends of Dulles began to air their doubts to him about the Warren Report. His European friends grew particularly skeptical, but some of his intimates closer to home—including Mary Bancroft—also started challenging Dulles’s explanation of the assassination. After feeding Dulles with tattletale reports about “the quite fiendish” Lane throughout the Warren Commission inquiry, Bancroft—a weather vane of shifting opinion in her Upper East Side circle—started to consider whether the outspoken critic might be right after all. “After listening to him, even I begin to wonder!” Mary wrote Dulles in July 1964. By 1966, Dulles’s longtime confidante had gone over to the other side, much to his chagrin. That November, after Mary sent Clover a letter about the commission’s many failings, Allen wrote back, telling her, “I imagine that we will have to agree to disagree about the Warren Report. . . . I respect your views and I doubt whether I can have any great influence on them, but I may make a try when we next get together.”

  By 1967, polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. That same year, against the backdrop of growing public skepticism, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison launched the first (and what will likely be the only) criminal investigation related to the Kennedy assassination. “At the beginning of the investigation,” Garrison later wrote, “I had only a hunch that the federal intelligence community had somehow been involved in the assassination, but I did not know which branch or branches. As time passed and more leads turned up, however, the evidence began pointing more and more to the CIA.”

  In February 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Dulles to testify before an Orleans Parish grand jury—which undoubtedly came as a cold slap for a man long accustomed to being invited to speak before gatherings of the Brookings Institution, Princeton alumni association, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, and other august forums. As Garrison and his investigators examined the work of the Warren Commission, they discovered that “leads pointing to the
CIA had been covered up neatly by [the panel’s] point man for intelligence issues, former CIA director Allen Dulles. Everything kept coming back to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the CIA.” The New Orleans district attorney wanted to question Dulles under oath about the CIA’s connections to Oswald and to local figures in the Kennedy case, like David Ferrie and Guy Banister, whose paths had crisscrossed intriguingly with that of the accused assassin.

  The Garrison investigation set off alarm bells in CIA headquarters. It soon became clear, however, that the authority of a crusading district attorney was no match for the U.S. intelligence establishment. Days after Garrison sent off the Dulles subpoena to the nation’s capital, he received a letter from the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., who tersely informed the DA that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Dulles. Meanwhile, the CIA—which, by then, was led by Helms—mounted an aggressive counterattack on the district attorney. Subpoenas like the one sent to Dulles were simply ignored, government records were destroyed, Garrison’s office was infiltrated by spies, and agency assets in the media worked to turn the DA into a crackpot in the public eye. Even the private investigator Garrison hired to sweep his office for electronic bugs turned out to be a CIA operative. After Dulles was subpoenaed by Garrison, the security specialist—Gordon Novel—phoned the spymaster to slip him inside information about the DA’s strategy.

  In the end, Garrison’s powerful enemies managed to turn the tables on him, and the New Orleans prosecutor himself became the target of an investigation, on trumped-up federal corruption charges. “This is what happens to you,” he observed years later, “when you do not go along with the new government’s ratification of the coup.”

  Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of the Warren Report, Dulles could count on the unwavering support of the Washington establishment and the corporate media. An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstep allegiance to the official story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research. “I hope you had a chance to view the four-part series on the Warren Commission,” wrote Small, referring to his TV network’s massive apologia for the Warren Report. “We are very proud of them and I hope you found them a proper display of what television journalism can do.” Dulles commended Small for a job well done, although he noted that he had missed the third installment. After reviewing transcripts of the entire series that Small had obligingly provided him, Dulles assured the CBS news executive, “If I have any nitpicking to pass on to you, I shall do so as soon as I have read them.” The spymaster was always happy to offer guidance to his media friends, down to the smallest details.

  Even the prominent group of men who had served President Kennedy were loath to break ranks with the establishment on the Warren Report. Dark talk of conspiracy had begun circulating within the Kennedy ranks immediately after Dallas, but with the exception of Dick Goodwin, no one dared to voice these suspicions in public.

  Arthur Schlesinger was cast adrift by Kennedy’s murder. The scholar had thrived in Kennedy’s court, where his intellectual and political aspirations intersected. Working in the Kennedy White House not only gave Schlesinger a voice in global affairs, it offered the decidedly unglamorous intellectual a chance to rub elbows with everyone from French novelist and cultural minister André Malraux to Hollywood siren Angie Dickinson. He gossiped over lunch with the sultry actress about Frank Sinatra, who had been deeply wounded when he was jettisoned from the Kennedy circle because of his association with the mob. Schlesinger was sipping midday cocktails with publishing queen Kay Graham and her Newsweek editors, who had flown him to New York to advise them on a magazine makeover, when the devastating news from Dallas was announced.

  Schlesinger soon realized that he was odd man out in the anti-intellectual Johnson administration. More than a month after the assassination, Schlesinger confided woefully in his journal, he still had not received “a single communication from the [new] president—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion, not even the photographs or swimming or cocktail invitations which have gone to other members of the Kennedy staff.”

  The entire mood of the White House suddenly shifted under Schlesinger’s feet. “LBJ differs from JFK in a number of ways—most notably, perhaps, in his absence of intellectual curiosity,” Schlesinger observed. “He has the senatorial habit of knowing only what is necessary to know for the moment and then forgetting it as soon as the moment has passed. . . . LBJ lacks the supreme FDR-JFK gift of keeping a great many things in his mind at the same time, remembering them all, and demanding always to know new things.” On January 27, 1964, two months into Johnson’s presidency, Schlesinger submitted his resignation. “It was accepted with alacrity,” he drily noted.

  Schlesinger’s early resignation from the Johnson administration—which came seven months before Bobby Kennedy’s own departure, to run for the Senate—solidified his position of trust within the Kennedy enclave. The historian was the recipient of murmured confidences, from Bobby, Jackie, and members of their entourage. Schlesinger heard disturbing reports about the events in Dallas. RFK told him that he was wracked with suspicions about what had happened to his brother. Even CIA director McCone thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” Kennedy confided to Schlesinger. Meanwhile, Air Force general Godfrey McHugh, who had served as JFK’s military aide in Dallas, gave Schlesinger a harrowing account of “that ghastly afternoon” when they bumped into each other at a French embassy party in June. McHugh had found LBJ huddled in the bathroom of his private quarters on Air Force One before the plane took off from Dallas. The panic-stricken Johnson was “convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the next to go.”

  Schlesinger took an interest in the first wave of Kennedy conspiracy articles that began appearing in the press, sending RFK a piece titled “Seeds of Doubt” from the December 21, 1963, issue of The New Republic. Nobody was more aware than Schlesinger of the explosive tensions that had surged within the Kennedy presidency. “Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the historian would acknowledge late in his life. And, as he knew from his futile efforts to reform the CIA, the Kennedy White House perhaps had even less control over the spy agency. But despite Schlesinger’s inside knowledge of the Washington power struggle during the Kennedy years—and his ability to see through such shoddy work as the Warren Report—the historian did nothing to explore the truth about Dallas.

  In the years after the assassination, Schlesinger secured his reputation as the official historian of Kennedy’s Camelot with his epic, Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the abbreviated presidency, A Thousand Days. The 1965 bestseller—which carefully avoided the dark, unanswered questions about Kennedy’s murder—burnished the historian’s intellectual celebrity and opened new doors for him on the cocktail party circuit. His bold-faced name popped up in New York gossip columns, including a sighting at a raucous Norman Mailer party in January 1967, highlighted by a trapeze apparatus that the more daring guests used to go flying through the air. “Any party with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and me in it can’t be a failure,” chirped Monique van Vooren, a Belgian-born actress who was once the va-va-voom girl of the moment.

  Schlesinger was frequently invited to appear on talk shows, and that year he found himself at a Los Angeles TV station where he was the guest of local news personality Stan Bohrman. After the show, Bohrman asked Schlesinger whether he would be willing to meet backstage with Ray Marcus, a respected Warren Report critic. Marcus, who had concluded that the official report was “the most massively fraudulent document ever foisted on a free society,” thought it was urgent that former Kennedy officials like Schlesinger examine his photographic evidence. He was certain that it would convince the New Frontiersmen that there had been a conspiracy. But when Schlesinger set eyes on Marcus’s display—which included the Zapruder film’s infamous Frame 313 kill shot—he visibly pal
ed. “I can’t look and won’t look,” Schlesinger said, turning his head and walking briskly away from Marcus. This was a perfect summation of the prevalent attitude among the Kennedy crowd. It was best not to linger on the horrors of Dallas.

  Despite the bad blood between Kennedy and the CIA, Schlesinger managed to maintain affable relations with the spy set after Dallas. As he had throughout his career, Schlesinger kept up a friendly, chatty correspondence with Dulles. In December 1964, Schlesinger even commiserated with the spymaster over Hugh Trevor-Roper’s “disgraceful piece” in the London Sunday Times, in which the eminent Oxford historian denounced the Warren Report as “suspect” and “slovenly.” After Dulles thanked him for the letter, Schlesinger wrote again in January, informing Dulles that British political scientist (and dependable Cold War pundit) Denis Brogan was working on a “detailed dissection of Trevor-Roper” for the CIA-funded Encounter magazine. “Perhaps if you are feeling up to it,” Schlesinger warmly signed off, “I could come by and see you one of these afternoons.” Schlesinger’s courtship of Dulles in the midst of the Trevor-Roper controversy was oddly sycophantic, especially considering the fact that Schlesinger himself shared some of the British historian’s doubts about the Warren Report.

  The cordial relationship between Schlesinger and Dulles suffered a bit of strain in the summer of 1965 when Life magazine ran an account of the Bay of Pigs that was excerpted from A Thousand Days. In his book, Schlesinger put the onus for the disaster on the CIA, which—he accurately wrote—had maneuvered Kennedy into the sand trap. Dulles found the Life article—along with a similar one that Look magazine excerpted from Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy—“deeply disturbing and highly misleading.” The Schlesinger and Sorensen broadsides on the Bay of Pigs spurred Dulles into action, but after wrestling with a long, belabored—and unbecomingly bitter—response for Harper’s, he decided it was best to take the high road. President Kennedy had done the honorable thing and taken responsibility for the fiasco, he told journalists calling for comment, and he would leave it at that. By November, Dulles had resumed amiable relations with Schlesinger, sending him condolences on the death of his father.