LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

151. Marrs, p. 307.

  152. O’Donnell, Life magazine, August 7, 1970, pp. 51–52, op. cit.; Johnny …, p. 16.

  153. Douglass, p. 148.

  154. Ibid. (ref. Ellen Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, Newspaper Hoa Binh’s: 1963).

  155. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 332.

  156. Ibid., pp. 333–334.

  157. Douglass, pp. 150–151.

  158. Ibid., p. 151.

  159. Ibid., pp. 163–164.

  160. Ibid.

  161. O’Donnell and Powers, p. 16.

  162. Douglass, p. 152.

  163. Douglass, p. 121.

  164. Ibid., p. 162.

  165. Ibid.

  166. Ibid., p. 53.

  167. Ibid., p. 237.

  168. Ibid., p. 235.

  169. Reeves, Richard, p. 554.

  170. Douglas, p. 53 (ref. Cousins, Norman, Improbable Triumvirate, pp. 113–114).

  171. Ibid., p. 37.

  172. U.S. News and World Report, August 12, 1963.

  173. Douglass, pp. 142, 192.

  174. Ibid.

  175. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 338.

  176. Douglass, p. 182.

  177. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 345–347.

  178. Ibid., pp. 348–350.

  179. Ibid., pp. 354–355.

  180. Douglass, p. 163.

  181. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 355–356.

  182. Ibid., pp. 355–356.

  183. O’Donnell, p. 383.

  184. Douglass, p. 165.

  185. McMaster, p. 39.

  186. Ibid., p. 209.

  187. Ibid., p. 210.

  188. McMaster, pp. 40–41 (ref. Bromley K. Smith, Memorandum of Conference between the President, October 29, 1963, 4:20 p.m., Subject: Vietnam, Temporary Box 16, Meetings on Vietnam August–November 1963 (Diem Coup), Papers of Bromley K. Smith, LBJ Library. For confirmation of Harkins’s ignorance of coup plans, see Cable, Harkins to Taylor, October 30, 1963, in Gravel, The Papers, Vol. 2, pp. 784–785, and Historical Division of the Joint Secretariat, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, part 1, chap. 7, p. 30).

  189. Douglass, pp. 210–211.

  190. Ibid. (ref. Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, New York: W.W. Norton, 1972, p. 301).

  191. Douglass, p. 187 (ref. Fletcher Prouty, interview by David Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations and Their Impact of the Vietnam War Era, Santa Cruz, CA: rat haus reality press, 1999, pp. 71–72).

  192. Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, p. 308.

  193. Russell, p. 567 (ref. J. Gary Shaw with Larry R. Harris, Cover-up, Cleburne, TX.: self-published, 1976, p. 200.

  194. Douglass, pp. 374–375.

  195. Schlesinger, p. 779 (ref. Brandon, Anatomy of Error, p. 30).

  196. Douglass, p. 304; Livingstone, p. 503.

  197. Ibid., p. 181.

  198. O’Donnell, pp. 383–384.

  Chapter 3

  WASHINGTON AFFAIRS

  CIRCA 1960–1963

  If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government, it will come from the CIA. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  The Spy in the White House

  John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, though now venerated by many for their public-spirited idealism and the aggressiveness with which they tackled the great issues of their time, were nonetheless hated viscerally by their enemies for the same qualities. Their political enemies on the right felt that their risk-taking aggressiveness was reckless and their idealism was putting the country at risk of being overcome by its Communist enemies. Their enemies in the Mafia, who felt they had been ambushed by John and Robert, after having helped their father get them elected in 1960, thought they had been used and abused by them. The oilmen of Texas had given at least partial support for the Democratic ticket because of Johnson’s presence, but then felt they were being double-crossed as well. Unfortunately for JFK, his decision to allow Lyndon B. Johnson to be his partner put the primary leader of his opposition—the military and the intelligence agencies, the oil barons, the defense contractors, even the Southern segregationists—into the White House.

  From the very first days of the Kennedy administration, behind the scenes in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson had begun to spy on the president. That story begins with an account of Johnson’s daily morning routine; according to JFK’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln,1

  [Johnson] started out, from the very beginning, to spend as much time as he possibly could around the White House. There were two doors in my office that opened out on the colonnade that led to the South Lawn. Mr. Johnson chose to enter the West Wing through one of the doors of my office. Nearly every morning he would open that door, grunt, and pause for a moment to look around to see what was going on. He would look into the President’s office to see if Mr. Kennedy was there, or pause to talk to people who came in and out of my office. If there was nothing to attract his attention, he would amble over to the other door and go out into the hall …

  One morning he was a little late coming through the door and when he arrived Mr. Kennedy was standing near my desk. They exchanged greetings and Mr. Johnson proceeded on his way to the hall. After Mr. Johnson had gone, Mr. Kennedy turned to me and said, “Does he use this door very often?? ?Every day,? I replied. ?What is he doing in these offices?? Mr. Kennedy asked.

  Mrs. Lincoln then talked to Johnson’s chauffer and learned that he always let him out near a sidewalk leading to the president’s office on the South Lawn. Johnson would then walk up that sidewalk past the windows to the Oval Office and into the door leading to her adjacent office. From there he would then proceed into the hallway leading to the reception room. By taking this meandering route to get to his own office, Johnson left the image—so he thought, anyway—that he was an integral part of Kennedy’s team, closely working beside him at all times. There would invariably be reporters or high-level officials in the outer offices who would benefit from such an impression, regardless of what everyone else might have thought about it, including, evidently, even JFK. Johnson’s peculiar, habitual actions fed widely based speculation about his possible motive: more than one report of him was ground through the rumor mills of the federal bureaucracy in Washington, which accused the vice president of having a mole in the White House; the mole was usually reported to be a Secret Service agent who was rewarded for solid information on JFK’s nonpublic activities and for overhearing private conversations in the West Wing.2

  There is little doubt that Mrs. Lincoln’s suspicion that Johnson was engaged in routine reconnaissance of the Oval Office was shared by other Kennedy aides. According to Kenneth O’Donnell, Johnson also maneuvered Kennedy into allowing him unfettered access to the Oval Office; based upon the nuances of both his and Mrs. Lincoln’s statement, this perk could have only been given after Kennedy became conscious of Johnson’s actions: “Only two men in the government, Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, were given the special privilege of entering the President’s office at any time unseen through the back door from the garden, without following the normal route into the front door and through my [O’Donnell’s] office.”3 That special privilege was implicitly given to him after the fact since Johnson started his routine from the first days of the administration, and according to Mrs. Lincoln’s account, JFK only became aware of it at a later date. It would appear, in retrospect, that that must have been one huge mistake, rather like giving the keys to the chicken house to a hungry, conniving fox.

  Meanwhile, as Johnson was manipulating and sabotaging the president he had sworn to support, John Kennedy mistakenly thought that he had neutralized Johnson by putting him into the vice presidency; he had told an angry Kenneth O’Donnell, when the announcement was being made in Los Angeles, “I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for president … I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anythi
ng … I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small Senate majority. Did it occur to you that if Lyndon becomes the vice president, I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, somebody I can trust and depend on?”4 Clearly, John F. Kennedy had finally come to terms with putting a man he deeply distrusted into the vice presidency, not because he thought he could be an effective member of his administration, but to put him into what he considered a dead-end position so that he could achieve his legislative objectives with someone more reliable on Capitol Hill. In fact, as will be seen in chapter 5, Kennedy had been forced into accepting Johnson because he was blackmailed by the aging, duplicitous, and conniving director of the FBI, who was enlisted by Johnson for that very purpose.5

  Unfortunately for JFK, he had not factored in Johnson’s absolute resolve to become president himself, much less how Johnson would undermine his efforts to achieve his objectives on both the domestic and foreign policy agendas.

  The Georgetown Crowd, circa 1960

  After World War II, a group of people involved in Washington journalism, politics, and covert intelligence began meeting on a regular basis in the long-trendy area of Washington known as Georgetown, thus becoming a group that was referred to as the “Georgetown crowd.” Many of them had gone to the same Ivy League universities or worked together; others had been members of the military intelligence agency, OSS (Office of Strategic Services), during the war. Many of the OSS alumni eventually became employed at the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency. They strongly supported FDR, yet generally thought that his policies were not radical enough; their views on domestic issues were said to be even more progressive than Roosevelt’s. The difference in these distinctions was that they did not believe that American socialists/Communists were a threat to U.S. national security, and they essentially agreed with conservatives with respect to U.S. foreign policy: that the Communists running the Soviet Union and China should not be allowed to take over the smaller, third world countries around the world.

  The Alsop brothers—Stewart and Joseph—having returned from service in both of the respective theaters of World War II in 1946, became Georgetown fixtures as well as collaborators in their syndicated newspaper columns and as Saturday Evening Post feature writers. Their political influence, based in large part by their ubiquitous presence at Georgetown dinner parties, was directed toward containing Communism in general and Soviet expansionism in particular. Their frame of reference was grounded by a common goal of bringing order to the chaos in countries left ravaged or destroyed by the war. The biggest fruit of their work with key statesmen in Washington was the Marshall Plan; some of the statesmen with whom they collaborated were Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Chip Bohlen, who were considered among the original “best and brightest.” Joseph Alsop became their leading chronicler, identifying with them in all their causes. Unfortunately, his association with them led him to follow the groupthink attitude into some areas where its simplistic and uncritical application—absent a thorough vetting from an honest debate—produced tragic results.

  The Georgetown crowd included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, William Averell Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles, Paul Nitze, Adlai Stevenson, James Forrestal, William O. Douglas, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan. The legendary CIA master spook James Jesus Angleton and his wife Cicely were also members of this clique, at least until Cicely left him in 1959; Angleton himself became trapped in his own paranoia about this time, which fed his infamous mole hunts, in 1961 with the defection of KGB agent Anatoliy Golitsyn and in 1964, with Yuri Nosenko.

  Many of the wives of the married men of this group assumed active participation in it as well, forming another group called the Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club, which included women such as Katharine Graham, Pamela Harriman, Polly Wisner, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Sally Reston, Janet Barnes, Tish Alsop, Cynthia Helms, Marietta FitzGerald, Phyllis Nitze, Annie Bissell, and Mary Pinchot Meyer. The wives of the CIA men—Angleton, Wisner, Barnes, Helms, Fitzgerald, and Meyer—were put in a unique position of access to extremely sensitive and valuable material, and the ladies, though no doubt admonished to be discreet, nevertheless became channels for distribution of certain highly confidential information. Their close connections between the center of the federal government—the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as well as its intelligence apparatus—juxtaposed with the core of the Fourth Estate (also known as the American press, and its constitutional mandate to flush and dispense sensitive information), formed a conundrum that was extremely detrimental to Mary Pinchot Meyer, as we will explore shortly.

  An assortment of other politicians also socialized with these people, even some whose diplomatic and social skills would seem to be rather incongruent with the Ivy League background of many of the above names, probably caused by a kind of “moth to a fire” phenomenon—men like Lyndon B. Johnson and Joseph McCarthy, for example. Johnson was a peripheral member of this group, attending many of the same parties and often playing poker with some of the men. Arguably the smartest thing Johnson ever did was to ingratiate himself into the exclusive Georgetown social scene. Despite his hard edges and crudeness, Johnson gained entrée early on with Phil Graham, Joseph Alsop, Drew Pearson, and several other columnists, which gave him direct access to every newspaper in the country; in many cases, the stories to be planted by him were also being pushed simultaneously by the CIA, through the same network of newspapers, journalists, and syndicated columnists.

  Although the Georgetown group generally supported Truman’s policies, they believed he was not sufficiently proactive regarding national security concerns, specifically his anti-Communist strategy. This caused Frank Wisner and George Kennan to create, with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s approval, the Office of Special Projects in 1948; it was later renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which became the espionage and counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Frank Wisner was made the original director of OPC, charged with the creation of “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”6 His organization evolved and became the agency’s Plans Division in 1951, when Wisner succeeded Allen W. Dulles. In the 1950s, Frank Wisner was intent on establishing direct contacts between the agency and the Fourth Estate—the American press—journalists and book publishers who would willingly assist the CIA to communicate their view on any national or international political or military issue in a favorable light. The principal responsibility of both the OPC and, subsequently, the Plans Division, was the conduct of secret political operations, in contrast to the other agency functions of gathering intelligence and making analysis.

  The Beginning of Operation Mockingbird

  In 1951, Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the American media. “‘Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry,’ according to Deborah Davis, in Katharine the Great: ‘By the early 1950s, Wisner “owned” respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.’”7 These journalists sometimes wrote articles that were unofficially commissioned by Cord Meyer, based on leaked classified information from the CIA.

  As noted earlier, Lyndon Johnson had struggled with recurrent bouts of depression since he was a child, but he was not alone among the men of the Georgetown crowd to have this burden. Phil Graham was one of Wisner’s first recruits; he was the publisher of The Washington Post, until his own death by a gunshot to the head in 1963 stemming from a long and brutal fight with him
self as a manic-depressive. Frank Wisner suffered from the same disease as his friend and collaborator Graham; Wisner became upset in November and December 1956 because of what he felt was the agency’s abandonment of Hungarian citizens who had been encouraged by the agency to revolt against Soviet domination. He told friends that he felt that Eisenhower had let Hungary down, pointing out that the agency had spent a great deal of money on Radio Free Europe “to get these people to revolt.”8 In fact, Wisner felt personally betrayed by this behavior, claiming to Clare Boothe Luce that twenty thousand people were killed: “All these people are getting killed and we weren’t doing anything, we were ignoring it.”9 The stress and anxiety this produced led to a mental breakdown. Wisner was subsequently treated for this condition but could not continue in his previous position. He served for a time in the more relaxed London offices before taking early retirement. Two years after Graham shot himself, so did Wisner; since then, mercifully, pharmaceutical advances have made this disease more manageable.

  Philip Graham became the de facto vice chairman of Operation Mockingbird, helping Wisner to recruit other willing journalists. According to Deborah Davis, “By the early 1950s, Wisner had implemented his plan and ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst. By 1953 the CIA, through Wisner and Graham, had a major influence over 25 major newspapers and wire agencies.”10 Wisner also recruited several members of the Georgetown crowd, including “Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and Cord Meyer. Other former members of the OSS such as Arthur Schlesinger worked closely with this group.”11 To make Operation Mockingbird work effectively, Wisner realized that he could not rely only on journalists and publishers like Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, who shared the Georgetown crowd view of the world. He therefore set out to recruit conservatives like William Paley (CBS), C. D. Jackson, and Henry Luce (of Time and Life magazines). According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA), in the 1950s, “Some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.”12 One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over three hundred different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the Central Intelligence Agency included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Herb Gold (Miami News), and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).13