by Kai Bird
For McCloy, the experience had been an exercise in frustration, and it pained him that his attempts to construct a consensus both within the Commission and, through its report, with the public at large, had unraveled over the years. Instead of putting the whole tragic business behind the country, the Warren Commission Report unintentionally planted the seeds of an enduring controversy. As Arthur Schlesinger put it, the Kennedy assassination had become a “quagmire for historians.”106
McCloy was in Cairo, waiting for an appointment with President Nasser, the day the Warren Commission Report was released. Johnson had sent him once again to use his charms on the Egyptian president in an effort to revive Egyptian-American relations. Since McCloy’s last visit, in June 1963, Nasser had hosted a highly publicized state visit to Egypt by Nikita Khrushchev. The Johnson administration feared that Nasser was providing the Soviets with a solid foothold in the Middle East. Washington was also unhappy over Nasser’s intervention in the Yemeni civil war, where fifty thousand Egyptian troops were backing the Republican government. Worse, U.S. intelligence sources had determined that the Egyptian surface-to-surface-missile program was progressing, a development that threatened a major new Arab-Israeli arms race. McCloy had been instructed by Johnson to raise all these issues with Nasser.
Given the upcoming election, Johnson had not wanted it known that he had sent a high-level emissary to talk with the controversial Egyptian leader. McCloy’s mission, and even his presence in Cairo, were supposed to have been a secret, but there was a leak, and the Egyptian press reported on September 29, 1964, that Nasser would be seeing John McCloy as a “special representative of President Johnson.” The U.S. Embassy quickly tried to cover the slip by releasing a statement to the wire services that McCloy was in Cairo on one of his “periodic visits” to discuss Ford Foundation projects with various Egyptian officials. He was to see Nasser only as a courtesy, to convey President Johnson’s “personal greetings.”107 When questioned by newsmen after he had spent an hour with Nasser in his suburban Cairo villa, McCloy told them that he had given him a copy of the Warren Commission report and that they had discussed “a variety of world issues.”108
This was McCloy’s fourth or fifth session with Nasser since 1957, and he found the Egyptian president “less suspicious and more willing to talk about the arms problem” than on his last visit. But his mission was no more successful than on previous visits. McCloy had been authorized by the State Department to tell Nasser that, if he froze the Egyptian missile program, Washington would persuade the Israelis to do the same. McCloy also assured Nasser that the Israelis were not refining bomb-grade plutonium. (This turned out to be incorrect: it later became clear that the Israelis had acquired a nuclear-weapons capability.) Nasser listened politely to these assurances, but gave no indication that he would respond positively. When the conversation turned to the still-festering Palestinian problem, Nasser confessed he had no solution to offer and implied that another war was no answer.109
At the end of their talks, McCloy raised an issue of concern to Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was still a board director. He asked what Nasser could do to keep Chase off the Arab Boycott Committee’s list of proscribed companies.110 Earlier that summer, in response to a report that the bank was being investigated by the Committee, Chase officials had submitted documentation of their contention that Chase had not acted directly as a financial agent for Israel.111 Nasser listened with more than polite interest to this plea. Egypt already had a $10-million commercial loan from Chase, and he wanted to be able to extend his lines of credit with Chase and other New York banks. (McCloy’s representation seems to have convinced Nasser, since, with the exception of Syria, most Arab states thereafter continued to deal with Chase Bank.112)
Back in Washington, McCloy told Harriman and other State Department officials that he was not optimistic that Nasser would freeze his missile program. “We were asking him something,” he said, “that was very hard for him to do.” But he thought the talks worthwhile, and if “we kept working on Nasser, we might eventually get some results.” Harriman agreed, though he felt it was going to be tough to get the Israelis and their domestic “supporters to think of the long-range aspects of our policy and understand why it was desirable for us to continue frank discussions with Nasser.”113
By the time McCloy returned from the Middle East, Lyndon Johnson was poised to win his own electoral mandate for the presidency. The Democrats had convinced many Americans that Senator Goldwater should not have his finger on the nuclear button. By contrast, Johnson was presented as a peace candidate, committed to keeping the United States out of a ground war in Vietnam, and dedicated to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. On such weighty issues, Johnson seemed to have bipartisan support. This was reinforced for the voters that autumn by the formation of two panels of foreign-policy advisers: the President’s Panel of Foreign Policy Consultants and a special task force to study nuclear proliferation. McCloy agreed to have his name associated with both groups, which included all the familiar names: Arthur Dean, Allen Dulles, Robert Lovett, Eugene Black, Roswell Gilpatric, and others. The New York Times dryly observed that Johnson was “eager” to “project an image of bipartisanship and unity in foreign affairs.”114 Despite the overt political purpose, McCloy was happy to loan his reputation to Johnson. Like 61.2 percent of the American electorate that November, he voted Democratic—for only the second time in his life.
* * *
I. If Nosenko’s story was true, it not only exonerated the KGB of any responsibility for Kennedy’s murder, but also discredited the bona fides of another KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had been providing Angleton with information that in retrospect we know greatly inflated the operational capabilities of Soviet intelligence. Among other things, Golitsyn claimed the KGB possessed a master plan to infiltrate the West, and would send just such a “disinformation” agent as Nosenko to discredit Golitsyn. By 1964, Angleton was so ensnared in Golitsyn’s web of paranoia that he had every reason to prevent Nosenko from testifying before the Warren Commission. In 1969, after five years of illegal imprisonment by the CIA, Nosenko was released, and his story is now accepted as true by most observers of the intelligence business.
II. Fifteen years later, the case was reinvestigated by the Select Committee on Assassinations of the House of Representatives. The Select Committee endorsed many of the Warren Commission’s findings, but on the central question it concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”101 In the same breath, the Committee admitted it was “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” The Committee’s evidence was hardly definitive, and its conclusions never won credibility with scholars of the assassination.
CHAPTER 26
McCloy and Vietnam: 1965–68, NATO Crisis, Secret Middle East Negotiations
“We’re organizing for victory over there, McCloy, and I want you.”
LYNDON JOHNSON, 1964
Even as a young congressman, Lyndon Johnson knew that foreign policy was not his strength. His earliest political mentor, Alvin J. Wirtz, wrote him in 1940, “I will admit you are a whiz on domestic problems, but I still think that on international problems you should listen to the elder statesmen.”1 Twenty-five years later, Johnson still lacked the confidence to rely on his own instincts when it came to foreign affairs. He knew pork-barrel politics; he knew how to bring running water and electricity to his Texas hill-country constituents; he knew how to make deals; and in 1965 he was ramming through Congress the most sweeping body of domestic legislation since Roosevelt’s New Deal. But even as Johnson savored these domestic triumphs, he feared that Vietnam was threatening his Great Society. He had inherited this troubling guerrilla war from the Kennedys after November 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered in a coup d’état just before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Coup followed coup, and the Vietnamese communists expanded their control of the countryside. Johnson’s foreign-policy advisers
—all of whom had been John Kennedy’s men—would tell him he had to stand firm, that Vietnam could not be lost. But he had no illusions. Two days after Kennedy’s death, upon listening to a particularly gloomy assessment of the situation by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Johnson said he felt like a catfish that had just “grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.” He nevertheless told Lodge to “go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word. . . .”2
More troops were sent to enable the shaky military regime to survive. When Kennedy died, eighteen thousand “advisers” were in Vietnam; by the summer of 1964, the U.S. commitment had risen to 23,30o.3 Johnson wanted just enough troops to make the difference, but not enough to make it seem that America was going to war. That June, he began casting about for someone to replace Henry Cabot Lodge as his ambassador in Saigon. Remembering Alvin Wirtz’s advice to “listen to the elder statesmen,” Johnson told Dean Rusk to sound out McCloy about the Saigon job.
One Saturday in late June, Rusk sat down with his former boss and gave him a long briefing on the situation and why his services were so needed in Southeast Asia. But McCloy was unimpressed. He could not see why he should give up his lucrative legal practice for a mere ambassadorship. He told Rusk that at the age of seventy he was “without independent income” and would therefore have to earn his livelihood for the rest of his life. (All told, he was earning close to $200,000 a year from Milbank, Tweed, the Ford Foundation, Chase Manhattan, and his other corporate directorships.4) In the last year, he explained, he had built up a “modest law practice” and he had assured his clients that he would not be taking another government job. Rusk reported back to Johnson that McCloy felt “Saigon is not the place. If there were an over-riding crisis about Germany . . . he would consider making whatever personal sacrifice is involved to help in that situation. He knows . . . nothing about South Vietnam, and does not feel a sureness of touch about such matters which would give him personal confidence that he could do a good job.” In sum, he couldn’t contribute enough to justify “making such a drastic personal sacrifice.”5
Johnson nevertheless thought he saw an opening. If McCloy were willing in principle to make a financial sacrifice for Germany, all the president had to do was convince him that Vietnam was of equal importance. So he called him to the White House and took him into the small sitting room off the Oval Office where he liked to have intimate conversations. He began by saying the Saigon ambassadorship was “almost as powerful as the Presidency,” and he wanted McCloy, the “finest proconsul ever,” to take the job. McCloy laughed good-naturedly, imagining himself dressed as a Roman proconsul, complete with toga and laurel wreath. But he told the president that the Saigon post wasn’t for him, that he wished to remain on Wall Street. Besides, he didn’t know anything about Vietnam, and what he did know only reminded him of Ike’s belief that America should never become involved in a land war in Asia. It was not a problem he personally cared to handle.6
This was an attitude Johnson could not understand. Leaning so close now that McCloy could feel his breath across his face, Johnson said, “Were organizing for victory over there, McCloy, and I want you. You are the only one now who is going to lead us to victory.” When McCloy tried to back away and politely repeated that the job really wasn’t for him, Johnson placed his hand atop the lawyer’s head and, drawing him close again, said it was his patriotic duty to take the job. He was ordering him—as an old soldier—to obey his commander-in-chief. And if he refused, why, he must be lacking the courage he had once had as an artillery captain. Maybe, said Johnson, “you’re just yellow.” Shocked, McCloy protested that he had served his country in two world wars and had sacrificed his legal career for many long years of public service. Calmly backing away, he said he would not go to Vietnam, and abruptly left the room.7
Johnson ended up appointing McCloy’s colleague from Germany, General Maxwell Taylor. Barely a month later, in the Gulf of Tonkin, two U.S. destroyers were allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats. And though Johnson later admitted, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there,” he sought and obtained from Congress a resolution authorizing him to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” to defend Vietnam.8 The first air strikes against North Vietnam were launched, and a policy of gradual escalation set in motion. By January 1965, additional American troops were required to shore up the unstable Saigon regime.
Three-quarters of all Americans were still not aware that their country had twenty-three thousand military “advisers” stationed in Vietnam. Most Americans could not even have located South Vietnam on a map. And yet Johnson feared the political consequences of being labeled by the Republican right wing as the president who lost South Vietnam. He remembered too well how the Democratic Party and men like General George Marshall had been pilloried by the McCarthyites for the “loss” of China. If this began to happen again, he risked losing congressional support for his cherished Great Society legislation. Out of such insecurities came the gradual escalations of 1964; the president and his closest advisers, particularly Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara, had convinced themselves that one more show of force—one more round of bombing, a few thousand more troops—would convince Hanoi that the Americans were determined to deny them a military victory in the South. Then some kind of truce could be negotiated, as had been achieved in South Korea.
McCloy had observed Johnson’s growing commitment to the war with increasing unease. Unlike America’s security interests in Western Europe, where the United States had identifiable allies with strong domestic constituencies, the situation in Southeast Asia seemed so much more vague. From one month to the next, it was hard to know who in Saigon was an ally and who was not. South Vietnam wasn’t so strategically important in itself as it was as the symbol of the U.S. commitment. If pressed in early 1965, McCloy was willing to have the administration use a display of U.S. military muscle to lend credibility to that commitment. But he did not wish to see Vietnam overshadow the centrality of Washington’s more important commitments in Western Europe. Vietnam just wasn’t that important. If he had thought otherwise, he would have seen to it that the Council on Foreign Relations grappled with the problem. But throughout the period 1960–68, the Council organized no study groups on the subject of Southeast Asia.9
His attitude was pretty much mirrored by a poll of his colleagues at the Council. Early in 1965, six hundred of the Council’s twenty-one hundred members responded to a questionnaire on U.S. policy in Vietnam. The results—published in a small pamphlet entitled American Dilemma in Viet-Nam, constituted less than a ringing endorsement by the “Establishment” of the U.S. effort in Vietnam: a quarter of the membership advocated an expansion of the war, a quarter supported disengagement, and half seemed to hope that the administration could muddle through with continued American aid to the Saigon regime.10
As these sentiments suggest, the foreign-policy establishment in 1965—the year of decision for Vietnam—was much more divided than has been supposed.11 Most of McCloy’s peers were pessimistic about the prospects for the war and had no firm conviction about how to resolve the conflict. Moreover, McCloy was also well aware that some of his closest friends were quite vigorously dissenting against any further escalation. Two days after the Viet Cong killed a number of U.S. Marines at Pleiku on February 7, 1965, Lew Douglas phoned Johnson and urged him not to retaliate. He followed this up with a cable arguing the merits of submitting the whole problem for negotiation at the United Nations. Douglas thought the South Vietnamese lacked the will to fight, and that the United States could not ultimately win “without making South Viet Nam an American Province for, at least, half a century.” When Johnson ordered B-52 raids on North Vietnam, Douglas told Arthur Krock that this decision was “nuts.” And after the first U.S. combat troops landed at Danang in March 1965, he wrote a friend, “That we are there at all is one of the residual heritages from John Foster Dulles.”12
/> Douglas was not alone in these thoughts. That spring, Undersecretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly tried to make the case for a negotiated withdrawal. So too did George Kennan, who in testimony before Congress flatly stated that Vietnam was not an area of “vital importance to this country,” and suggested that the best the United States could probably hope for was some kind of “Titoist” solution.13 Yet another close friend of McCloy’s, Averell Harriman, privately complained in March, “We have got to have a settlement. . . . We are applying the stick without the carrot.”14
McCloy more or less agreed with the basic premise behind these views; if possible, America should not be drawn into another land war in Asia. He also had reason to think the country could live with a “Titoist” solution in South Vietnam. Beginning in 1962, the Ford Foundation had generously funded a Council on Foreign Relations study on the possibility of opening up a new relationship with communist China. McCloy and other Council members had long thought Washington’s China policy unrealistic. If a civil relationship could be established with Peking, the symbolic importance of drawing the line in Vietnam became quite academic.15
