The Chairman
Page 108
26. McCloy-Harriman telcon, 11/4/63; McCloy-Harriman telcon, 11/29/63, AH; Frederic L. Chapin to McCloy with enclosures, 12/16/63, AH.
27. Dulles, “Hanna in Brazil,” p. 355.
28. Ibid., pp. 346–47, 359.
29. Ibid., p. 360.
30. Harriman-McCloy telcon, 3/10/64, AH.
31. Dulles, “Hanna in Brazil,” p. 366.
32. Walters to ACSI, Department of State cable, 3/27/64, LBJ.
33. Walters, Silent Missions, p. 386.
34. Top-secret Joint Chiefs of Staff cable to CINCSTRIKE, 3/31/64, LBJ; Ruth Leacock, “Promoting Democracy: The United States and Brazil, 1964–68,” Prologue, 1981, p. 79; see also Department of State cable from American Consulate in São Paulo, 3/30/64, LBJ.
35. CIA intelligence-information cable, 3/30/64, LBJ.
36. Jan Black, “Linkage Groups and Denationalization, Denationalizing Business Elites,” p. 87, unpublished manuscript.
37. Jack W. Buford interviews, Jan. 17, 1985, Feb. 1, 1985.
38. Black and Goff, Hanna Industrial Complex, p. 4; Philip Siekman, “When Executives Turned Revolutionaries,” Fortune, Sept. 1964, p. 221.
39. When Arthur Schlesinger expressed his puzzlement as to why the United States had “rushed to embrace the new Brazilian regime,” he received a firm rebuke from McGeorge Bundy, who said Johnson was “considerably annoyed” by this criticism. Bundy explained that Johnson was extremely sensitive to the suggestion that his administration’s policies in Brazil represented a reversal of John Kennedy’s support for democratic forces in Latin America. (McGeorge Bundy to Schlesinger, 5/12/64; Schlesinger airgram to State Department, 4/23/64, LBJ.)
40. Ruth Leacock, “Promoting Democracy,” p. 81.
41. State Department airgram, 11/10/64, reporting on McCloy’s call on President Branco, 11/5/64, DOS FOIA.
42. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 19.
43. Ibid., p. 327.
44. David S. Lifton, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 106.
45. Ibid., pp. 83–84.
46. Ibid., p. 85.
47. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/16/63, p. 55, JFK; Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 43.
48. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/16/63, p. 35, JFK.
49. Ibid., p. 12.
50. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 252.
51. Edward J. Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978), p. 17.
52. Ibid., p. 264.
53. David E. Scheim, Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988), p. 218; NYT, Nov. 29, 1985.
54. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 32.
55. Epstein, Legend, p. 254.
56. Ibid., p. 232. The CIA also withheld Agency documents reporting that a Cuban agent named Miguel Casas Saez was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, on a “sabotage and espionage mission.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 420–22.)
57. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 12/16/63, p. 39, JFK.
58. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 214.
59. McCloy interview, BBC Panorama, March 6, 1978.
60. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 237.
61. Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 368.
62. Ibid., p. 367–68.
63. Anson, “They’ve Killed the President,” pp. 46–47.
64. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 235.
65. C. D. Jackson to McCloy, 1/20/64, DDE.
66. Lifton, Best Evidence, p. 73.
67. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 4/30/64, pp. 33–35, JFK.
68. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 245.
69. Long Beach Independent Press, July 3, 1967.
70. The Final Assassinations Report, House Select Committee on Assassinations (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 34; Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 53–54.
71. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 108.
72. David W. Belin, Esq., November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury (New York: Times Books, 1973), p. 194.
73. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 244. In fact, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1978 that such “smokeless” gunpowder can indeed be seen when fired. (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 117.)
74. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior James Jesus Angleton: The CIA ’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 174–75; Epstein, Legend, pp. 47–48.
75. Epstein, Legend, p. 49.
76. Nosenko actually brought with him some documentation of his story, including some papers from Oswald’s KGB file. These documents testified that the Soviets indeed feared that Oswald was a sleeper agent under the control of U.S. intelligence. Nosenko said orders were given for Oswald to be kept under surveillance but not recruited. He claimed that, when Oswald was accused as Kennedy’s assassin, KGB officials feared that someone in their organization might nevertheless have recruited him. A bomber was quickly dispatched to Minsk, Nosenko says, to retrieve Oswald’s file, and KGB officials were relieved to read that the ex-Marine had never been recruited. (Anson, “Theyve Killed the President, ” p. 164.)
77. McCloy interview, BBC Panorama, March 6, 1978; see also McCloy questioning of Alan H. Belmont, assistant to the director of the FBI, in The Witnesses: Selected and Edited from the Warren Commission’s Hearings by the New York Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 604–13, 526, 551.
78. Anson, “They’ve Killed the President,” p. 154.
79. Warren Commission meeting transcript, 4/30/64, p. 18, JFK.
80. Ibid., p. 31.
81. Baltimore Sun, July 21, 1975 (interview of McCloy on CBS by Eric Sevareid).
82. The Witnesses, p. 553.
83. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 250.
84. Epstein, Inquest, p. 81.
85. Drew Pearson, Bell-McClure Syndicate, June 22, 1964.
86. McCloy-Harriman telcon, 7/13/64, AH.
87. McCloy-Harriman telcon, 8/4/64, AH.
88. McCloy-Harriman telcon, 7/13/64, AH.
89. Harriman-Mac Bundy telcon, 7/13/64, AH.
90. Harriman-McCloy telcon, 8/4/64, AH.
91. In a 1978 postscript to his famous essay, Rovere wrote, “There was no American Establishment; of course there wasn’t, yet in a way there was, and in any case the chairman of the board had to be John J. McCloy.” (Richard Rovere, “The American Establishment,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1978, pp. 170–84.)
92. McGeorge Bundy memo to the president, “Backing from the Establishment,” 8/24/64, Bundy Memos, LBJ.
93. Harriman-McCloy telcon, 8/4/64, AH.
94. Cyrus Sulzberger-Harriman telcon, 7/23/64, AH.
95. NYT, Aug. 1, 1964.
96. Ibid.
97. Official Warren Commission Report, p. 19.
98. Epstein, Inquest, p. 122.
99. Ibid., p. 124.
100. Pollack, Earl Warren, p. 253.
101. The Final Assassinations Report, House Select Committee on Assassinations (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 104.
102. Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 30.
103. FBI memo, C. D. De Loach to Mr. Toison, 4/4/67, FBI FOIA.
104. McCloy told an interviewer in 1978, “I must assume he [Johnson] knew it at the time when I was sort of visiting with him and we were talking about these matters—that there had been an effort, on behalf of the CIA, to assassinate Fidel Castro, and that therefore this was logical that Fidel Castro was retaliating and had retaliated.” (McCloy interview, BBC Panorama, March 6, 1978.)
105. Ibid.
106. Scheim, Contract on America, p. vii.
107. Ambassador Lucius Battle cable to secretary of state, 9/29/64, DOS FOIA.
108. NYT, Sept. 29, 1964.
109. “McCloy’s Impressions of His Meeting with President Nasser on September 28,” State Department memorandum of conversation, 10/6/64, AH.
110. Ibid.
111. NYT, Dec. 19, 1964.
112. Eugene Bird interview, Aug. 11, 1988; Ben Read memo to Mac Bundy, 1/8/65, LBJ.
113. “McCloy’s Impressions of His Meeting with President Nasser on September 28,” State Department memcon, 10/6/64, AH.
114. NYT, Sept. 10, 1964, Nov. 2, 1964.
TWENTY-SIX: McCLOY AND VIETNAM: 1965–68, NATO CRISIS, SECRET MIDDLE EAST NEGOTIATIONS
1. Alvin Wirtz to LBJ, 5/20/40, LBJ (courtesy of Robert Dallek).
2. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950–1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, 2nd ed. 1986), p. 110; NSC action memo no. 273, 11/26/63, LBJ.
3. Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 116.
4. NYT, n.d. (1965) reports McCloy receiving $30,000 from the Ford Foundation; Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1965, reports he was paid $49,914 by Chase in 1964, and he must have drawn a minimum of $100,000 from his Milbank, Tweed partnership. Finally, he was being paid thousands of dollars as a board director for numerous corporations.
5. Dean Rusk memorandum of conversation with Mr. John J. McCloy, 6/20/64, LBJ.
6. Endicott Peabody memo to the president, 11/6/67, NSF, Memos to the President, vol. 53, box 26, LBJ.
7. McCloy interview, Sept. 14, 1984; McCloy oral history, LBJ Library; Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, pp. 647–48; Alan Brinkley, “John J. McCloy,” Harper’s, Feb. 1982.
8. Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 33.
9. Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, p. 238.
10. George S. Franklin, Jr., to Lew Douglas, 1/28/65, LD.
11. Godfrey Hodgson, “The Establishment,” Foreign Policy, Spring 1973.
12. Lew Douglas cable to LBJ, 2/10/65; Douglas to the earl of Swinton, 7/8/65; Douglas to Congressman A. Willis Robertson, 7/30/65, LD. Douglas told anyone who would listen that South Vietnam was a “mouse trap” and the problem now was to find an “acceptable” way of escaping it. The whole notion of a monolithic communist menace was an “antiquated idea,” and he believed that a country, “though it might be communistic, need not necessarily be the handmaiden and the servant of Peking, any more than we thoroughly understand that Tito is not necessarily orbiting around the Kremlin.” (Robert Paul Browder and Thomas G. Smith, Independent: A Biography of Lewis W. Douglas, p. 396.)
13. Marcus Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 15–17.
14. Harriman to Arthur Schlesinger, 3/20/65, AH.
15. Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, p. 210.
16. Ibid., p. 239.
17. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, p. 80.
18. Ibid., pp. 89–91.
19. Mac Bundy to LBJ, 2/7/65, LBJ.
20. NSC action memo no. 328, 4/6/65, LBJ.
21. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, p. 63.
22. “Commencement Address by John J. McCloy,” Haverford College, 6/4/65, AH.
23. Dean Rusk to McCloy, 6/14/65; Harriman to McCloy, 6/28/65, AH.
24. William Bundy memo on Vietnam Panel, 7/10/65, LBJ.
25. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 650.
26. William Bundy memo on Vietnam Panel, 7/10/65, LBJ.
27. The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 453–54.
28. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 691.
29. McCloy to Arthur Dean, 8/20/65, LBJ. On March 24, 1965, McNamara’s chief aide, John T. McNaughton, wrote a memo to his boss in which he asserted that 70 percent of the U.S. aim in Vietnam was “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat. . . .” (Pentagon Papers, p. 432)
30. William Bundy memo on Vietnam Panel, 7/10/65, LBJ.
31. Roswell Gilpatric to Mac Bundy, 7/9/65, LBJ.
32. William Bundy memo on Vietnam Panel, 7/10/65, LBJ.
33. Ibid.
34. Hodgson, “The Establishment,” p. 21.
35. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 652.
36. Richard N. Goodwin, “The War Within,” NYT Magazine, Aug. 21, 1988, p. 38.
37. Transcript of Cabinet Room meeting, 7/22/65, Meeting Notes File, box 1, LBJ.
38. Mac Bundy memo to the president, 7/28/65, LBJ.
39. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, p. 265.
40. Transcript of Cabinet Room meeting, 7/22/65, Meeting Notes File, box 1, LBJ.
41. Berman, Planning a Tragedy, pp. 151–52.
42. Clark Clifford to president, 5/17/65, LBJ.
43. Bundy memo to the president, 7/28/65, LBJ.
44. Marcus Raskin interview, April 28, 1985; Ralph Stavins, Richard J. Barnet, and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War: A Documented Account of the United States’ Adventure in Indochina (London: Davis-Poynter, 1972), p. 192.
45. Bundy to president, 8/2/65, LBJ.
46. Hamilton Fish Armstrong to Arthur Dean, 8/9/65, LBJ. Nearly half of the Committee’s membership overlapped with the Council on Foreign Relations. (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, p. 240.)
47. McCloy to Arthur Dean, 8/10/65, LBJ.
48. “Statement of Principles of Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia,” 9/9/65, LBJ. The statement was actually drafted by members of the White House staff and State Department officials working under William Bundy. (Jonathan Moore memo to William Bundy, 8/3/65, LBJ.)
49. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969), pp. 335–36.
50. Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon and the Doves (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 61.
51. Chomsky, American Power, p. 303.
52. Meeting in Cabinet Room, 1/25/66, LBJ.
53. Mac Bundy to the president, 1/26/66, LBJ.
54. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 669.
55. Meeting in Cabinet Room, 1/28/66, LBJ.
56. Small, Johnson, Nixon and the Doves, p. 78.
57. Lew Douglas to Senator Fulbright, 7/23/66, LD.
58. Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, p. 239.
59. Chomsky, American Power, p. 335.
60. Lew Douglas to Thomas Lamont, 10/17/66, LD.
61. Douglas to Fulbright, 7/23/66, LD.
62. Douglas to Lord Salter, 11/27/67, LD.
63. Douglas to Walden Moore, 10/12/67, LD.
64. Glenn T. Seaborg with Benjamin S. Loeb, Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Administration (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 359.
65. McCloy’s meeting with Kissinger, State Department cable, 3/5/67, DOS FOIA.
66. Notes on conversation with John J. McCloy, 1/22/66, AH. In the same breakfast meeting, McCloy said that, as far as Germany was concerned, he was prepared to “settle the Oder-Neisse line with an agreement with the Russians that we would protect it from attack in either direction.” Harriman thought this was a startling suggestion coming from McCloy, and so he immediately asked why McCloy hadn’t posed it before. McCloy said he had. And it was true: he had done so back in 1956, when he wrote the preface to the Council on Foreign Relations’ book on U.S.-Soviet relations. Harriman was skeptical and noted in a memo for his files, “I doubt whether he has put it that specifically, as the Germans would have a fit since they would think we would be giving up support for unification, this being their last card to play in return for Soviet agreement to unification.”
67. Ibid.
68. Seaborg with Loeb, Stemming the Tide, pp. 139–40.
69. Secret McCloy cable to secretary of state, 4/15/66, DOS FOIA.
70. Dean Rusk appointment book, 3/7/66, LBJ; NYT, April 12, 1966.
71. Memo of conversation, McCloy, Erhard, et al., 4/17/66, State Department, DOS FOIA.
72. David P. Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 10.
73. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969, p. 305.
74. John J. McCloy, “Statement on the Atlantic Alliance,” 5/25/66, Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations, AH.
75. McCloy, “Statemen
t on the Atlantic Alliance,” 5/25/66, AH.
76. Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 307.
77. John J. McCloy testimony, 5/14/71, LD.
78. NYT, Oct. 27, 1966.
79. Calleo, Imperious Economy, pp. 21, 47, 60.
80. Johnson, Vantage Point} pp. 306–7.
81. Calleo, Imperious Economy, p. 55.
82. Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 307.
83. McNamara memorandum to the president, 9/19/66, LBJ.
84. McCloy’s meeting with Kissinger, State Department cable, 3/5/67, DOS FOIA; Louis Heren, “The Duties in London of a Philadelphia Lawyer,” The Times (London), March 14, 1967.
85. “Conversation with Jean Monnet,” confidential State Department cable, Ambassador George McGhee to secretary of state, 10/14/66, AH.
86. Secret memo of conversation: Rusk, Ball, McGhee, Erhard, Schröder, et al., Blair House, 9/25/66, AH.
87. LBJ diary cards, 10/7/66, LBJ.
88. McGhee State Department cable to secretary of state, 10/14/66, AH.
89. Heren, “Duties in London.” Heren, The Times’ Washington correspondent, blamed McNamara’s tough position on obtaining full payment on the offset deal for Erhard’s downfall.
90. McCloy to President Johnson, 5/17/67, DOS FOIA.
91. The Reporter, May 18, 1967.
92. Raymond J. Albright memo to the secretary, 1/11/67, Treasury Department FOIA.
93. Memorandum of conversation, Secretary Fowler, McCloy, et al., 1/12/67, Treasury Department FOIA.
94. The Reporter, May 18, 1967.
95. In fact, the Pentagon estimated that the dual-basing, rotation scheme would be very costly. One 1966 study estimated that over a five-year period such rotations would add $9–25 to the Defense Department budget for every $1 improvement in the U.S. balance of payments. (“Balance of Payments Impact of Offset Arrangements and Troop Deployments,” Alfred Puhan memo to Mr. Leddy, State Department, 9/29/66, with attached summary of Institute for Defense Analyses study, DOS FOIA.)
96. State Department cable to London and Bonn, 3/1/67, FOIA.
97. Johnson, Vantage Point, pp. 310–11.
98. McCloy later wrote the president that the German “gold letter” “protects US gold stocks against much more than defense expenditures in Germany.” (See McCloy to Johnson, 5/17/67, State Department FOIA; see also “Deming Option Roman Two,” 1/18/67, State Department FOIA.