by Gerard Colby
One Rockefeller associate at the Pentagon was CIA veteran William R. Kintner. Here was the epitome of the intelligence operative, a “spook” who filtered easily into all social and political levels, moving in and out of a labyrinth of clandestine circles. Kintner owed his rise at the Pentagon to Nelson Rockefeller, first as a member of Nelson’s White House staff, serving as his chief aide at the top-secret Quantico seminars, then as a participant in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, and finally as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he headed long-range planning for the army. In 1961, Kintner left the Joint Chiefs to become deputy director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a CIA-associated think tank based in Philadelphia. There he began advocating the use of private voluntary organizations, including religious personnel, in Cold War operations.
From the beginning, Kintner argued for the adoption of the counterinsurgency doctrine at all levels of government, military and civilian. He rejected “peaceful coexistence” as illusory; “violent coexistence” was his reality.5 Local elite military officers, trained “to assume not only military duties but also ‘civilian’ roles in government,” were his preferred weapons in fighting the Cold War. Only the military would provide “the indispensable base for proper economic development” in the Third World. This militarized development thesis gave a theoretical foundation to the “civic action” programs of unconventional warfare previously tested in the Philippines by General Edward Lansdale. Kintner’s emphasis on the military for counterinsurgency strategy and economic development was elevated to a new status in the National Security Council (when the president, smarting from the Bay of Pigs defeat, created the Special Group-C.I. [counterinsurgency] in August 1961). Kennedy’s appointment of General Maxwell Taylor as its chair crowned the new doctrine with administrative competence. Robert Kennedy, as cochair, was only a presidential watchdog. Taylor ran the show, focusing attention on Vietnam and on the Pentagon’s “flexible response” ability to wage counterinsurgency war, not just nuclear war.
Nelson was pleased with this reorganization of the Pentagon around counterinsurgency. Better yet was Kennedy’s willingness to raise the policymaking status of the office of the national security adviser, adopting much of the substance, without the title, of Nelson’s previous proposal for a presidential assistant with “first secretary” premierlike powers.
From his Foxhall Road estate in Washington and visits to the Pentagon, Nelson could keep abreast of foreign developments and the Kennedy administration’s reactions to them. When he spoke publicly, however, Nelson tended to beat the drums of his favorite subject, nuclear war. No matter what the Soviets did, he told 346 journalists at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, the United States should not only continue underground nuclear testing, but resume testing in the atmosphere as well.
More research, he insisted, was needed: research and development of lighter nuclear warheads; new weapons, such as the neutron bomb; antimissile defense systems (more missiles), and tactical nuclear weapons “so needed for local and limited military action.”6
He did not mention that his International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) was now moving rapidly into the production of missile components. IBEC’s rubber, plastics, and plywood division had expanded to include fluid power systems for satellite launches; air compressor units to start jet aircraft; valves in nuclear reactors; and, by 1963, direct Pentagon orders for Titan II ICBM skirt assemblies.7
Neither did Nelson mention Airborne Instruments Laboratory, one of Laurance’s favorite ventures, whose Eugene Fubini was a recent full-time addition to the Pentagon and subsequently the National Security Agency’s top official. Or Reaction Motors, another of Laurance’s holdings, maker of liquid fuel rockets and now part of the rapidly growing Thiokol Chemical Corporation, developer and producer of motors for the Minuteman ICBM since 1961 and much later the producer of the faulty O-rings that doomed the Challenger spacecraft.
Nor did he mention Rockwell Manufacturing Company, a major air force contractor, which had IBEC director and Room 5600 financial director J. Richardson Dilworth as a board member. Or Vitro Corporation, a defense contractor controlled by Nelson’s close friend and CIA collaborator, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, which had first Laurance and then Nelson’s IBEC chairman Robert Purcell on the board. Or Itek, the maker of the U-2’s ultrapowerful camera lens, which had Laurance as a major investor and his aides Harper Woodward and Theodore F. Walkowicz as directors.* Or Marquardt Aircraft, another of Laurance’s “risk” investments. Or Vertrol Aircraft, maker of Piasecki helicopters, which Laurance and Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon had helped, at the behest of the Pentagon, giving it the financial launching pad to take off toward more lucrative “limited war” horizons by demonstrating the helicopter’s utility during the Korean War.
Rockefeller Family Investments in the Military-Industrial Complex (1950–1974)
Of the five Rockefeller brothers, David, Nelson, and Laurance were the most active in this area. (Names of individuals are of Rockefeller family representatives on boards of directors of companies with defense contracts.)
Sources: Nelson Rockefeller vice presidential confirmation hearings; New York Times, December 4, 1974, p. 29; U.S. Department of Defense, 100 Companies and Their Subsidiary Corporations, Listed According to Net Value of Military Prime Contract Awards (annual, various years); U.S. Department of Defense, 500 Contractors Receiving the Largest Dollar Volume of Military Prime Contract Awards for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation Work (annual, various years); company annual reports; Moody’s Industrials Manual; and Who’s Who in America.
Dependence on the Pentagon for, effectively, a public subsidy of many of the largest private employers in the United States grew enormously during the Kennedy era. And out of this public subsidy came an escalated arms race. It mattered little that the much-touted “missile gap” did not, according to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, exist;8 contracting for missiles, the Pentagon convinced Kennedy, was an easy way to buy off corporate proponents of the already outdated B-70 bombers. Through the arms race, the Pentagon was taking Kennedy and the American people on their first fateful step to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Kennedy’s rapid missile buildup supplemented an already overwhelmingly superior U.S. nuclear strike force of ICBMs, bombers, intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe and Turkey, and unmatched data on Soviet strength from Richard Bissell’s U-2s and satellite reconnaissance. For the Soviets to conclude that their own nuclear deterrence force was no longer credible, all that remained was the defection in April 1961 of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, one of the KGB’s top missile intelligence officers. It took another year for the Soviets to learn that Penkovsky had passed some 5,000 frames of microfilm of top-secret information to the CIA.
With some political voices in the United States calling loudly for a “first strike” on the Soviet Union and Kennedy’s buildup proceeding at breakneck pace, the Soviets became willing to gamble on Fidel Castro’s request for “defensive” intermediate-range missiles to deter an expected U.S. invasion.
Cuba, only ninety miles from U.S. shores, put major metropolitan cities in the Southeast within range of Soviet intermediate missiles. (Soviet submarines capable of firing Polaris-type missiles like the U.S. Polaris submarines were still years away.) Using Cuba as a base would circumvent the bulk of the U.S.’s early-warning radar system aimed at the polar cap. Here was an opportunity for the Soviets, under standard nuclear deterrence doctrine, to restore the credibility of their defense system.9 As in the United States, fear and desperation played too important a role in shaping defense strategies in the Soviet Union; unlike Nelson Rockefeller, however, both Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy had enough sense to know that fallout shelters bought little hope of survival if nuclear war broke out. But also unlike Rockefeller, they underestimated how easily Latin America could be turned into Armageddon.
THE EDUCATION OFFENSIVE
As the nuclear deterrence strategi
es of the United States and the Soviet Union were leading both nations at the end of 1961 toward nuclear confrontation in Latin America, one of the Democratic party’s most experienced Latin America hands, Adolf Berle, was still chafing over having been pushed out of the Kennedy administration. The president had done it gracefully, leaving his options open to use Berle’s talents in the future. But all the praise and smiles for the cameras could not hide Berle’s unhappiness at being made the first scapegoat for the Bay of Pigs failure. Berle believed that the invasion, though a “fiasco,” was “entirely lawful and consistent with international law and with our treaties … probably one of the few intelligent things we did. It was noted in the Soviet Union and possibly in China that they had met the threshold of armed action and overtly at least pulled in their horns.”
Berle’s hatred of the traditionalists in the State Department was stronger than ever. He called the department’s bureaucracy for Latin America, the Bureau of Latin American Affairs, “unready, inefficient, even in its own way corrupt.”10 His bitterness was directed less at the president than at the “views and delaying tactics of a State Department Bureaucracy” whose “tenacity is not justified by its record of success.”11
Berle believed that the State Department had singled out Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress policy for attack. Kennedy was well aware of the bureau’s opposition. “These fellows really object to my being President,” Kennedy told Berle.12
A bond, though weak, still remained between Kennedy and Berle, sealed by a mutual belief that democratic reforms and imaginative counterinsurgency programs could dampen revolutionary fervor, prevent the spread of communism, and usher in a new prosperous epoch of American-led capitalist growth in the Third World. And both men knew that some of the brightest architects of this strategy had worked above and apart from the State Department, drawn instead into orbits more influenced by Rockefeller power than by the more diffused, unfocused, and often contradictory policies of a federal government filled with the laissez-faire advocates in the Republican administration.
Kennedy had been fully persuaded by veterans of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project like McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Roswell Gilpatric, and Edward Lansdale to rely on their counterinsurgency doctrine to prevent World War III. With the help of the Green Berets, the CIA, and the Agency for International Development, Kennedy had been told, allied governments could carry out successful antiguerrilla military operations and initiate social and political reforms and economic progress that could “contain” communist-led revolutions as “limited wars” and prevent their growing into major wars and sparks for nuclear conflagration. In this way, counterinsurgency and its limited wars remarkably became both a global and an internal quest for peace.
The whole strategy depended, of course, on the willingness of the “host” government to initiate social reforms, especially in the countryside. It was there, according to Walt Rostow’s theory of economic growth, that economic development could take place along general capitalist lines. The formula was ingenuously simple: Small title-holding farmers could use crop rotation, hybrid seeds, fertilizer, and machinery to increase productivity and lower food prices in urban areas. Lower food prices would reduce inflation, contribute to political and market stability, and lower the cost of hiring workers. The upper class would be more encouraged to invest in other manufacturing and home-market ventures instead of sending its money abroad or investing in the traditional export sector. All these economic developments, in turn, would increase the volume of goods and services for the domestic mass market, which would grow as credit and the better-paid wage-earning middle class grew. Rockefeller well understood and shared this thesis.
Kennedy worried about Rockefeller. Whereas a governor can build his track record on domestic affairs, a U.S. president ultimately is judged by his accomplishments in foreign affairs. And it was not Vietnam that had become the embarrassment of Kennedy’s presidency, but Rockefeller’s claimed domain of expertise: Latin America.
So it had come to pass that at the same time that Kennedy endorsed an escalation of counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam, he did likewise in Latin America. And rather than avoid Nelson Rockefellers influence south of the border, Kennedy decided to tap it, seeking access to Nelson through Berle.
Berle was an old master at psychological warfare, a skill honed and developed while working with Nelson’s CIAA during World War II. Now, to counter the State Department’s perceived resistance to the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy asked Berle to “work out a good propaganda education program” for Latin America.
Berle was happy to oblige. Kennedy’s assignment allowed him to work out his frustrations by drafting a twenty-four-page “Psychological Offensive in Latin America.” He argued that the State Department’s lack of clear democratic objectives and methods had allowed movements for social change in Latin America to relapse into dictatorships. These dictatorships, in turn, only set the stage for more disorder.13 The State Department’s cultural officers, he went on, were not up to the task of effectively spreading propaganda because of their fear of offending the host governments. “As a great Power, we are entitled to have propaganda,” he insisted. “‘Cold Wars’ are no less serious than ‘Hot Wars’ in this respect.”14 The intellectual effort, he argued, “ranks in importance and scale with our economic offensive and with our measures for military defense.”
“Contrary to most impressions,” he went on, in Latin America “the battlefield is not for the ‘minds of the masses.’ Essentially the objective is control of the relatively small stratum of intellectuals, the educated and the semi-educated. The strategy is to achieve domination of Latin American intellectual life now, and to assure indefinite perpetuation of that domination by controlling educational processes.”
Berle laid out a strategy of U.S. government control of Latin America’s educational processes, covertly carried out through private agencies. Books would be selected, promoted, and distributed by “a philosophical and intellectual staff.” These efforts would be backed by a director of educational activities who would “assure that in all the departments of instruction in the various universities of Latin America, professors who expound the American philosophy have support and encouragement.” His proposed Directorate of Information would “own or control in each Latin American country and through citizens of it, at least one newspaper of general circulation and, if feasible, at least one substantial radio chain. In fact, he recommended establishing a central radio station modeled on Radio Havana, capable of broadcasting regularly to the entire Latin American area. “There is no reason why we should not have our own ‘Tass.’”15
If all this sounded like Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA operation during World War II, it also dovetailed with Kennedy’s interest in breaking down the feudal bureaucracies that Eisenhower’s hierarchical style had fostered and replacing them with his own centralized command and loyal lieutenants.
Berle also wanted to get the Alliance for Progress, a key element of counterinsurgency, off the ground. He introduced White House aide Richard Goodwin, who had helped design the Alliance for Progress, to Rockefeller. “I think all the White House wants is to exchange ideas [about the Cold War],” Berle told Nelson, “because matters are getting tight.”16
Berle knew, however, that Nelson Rockefeller had more than ideas and experience when it came to propaganda in Latin America. Nelson controlled access to a private network of business and political contacts, in Latin America and the United States, that was not readily accessible to the bureaucrats in the State Department’s Latin America Division.
Nelson’s network reached not only high but deep and far, touching everything in the world of the Rockefellers, from Nelson’s own political and business connections to the vast business and philanthropic empire sired by Grandfather’s fortune. At certain times and in certain companies, markets, or geographic areas, the interests of political and business contacts in this network met. These mutual points of interes
t held the potential for making history.
Such mutual points of interest during the Kennedy era were the seemingly disparate cases of North Carolina and Colombia. North Carolina, a state with Rockefeller ties since Grandfather had done business in Charlotte in the nineteenth century, would have a profound impact on the development of counterinsurgency policy through the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. And Colombia, a nation that had played host to Standard Oil for almost forty years, would be the doctrine’s laboratory.
NORTH CAROLINA AND THE COLOMBIAN EXPERIMENT
Sixty years had passed since Nelson’s father had toured North Carolina on the Southern Railway’s “Millionaire’s Special” with other northern financiers to inspect that state’s potential for school funds and industrial development. Rockefeller’s Sanitary Commission and General Education Board, having used North Carolina as their medical and social laboratory, had taken their programs abroad to Latin America and Asia, eventually merging as the giant of American philanthropy, the Rockefeller Foundation.
North Carolina was still a poor state in desperate need of development. To satisfy that need, its leaders again courted northern capital. And once again, North Carolina would be used as a launching pad for social engineering in Latin America. But this time both the Cold War and economics conspired against maintaining the status quo of white supremacy.
North Carolina’s development of a home market was hampered by the servitude imposed on its African American population, whose low wages, backed by Klan terror, put downward pressure on the price of all labor. Although low wages could attract northern industries, they also retarded the growth of a home market of consumers. And from Washington’s viewpoint, the South’s version of apartheid was not the image needed for the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World. Could North Carolina break the segregationist mold and become the model of development and trade for the Alliance for Progress as it had for the health and sanitation programs that accompanied U.S. corporate investment in Latin America sixty years before?
