JFK (35 page)

By the end of April 1961, a revised counterinsurgency program
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had been submitted to President Kennedy, without the Lansdale material. Kennedy lost no time in implementing many of its recommendations. The first troop movement, the deployment of a four-hundred-man Special Forces group to South Vietnam, was made to accelerate the training of the South Vietnamese army. This move was directed by President Kennedy under the terms of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #52, issued on May 11, 1961.

By April 20, Kennedy knew that if he was ever going to gain full control of the CIA, he would have to understand what went wrong with the anti-Castro program and what he had to do to take over control of the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam. This accounts for the strong directive he wrote to Gen. Maxwell Taylor on April 21, 1961.

With the collapse of the brigade in Cuba, Kennedy lost no time in getting to the heart of the matter. On June 13, 1961, Maxwell Taylor forwarded his “Letter to the President.” It was a most remarkable document. Kennedy and his inner circle studied it carefully, and on June 28, 1961, President Kennedy issued one of the most important and unusual directives to leave the White House under any President since World War II.

This directive, National Security Action Memorandum #55, said in part, “I wish to inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff as follows with regard to my views of their relations to me in Cold War Operations: . . . The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities.”

This is a revolutionary statement when one considers who wrote it and the circumstances under which it was promulgated. The Cold War was a massive global struggle that existed only in vague terms. A “Cold War operation,” however, was a very specific term that referred to a secret, clandestine activity. Traditionally, the uniformed services of this country have not been authorized to become involved in clandestine activities in peacetime. Therefore, with NSAM #55, President Kennedy was making the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the military forces of the United States—responsible for the Cold War, just as they would be responsible for a real, declared state of war among nations. This was a radical departure from the traditional rules of warfare among the family of nations.

Kennedy was directing that U.S. military forces be used against any Cold War adversary, whether or not there had been a declaration of war. This was a revolutionary doctrine, especially for the United States, and if these presidential directives (NSAM #55 was accompanied by two others, NSAM #56 and #57) had become operationally effective, they would have changed drastically the course of the war in Vietnam.

They would effectively have removed the CIA from Cold War operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the coordination of intelligence. In many situations, these directives would have made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the day-to-day counterpart of the secretary of state.

At the same time, these documents stated the Kennedy position, clearly setting forth his battle plan. Kennedy was taking charge, if he could, and he was relying upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff for assistance. He did not know it at the time, but with the issuance of these directives, he had only eighteen months left to win his battle against the CIA and its allies, or to die in the attempt.

It was an odd twist of fate that led Kennedy to choose the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the CIA to become his strong right arm. He did this because of the strength and courage of Maxwell Taylor’s letter. By midsummer, Taylor had become Kennedy’s military and intelligence adviser in the White House. Kennedy appointed him to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1962. It was Maxwell Taylor—not Jack Kennedy or anyone else in the White House—who, representing the members of the Cuban Study Group, actually wrote the paragraphs in NSAM #55 that are cited above. Those words, along with many others like them from the same series of documents, were taken absolutely verbatim from that long-hidden “Letter to the President” that Taylor wrote on June 13, 1961.

Why did Taylor, Burke, and Dulles, all members of the Cuban Study Group, unanimously put those words into the mind of Jack Kennedy? Why did Kennedy accept them and publish them with his signature without delay?

Having been given such vast powers by their President, where were the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the guns were fired in the streets of Dallas only eighteen months later? Where was Lansdale? Where was Allen Dulles? Why was Kennedy so alone and unprotected by the time he made that fateful trip to Texas in 1963?

Kennedy asserted a power of the presidency that he assumed he had, but when his orders were delivered to the men to whom they were addressed, he discovered that his power was all but meaningless. His directives were quietly placed in the bureaucratic files and forgotten. There have been few times in the history of this nation when the limits of the power of the President have been so nakedly exposed. I was the briefing officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom NSAM #55 was addressed. I know exactly what he was told about that series of documents, and I know what he said about them during that meeting. During that meeting, I was told to have them put in the chairman’s file, where they remained. Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer did not choose to be a “Cold Warrior.”

In the great struggle between Kennedy and the entrenched power sources of Washington, as personified by the CIA and its allies in the Defense Department and the military-industrial complex, the President learned that his weapons were powerless and his directives unheeded. Beginning in July 1961 he set out to change that situation.

BARELY TWO MONTHS after the humiliating defeat of the Cuban exile brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy attempted to put a halter on the maverick CIA. On June 28, 1961, three top-level White House directives, National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM), were published.

One of them, NSAM #55, entitled, “Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations,”
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was signed by Kennedy and sent directly to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer. This was a most unusual intragovernmental procedure. Ordinarily it would have gone to the chairman via the secretary of defense, with copies to the secretary of state and the director, central intelligence, because of its subject. Without doubt, this directive was the most important single act of the first year of the Kennedy presidency. He had determined to limit the CIA’s role in clandestine activities, perhaps eliminate it altogether. This was the first in a series of such top-level policy directives issued by Kennedy that culminated in NSAM #263, issued one month before his murder.

These papers, and their actual authorship, were concealed for years. Although parts of them appear in the so-called Pentagon Papers, they do not appear there as a unit or with their correct titles and language. As far as I know, they have never before this work been linked with their source document, the Cuban Study Group report contained in a “Letter to the President” from Gen. Maxwell Taylor to John F. Kennedy dated June 13, 1961. This is discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this book.

The White House did make a copy of NSAM #55 available separately to the secretary of defense. No copy was sent to either the secretary of state or to the director of central intelligence. Kennedy’s no-nonsense policy directives marked the first steps in his ambitious plan to change the course of Cold War operations, which, for the most part, had been made the responsibility of the CIA since that agency’s creation in late 1947. These remarkable documents led directly to the later Reagan decision to do away with Eisenhower-period “plausibly deniable” covert operations and to come out into the open with Cold War operations, such as his action against Grenada and the overt F-111 air strikes against Libya. The Bush administration has continued this “overt” policy with its attack on Panama and the Desert Storm operation.

Whether or not this new military policy has been formally proclaimed the official guideline of the United States, it is being practiced today, as evidenced by the Gulf War. This policy means, in effect, that national sovereignty no longer exists and that a nation’s independence and borders are no longer sacred.

As this newer doctrine becomes more widely implemented, the traditional family of nations will dissolve into a shambles of raw power. From now on, no one will be safe. There is no sanctuary. Everyone, everywhere, is someone’s potential target. There is no place to hide.

This doctrine, quite literally adopted from the writings of Mao Tse-tung, first attained prominence and a measure of legitimacy under the signature of John F. Kennedy, who clearly and unhesitatingly stated his intentions in the opening sentences of NSAM #55 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (To repeat, this directive was not written by JFK. We learned later that it was written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, who was familiar with the studies of Mao’s writing done by the U.S. Army.)

As used in these directives, the term “Cold War operations” generally referred to covert operations, although it was not entirely limited to secret activities. What was new about this policy was that the President was bringing the experienced military Chiefs of Staff into an area of operation that traditionally, as under the terms of the March 15, 1954, NSC Directive #5412, had been declared to be outside the scope of the uniformed services in peacetime. A first step in this direction had taken place in 1957, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was made a member of the NSC #5412 “Special Group” that had been empowered to approve clandestine operations.

It must be noted that these policy statements that JFK signed arose directly from a study of the Bay of Pigs operation. President Kennedy had directed an essential, covert air strike against Castro’s last three combat aircraft. As noted, that strike did not take place. Others, unwitting of the stipulations of NSC #5412, have charged that Kennedy ought to have provided U.S. military “air cover” for the Cuban exile brigade on the beach, when it came under attack by Castro’s last three jet aircraft. Those who make this charge do not realize that the NSC had prohibited the utilization of regular military forces in support of clandestine activity and that that prohibition had established the parameters of the overall strategy.

With this in mind, Kennedy emphasized this factor when he stated, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities.” He was making it possible, when necessary, to turn to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for just such purposes as had previously arisen at the time of the Bay of Pigs operation.

Thus, his NSAM #55 is an important statement, and much could be said about it as it has reappeared during succeeding administrations. In conventional hostilities, as defined by Clausewitz
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or in the traditional sense, the military establishment takes over from the diplomats and is made responsible for total war against the citizens, territory, and property of the enemy, in every possible way. Converting this doctrine for application during time of peace, albeit during the Cold War, has the effect of raising the Cold War to a higher and more overt level and prescribes a role for the U.S. military that it has never had before. When these three directives hit the Joint Staff,
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the wheels within wheels of the Pentagon began to grind. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that no immediate explanation for this significant policy change had reached the CIA or the Department of State.

Within the bureaucracy, whenever a major shift in policy occurs, the first thing that is done is to dispatch secret investigators in all directions to discover the origin of the new policy and to determine what the change means. A new President and a new presidential staff rarely come equipped with insiders of sufficient experience to produce such major changes on their own in one swift stroke. It was thought that Ted Sorensen, the President’s counsel, and Bobby Kennedy must have been the source of these directives. This was not so.