Mary's Mosaic (44 page)

Jack Kennedy entered his presidency as an avowed Cold Warrior. Allen Dulles wanted to take advantage of the new president’s CIA sympathies as quickly as possible. Initially dazzled, then seduced, by Dulles and the aura of CIA covert operations, both Jack and his brother Bobby agreed to keep Allen Dulles in place—which included supporting, at least initially, the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba run by Dulles protégé Richard Bissell. The CIA had been startled by Kennedy’s election; they weren’t prepared for it. “When Kennedy got elected, people at CIA were alarmed,” said former CIA covert operative Donald Deneselya. “Nixon was a team player, a known quantity. No one knew what was going to happen with Kennedy.”
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President Kennedy would soon boldly demonstrate why.

Early into his presidency in 1961, before the Bay of Pigs debacle, Jack had pushed hard against the CIA and the Joint Chiefs for the goal of a neutral and independent Laos in Southeast Asia. He wanted to end U.S. support of
the country’s anti-Communist ruler, General Phoumi Nosavan, whose puppet government had been installed by a joint CIA-Pentagon military force during the Eisenhower administration. The insistence of the new president wasn’t well received; it also foreshadowed a bigger event to come. That April, the CIA launched the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, hoping to get rid of Fidel Castro and install (or restore) a government more sympathetic to American business interests and the interests of the Mafia, who wanted to regain possession of the lucrative casinos in Havana. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a complete, utter fiasco. It would, however, become a defining event in the Kennedy presidency and in Cold War history.

A CIA-trained, equipped, and commanded Cuban-exile brigade was used to attempt the overthrow of Castro’s government. Almost laughably, Fidel Castro, along with the rest of the world’s leaders, including the Russians, knew the invasion was being launched, and who was really behind it. The invasion had originally been conceived during the Eisenhower administration. Its success would inevitably depend on American air support, although that detail had not been revealed to the president before the operation began. When the moment came, Jack realized he had been tricked by the Dulles inner circle, which had attempted to possibly play upon the president’s fear of appearing politically weak and inexperienced. Dulles believed Kennedy would cave in to political pressure, and thereby fall into line to make the operation a success. Awakened, Jack’s rectitude intervened; realizing he had been intentionally deceived, he called the operation to a halt, willing to suffer whatever political consequences might ensue.

Years later, according to Cold War historian L. Fletcher Prouty, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas recalled a discussion he and the president had about the debacle. “This episode seared him,” said Justice Douglas. “He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect … it shook him up!”
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“We were at war with the national security people,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would quietly confide to a friend many years later.
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The enormity of the disaster wasn’t lost on Jack, who told one of his highest administration officials that he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Inside the White House, the president was seething. “How could I have been so stupid? I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards.”
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That was followed by the realization that Allen Dulles—the man who had convinced him the CIA was indispensable, as he had done with Eisenhower—was too much of a legendary figure, and that it was hard “to operate with legendary figures.” He needed someone within the Agency he could trust. “I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. Bobby should be in CIA,” he had said.
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The Bay of Pigs fiasco would turn out to be a harbinger of worse things to come. The Kennedy administration’s maiden voyage in foreign affairs, its shakedown cruise, was a rude awakening, and it would begin to reveal the kind of ruthless treachery at work.

Attending a conference on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba some forty years later in March 2001, longtime political journalist Daniel Schorr, speaking on the NPR radio program
All Things Considered
, said he had gained an entirely new perception of the fiasco:

It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, director Allen Dulles and deputy Richard Bissell, had their own plan of how to bring the United States into the conflict. It appears that they never really expected an uprising against Castro when the liberators landed as described in their memos to the White House. What they did expect was that the invaders would establish and secure a beachhead, announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary government and appeal for aid from the United States and the Organization of American States. The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots.

“In effect,” said Schorr, “President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.”
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Unlike any president before him, President Kennedy took responsibility for what had occurred. The American public forgave him, upsetting the well-established CIA protocol of manipulating presidents and political leaders. The president would then do what his predecessor should have done years earlier: He fired Allen Dulles and his chief lieutenant, Richard Bissell.

But getting rid of Allen Dulles didn’t mean Dulles was gone. The entire upper echelon of the Agency, most of which had been recruited by Dulles, were loyal to him and would remain so. While Kennedy replaced Dulles with John McCone, a wealthy Catholic businessman, McCone was largely just a figurehead, intentionally left out of the loop, not aware of the more egregious
CIA covert operations being run by people like Richard Helms, who now occupied Richard Bissell’s position at the head of the Directorate of Plans, and chief of counterintelligence Jim Angleton, both of whom would remain staunch, loyal Dulles followers. Allen Dulles would always be their boss, and they would consult him regularly after his formal departure.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco was a demarcation in the sand, an event that ultimately identified and determined the real forces that would work to undermine President Kennedy’s objectives. These forces were not the Soviets, or their puppet Fidel Castro, or the so-called falling dominoes of alleged Communist takeovers. They were internal. Global American hegemony was predicated on financial and political control, even if Communism was one way underdeveloped nations sometimes developed themselves. Eventually, financial and economic control became paramount, once political control had been established. The Empire always struck back.

In addition to firing Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Charles Cabell, the president made an attempt to immediately deal with the CIA and redefine its mandate by issuing two new National Security Action Memoranda (55 and 57) on June 28, 1961, whereby he stripped the CIA of its covert military operational capacity and put it back into the hands of the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—at least on paper.
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Ultimately, the memoranda may not have changed anything, other than to incur the further wrath of CIA higher-ups. Kennedy then moved “quietly,” according to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a 20 percent reduction by 1966.”
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So bold were these moves, according to L. Fletcher Prouty, they shocked the entire national security apparatus. It was the beginning of a “dead man walking” in the White House. Indeed, Allen Dulles, the man who extracted the final revenge—the man who Mary Meyer once compared to “Machiavelli, only worse”—inadvertently let it slip to a young editor many years later what he really thought: “That little Kennedy … he thought he was a god.”
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Little did Dulles understand his statement was just his own psychological projection. It was Dulles himself who, for nearly twenty years, “thought he was a god,” as he and his CIA imperium pillaged the integrity of American democracy.

On July 20, 1961, during heightened tensions over Berlin, President Kennedy attended a National Security Council meeting. He listened attentively as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Lyman Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles, who was still in charge at the CIA,
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presented a plan for a first-strike, preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union that would take place in late
1963, preceded by a well-orchestrated series of events designed to produce “heightened tensions” between the two superpowers. The scheme for “heightened tensions” was eventually codenamed “Operation Northwoods,” and it had the written approval of all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. According to author James Bamford, who first reported it in his bestselling book
Body of Secrets
(2002), “the plan called for called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving [General] Lemnitzer and his cabal [at the Pentagon] the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”
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Sound familiar? We need only to remember how President George W. Bush—under the direction of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—took us into a war with Iraq under false pretenses.

Aghast at the above referenced NSC meeting in 1961, President Kennedy nonetheless respectfully asked, “Had there ever been an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R. which would be incurred by a preemptive attack?” and what would be “the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack?” The president became so agitated that such a plan was even being considered that he directed “that no member in attendance at the meeting ever disclose even the subject of the meeting.” Disgusted, he finally got up and walked out. As he made his way back from the cabinet room to the Oval Office with Secretary of State Dean Rusk at his side, he was said to have muttered, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
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H
ow much Jack shared with Mary about what he was up against in the early days of his presidency will probably never be known—unless perhaps Mary’s real diary during the last few years of her life becomes available. Jack regarded Mary as completely trustworthy; increasingly, he sought out her counsel. Having had a life with Cord, Mary was already well acquainted with CIA skulduggery. Likely, she even knew a few things Jack didn’t. Throughout his most critical moments during his presidency, Mary invariably found her way to his side, and always by invitation. No moment, however, was more critical than what occurred during the month of October 1962. Thirteen days would change everything, eventually inviting the highest of hopes, but not before a confrontation that portended nuclear annihilation.

Knowing Jack’s penchant for sailing, Mary might have even mentioned her father Amos’s warning to his brother Gifford in 1933: “Keep an anchor to windward in case of revolution,” Amos had told his brother in a letter, referring to the Depression era that was taking a toll on American economic stability. Whether it was the fog of economic uncertainty, the fog of shady covert operations, or the fog of war itself, only a true nautical seafarer understood how quickly conditions at sea could change. A ready, unentangled anchor might well save the day, or at least until it looked as if the fog might be lifting—the appearance of which sometimes turned out to be a mirage.

10

Peace Song

An honorable human relationship, that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of redefining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

—Adrienne Rich

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.

There is no “they.” There is no “other.” It is all one.

—Ram Dass

(formerly Harvard professor Richard Alpert)

You believe in redemption, don’t you?

—President John F. Kennedy

May 1, 1962

S
OMETIME ON
M
ONDAY
, October 22, 1962, Mary Meyer was invited to the White House for a small, impromptu dinner party that had been hastily organized by Jackie. The guest list included Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, friends
Benno and Nicole Graziani, and Jackie’s dress designer, Oleg Cassini. Mary’s escort for the evening was to be her friend and fellow artist William Walton, a longtime friend of both Jack and Bobby Kennedy who had already functioned as Mary’s partner at previous White House social gatherings. For some unknown reason, however, Mary wasn’t able to attend; Helen Chavchavadze took her place instead.
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Why Mary had inexplicably canceled the engagement remained a mystery, but the fact that Jack had wanted her to be in close proximity that night was noteworthy.