SD enterprise: JFK and The Long History of CIA Mischief

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You think #SignalGate is a disaster? Well, Charles P. Pierce has a tale to share with you. Ordinarily, Last Call is reserved for Esquire members only. But for a limited time, we're giving all newsletter subscribers the weekly long read from Pierce, one of America's foremost political pundits.

Today, Charlie tackles the revelations contained in newly released documents related to the assassination of JFK—and the decades of CIA hijinks highlighted therein. As in his daily blog posts on Esquire.com, the essay is infused with his signature irreverent humor and unique insight. We hope you enjoy Charlie's newsletter and consider supporting Esquire's commitment to quality journalism. —Brian O'Keefe, Executive Editor

JFK and The Long History of CIA Mischief

It was the summer of 1962, and the New Frontier was in more turmoil than the rest of the country knew. The Bay of Pigs disaster had happened less than a year previously. And the fiasco permanently poisoned the relationship between the Kennedy White House and the CIA, which President John F. Kennedy was sure had lied to him about what a slam dunk the invasion was. Behind the scenes, Kennedy was furious, saying that he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them on the four winds. He rebranded the Cuba brief as Operation Mongoose and later transferred the head spook to Rome

Still, while all this palace intrigue was reaching a full boil, the Washington summer social scene rolled on as if nothing else was happening. One night in July, the Kennedy family threw a pool party. One of the invited guests was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a noted historian and a close advisor to President Kennedy. He was almost a caricature of a academic–balding, looking at the world from behind horn-rimmed glasses, Harvard professor, recipient already of one Pulitzer Prize.

(Schlesinger had won it for The Age of Jackson, a study of our genocidal seventh president. He would win a second for A Thousand Days, an laudatory account of his relationship with the Kennedys and his work in their short-lived administration.)

Schlesinger was standing by the swimming pool when he caught the eye of Lee Udall, the wife of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. (Full disclosure: That also made her the sister-in-law of the guy I tried to make president in 1976.) Udall couldn't resist and she threw Schlesinger into the pool. From War On The Rocks:

After the swimming pool incident, his ego still bruised even as his clothes were dried, the distinguished scholar offered his resignation to the president. "Don't worry about it," came the amused reply from Kennedy. It later emerged that the culprit was Lee Udall, the wife of the interior secretary Stewart Udall. She confessed that the sight of the pontifical scholar proved too much: "he was standing there holding forth and looking so Arthurish and something came over me."

Schlesinger was in an odd position in the go-go Kennedy White House. Among other things, he used his unique position as a kind of house philosopher to oppose both the Bay of Pigs adventure and the efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro generally.

The Bay of Pigs episode certainly made Schlesinger reflect upon the challenges of his position. As he put it, it was one thing for a special assistant to "talk frankly in private to a President at his request" but quite another for a "college professor, fresh to government, to interpose his unassisted judgment in open meeting against that of such august figures as the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, each speaking with the full weight of his institution behind him." What is more, the military and intelligence agencies were able to "strike virile poses and talk of tangible things — fire power, air strike, landing craft and so on." Schlesinger had to depend on intangibles such as the reputation of the United States or other "odious" concepts such as "world opinion." The temptation for diplomats, he added, was always to fall in behind the lines of the military types, to show they were "not soft-headed idealists but were really tough guys, too."

Kennedy did what he could to bring Schlesinger into line with the Rostows and Bundys, and with the administration's policies toward Cuba generally, even introducing him to the CIA-backed rebels who would be hitting the beach.

Schlesinger was also concerned that he had appeared an almost lone voice in opposition to the mission in the court of Kennedy. What might that do to his future prospects, even if he was proved right? Notably, as it became clear that the mission was a disaster, Kennedy took him to Miami where they met the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exiled group who had been groomed by the Central Intelligence Agency to replace Fidel Castro's regime. In the fall-out, McGeorge Bundy did concede that Schlesinger had indeed got it right.

"Oh sure," said Kennedy, in anger and with Schlesinger in the room, "Arthur wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive."

"Arthur wrote me a memorandum."

Indeed, he did. And it emerged, fully redacted, as part of the massive document dump of nearly 70,000 documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and it did make Schlesinger look pretty good. You can't say as much for the rest of the intelligence community.

One night in July, the Kennedy family threw a pool party. One of the invited guests was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a noted historian and a close advisor to President Kennedy.

The memo is 15 pages long, and it's dated June 30, 1961, two months after the failure of the invasion. And it is a stunning piece of work,. In it, Schlesinger tells Kennedy that almost 50 percent of the political officers attached to some U.S. embassies abroad were CIA operatives. Moreover, it was in the Schlesinger memo where we first see the notion that control of covert activities abroad should be lifted from the CIA. Schlesinger suggests that, in the future, control should rest with the State Department, and he is quite plain that the change is prompted by the fact that the CIA cannot be trusted. Schlesinger writes:

For its part, ClA had developed a whole series of functions paralleling already existing functions of the State Department and of the Defense Department as well. Today, it has its own political desks and military staffs; it has in effect its own foreign service; it has (or has had) its own combat forces. It even has its own air force…The contemporary CIA possesses many of the characteristics of a state within a state…The problem of doctrine for the CIA is the extent to which its various clandestine missions are compatible with a free and open society.

From these concerns, Schlesinger went on to warn Kennedy that the CIA had "forced policy" on the State Department, and that the agency had become a dangerous engine that would drive itself further astray. By letting the CIA operate on its own in situations like the failed invasion of Cuba, the government would find itself "the prisoners of our own agents" in a number of ways–including, and this will become significant as we go along, "The Cuban episode leaves the strong impression that CIA is not able to control its own low-level operatives."

There has been a strong current within the current mainstream media to hand-wave the contents of this latest release of JFK assassination related documents. Some of this reaction seems based on a feeling that there was no page from Allen Dulles' daily diary reading, "11/22/63: 9 a.m.Breakfast With Alsops; 1230: Shoot president in head."

However, as veteran reporter Jefferson Morley points out, every new revelation regarding the poisonous relationship between President Kennedy and the CIA must needs diminish the credibility of all CIA testimony from 1963 on. Morley calls the memo the "origin story" of the CIA's enmity of Kennedy. There's evidence of that to be found in the conclusions of Schlesinger's memo. He proposes that control of covert activities be given to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. It's not a thousand splinters in the wind but, to the high-riding CIA of the early 1960s, it was a death threat.

And, considering that, for example, CIA officials have been lying about the agency's interest in Lee Harvey Oswald ever since the deliberations of the Warren Commission, there isn't a whole lot of credibility left in that testimony to diminish. So it was no surprise that the memo was redacted to within a dipthong of its life, and that it was buried as deeply in the files as it was for so many years. In the past few years, we have discovered that the CIA had been watching Oswald for years. That they had been tracking his movements and reading his mail, and that legendary super-spook James Jesus Angleton had taken a particular interest in this "lonely loser" with the mysterious travel itineraries and oddball politics.

It is also clear from the new documents that the CIA lied repeatedly to investigators about what it knew about Oswald's connections with Miami's Cuban exile community. These same exiles were some of the first people to try and sell a connection between Oswald and Castro in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. One cannot help but recall the insight from Arthur Schlesinger's memo.

"The Cuban episode leaves the strong impression that CIA is not able to control its own low-level operatives."

Everybody into the pool.