Despite the unquestioned skill with which Stone presented his version of history, the film was harshly criticized by many reviewers. Typical of the more trenchant criticism is that of George Will in the Los Angeles Times of December 24, 1991. He describes Stone as “an intellectual sociopath, indifferent to truth” and a man who combined “moral arrogance with historical ignorance.” Will considers the film “execrable history and contemptible citizenship.”*
Garrison’s case was based on his imagination, rumors plucked from thin air and supported by the antic testimony of some witnesses who were at best no more stable than Garrison himself. Somewhere along his path, Garrison realized that no matter how implausible an allegation might be, the fact that it had been made meant that every time the lies were refuted, the charges were perforce repeated. The bigger the lie, the more often it is challenged by responsible persons. Rather than arguing, the demagogue ignores the points made by his opponents and attacks the motives of his critics. Joseph Goebbels knew this and so did Senator Joseph McCarthy.
After floating the initial charges of CIA’s alleged activity and directing the communist media—and urging opportunistic journalists and sympathetic intellectuals—to keep things on the boil, the KGB could rest on its laurels. Garrison’s scheming had taken on a life of its own. At this writing, the phony history is still alive and well, and will presumably live on indefinitely in the minds and books of careless “historians.”
This Soviet operation, and I would be delighted to learn the KGB code name for it, is a textbook example of how, with a minimum of effort, the KGB covert action specialists were able to exploit a corrupt minor official and one of democracy’s most precious components, a free press.†
*Counterplot (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 22.
*Ibid.
†(New York: M. Evans, 1998).
‡(New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988).
§Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 219–20.
*Quoted from False Witness, p. xvii.
†Max Holland’s “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall/Winter 2001, unclassified edition (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001), is a documented analysis of the Paese Sera and Garrison cases.
Chapter 30
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SIX DAYS
Lyndon Johnson had no significant dealings with the Agency while serving as senator and later as vice president. Nor, to my knowledge, had he ever expressed any particular interest in CIA activity. This might have been expected to change overnight on November 22, 1963, when he succeeded President Kennedy. Far from it. Aside from giving me the impression that he did not share the Kennedys’ obsession with Castro, LBJ’s relations with the Agency were slowly to develop into a reasonable—despite a few sparks—and productive routine.
The first bump in the road came abruptly, and apparently out of the blue, when President Johnson accused me of being entirely too close to Joseph Alsop and leaking information to him. Joe was then a syndicated columnist at the Washington Post, and one of the most senior and best-known Washington press pundits. Washington deserves its reputation as a company town composed largely of the government, businesses feeding off the government, and journalists reporting on both. Chances are that anyone with a background in newspaper work who has been around the city as long as I have will have a speaking acquaintance with a dozen or so print and TV journalists on the national beat. I made it a practice to have lunch occasionally with various newsmen for no reason other than to show that I was in touch with the world beyond what some observers considered to be the totally closed bastion of the Central Intelligence Agency. I never encouraged it, but left it to the more surefooted station chiefs working abroad to do as much. There is a fine line between an innocent relationship and the public impression of attempting to influence the American press.
President Johnson lapsed deeply into the vernacular in characterizing Alsop and, before allowing me to say anything, ordered me to stay clear of him. I had known Joe for some time, though we could scarcely be described as being close. Johnson’s assumption of my misprision caught me by surprise and I retorted vigorously. LBJ loosed another salvo, and I fired back. After a moment or two of silence, the President turned to another subject and business went on.
The lunches I recall having with Alsop consisted almost entirely of his discussing events in Vietnam. Joe, a hawk, was convinced that the United States would win that war. He was also so wrapped up in his own views that it was almost impossible to wedge a word into the flood of his discourse. Because I considered myself relatively well informed on Vietnam, I once tried to deflect Joe’s lecture with a question about the book I had heard he was writing—a scholarly treatise on art.* This would have worked with most of the authors I’ve known, but after Joe’s single sentence response—“I’m well into it”—we were back in Hanoi.
The fact that LBJ could scarcely have asked for any more well-informed or high-level journalistic support for his policy in Vietnam than that offered by Alsop may not have been enough to balance LBJ’s knowing that Joe was one of the most prominent members of the “Georgetown set.” In the eyes of those who did not consider themselves qualified for membership, the Georgetown set were, top to bottom, presumed to be liberal, snooty, well-to-do, and contemptuous of the mere mortals and their spouses who came and went with the change of administrations in Washington. LBJ was more rational on this subject than Richard Nixon, the prototype of an outsider’s outsider.
Some days after this episode, we crossed swords again. LBJ jumped me on a different topic, again totally by surprise. After another sharp exchange of views and a standoff, we returned to business.
Later, I decided that although the President was indeed probing for information he thought would be sensitive to me, he might have been equally interested in testing my reaction to such sharp criticism. Whatever his reason, these were the only two such encounters in our long relationship.
Lyndon Johnson stepped into the White House determined to realize a legislative program as ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. From the beginning, the Great Society was the issue closest to Johnson’s heart. He realized that the inherited Southeast Asia dilemma was a spear in his side, but in the early days of his administration LBJ showed little interest in any intelligence that did not point toward victory in Vietnam. Johnson’s relationship with John McCone was correct, but as hard as McCone tried, he was never accepted into Johnson’s intimate circle of advisors, and his views on policy were rarely if ever solicited. My guess is that the President never forgot that McCone was a conservative Republican. By April 1965, his patience exhausted, McCone resigned.
I got another glimpse of McCone’s relationship with LBJ when Colonel Lawrence K. White, CIA executive director and comptroller, and one of the Agency’s most respected senior officers, briefed me on Vice Admiral Raborn’s account of his first session with Johnson. The President’s final remark was an exasperated “And I’m sick and tired of John McCone’s tugging at my shirttails. If I want to see you, Raborn, I’ll telephone you!” This was insight enough into LBJ’s initial lack of interest in the CIA product, and his reaction to McCone as a policy advisor.
In office, Admiral Raborn fared little better. The admiral did his absolute best, but he was neither born nor trained to be a director of Central Intelligence. It was as easy as it was unfair to make fun of him, but it was impossible for me to dampen it down within the Agency.
It was soon after my appointment that President Johnson first invited me to lunch. Early in his administration, LBJ instigated what became known as the “Tuesday lunch,” a weekly gathering of his closest advisors—Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara (later Clark Clifford); General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Walt Rostow, national security advisor; and George Christian, White House press secretary. Tom Johnson, deputy pres
s secretary, took notes. Occasionally the Vice President or a senior general officer back from Vietnam would attend. Sometimes the Tuesday luncheons were on Wednesday; occasionally at breakfast on Thursday.
These luncheons were the hottest ticket in town. The Washington insiders who considered political scuttlebutt to be the coin of the realm recognized the Tuesday meetings as the ultimate in hard currency, and rightly so. As far as I know there was never a leak from any of these gatherings.
Because the sessions were unofficial, and the invitations for each meeting came directly from the White House, President Johnson was able to control attendance. At the National Security or cabinet conclaves, the President had almost no control of attendance. Any of the principal officers might bring along an assistant, or even a note-taker. The risk of self-serving leaks expanded exponentially with the number of persons present. On Tuesday, LBJ wanted a candid, uninhibited exchange of ideas, with no chance whatsoever of press leaks, and that’s exactly what he got.
President Johnson never mentioned the reason for including me as a member of the group, but it seemed obvious that the intelligence and the estimates the Agency was providing had impressed him. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last long after LBJ’s retirement.
—
Russell Jack Smith, former director for intelligence, has described my working relationship with President Johnson as “golden”—in the sense that it was close to the maximum that any DCI might hope to achieve.* However comforting, this assessment is too generous. It was not my relationship with LBJ that mattered, it was his perception of the value of the data and the assessments the Agency was providing him that carried the day. One thing is sure: once our relationship developed, I could not have asked for a more considerate chief and taskmaster than President Johnson.
For some time I had been cogitating about leaving my marriage to Julia. I knew that we had been growing apart and that it was probably my fault. The more I thought about divorce, the more complicated the problems seemed to be. Aside from the personal aspects, there loomed the question of the White House reaction to a presidential appointee being divorced while holding a job with far-ranging national security responsibilities. I realized that I would have to discuss the divorce with President Johnson. Obviously, this could only be done privately and without any of the omnipresent staffers taking notes. I knew from experience that personal secrets can be kept in the White House only if the President knows and wants it that way. The Style section of the Washington Post is a billboard for such insights.
After one of the Tuesday lunches in April 1967, I sidled close enough to LBJ to ask for a private meeting to discuss a sensitive personal matter. Without missing a beat, the President said, “See me as soon as I come into the office before my nap any afternoon.” Fine, I thought, but how do I position myself close enough to any of LBJ’s offices to know when the coast is clear? There is no spot in the United States where one is more certain to attract the attention of human watchdogs than loitering within sight of the President’s offices.
It was luck that a few minutes after the next Tuesday gathering I managed to see the President entering the Oval Office unaccompanied. By the time I slipped through the door, LBJ was already in the Kennedy rocker, motioning me to a chair. “Mr. President,” I said, “I am considering getting a divorce, and I want to ask you whether or not this would cause any political complication for you.”
LBJ focused his attention full on my face and replied, “No, Dick, it will not be a problem for me.” After expressing sympathy about the breakup, he added that although he appreciated my informing him, it had not been necessary. “You may be interested to know that not so long ago, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker asked if his planned marriage to Ambassador Carol Laise would cause me any problem. I admitted that although it might be a first in the history of American diplomacy, it wouldn’t cause me any problem.”
—
As directors of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Admiral Raborn were assigned individual security officers to live in their respective homes and remain on duty overnight. The prospect of a live-in security man in an apartment was obviously out of the question. I was fortunate to find temporary living quarters at the Bradley House, the men-only residential component of the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland. This was a blessing: not only was it financially within reach, but I could eat there, and come and go at all hours without attracting attention.
Each of my three predecessors also had an armed security man riding beside the driver of his Agency limousine. When it became my turn, I decided that the sight of a security guard obviously riding shotgun beside a chauffeur was more likely to suggest that a ranking official had come within range than to provide any additional safety. The Agency security office was well enough plugged in to the local police, the Secret Service, and the FBI to provide adequate safety without the additional guard. Today, security problems are vastly more complex. The differences between trained and motivated terrorists and a deranged individual are profound.
For the six and a half years I served as DCI, Ernest McCoy, my driver, and I traveled by ourselves, and without a “follow” vehicle. “McCoy,” as he was universally known, possessed a level of discretion that would have become some of the more senior White House regulars. The only question I recall him ever posing concerned food. “Mr. Director, may I ask what you gentlemen get to eat at the White House?”
“If it is at lunchtime,” I explained, “we eat in the family dining room, on the second floor. Lunch is prepared in the family kitchen, and we usually have a table d’hôte meal—a cup of soup and a light serving of fish or fowl. Dessert is optional, and all the food is tailored to LBJ’s heart condition.” McCoy nodded approvingly.
—
It is sometimes forgotten that the President of the United States is the DCI’s only boss and principal constituent. No matter that the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, the chiefs of the other members of the U.S. intelligence community, and a number of senators and representatives have claim on the DCI’s services—it is the President who makes the appointment, approves the budget, and judges the DCI’s performance. Every president is different, and during my tenure each shaped his administration’s relationship with the Agency to his own needs and methods of work.
President Johnson was an omnivorous and demanding reader, but was impatient in the extreme if any oral briefing lasted more than a few minutes. If this limit was exceeded at a National Security Council meeting, LBJ would turn to chat with the secretary of state or defense, phone for coffee, or summon up a soft drink. I learned to say what I thought most important in the first minute or two of any briefing. Unless the President clearly showed interest, I would subside after delivering a few sentences fashioned like the lead in a newspaper report—who, what, when, where, why, and how.
In the past fifty-five years, no American president has suffered from a want of opinions, advice, facts, and factoids—solicited or otherwise—from sources ranging from the White House barber to the most sensitive intelligence reports. The wonder is that the White House has not collapsed under the weight of it all.
—
In early 1967 our reports showed that a crisis was building in the Near East, and that a military confrontation between Israel and Arab forces was a probability. Drexel Godfrey, then head of the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), established a task force headed by Waldo Duberstein, a Near East expert, to monitor and report on the military developments in Arab countries on a daily basis. With this at hand, we were able to focus every appropriate resource on the developing crisis.
I had returned from a “Tuesday” breakfast at the White House in early May for my regular daily staff meeting. Jack Smith, then deputy director for intelligence (DDI), brought the meeting to attention with his opening remark that the Duberstein group had in the last twenty-four hours determined that war between the Arab and Israeli forces was imminent, and that Israel was likely to
win it in from ten to fourteen days. For a moment, intelligence from the rest of the world slipped down on the roster of events demanding immediate attention.
At the breakfast, President Johnson had discussed the pressure he was under from Israel and the pro-Israel members of the U.S. government to radically reinforce our military and other aid to Israel. Arthur Goldberg, the ambassador to the United Nations in New York, was a strong and persistent advocate for additional military aid. To reinforce their plea for aid and more military support, Israeli representatives had circulated an intelligence estimate to various American officials and private persons casting considerable doubt on the ability of Israel’s armed forces to defend themselves against the allegedly superior Arab forces. Because the Israeli data were so far at odds with our assessment, it seemed probable that the glum Israeli projection was meant to influence foreign opinion, and that more balanced evaluations of the situation were restricted to Israeli government officials.
CIA had earlier predicted that the Israelis could defeat any combination of Arab forces in relatively short order. The time likely to be required for such a victory remained contentious. The answer would depend upon who struck first and under what circumstances.
I asked Jack Smith and the Duberstein group to update their data and recheck the earlier estimate. In a few hours we had prepared a brief report outlining the present situation, refuting the Israeli claim to being outgunned and predicting Israeli victory within ten to fourteen days. Copies were rushed to the White House—President Johnson was in Canada for the opening of the U.S. exhibition at Expo ’67—to Dean Rusk, and to Bob McNamara and General Wheeler at the Pentagon. From Canada, LBJ telephoned instructions for us to meet at the White House immediately upon his hasty return.
While we waited for the President, Dean Rusk, with a slightly sardonic expression, asked if I agreed with the report’s conclusion of an Israeli victory in from ten to fourteen days. I said that I did. Dean then uttered his often-quoted remark: “All I can say is to remind you of the immortal words of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—‘If this is a mistake, it’s a beaut!’ ”
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 36