by Peter Janney
“That was a dangerous relationship,” Bartlett recalled. “Jack was in love with Mary Meyer. He was certainly smitten by her, he was heavily smitten. He was very frank with me about it, that he thought she was absolutely great.” That there were moments when Jack couldn’t contain his affection didn’t go unnoticed, either. Recalling a number of excursions on the presidential yacht Sequoia and the Kennedy family boat Honey Fitz, Bartlett further added: “We had these boat parties and we could see it [Jack’s affection for Mary]. I even got a little mad with him on one of the boat parties, because it was more than obvious. He took it [his relationship with Mary] pretty seriously.”57
Charlie Bartlett’s observations further dovetailed with Kenny O’Donnell statements to Leo Damore. O’Donnell, who was as close to Jack as anyone could be on a daily basis during his presidency, knew firsthand Jack’s affection for Mary. “Kenny had always admired Jack as a cool champion, the man of political celebration,” Damore revealed in 1992. “He saw it start to collapse because of Mary. Jack was losing interest in politics. The fun for Jack was winning the job [being elected president].”58 Sometime in October 1963, said Damore, just a little more than a month before his death, “Jack confided to Kenny he was deeply in love with Mary, that after he left the White House he envisioned a future with her and would divorce Jackie.”59
Mary was in the White House residence on Monday evening, August 6, 1962, just thirty-six hours after the apparent suicide of famed Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Her sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” appearance three months earlier at a combined fund-raiser and birthday party for Jack in New York had already become an iconic Americana moment. Surely Mary knew that Jack had been involved with Marilyn. But had she known how the relationship had disintegrated, or how his brother Bobby had recently “taken his turn” with the world’s most famous sex goddess—who had been unwilling “to go away quietly”? That Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford were at Marilyn’s house the day she died was suspicious enough; that Bobby returned a second time that evening, according to two witnesses, immediately prior to her “suicide” was a bit more unsavory.60 The situation, according to people who knew Marilyn closely, had become critical. Should she have proceeded with her intention to publicly reveal the affairs, the Kennedy political machine might have been dealt a severe blow. The events immediately following her death created more questions than answers.61 Marilyn’s alleged crusade “to expose the Kennedys for what they are” has had enormous reverberations, including the close guarding of fifty-four crates of Robert Kennedy’s records at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum that are so confidential even the library’s director is prohibited from knowing what’s in them.62 Such have been the extensive efforts of the Kennedy image machine to keep the full disclosure of truth from the American people.
Toward the end of 1962, inside the White House Mary Meyer had become “almost part of the furniture,” in the words of White House counsel Myer Feldman, according to author Nina Burleigh. “Unlike with some of the other women—and men—in the White House, the president did not ask her to leave the room when he discussed business,” wrote Burleigh. “So frequent was her proximity to the president, and so obvious Kennedy’s admiration for her, that Feldman felt Mary might make a good conduit to the president’s ear if and when Kennedy was unavailable to discuss matters of state with him.”63 Mary’s emerging presence in the White House was more than just what was documented in the entry logs.
“I’d walk in and out of the office all the time,” Feldman told Burleigh, “and I would see her in the Oval Office or over in the residence. Around eight-thirty, when the day was over, often I’d walk over to the residence and she’d be sitting there. There wasn’t any attempt to hide her the way there was with some of the other women.”64
In addition, Mary’s evolving position within the Kennedy White House senior staff was never second tier. Mention of her name could even be considered advantageous for employment, in the opinion of Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In a two-page December 1962 memo in support of fellow historian Trumbull Higgins’s proposal to write the official White House account of the Bay of Pigs debacle, Schlesinger stated, “I know Higgins slightly. He is an old friend of Mary Meyer’s, who knows him better.”65 Higgins eventually published a book on the Bay of Pigs fiasco entitled The Perfect Failure (1987), in which he concluded that President Kennedy had inherited a catastrophe in the making that had been prepared by the CIA under Kennedy’s predecessor President Eisenhower.
Allen Dulles was finally granted his wish by President Dwight Eisenhower to be director of the CIA (DCI) in 1953. But Eisenhower, even before leaving office, had regretted the Dulles appointment. With the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Eisenhower finally realized the Agency was dangerously out of control. He was advised to get rid of Dulles, but didn’t. It proved to be a huge mistake. Several year later, right before Eisenhower’s May 16, 1960, peace summit with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the CIA engineered the May 1 downing of its own U-2 reconnaissance spy flight over Russian territory as a way to undermine any possibility of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had planned to orchestrate a Soviet détente before he left office, so that he could cut the defense budget and redirect resources toward America’s domestic needs. That dream was quickly vanquished as tensions between the two emerging superpowers resumed unabated. Through fear-mongering, the CIA had achieved its goal, urging upon Congress the strategic necessity for further increases in its budget. As he left office, President Eisenhower would finally explode at Dulles. “The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty,” he told the director. “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this. Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor. I leave a ‘legacy of ashes’ to my successor.” By 1964, the Agency’s clandestine service and operations would consume nearly two-thirds of its entire (classified) budget and, according to author Tim Weiner, 90 percent of the director’s time.66
In his farewell speech, President Eisenhower warned the public to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,” by what he called “the military-industrial complex.” Warning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” Eisenhower pointed to “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” as the antidote. But the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower spoke had a third, unnamed component: intelligence.
Established in 1947, the CIA was, from its inception, virtually unaccountable to any authority. It was subject to little, if any, congressional oversight, a fact that would increasingly haunt both President Harry Truman and his successor, President Eisenhower. As a career military general, Eisenhower was skeptical about the role of civilians in clandestine paramilitary operations. In addition, he was troubled by the fact that the Agency had a carte blanche “get out of jail free card” for anything it attempted. President Truman’s 1948 National Security Council (NSC) had so imbued the Agency with unchecked, absolute power, it threatened the entire foundation of America’s constitutional premise.
That year the NSC approved what became known as “Top Secret Directive NSC 10/2,” a virtual bottomless pit of nefarious, illegal quicksand. The directive defined covert operations as actions conducted by the United States against foreign states “which are so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” Creating what came to be known as “plausible deniability,” the directive sanctioned and authorized U.S. intelligence, principally the CIA, to carry out a broad range of clandestine activities and paramilitary operations that included preventive direct action, propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, demolition, subversion against “hostile states,” assassinations, and “support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” Years later, George Kennan, the directive’s or
iginal sponsor and architect, bluntly told Yale historian John Lukacs: “That was the greatest mistake I ever made in my life, because you know what the Central Intelligence Agency has devolved or evolved into.”67 In the mid-1970s, Kennan again reiterated before a U.S. Senate committee that it was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”68
During the 1950s, in the interests of promoting American economic growth and hegemony, the emerging Dulles calling card was an uncanny expertise in overthrowing foreign governments, many of them democratically elected. Eisenhower’s predecessor, President Harry Truman, had had his own confrontations with covert operations run by the Dulles cadre. Iran, in 1951, had decided to nationalize its oil industry, which before had been controlled exclusively by Britain. Winston Churchill had implored Truman before he left office in 1952 to order the CIA to join with British forces in MI6 and arrange for a coup against the newly democratically elected Mosaddeq government in Iran. Truman, without equivocation, said no. A year later, Eisenhower, seduced by Dulles, caved in. In August 1953, Operation Ajax overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq and installed the Shah, leaving the Iranian people to suffer unimaginable horrors under the reign of SAVAK, the shah’s heinous praetorian guard, trained in surveillance, interrogation, and torture by the CIA.69
A year after the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the CIA (again under Dulles’s tutelage) would take down the government in Guatemala. President Arbenz, who had been democratically elected by his country in 1950 with 65 percent of the vote, was deemed “leftist” by the mainstream American media—no doubt reflecting the influence of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird in the press—and vulnerable to the approach of a “Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere.” The Arbenz government’s “mortal sin” was land reform in its own country; it wanted to put a stop to private corporations like the United Fruit Company taking land away from the Guatemalan peasant population. Although few knew it then, both Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, owned sizable stock in United Fruit, with Allen Dulles himself serving as a member of the company’s board of trustees. The company lobbied hard for Washington to remove the Arbenz government, and in 1954, the CIA did so.70 Under Dulles-CIA auspices, similar coups would occur in Hungary, North Vietnam, and Laos before the 1960 election.
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.”71 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!”72
“We were at war with the national security people,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would quietly confide to a friend many years later.73 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.”74That 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.75 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.”76 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 figureh
ead, 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.77 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.”78