The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  When WW II broke out, he joined the infantry as a Captain in the reserves. He served as a staff officer in the China-Burma-India theater. At the end of the war he was a colonel. He won both the Legion of Merit and the Oak Leaf Cluster military awards.

  Rusk began his State Department career in 1946 as assistant chief of the Division of International Security Affairs. He was Deputy Under-Secretary of State in 1949. He then served in a number of positions which led to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950. As head of Far Eastern Affairs, he played a major role in the U.S. decision to enter the Korean Conflict in 1950. Rusk was known as a cautious diplomat and always sought international support.

  Upon returning to the U.S. in 1945, Rusk went to work for the War Department, soon to be merged into the Department of Defense. His job was with United Nations Affairs. It was Rusk’s idea to split the Korea’s along the 38th parallel. He began his career with the State Department in 1946 as assistant chief of the Division of International Security Affairs.Next he became Deputy Undersecretary of State in 1949, and was put in charge of Far Eastern Affairs in 1950.

  From 1950 to 1961, Rusk was President of the Rockefeller Foundation.

  On December 12, 1960, Rusk was selected by the newly elected John F. Kennedy as his Secretary of State.

  Rusk was sworn in on January 21st, 1961. Rusk was an advocate of the use of military force in the battle against Communism. In an example of this philosophy, Rusk remained totally non-committal in the debate which preceded the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. An expert named Sheldon Stern has reviewed the tape recordings of the deliberations at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the meetings of EXCOMM committee of the National Security Council. Stern claims that it was the contributions of Rusk to the discussion that averted nuclear war. This would be a viewpoint not supported elsewhere in the reporting of the Cuban Missile Crisis debates and probably exaggerates the role of Rusk. The credit for avoiding nuclear war at that point is generally given to JFK himself and no one else. Rusk was, as mentioned in the previous paragraphs, generally a military hawk – as was demonstrated over and over again in the Vietnam War.

  After the assassination and well into the period of the Johnson Administration, Rusk became a target of anti-war protests, all because of his never-ending support for the Vietnam war. Rusk met with diplomat Llewellyn Thompson and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko during the important 1967 Glassboro Summit Conference.

  In his autobiography entitled As I Saw It, Rusk admitted that he did not have a good relationship with President Kennedy. That is a considerable understatement considering that he was perhaps one of the perpetrators of the President’s assassination. The role of Rusk in the assassination might be suggested due to two factors: 1) his powerful connection to the Rockefeller clique which would at least have made him aware in advance of the assassination and 2) by the dark portrayal of Rusk by Otepka biographer William J. Gill. As we shall see, Gill almost certainly had some inside informantion about the assassination after the fact. Kennedy was generally unsatisfied with the State Department as an institution. Some historians view Kennedy’s attitude as a desire to be his own Secretary of State. This is an incredibly simplistic, even a nonsensical analysis. Author Theodore Sorensen has claimed that Kennedy disliked the tendency of Rusk to be non-committal in meetings. More likely, Kennedy’s dissatisfaction with Rusk, if it did exist, was that the fact the Rusk lacked loyalty to the United States, pure and simple. For reasons that we will next analyze, Rusk was more worried about following the philosophies of the British, the Rockefeller family and other special interests. Kennedy, being a very astute person, would have figured that out.

  There were rumors of JFK’s possible dismissal of Rusk prior to his assassination, but Rusk might have hypothetically helped solve that problem for himself by assisting in Kennedy’s murder.

  Rusk offered his resignation to the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, but that would have been perfunctory. Considering the circumstances and confusion after the assassination, the next President would likely not have been eager to cross Rusk or others who may have been among the plotters. When Johnson died in 1973, Rusk praised the former president.

  During the Johnson Administration, Rusk was caught in the middle of President Charles de Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO and Johnson’s resulting anger. Johnson asked Rusk to communicate his resentment against de Gaulle over the situation.

  As previously mentioned, Rusk went on to be a major hawk in the divisive struggle to support the Vietnam War against growing disapproval and rancorous public protests.

  After he left the State Department, Rusk became a professor of international law at the University of Georgia beginning in 1970 and held that position until his retirement in 1984.

  Rusk died of heart failure at the age of 85 on December 20, 1994. A building at the University of Georgia was named Dean Rusk Hall in his honor.

  Robert S.

  McNamara

  When discussing Robert S. McNamara and the National Security Council, it must be stated at the outset that McNamara was the one member of the NSC who was probably not involved in the assassination and who, if he knew about it (which he probably did not) would not have participated or approved based on his background, his record and his personality.

  This conclusion is based on two facts. First, during the first week of tape recorded LBJ phone calls, LBJ rudely hung up the phone on McNamara when the latter tried to call him. He treated the call as if it were a wrong number. This response from LBJ was unique. Out of 120 phone calls, only McNamara got this rude treatment by LBJ. Hanging up would not be a way for LBJ to express his thanks for becoming the President if LBJ thought McNamara had a part in the plot.

  Second, McNamara, like Kennedy, was a secular Catholic. He grew up in California, a secular melting-pot and not a state with ethnic ghettos of Italians, Poles and Irishmen like Massachusetts and the states of the Northeast. He attended the University of California, while virtually the entire inner circle of the JFK administration and indeed, Washington D.C. itself, was part of the Yale-Harvard and Rockefeller-type Northeastern clique.

  McNamara never attended any Catholic schools to the knowledge of this author. When JFK was pitted against extreme Catholic activism in the person of Senator Thomas J. Dodd, former Congressman Charles Kersten, Judge Robert Morris and others, McNamara would have most likely allied himself with the liberal JFK. Of course, the Vietnam War was a huge issue when it came to the Catholic Church and the Diem brothers. Every Catholic, staunch or otherwise, would have to have held an opinion on that issue.

  Robert Strange McNamara was an American professor, business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. McNamara remains the Defense Secretary with the longest service in U.S. history.

  McNamara was born in San Francisco, California on June 19, 1916. His father was a shoe wholesaler and his mother was Clara “Nell” Strange McNamara. His family was of Irish descent, coming to Massachusetts in 1850 and then went west to California. As previously mentioned, although a Catholic, McNamara apparently did not attend Catholic schools, though this is not completely clear in the historical record. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and graduated in 1937 with a degree in Economics. He then attended Harvard Business School and earned an MBA in 1939.

  McNamara married Margaret Craig, his high-school sweetheart on August 13th, 1940. After one year at the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse, he went back to Harvard as a professor of accounting. In 1943, he entered the USAF as a captain and served in World War II in the Office of Statistical Control. His main responsibility was the analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of the B-29 bomber, especially in the raids carried out by controversial Air Force General Curtis LeMay over Japan. When he left the service in 1946, he had earned the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

  In 1946 Charles “Tex” Thornton, a colonel
under whom McNamara had served, started a management group. Thornton would later be a business contact of George de Mohrenschildt, when Thornton was head of a Dallas Bank. Thornton had seen Ford Motors as a company in need of serious reform. Henry Ford II (a WWII Navy veteran) hired Thornton’s group which became know as the “Whiz Kids.”

  McNamara pushed for the design of the Ford Falcon, a very small car for its day, which was introduced in the Autumn of 1959. On November 9, 1960 McNamara became the first president of Ford Motor Company who was not a Ford family member. He was only in that job for a month.In 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy offered McNamara the job of Secretary of Defense, which after much discussion, he accepted.

  According to Ted Sorensen, a Kennedy advisor, JFK regarded McNamara as the star of his team. He relied on McNamara not just for military advice, but in economics as well. McNamara was one of the few who socialized with Kennedy. At the funeral of Robert Kennedy in 1968, McNamara was one of the pallbearers. McNamara used his statistical and accounting knowledge to analyze logistical and related issues in Vietnam such as the effectiveness of defoliants and the success of bombing there.

  Beginning in 1961, Kennedy along with McNamara decided to switch the overall military strategy of the U.S. from the “massive retaliation” favored by Eisenhower to the “flexible response” which relied much more on conventional forces. To the European allies, this new strategy could mean the sacrifice of Western Europe to the Soviets, who had overwhelming superiority in conventional forces. On the issue of “flexible response” alone, McNamara would not have been a friend of the JFK plotters with their anti-Communist fervor and West German connections.

  Kennedy wanted a greater ability to counter Communist led “wars of liberation.” In reality, this strategy implied a type of “Vietnamization,” whereby local forces would be enlisted to fight their own battles.

  In the midst of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara served as a member of EXCOMM, a committee at large of the National Security Council along with related individuals. McNamara was a strong proponent of the strategy of blockade which eventually prevailed.

  McNamara increased the size of conventional forces and increased air and sea-lift capability. He provided more funds for space research and development. Importantly to the topic of the assassination, he combined the intelligence functions of the service branches into one Defense Intelligence Agency. This new agency was therefore under the control of the Defense Department and the Secretary of Defense.

  If each service had exclusive control of their intelligence agencies, it only stands to reason that it would be impossible to get all four agencies to agree on an issue like a Presidential assassination. When the Defense Department itself was created, little thought was given to the evil side of basic human nature. The priority was placed only upon financial efficiency. This got both Kennedy and McNamara in trouble in the short term, although as we shall see, according to author H.H. Nieburg, McNamara’s efficiency theories reaped great benefits in the longer term.

  None of McNamara’s procurement policies were popular with the military and their allies in Congress. Some critics such as Col. L. Fletcher Prouty have claimed that his policies were an attempt to put military pork-barrel dollars under the control of the White House rather than Congress.

  McNamara directed the Air Force to adopt the Navy’s F-4 Phantom and A-7 Corsair combat aircraft, a consolidation that was quite successful. Conversely, his actions in mandating a premature across-the-board adoption of the untested M16 rifle proved catastrophic when the weapons began to fail in combat. McNamara tried to extend his success by merging development programs as well, resulting in the TFX dual service F-111 project. This was the fighter called the General Dynamics F-111B. It was intended to combine Navy requirements for a Fleet Air Defense (FAD) aircraft and Air Force requirements for a tactical bomber. His experience in the corporate world led him to believe that adopting a single type for different missions and service would save money. He insisted on the General Dynamics entry over the DOD’s preference for Boeing because of commonality issues. Though heralded as a fighter that could do everything (fast supersonic dash, slow carrier and short airfield landings, tactical strike, and even close air support), in the end it involved too many compromises to succeed at any of them. The Navy version was drastically overweight and difficult to land, and eventually canceled after a Grumman study showed it was incapable of matching the abilities of the newly revealed Soviet MiG-23 and MiG-25 aircraft. The F-111 would eventually find its niche as a tactical bomber and electronic warfare aircraft with the Air Force.

  McNamara’s tendency to take military advice less into account than had previous secretaries and to override military opinions contributed to his unpopularity with service leaders. It was also generally thought that one of his favorite ideas, “Systems Analysis,” rather than being objective, was tailored by civilians like himself to support decisions they had already made for other reasons. In practice, the data produced by the analysis was so large and so complex that (while it was available to all interested parties), none of them could challenge their conclusions.

  Among the management tools developed to implement PPBS were the Five Year Defense Plan (FYDP), the Draft Presidential Memorandum (DPM), the Readiness, Information and Control Tables, and the Development Concept Paper (DCP). In a book called In The Name of Science, H.L. Nieberg wrote that these methods allowed McNamara to tame the military-industrial complex.

  McNamara traveled around Vietnam many times to study the situation directly and he was always more reluctant to approve force increases than were the military commanders.

  McNamara believed that the “Domino Theory” was the prime cause for entering the Vietnam War. In an interview he announced, “prior to his death, President Kennedy did not speak of a withdrawal from Vietnam, but McNamara believed JFK would have withdrawn had he lived.” This, of course was untrue or inaccurate because Kennedy had, in fact, signed an order of withdrawal just a week before the assassination.

  McNamara often noted his close personal friendship with Jackie Kennedy, and claimed she asked for a stop to the killing in Vietnam.

  As the controversy over the Vietnam War continued to heat up in the mid and late 1960’s, McNamara became an ever more controversial figure. Rumors circulated that he would leave office. In early 1967, McNamara wrote a memo for LBJ suggesting that the fighting be turned over to the Vietnamese, which Johnson rejected. In November 1967, Johnson announced that McNamara would leave the Pentagon to become President of the World Bank.

  McNamara left office on February 29, 1968. The President awarded him the Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Medal.

  Robert McNamara served the World Bank from April 1968 as head to June 1981, when he retired at age 65.

  In later years, McNamara acknowledged that the firebombing of Tokyo by General LeMay would have been rightfully regarded as a war crime had the United States not won the war.

  McNamara kept up his participation in politics in later years and made statements critical of the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration. McNamara and the other living Secretaries of Defense met with President Bush at the White House briefly to discuss the war.

  McNamara died in his sleep, at his house in Washington, D. C. in 2009 at the age of 93. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Suffice it to be said that as of 1958, the Vice-President was a statutory member of the National Security Council. His biographical information and the manner in which JFK placed him in power is too well known to merit special treatment in the discussion of the National Security Council. There are no issues in the analysis of the role of the NSC in the assassination which point in any way to LBJ in particular.

  What can be stated regarding LBJ is 1) he was very active in the space race and the committees in Congress which had oversight in that area and 2) his statutory membership on the NSC does not automatically implicate him in an NSC
plot against JFK. We must remember that JFK himself was a statutory member of the NSC. What good did that do him? Another key thing to remember is that during the heyday of HUAC, SISS and the McCarthy Committee, LBJ showed no interest at all in being part of rogue investigative committees. LBJ did all his work out in the open and on the table for everybody to see. Also, as Vice-President, LBJ had no army of staff to carry out any part of the assassination as did McGeorge Bundy, C. Douglas Dillon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Congressional Committees. JFK plotter Thomas J. Dodd claimed to be “an LBJ man” but there is no evidence that LBJ and Dodd colluded on much of anything. LBJ undoubtedly knew about the plot in advance as did his friend J. Edgar Hoover. But since others were going to pull off the murder, he had no reason to implicate himself. What if JFK had lived? Why put your neck in the noose if you were LBJ? There could always be a Jim Garrison or many Jim Garrison’s. Why take the risk?

  C. Douglas Dillon

  As Treasury Secretary, C. Douglas Dillon was not a statutory member of the National Security Council. But according to a consensus of the information about the Council, the Secretary of the Treasury was the one office whose occupant was most often included in Council meetings by invitation.

  Clarence Douglas Dillon who was born on August 21, 1909. He was an American diplomat and politician who served as U.S. Ambassador to France (1953-1957) and as the 57th Secretary of the Treasury (1961-1965). He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the Cuban Missile Crisis.