The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  He was wrong. Harriman arrived in Moscow in July and discovered that Khrushchev was willing to sign a partial agreement banning nuclear explosions underground, in the sea, or in outerspace. Within two weeks, Harriman had the initialed treaty in his pocket and was on his way home. It was a diplomatic coup that greatly pleased the president, and one that by all rights could have belonged to McCloy. He always thought, with good reason, that he had laid the foundation for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty during his negotiations with the Soviets in the previous two years.

  Ironically, instead of negotiating with Khrushchev that summer, McCloy found himself once again across the table from Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Rusk had learned that McCloy intended to take his daughter, Ellen, and one of her college classmates on an Aegean cruise, he persuaded him to take a detour into Cairo and Tel Aviv.110 So again McCloy tried to cajole Nasser into abandoning his missile program, this time with the promise that he would ask the same thing of the Israelis. Nasser seemed a little more receptive now, but when McCloy saw Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, he found them unimpressed with the whole idea. Once more he returned empty-handed from the Middle East.

  In his absence, The New York Times had announced that President Kennedy had named him and some thirty other individuals as recipients of the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Freedom Medal. Describing him as a “diplomat and public servant, banker to the world, and Godfather to German freedom,” Kennedy said, “He has brought cheerful wisdom and steady effectiveness to the tasks of war and peace.” Other recipients of the Freedom Medal that year were such old friends as Felix Frankfurter, Alexander Meiklejohn, Robert Lovett, Jean Monnet, and Ralph Bunche. The Times reported that Kennedy would personally award the medals at a ceremony scheduled for December 6, 1963.111

  On the morning of November 22, 1963, McCloy had breakfast with Dwight Eisenhower, and shortly afterward heard the news from Dallas. The young president he had served in so many different ways was dead.

  Early the next morning, he cabled Lyndon Johnson that he was “stunned and shocked at the terrible loss to the nation. . . . If I can do anything to help, you know I am available.”112

  BOOK VI

  LBJ’s Wise Man

  CHAPTER 25

  The Warren Commission, a Brazil Coup, Egypt Again, and the 1964 Election

  “The Commission is going to be criticized . . . no matter what we do. . . .”

  JOHN J. MCCLOY, 1963

  On November 24, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot dead before a live television audience. A shocked and grieving nation instinctively suspected a conspiracy had taken the life of John Kennedy. As McCloy later told CBS’s Eric Sevareid, “Here the President was shot, and a couple of days later the fellow that shot him was killed. It was a strange sort of thing.”1 Lyndon Johnson knew that such suspicions could quickly diminish his authority. “I became President,” Johnson later told his chosen biographer. “But for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper.”2 It was soon learned that Oswald had been a self-proclaimed Marxist and had once defected to the Soviet Union. His killer, Jack Ruby, was the owner of a strippers’ bar in Dallas and boasted years of associations with mobsters in Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, and Miami. And all of this had taken place in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas, a hotbed of anti-Catholic, antiliberal, and anti-Kennedy passions. Not even the new president was exempt from suspicion.3

  Before Kennedy was even buried, both Senate and House committees announced their intention to investigate the assassination. On top of this, the FBI, the Dallas police, and the Texas attorney general were all beginning their own independent investigations. Johnson was well aware that such multiple investigations might only entrench the country’s skepticism by coming to different conclusions as to what happened on November 22, 1963. He felt he had quickly to persuade most Americans that whatever had happened in Dallas was finished. A single investigation, carried out swiftly by a blue-ribbon presidential commission, was most likely to dispel the country’s worries. Eugene Rostow, then a professor at Yale Law School, first suggested the idea to Johnson on the day Oswald was killed. Abe Fortas, Dean Rusk, and Joe Alsop gave him the same advice.4

  Johnson recalled that the last time a shocking event had so disrupted the nation’s collective psychic had been in the aftermath of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Many Americans had then suspected Franklin Roosevelt of having foreknowledge of the Japanese attack, a conspiratorial theory laid to rest by a presidential commission led by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. To Johnson’s mind, there could be no better choice to lead a similar investigation than the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. The chief justice, however, didn’t want the job. The president only persuaded him to serve when he insisted that it was a matter of war and peace. No one but the country’s highest judicial officer, Johnson said, could “dispel these rumors.” Otherwise, “if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev, there might be war.”5 And, to turn the screws a bit more, the president claimed that the other commissioners he had selected—John McCloy, Allen W. Dulles, Representative Gerald R. Ford, Representative Hale Boggs, Senator Richard B. Russell, and Senator John Sherman Cooper—had only agreed to serve if Warren chaired the Commission.6

  In fact, only after wheedling a reluctant promise from Warren to chair the Commission did Johnson approach McCloy. As a Republican who had served Kennedy, the Milbank, Tweed lawyer was an ideal choice.7 Johnson’s chief behind-the-scenes adviser, Abe Fortas, suggested McCloy’s name.8 Fortas had known McCloy ever since their occasional tiffs during World War II over the internment of the Japanese Americans. He was also aware of McCloy’s prewar detective work on the Black Tom case. In addition to everything else that McCloy symbolized—bipartisanship, a deep and long familiarity with the law, and a reputation for sound and sober judgment in serving four previous presidents—his Black Tom credentials made him peculiarly suited for the purpose at hand. Later, the famed trial lawyer Louis Nizer, in a preface for Doubleday’s 1964 unabridged version of the Commission’s final report, cited McCloy’s role during the 1930s in unmasking “German secret agents” as evidence that “if there was conspiratorial chicanery [in the Kennedy assassination], he could cast an experienced eye on the scene.”9

  Early in the Commission’s deliberations, in fact, McCloy demonstrated that he was the one man most inclined to look for the threads of a conspiracy. Allen Dulles opened one early Commission meeting by passing out copies of a ten-year-old book about seven previous attempts on the lives of various presidents. The author argued that presidential assassins typically are misfits and loners. Dulles told his colleagues, “. . . you’ll find a pattern running through here that I think we’ll find in this present case.” To this McCloy retorted, “The Lincoln assassination was a plot.”10 And when Chief Justice Warren announced at the first meeting that he didn’t think it would be necessary for the Commission to request subpoena powers, McCloy convinced his colleagues that without such investigative powers the Commission’s credibility would be “somewhat impaired.”11

  But if his Black Tom experience thirty years earlier prepared him temperamentally to ferret out any conspiracy, circumstances did not favor the exercising of these investigative instincts. There was neither the time nor the political will to conduct a thorough investigation. McCloy acknowledged these political pressures during the commissioners’ very first meeting, on December 5, 1963, when he muttered something about how the Commission had been “set up to lay the dust . . . not only in the United States but all over the world. It is amazing the number of telephone calls I have gotten from abroad.”12 He was disturbed by how many of his friends in Europe assumed that some kind of conspiracy was behind the assassination. He thought it was important to “show the world that America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy.”13 On the other hand, he, of all the commissioners, was best equipped to know that an investi
gation that really intended to establish the truth or nontruth of a larger conspiracy would require more than a few months. It had taken him nine years to prove the Black Tom conspiracy. It would be that much harder to prove the absence of a conspiracy. “The Commission,” he said in that first meeting, “is going to be criticized . . . no matter what we do. . . .”14

  Neither the country nor the president could wait nine years for an exhaustive investigation. Johnson wanted the Commission’s conclusions published before the November 1964 elections, and so a deadline was set for all drafts of the report to be completed by June 1. Despite this looming deadline, the Commission was slow to gear up. They met twice in a room in the National Archives during December 1963, but there was not another meeting until the third week of January. This delay worried an impatient McCloy. One evening, over dinner with John McCone, he told the CIA director that he feared with the passage of time “trails [of evidence] will be lost.” He thought the commissioners should be interviewing witnesses right away and asked McCone to see if he could get the president to exert a little pressure on Chief Justice Warren. The next day, McCone wrote a short note to Johnson recommending that he call the chief justice.15

  To be fair, Warren was already working hard to assemble a staff. Because each of the commissioners had a full-time job, the bulk of the actual investigative work would have to be done by a team of lawyers. But many of these lawyers came from prestigious firms and could give only part of their time to the Commission. The lawyers did not begin their actual investigations until March, leaving themselves with only three months to interview witnesses and write their reports. The commissioners themselves regarded their commitment to the investigation as a part-time responsibility. McCloy attended only sixteen out of the fifty-one formal sessions and heard fewer than half of the witnesses who testified.16

  He had a number of weighty business affairs on his mind when he began working on the assassination investigation. In their very first meeting, McCloy told Chief Justice Warren that he had “a terrific schedule, it’s just piled up at this time.”17 The next day, at noon, he went to the White House to receive his Freedom Medal from Johnson in the State Dining Room. Then he flew to London for a day, to give a major address attacking the rise of European nationalism and its Gaullist manifestations in particular for undermining the Atlantic alliance.

  Upon his return to New York, he began to prepare for a business trip to Brazil he had scheduled for later in the month. One of Milbank, Tweed’s corporate clients, the M. A. Hanna Mining Company, the largest producer of iron ore in the country, was facing some serious legal difficulties in Brazil. George Humphrey, Hanna’s chief executive officer, and a man McCloy knew as Eisenhower’s Treasury secretary, wanted him to see what he could do to protect Hanna’s Brazilian investments. Two years earlier, a left-of-center government led by President Joao Goulart had issued an expropriation decree against Hanna’s iron-ore concession. Humphrey had appealed the decree, but by the autumn of 1963 it looked as if the Brazilian federal courts would uphold the nationalization.18 In the late 1950s, Humphrey had paid no more than $8 million to acquire the mineral rights to one of the richest Brazilian concessions, and he was desperate to retain this concession.19

  In late September, he sent his right-hand man, Jack W. Buford, to Washington to explain how serious matters had become. Buford told the State Department that the whole conflict had now entered the “political arena.” Pointing to the “constant agitation and activity against Hanna on the part of the Communists and leftist elements in Brazil,” Buford said the “United States must now stand and be counted.” By referring to the “close past collaboration of Hanna with conservative and military groups in Brazil,” he hinted that the company was preparing to intervene directly in the country’s political contest.20

  Despite this blunt language, Humphrey and Buford feared that their appeal to Washington for some kind of intervention was not being heard. So, on the recommendation of a mutual friend, Leo Model, a Wall Street investment banker with close ties to Rothschild interests, Buford went to see McCloy. He immediately recognized that McCloy had “a little more ‘oomph’ than the usual lawyer.”21

  McCloy quickly set about educating himself on the situation by seeing all the appropriate officials at the State Department, the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA. As it happened, one of the men he had worked with in Germany after the war, Lincoln Gordon, was now the U.S. ambassador to Brazil. Gordon was back in Washington temporarily that week and gave McCloy his own highly pessimistic assessment of the situation.22 He told him things were so bad that contingency planning for a coup had begun as early as September 1963.23

  In preparation for the worst, McCloy set up a channel of communication between the CIA and Hanna’s man, Buford. Thereafter, whenever Buford returned from one of his frequent trips to Rio de Janeiro, he would drive out to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a debriefing. According to Buford, McCloy also arranged for him to meet periodically with the CIA station chief in Rio. “Through this fellow,” recalled Buford, “we had many, many meetings with the military people who were opposing Goulart behind the scenes.”24

  Goulart had forged a broad political alliance with the left. But he was far from being a communist. A large landowner, Goulart was described by Colonel Vernon Walters, the U.S. military attaché in Rio, as “basically a good man with a guilty conscience for being rich.”25 And as long as he was in power, McCloy thought it was worth the effort to try to strike a deal with him. In late November, he told Harriman that he thought Humphrey “should face the new trends” and invite the Brazilians to negotiate some kind of joint participation in Hanna’s mining concessions.26

  But as political tensions rose, Hanna became an obvious target for anti-American sentiment. In January, signs began to appear in city streets that read, “Out with Hanna. . . .”27 Passions were such that the Goulart government went to great lengths to ensure that McCloy’s arrival in Rio on February 28 received no publicity. The next day, he met with President Goulart.

  The Brazilian president was actually looking forward to meeting the famous American. He was so curious to learn what McCloy had to say about the Kennedy assassination that it was some time before Hanna’s troubles were discussed. But then McCloy pulled two proposals out of his suit pocket. Plan “A” guaranteed that, if Hanna was allowed to mine the Minas Gerais iron-ore fields, the company would make a $18-million investment in the construction of a modern ore-and-coal maritime terminal on the Brazilian coast. Alternatively, Plan “B” proposed that Hanna lease at a nominal cost 50 percent of its current iron-ore reserves to a new joint-venture company of which Hanna would have a minority share. In either case, Hanna retained control of the majority of its iron-ore reserves, while the government could advertise either deal as a major American concession. Goulart bought this pitch and agreed that a six-man committee of Hanna and government representatives could commence detailed negotiations in a week.28

  By the time McCloy boarded a Pan Am flight back to the United States, his presence in Rio had been detected. One pro-Goulart newspaper reported that McCloy, “considered the highest asset of the American government in any international deal,” was in Rio. In another article, headlined “The Great Negotiator,” readers were told that McCloy was insisting on “taking back that which belongs exclusively to our people. . . . The main thing in this fight is not to give up what is legitimately ours. . . . Even if conversations are carried out by the great expert in negotiations, McCloy.”29

  Despite this negative publicity, he left hoping that he had brokered a deal both acceptable to Hanna and politically palatable to the Brazilians. A few days later, Harriman told him that he “had heard that he did a good job.” McCloy replied that he “didn’t know yet whether they were out of the woods.”30 Three days later, the political landscape changed dramatically when Goulart, addressing a mammoth leftist rally, announced the expropriation of all private oil refineries and some landholdings. The Brazilian right-wi
ng opposition responded by organizing a counterdemonstration. Rhetoric on all sides escalated, and many private citizens, including Hanna’s American employees in Brazil, began arming themselves.31 The political crisis was such that no further progress was made on the tentative agreement worked out by McCloy in early March.

  Hanna officials were now very worried. Back in their Cleveland headquarters, Humphrey and Buford considered sending McCloy down to Rio once again. But McCloy knew from his contacts in the intelligence community that the time for deal-making was over. On March 27, 1964, Colonel Walters cabled Washington that General Castello Branco had “finally accepted [the] leadership” of the anti-Goulart “plotters.”32 Three days later, he told Ambassador Gordon that a military coup was “imminent.”33 The following morning, Washington’s contingency plan for a Brazilian coup, code-named Operation Brother Sam, was activated as a U.S. naval-carrier task force was ordered to station itself off the Brazilian coast. Well before the coup began, the Brazilian generals were told that the U.S. Navy would provide them with both arms and scarce oil.34

  The Goulart regime, however, collapsed so quickly that the protracted civil war predicted by the CIA on March 31 never developed.35 The generals who planned and executed the coup did not need the arms or oil supplies waiting for them off the coast. Hanna Mining Company, in fact, ended up giving the generals more direct assistance than did Operation Brother Sam. The initial army revolt occurred in Minas Gerais, the state in which Hanna had its mining concession. When these troops began marching on Rio, some of them rode in Hanna trucks.36 In Rio itself, Jack Buford was in constant touch with the local CIA station chief, who kept him informed by phone on Goulart’s movements.37