The Chairman
Page 106
4. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 594.
5. Halberstam, Best and Brightest, p. 16.
6. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 156.
7. Ibid., p. 133.
8. McCloy memo of conversation with President-elect Kennedy, 12/8/60, box PA 1, folder 9, JJM; Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 20, 1985; Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 599.
9. Mrs. Frederick Warburg interview, April 10, 1984.
10. McCloy interview, Sept. 14, 1984; Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 20, 1985; McCloy memo of conversation with President-elect Kennedy, 12/8/60, box PA 1, folder 9, JJM.
11. McCloy interview, Sept. 14, 1984.
12. Halberstam, Best and Brightest, p. 33.
13. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 472.
14. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 20, 1985.
15. Ibid.
16. John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World: The Life of Adlai Stevenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 556.
17. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 518.
18. When Rusk complained that a government salary would not cover his large mortgage or pay for the college education of his children, Lovett and McCloy quickly assured him that the Rockefeller trustees would pay him a sizable bonus. (Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 595.)
19. Leonard Silk and Mark Silk, The American Establishment, p. 202.
20. Dean Rusk appointment books, Rusk Papers, LBJ.
21. McCloy was prepared to tell the president that, on the question of whether to seek a test ban agreement, “all things considered, including the chance of detection and the relatively limited advantage which the Soviets could gain by surreptitious testing, it is probably better for us to seek this agreement.” (Notes for talk with President Kennedy at White House conference, 1/24/61, box DA 1, folder 44, JJM.)
22. McCloy to General W. Bedell Smith, 1/24/61, DDE.
23. Edmund A. Gullion memo to McCloy, 4/28/61, “Comments on Draft Report to the President on Disarmament Organization, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency” (ACDA) document, DOS FOIA.
24. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 473.
25. Memorandum of conversation, “Meeting of Principals,” 3/2/61, State Department document obtained from ACDA under FOIA.
26. Shepard Stone memo to JJ McCloy on the subject of disarmament, dated about Jan. 6, 1961, an ACDA memo obtained by the author under FOIA.
27. John J. McCloy speech at Phillips Andover Academy, Feb. 25, 1961, JJM.
28. Meeting with Andrei Gromyko, 3/30/61, box DA 1, folder 11, JJM. McCloy told Gromyko, “I was sure that we were over-armed viz-a-viz [sic] the Soviets if we really knew the facts, and probably they were against us.”
29. WP, July 4, 1963.
30. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 474.
31. Ibid., p. 469.
32. Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World, p. 24.
33. Ibid., p. 165.
34. Kennedy appointment book, 3/12/61, JFK.
35. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 474.
36. NYT, May 10, 1961.
37. “The Fine Qualities of Mrs. McCloy,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 5, 1962.
38. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War; p. 218.
39. Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine, 1979), pp. 492–93.
40. McCloy to Sorensen, 4/27/61, box DA 1, folder 35, JJM.
41. Dean was a poor choice. Averell Harriman later commented of the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer that he was the kind of negotiator you sent to the Soviets when “the American objective is to make a record and not to reach an agreement.” (Harriman memo, 5/2/67, AH.)
42. NYT, May 20, 1961.
43. Memorandum of conversation, “Meeting of Principals,” 3/2/61, DOS FOIA; Arthur Dean to McCloy, 4/18/61, DOS FOIA.
44. Memorandum of conversation, McCloy, Rusk, McNamara et al., 3/2/61, DOS FOIA.
45. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 23, 1985. By late 1962, with the advent of new satellite technology, the United States was willing to reduce its annual inspection quota to only six. (Albert Carnesale, “Learning from Experience with Arms Control,” final report submitted to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Sept. 1986, Contract AC5PC101, pp. 2–8. This report mistakenly asserts that the Soviets did not offer to have two or three inspections until December 1962. Its source is Glenn Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, pp. 179, 187–88. But 3/2/61 memorandum of conversation, meeting of principals, ACDA FOIA document, p. 5, refers to “Soviet proposal of 3.”)
46. “Extract From Transcript of Vienna Talks Between President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev, Conversation at the Soviet Embassy June 4, 1961,” secret document, AH. The Vienna summit has always been painted officially as a harsh confrontation. This document, however, shows that Khrushchev was not entirely the blustering hard-liner that we thought.
47. NYT, June 11, 1961.
48. McCloy memo for the president, 6/7/61, taken to the president by JJM on June 13, 1961, at about twelve noon. ACDA FOIA.
49. McCloy to Kennedy, 6/7/61, ACDA FOIA.
50. NYT, June 24, 1961.
51. McCloy to Eisenhower, 6/23/61, DDE.
52. NYT, June 24, 1961.
53. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 611.
54. McCloy to Eisenhower, 7/7/61, DDE.
55. NYT, June 29, 1961, June 30, 1961.
56. Kennedy appointment book, 7/10/61 & 7/13/61, JFK.
57. NYT, July 16, 1961.
58. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 475.
59. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 20, 1985.
60. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 392; Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 613.
61. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 391; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 460.
62. LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, p. 220.
63. NYT, July 27, 1961; see also Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, pp. 526–27, for a description of Khrushchev’s Sochi dacha.
64. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 454.
65. Senator Willis Robertson statement, 9/16/63, Congressional Record. Robertson reported that, after returning from Sochi, McCloy had given him an account of his talks with Khrushchev. The senator was now using McCloy’s account to argue against ratification of the test-ban treaty in the summer of 1963.
66. McCloy interview, Sept. 14, 1984.
67. Senator Willis Robertson statement, 9/16/63, Congressional Record.
68. Memorandum of conversation with Ambassador Dobrynin, 7/3/62, box Ci, folder DB 1, JJM.
69. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), as excerpted in Time, May 14, 1990, p. 70.
70. Acheson to Frankfurter, n.d., Frankfurter Papers, LOC; also quoted in Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 614.
71. LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, pp. 219–20.
72. Eleanor Lansing Dulles interview, April 7, 1982. But even Dulles had personally told Dean Rusk in the month before the wall was built that something had to be done to stop the refugee flow through Berlin.
73. Wilhelm Grewe interview, Feb. 9, 1984.
74. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, pp. 614–15.
75. Harriman to JFK, 9/1/61, AH.
76. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 23, 1985; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 920.
77. NYT, Aug. 25, 1961.
78. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 23, 1985.
79. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 460, 481.
80. Ibid., p. 458.
81. Clark’s research had been financed by a Ford Foundation grant, obtained as a result of McCloy’s intervention. When it was finally published, the Foundation spent an extraordinary $2 million to give it the widest possible circulation. It was translated into Russian, Chinese, French, German, and a number of other languages. (Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., letter to the author, Nov. 23, 1
982; Gerald T. Dunne, Grenville Clark: Public Citizen [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986], p. 214.)
82. Dunne, Grenville Clark, p. 189. The following year, Clark in turn used the McCloy-Zorin Agreement as the blueprint for his “Draft of a Proposed Treaty on General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.”
83. Shepard Stone memo to J. J. McCloy, “Disarmament,” about Jan. 6, 1961: Stone told McCloy one of the first things he had to do was “A review of the Grenville Clark proposals.” (ACDA FOIA.)
84. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 477; John J. McCloy, “Balance Sheet on Disarmament,” Foreign Affairs, April 1962, pp. 339–59.
85. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 476–77.
86. Betty Goetz Lall interview, Feb. 23, 1985. Lall later confronted Bundy on why the Foster Panel proposals to limit delivery vehicles had been turned down by the White House, and Bundy admitted in retrospect that it might have been a mistake.
87. NYT, Oct. 6, 1961.
88. Memorandum of conversation with Ambassador Dobrynin, 7/3/62, box C 1, folder DB 1, JJM.
89. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 288.
90. Albert L. Danielsen, The Evolution of OPEC (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 128.
91. John Loudon oral history, pp. 1–2, FF. Loudon, the chief executive officer of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (Shell), was later selected by McCloy to go on the board of the Ford Foundation.
92. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 730. McCloy’s success in so quickly obtaining this dispensation from the Justice Department was all the more remarkable since an antitrust suit dating back to 1953 was still pending against three of the five American companies in question. Not only that, but the companies already had a venue in which to discuss their relationship with OPEC. Back in 1956, when the Suez crisis disrupted international oil supplies, the Eisenhower administration had activated the Foreign Petroleum Supply Committee. The Committee allowed oil-company officers to sit in the presence of government observers and share the kind of information necessary to ensure the delivery of emergency supplies of petroleum to U.S. allies in Europe. The Committee still existed in 1961 and could have served as a forum for the kind of discussions the oil majors claimed were necessary to deal with OPEC. One difference, of course, was that they would have been compelled to hold their discussions in the presence of Justice Department observers. Another was that the companies were barred from exchanging marketing data in their meetings with the Committee.
When McCloy went in to see Robert Kennedy, a debate was taking place within the Justice Department as to whether the Foreign Petroleum Supply Committee should even continue to function. As one Justice Department official in the Antitrust Division explained to the attorney general, “The ability of these five major international oil companies to sit as a governmentally sponsored Committee, to discuss and perhaps arrange details of their foreign operations, all with full antitrust immunity, certainly conflicted with our objectives in the oil cartel case.”
In the event, Robert Kennedy decided that “national-security” needs had to prevail over antitrust considerations and authorized the continued meetings of the Committee. He made this decision about the same time that he gave the companies a dispensation to meet in the privacy of McCloy’s law office. (Lee Loevinger, assistant attorney general, Antitrust Division, memo to Deputy Attorney General Byron R. White, 10/16/61, Justice Department memo obtained by the author under FOIA; memorandum for the attorney general from W. Wallace Kirkpatrick, acting assistant attorney general, 2/2/61, obtained by the author under FOIA from the Justice Department; attorney general to Frank B. Ellis, Office of Emergency Planning, 10/18/61, Justice Department FOIA.)
93. “Middle East Oil Developments,” Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, CIA, OCI no. 0265/61, 2/2/61, CIA FOIA.
94. “Strategic Threats to Free World Petroleum,” 8/29/62, box Oil 1, folder 9, JJM. McCloy even suggested that he should arrange with the U.S. government and the EEC to erect a “quota wall which would limit Russian oil imports [into Western Europe]. . . .” Such a quota would have been directly targeted at Italy’s government-owned oil company, ENI, led by the charismatic Enrico Mattei, who was killed in a mysterious plane crash that autumn. (McCloy memo, “Specific Current Problems,” 8/28/62, box Oil 1, folder 9, JJM.)
95. “List of Dates Mr. McCloy Saw the Attorney Generals,” box Oil 3, folder 28, JJM.
96. McCloy memo to Miss Lamkin, 8/16/62, box Oil 1, folder 12, JJM.
97. As McCloy put it, in order to “develop unified policies to resist expropriations . . . a Consultant is needed. Through this mechanism the views of the companies could be coordinated and common denominators could be found for a united industry front. The Consultant would represent the industry before the United States, United Nations and other appropriate governments and organizations to represent the industry’s views.” (“Representational Problems,” 8/29/62, box Oil 1, folder 9, JJM.)
98. NYT, March 16, 1962.
99. Laurence M. Gould oral history, FF.
100. Marcus Raskin interview, April 28, 1985.
101. John J. McCloy oral history, FF.
102. W. McNeil Lowry oral history, FF.
103. Ibid.
104. Paul Ylvisaker oral history, FF.
105. W. McNeil Lowry oral history, pp. 103–5, FF.
106. Ibid., p. 106, FF.
107. John J. McCloy oral history, FF, and Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., letter to the author, Nov. 23, 1982.
108. State Department cable, 10/5/62, DOS FOIA.
TWENTY-FOUR: THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
1. Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1966), p. 45.
2. Transcript of tape of National Security Council Executive Committee meeting, 10/16/62, 6:30 P.M.-7:55 P.M., mandatory review case, NLK-82–131, JFK. The CIA’s intelligence estimate in early Oct. had predicted that the Soviets would not install ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba. (John Ranelagh, The Agency, The Rise and Decline of the CIA from Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey, p. 394.)
3. This information was leaked to Keating by low-ranking intelligence officials who believed the Kennedy administration was for political reasons disregarding human-intelligence reports that gave circumstantial evidence of the presence of such missiles as early as Aug. and Sept. (Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis [Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987], p. 14.)
4. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 35–36; Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 45. Abel reports that the president reached McCloy in New York shortly before McCloy departed for Europe. But an Oct. 5, 1962, State Department cable obtained by the author under FOIA shows that McCloy was scheduled to leave New York on Oct. 6 and was supposed to be in Rome Oct. 13–17. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, in The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, p. 802, report McCloy’s recollection that he was called by the president in Frankfurt. This apparently was not true, for it was McCloy’s secretary who reached him later in Frankfurt and conveyed the president’s desire that he return immediately. It is reasonable to assume that McCloy’s memory was essentially accurate, but that the call took place when he was in Rome, not in New York.
5. Handwritten McCloy notes, Oct. 1962, “Main thing . . . ,” box CMC 1, folder 12, JJM. Lovett wrote him a letter during the crisis, quoting from a book about the lessons of Munich. (Lovett to McCloy, 10/31/62, box CMC 1, folder 9, JJM.) See also McCloy to Sorensen, 4/27/61, box DA 1, folder 35, JJM.
6. Colonel Burris to the vice-president, “Highlights of World Activities and Situations,” 11/5/62, LBJ.
7. Garthoff, Reflections, p. 142.
8. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War: 1945–1975, p. 226; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 163.
9. According to the CIA’s top spy in Moscow, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the entire Soviet ballistic-missile program had recently suffered a serious setback when
one of their ICBMs exploded at a test site and killed the head of the program along with three hundred officers. (Abel, The Missile Crisis, p. 52; Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 402; see also Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs.)
10. Robert S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 44–45.
11. More probably, the Soviets were aware that U.S. U-2 flights over Cuba had discovered the missile sites but believed that Kennedy was postponing any response until after the Nov. elections.
12. There is some dispute about whether four of the six medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) might not already have been operational. (Barton J. Bernstein, “We Almost Went to War,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Feb. 1976, citing an Oct. 23, 1962, declassified CIA report.) A handwritten undated note found in the vice-president’s files concerning the missile crisis suggests that thirty-two MRBMs were expected to be operational by Nov. 1. (Handwritten notes, C, LBJ.)
13. Until recently, most accounts of the Cuban missile crisis have had to rely on the memoirs of various participants in the crisis, such as those written by Robert Kennedy, Roger Hilsman, and Arthur Schlesinger. The release of the secret White House transcripts now requires historians to reconsider these accounts, which in more than one instance either are self-serving or leave out critical parts of the story. (See Professor Marc Trachtenberg’s introduction to the published excerpts of the transcripts, “The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security, Summer 1985, pp. 164–70.)
14. Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 195. Hilsman, a State Department official and a participant in Kennedy’s deliberations, suggests that others disagreed with McNamara’s assertions. This disagreement, however, is not reflected in the transcripts. Hilsman himself, in his later account of the crisis, states that, even if McNamara’s assessment was correct, “the United States might not be in mortal danger but the administration most certainly was.” (Ibid., p. 197.)
15. Evening transcript, NSC Excomm meeting, 10/16/62, pp. 12, 14, JFK. Today there is still a debate concerning whether the Cuban missiles substantially altered the strategic equation. At one point that evening, the transcripts show Kennedy saying, “What difference does it make? They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway.” But it is also true that the president and others felt that the missiles might be an “opening wedge,” a prelude to another installment of many more missiles. (See Trachtenberg, “Influence of Nuclear Weapons.”)