by Gerard Colby
On June 8 he announced his intention to lead the state’s huge delegation to the Republican National Convention in July. He then exploited the front-runner’s typical fear of controversy before obtaining the nomination: He challenged Vice President Nixon to speak out on the issues. He listed a “number of problems,” including the missile gap, the need for a $3 billion per year defense spending increase and another $500 million for fallout shelters, a “more tightly organized Department of Defense,” and “international inspection and control of arms.”26
“I am deeply convinced, and deeply concerned, that those now assuming control of the Republican party have failed to make clear where this party is heading and where it proposes to lead the nation.…
“Once the Vice President has made his position clear on the specific issues … I shall be glad to debate these issues with him.”27
Before startled Rotarians in upstate Binghamton, New York, he raised again the proposal Eisenhower had rejected for the creation of a “first secretary” or superassistant, who would assume the de facto powers of a premier. In Washington, he argued for centralization of the Defense Department and attacked the State Department for undermining his role as the first chairman of the Special Group.
He upped the ante in an appearance before downstate Young Republicans. He charged that Khrushchev’s planned visit to Cuba “may be accompanied by the announcement of a military pact giving Russia air bases, missile bases and submarine bases in Cuba.” This, he declared, would shift the balance of power against the United States. The country’s “vulnerability to nuclear devastation” would be enhanced.
It would be a year before Khrushchev would place intermediate missiles in Cuba, and then only at Castro’s request after the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion. But Nelson’s speech helped stir the war hysteria sweeping the nation. Nelson then used these fears to promote a cause that had been the cornerstone of his political career: counterinsurgency in Latin America. Revolution might spread, he warned. Through the use of Cuba as a base, the Soviets were moving “men, money and propaganda” into Latin America “on an unprecedented scale.”
The solutions were familiar: industrialization and agrarian reform as the cornerstones of a broad program of economic and social development; a Western Hemisphere economic union, backed by a Marshall Plan for Latin America; and, of course, joint military and economic action against Cuba. But there was also a new, startling Rockefeller twist in the formula: a political confederation of the Western Hemisphere.28
Republican leaders were furious. But the Rockefeller onslaught continued. He rejected Republican platform drafts prepared by Nixon’s handpicked chairman of the platform committee. He proposed his own program for increased defense spending, enhanced powers for a national security adviser, and civil rights enforcement, the last being the key to the African American vote without which no Republican candidate could hope to carry the big cities. Nelson indicated that he was prepared to fight for his own program on the convention floor.
But suddenly Nelson found himself trapped by his own ambition. His rashness had put him on the march toward a confrontation he could not win. If Nixon ignored him and was nominated, Nelson’s power in the party would suffer immensely. If he engaged Nixon in an open floor fight, he would win over many independents who were crucial for any Republican’s future presidential aspirations, but he would be forever damned by party regulars as a spoiler. His only hope was that Nixon, needing party unity, would bail him out.
Nixon did just that. Days before the convention opened, Nixon requested a meeting. It was his worst mistake. Nelson insisted that the vice president should call on him personally, and if Nixon wanted to meet, he would have to come to him, in New York.
The vice president arrived, weary and beaten, at Nelson’s Fifth Avenue apartment on the evening of July 23. Over a quiet dinner, Nixon tried to give his humiliating trip some justification by seeking the governor of New York as his running mate. Had he succeeded, he would have turned a bad scene into a personal triumph: Between California and New York, with a unified party and Nelson’s liberal big city constituency, Nixon could not lose.
Nelson flatly turned him down. Instead, he wanted Nixon to adopt his program for the United States and formally incorporate it into the Republican platform. It took until 3:00 A.M., but when Nelson was finished, Nixon had given in to almost all his demands. Only strict civil rights enforcement, which Nixon feared would lose him the segregationist South, went into the dustbin. This decision probably doomed Nixon in November.
Over a special trunk line Nelson had installed for this occasion, Nixon dictated their draft to the Republican Platform Committee in Chicago, which accepted the decision with grim resolution. The president, as titular leader of the party, had approved the old draft; he would not be happy about not being consulted.
Eisenhower’s grumbling, however, was nothing compared to the furor of the conservatives. Arizona’s Senator Barry Goldwater thundered that it was “the Munich of the Republican Party.” Mindless of the bitterness he was stirring, Nelson arrived in Chicago with the largest staff at the convention and jubilantly waved his “Compact of Fifth Avenue” in front of reporters. “If you don’t think this represents my views,” he told them, “you’re crazy.”29 Then, as if to rub salt in the wounds he had inflicted, he refused to nominate Nixon. He consented only to introduce him to the convention—and the nation, of course—after the nomination was over. To everyone’s horror, even that introduction ended in humiliation for Nixon. Winding up his speech, Nelson called forward the “man who will succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower next January—Richard E. Nixon!”30
“Nelson has taken himself off the hook,” a bemused Adolf Berle wrote in his diary. “… If Nixon wins, Rockefeller can claim he has at last pushed things in the right direction; if Nixon loses, Rockefeller is the logical candidate for ’64. It was a good hand, well played.”31
And well acted. Campaigning for Nixon gave Nelson more national exposure. But by October, Nixon was beaten. Nelson’s closest aides were already working for Kennedy, shaping the issues of the campaign and the policies of the future administration. Henry Kissinger was on board, as were Berle and a score of other veterans of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project panels.
THE MATING DANCE
John F. Kennedy became a devotee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund panel reports during the 1960 campaign. “When some foreign policy question came up, Kennedy yelled to Salinger, ‘Hey, Pierre, get the Rockefeller Brothers Studies. It’s all there.’”32 Top Rockefeller aides were also there, right at Kennedy’s ear, helping to shape the campaign’s issues—and the future administration.
Roswell Gilpatric worked on reorganizing the Pentagon along the lines Nelson had advocated.33 Nelson’s “missile gap” became Kennedy’s “missile gap.” Almost a year after the election, Gilpatric would announce that there never had been a missile gap, or if there was, it was on the Soviet side. But in 1960, Rockefeller themes triumphed as Kennedy themes.
Nelson’s demand that Nixon support greater government intervention to stimulate “economic growth” became Kennedy’s call for greater “economic growth.”
Nelson’s call for more research in nuclear energy became Kennedy’s call. “Our research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy has fallen far short of expectation.”
Henry Kissinger, too, had joined the Kennedy “brain trust,” advising the campaign while working out of both Harvard and a Manhattan town house on West Fifty-fifth Street as Nelson’s adviser.
This cross-pollination of ideas between the Rockefeller and Kennedy camps—or, more precisely, the tutoring of the Kennedy campaign by the Rockefeller camp—reached its natural outcome in October, after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, when it was clear that Kennedy was going to win.
Nelson decided he had better begin preparing for 1964, when he expected to run against Kennedy. On the day that the New York Post endorsed Kennedy, Nelson had Kissinger speak to Berle, who was by the
n assisting Kennedy as a speechwriter, to ask him to help draft a five-year program for regional confederations between the United States and its allies.34
Berle, in his loyalty to Rockefeller, was long past sensing any conflict of interest in advising a future opponent of the presidential candidate he was expecting would appoint him to a top-level job. Berle’s only concern was for Nelson’s political success.
Nelson eventually came to his senses and decided to defer discussing Berle’s paper until after the campaign.35 By December, the matter had been shunted over to the Rockefeller Foundation, which initiated a new program for young scholars in research on international relations.36 And Berle had begun his new job as head of the president-elect’s Task Force on Latin America.
Nixon had succumbed to the missile gap, the bomber gap, and, ultimately, the Cuba gap. Kennedy had pressed for tough measures against Cuba, expressing the same apprehension about communists “eight jet minutes from the coast of Florida” that Nelson had shown. Nixon, too, had called for surgery to remove the Castro “cancer” from the hemisphere “to prevent further Soviet penetration.” Kennedy’s staff, however, went further, issuing a statement calling for U.S. aid to Cuban “fighters of freedom.”
Nixon again felt betrayed by Kennedy, never believing Allen Dulles’s later claim that he had not briefed Kennedy on the plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion until after the election. Nixon was trapped by his knowledge of government secrets. He was not only aware of the coming CIA invasion, but he had had a hand in initiating it in 1959, and as de facto overseer of covert operations during 1960 had shifted the emphasis from the guerrilla campaign to a D-Day-type full-scale amphibious invasion.
Ultimately, however, it was Nixon’s own indecisiveness and lack of commitment to enforcing the civil rights laws that brought him down. In the last three weeks of the campaign, as African American students demonstrated throughout the South, word flashed over the wires that Rev. Martin Luther King had been thrown into a Mississippi jail. Many feared for his life. While Nixon remained silent, Kennedy telephoned Coretta King to express his concern and support and had his campaign manager, brother Robert, wire Mississippi’s governor urging King’s release. Whether his motives were generous or self-serving, Kennedy had the courage to ignore the dire warnings of Southern white governors and defend what Nelson had said Nixon must defend if he wished to win the northern cities—civil rights. The African American vote gave Kennedy the slim margin he needed to win.
“I want to repeat my deep regret at the outcome of the elections,” Nelson told reporters after the close election. “But I don’t believe in post mortems.”37 Then he warned that “the party has got to get closer to the people.” That was the road to power.
It was not, however, the means of exercising power. That, Nelson had learned early in his career, was best done without the knowledge of the people, with power centralized in a few hands.
The sweet irony for Nelson was that the defeat of his own party brought him closer to the citadel of power, the White House.
NELSON’S SECRET VICTORY
Within a month of Kennedy’s election, some of Nelson’s closest allies from the Special Group and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s studies panels were meeting in the White House’s Cabinet Room or heading key offices in the new administration. Swiftly and quietly, they began implementing many of the changes in government structure and policy that Nelson advocated.
This secret victory was the outcome of the young president-elect’s administrative inexperience. Kennedy had spent the past five years running for office. He knew politicians, but not men who could run the government of a world power. He asked Robert Lovett, a former undersecretary of state and defense secretary in the Truman administration, for advice.
Kennedy firmly believed in the Establishment. He had no cause to doubt the wisdom of a man like Lovett, a power in the Democratic party. Lovett was the quintessential consigliere to the rich and powerful. He was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Lovett was not interested in heading the departments of State, Defense, or Treasury and turned down Kennedy’s offer of each. He recommended Dean Rusk, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, for secretary of state. On December 4, while attending a meeting of the Rockefeller Foundation’s board, Rusk got a call from the president-elect. He was in Washington the next day.38 He was soon joined by another Rockefeller Foundation trustee, Chester Bowles, as his undersecretary of state.
For the secretary of defense, Lovett recommended Robert McNamara, the recently appointed president of the Ford Motor Company and a former systems analyst of strategic bombing during World War II. McNamara’s deputy secretary would be another trusted Rockefeller aviation associate, former Air Force Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric.
For the secretary of the treasury, Lovett suggested C. Douglas Dillon, a Rockefeller business partner in the Congo and a scion of the Dillon Read investment bank. Dillon was also a Rockefeller Foundation trustee.
Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, McGeorge Bundy, a member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies panel, became special assistant to the president for national security affairs. Bundy shaped the NSC into the administration’s major initiator of action on foreign policy. In doing so, he enhanced the powers of the presidential assistant for national security affairs along the lines originally proposed in 1955 by Nelson Rockefeller.
This change left Kennedy relying on Bundy for information on covert operations by intelligence agencies of the Pentagon and the CIA. And Bundy, in turn, relied on the CIA, where his brother Bill had worked before moving over to the Department of Defense to help Walt Rostow in “counterinsurgency planning.”
With an allied covert-operations network inside the Defense Department and the CIA, Bundy’s staff soon became a hidden government, accountable only to the president and unaccountable to Congress or the American people, a harbinger of Colonel Oliver North’s operation twenty years later.
Eugene G. Fubini, another Rockefeller associate, became a top official in the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon’s supersecret electronics eavesdropper. Fubini was a vice president of Airborne Instruments Laboratory, a company controlled by Laurance Rockefeller that helped originate the “missile gap” thesis. In 1963, Fubini would be put in charge of the NSA as assistant secretary of defense.
Kenneth Holland, yet another Rockefeller associate, was also placed in the Kennedy foreign policy network. Holland had been Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA educational director during World War II and then headed CIAA’s spin-off, the Inter-American Educational Foundation. He was appointed to the president’s Task Force on International Education and the Task Force on Education of the Organization of American States. Holland was now president of the Institute of International Education, a conduit for CIA funds, including those used to sponsor young Africans who were identified by the African American Institute (now headed by David Rockefeller’s closest aide, Dana Creel) as promising alternatives to the militant, anticolonialists symbolized by the former Belgian Congo’s first premier, Patrice Lumumba.
KENNEDY’S BAPTISM BY BLOOD
On November 27, 1960, Patrice Lumumba, his family, and loyal government officials slipped away from their home in Leopoldville and drove into the African night. Lumumba had just been deposed as prime minister of the Congo in a CIA-backed coup. Threatened by the new ruler, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, he had only one hope: to try to reach safety in the friendly providence of Kivu, far to the east. It was a slim hope.
Mobutu’s troops, assisted by the CIA in setting up road blocks,39 caught up with Lumumba’s caravan in Kivu. Since U.N. troops in the area had decided not to intervene, Lumumba and two of his colleagues were delivered to the Belgian-controlled Tshombe regime in Katanga.
Rockefeller Foundation trustee Ralph Bunche, working on behalf of the United Nations in the summer of 1959, had negotiated an agreement that U.S. forces were to share control with Belgian troops over the airport of Ka
tanga’s capital, Elizabethville. But when the Air Congo DC-4 carrying Lumumba arrived, the European-manned control tower merely telephoned the Belgian chief staff officer of the Katangese police, relaying the pilot’s message that “three big packages” had arrived. In full view of U.N. officials, Lumumba and his companions were thrown out of the plane, beaten by Katangese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers, and trucked in a military convoy to a secluded house. There they were murdered.
Two months later, in March 1961, a small airplane hovered over the same Elizabethville airport and then floated down on unusually wide wings. From the cockpit emerged Larry Montgomery. The superintendent of SIL’s missionary air fleet (JAARS) was now also a pioneer of the CIA-inspired advance of Helio Couriers into Africa.
The Helio Corporation originally had planned to enter the Third World via India, but as Helio president Lynn Bollinger later reported, “U.S. governmental officials with substantial international responsibilities” urged him to give Africa his top priority.40 Since the CIA was then one of Helio’s largest potential buyers and a secret backer, the agency’s request could hardly be refused.
Early in 1961, Montgomery was recruited to fly a CIA-owned Helio Courier to Africa for demonstrations to local governments.41 Bollinger had known Montgomery well. SIL purchased Helio Couriers for JAARS and, on at least one occasion, helped Bollinger sell four Couriers42 to the Peruvian air force. Now it was the CIA who took up Montgomery’s services, paying him $1,000 per month as salary and using Bollinger’s Helio Corporation spin-off, General Aircraft, as a conduit.43
Montgomery had not resigned as JAARS’s top pilot; instead, he took an unpaid leave of absence while serving on the CIA’s payroll.*
The Elizabethville Larry Montgomery found was haunted by the CIA. Seven Seas Airlines, a CIA proprietary airline, was making regular landings, bringing in badly needed supplies to Katanga from Europe, including fuel that Montgomery used for his own Courier. The Courier’s maintenance at the airport was done by a CIA officer. The CIA had provided the Courier so that Montgomery could demonstrate its remarkable bush-warfare capacities to Katanga’s Moise Tshombe and Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo, the officials responsible for Lumumba’s murder.* What the CIA got in return was the placing of one of their airplanes, Montgomery’s Courier, under a civilian cover (General Aircraft) in Katanga. They also got a CIA officer, Malcolm “Mac” Heckathorne, under cover as Montgomery’s fellow General Aviation employee.