Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  The Mafia and Cuban exiles were not the only breeders of hatred. Southern segregationists were furious over Kennedy’s desegregation of federal housing after the November 1962 election and his subsequent introduction of a civil rights bill that had only one major supporter in the administration: Robert Kennedy.23

  And the military and the CIA were furious over Kennedy’s plan to have Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman negotiate a nuclear test ban with the Soviets.

  By the spring, when Senator John Stennis of Texas responded to leaks from the CIA and held hearings on a test ban, the conspiracy against the treaty had reached up to the office of the director of the CIA at Langley, Virginia. Dean Rusk had been less than enthusiastic about the test ban. But no one expected the new CIA director, John McCone, former director of Standard Oil of California, actually to help Stennis make his case against a treaty by secretly lending him CIA advisers on nuclear weapons. But McCone did.24

  In September, just before the election, Nelson had asked Berle what he thought of Kennedy. “I said I thought Kennedy thought and worried too much,” Berle recalled, “and too deeply—thus impairing capacity for action.… He wondered whether Kennedy did think.”25 Now Nelson publicly wondered if Kennedy was following a policy of appeasement.

  Nelson took this theme of White House trickery before the press in January 1963, accusing Kennedy of withholding facts before the blockade and then doing the same with regard to the “Cuban war-making build-up. This, as the first, probably is just the starter.”26 Two weeks later, Nelson hosted a formal lunch at his Pocantico estate for Venezuela’s Rómulo Betancourt, who was hoping to persuade U.S. Steel to mine ore in the Orinoco area for the state-owned Venezuelan Steel Company, not just export ore to the States and Japan in ships owned by D. K. Ludwig. Berle was among the guests.

  “He [Betancourt] apparently had a good talk with Kennedy.… Increasingly it is clear that Kennedy did negotiate with the Russians about Cuba; did get a half agreement to withdraw some troops; did impliedly at least accept a Russian force of greater or less strength in Cuba—in a word, was jockeyed into the position of agreeing to permit a Russian force in Cuba. This will raise hell as it increasingly comes out.”27 Nelson made sure it did, taking his charges of appeasement to Houston in April.

  “There has been a sharp change of policy of which the public has not been advised,” he told Texas Republican congressmen. Nelson had no trouble suggesting that the president was getting soft on communism. He found the suspension of raids on Cuba “very hard to understand. I hope it is not an arrangement to appease Khrushchev.”28 Nelson was making an obvious bid for the conservative wing of the Republican party, which was backing his major rival for the nomination, Senator Barry Goldwater.

  It was beginning to look like Nelson was unstoppable. He was the only Republican who could win the large industrial cities of the North, as well as attract some of the more conservative votes of the West and Southwest. If the white South disliked the Rockefellers, they disliked the Kennedys even more.

  The president was worried. Roswell Gilpatric, who knew the Rockefeller brothers personally, noted Kennedy’s obsession with his most dangerous rival. “JFK regarded Nelson Rockefeller as his probable opposition in 1964. He had both a fascination and a fear of Rockefeller”—fascination because Nelson was a liberal; fear because Kennedy did not know a lot about political power in New York.

  “Whenever I was with the President alone, whether it was on the Enterprise or on the Northampton or down in Palm Beach or at the Army-Navy football game, he endlessly questioned me about every phase of the Rockefeller family.… You know, their marriages, their children, their wealth. It just absorbed him.… I think he felt that it would be a close contest between the two of them, as he saw it, and he wanted to have a good feel for what he was going to encounter.”29

  But then Nelson, whom Tod had divorced a year earlier, made one of his characteristic impulsive moves that he relished and his family dreaded. He decided to marry the woman he had loved since 1958.

  FOR THE WOMAN HE LOVED

  She was called “Happy” for her bright disposition, but Margaretta Murphy was taking a terrible risk. So was Nelson. Happy had divorced her husband just a month before. To be free for Nelson, she gave up her four children. Nelson, feeling that he had paid his dues by his own divorce, gambled that voters would accept true love.

  His family was stunned. Junior had tried to press upon all his sons the burden of social responsibility that came with wealth. A Rockefeller would be wise to subject himself to the laws of a Protestant heaven and the limits of mortal men. But for Nelson, only the first half of Junior’s lesson stuck.

  Now, both Junior and family adviser Frank Jamieson were gone. Nelson could not be constrained from following his heart. And as the wedding approached, there was much tugging at his heart. The woman he had loved for five years had given up everything for him. She was eager for the official consecration of their love.

  So was he. At fifty-four, Nelson was eighteen years older than Happy, but the attractive woman made him look and feel younger. United in marriage at Laurance’s home on the Pocantico estate, they smiled bravely, ignoring the absence of Nelson’s children—Rodman, Steven, and Mary—and of his brothers John 3rd, David, and Winthrop.

  The quiet event at Pocantico exploded in the headlines when it was announced four hours after the ceremony. Nelson was besieged by reporters. As he had done so often in the past, he retreated to Latin America. He jetted south with Happy into the welcoming arms of Venezuela.

  At Monte Sacro, Nelson’s vast 18,000-acre ranch, the couple posed for honeymoon pictures, then flew north to Laurance’s resort in the Virgin Islands. When the honeymoon was over and Nelson returned with his now-pregnant wife, he found that his lead over Goldwater had evaporated. He now was 30 to 35 percent behind.

  An old enemy of the Rockefellers, not seen since the Fundamentalist Controversy of the 1920s, was aroused. Forty years had not weakened Fundamentalism. If anything, the Great Depression, World War II, and the renewed destruction of parity between agricultural prices and the costs of production since 1953 had nourished it. As the fabric of rural society continued to unravel, migration to the cities spread its unrest, resentment, and Fundamentalist culture to the new working-class suburbs. These bedroom communities retained the character of isolated small towns. With the exception of the national media, exposure to outside cultural influences was contained through local school boards and zoning. Fundamentalism thrived, immune from challenge by science until Sputnik forced the federal government to provide funds for the sciences through grants and a massive student-loan program. And even then, the influence of science often was restricted to the technological and seldom allowed into the social realm and discourse on philosophical foundations.

  Fundamentalism had been beaten before, and Nelson, insulated from the provincialism that still held sway over much of American life, did not consider it a great threat. He and his brothers had gloried in their self-appointed roles as the vanguard of the last drive of urban modernity upon not only rural America, but a predominantly rural world. As Nelson championed higher educational standards, a state university system, racial integration, and a science-based faith, the old battle with Fundamentalism was joined.

  Only now, Fundamentalism had corporate angels like the Pews of Philadelphia and the Hunts of Texas, men whose wealth offered Fundamentalism unprecedented financial means to enter politics on a more sophisticated level. Through the modern corporation and the armed forces, Fundamentalism had experienced men and women who had seen the world and learned modern organizational, fund-raising, communication, and transportation skills. So armed, all the furies of the Religious Right focused their hatred on the one man standing in the way of the Republican nomination of ultraconservative Barry Goldwater: the quintessential liberal of the Eastern Establishment, Nelson Rockefeller.

  Scorn came down in cascades of “two broken homes” and “children deprived of their mother,”
pounding away at the rock of reputation Junior had laid as a foundation for the family. For the first time since the turn of the century, when the Congregational elders rejected a $100,000 Rockefeller gift to their missionaries as “tainted money,” the name Rockefeller had become synonymous with immorality in the press. It was as if all that his father had tried to bury under good works was now being unearthed by Nelson’s ambition.

  If Nelson was surprised by the conservatives’ reaction, criticism from the liberal camp stunned him. Reinhold Niebuhr, the outstanding resident theorist of the Rockefeller-funded Union Theological Seminary, thought his cleaning woman right when she judged the governor’s remarriage “too quick.”30 The local Pocantico minister who had presided over the ceremony was rebuked by his own presbytery.

  Stung, Nelson tried to recapture his reputation and his liberal base by attacking the conservative wing he now had no hope of winning over. In July, he ended his truce with Goldwater. Releasing a manifesto entitled “A Matter of Principle,” he charged that “the Republican Party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well financed and highly disciplined minority.” Using the recent Young Republicans convention in San Francisco as his sole example, he denounced “vociferous and well-drilled extremist elements boring within the party.”31 On November 7, Nelson called a press conference in the Red Room of the State Capitol, an imposing hall with plush red carpets and drapes and Honduran mahogany wainscotted walls—a place where history in the Empire State had been made many times. Surrounded by such regal splendor, Nelson had no qualms about asking ordinary Americans to support his quest for the presidency.

  A CLASH OF WILLS

  Nelson pointedly attacked the Rights proposal that the Republican Party “write off the Negro and other minority states … write off the big cities, and that it direct its appeal primarily to the electoral votes of the South, plus the West … to erect political power on the outlawed and immoral base of segregation.”32 Wooing the African American vote had the dual value of enlisting liberal support against Goldwater’s followers from the John Birch Society while offering frustrated civil rights activists an alternative to a cautious Kennedy.

  Kennedy, who once confessed that Rockefeller could have beaten him in 1960, thought that Nelson would be a greater threat than Goldwater in 1964. Nelson’s speeches in September scored Kennedy for his caution on civil rights despite the president’s introduction of a civil rights bill.

  The international balance of payments, likewise, had “actually gotten worse,” he charged. Unless corporate and personal income taxes were cut further to stimulate investment and spending overseas was reduced, the national debt would cause such a hemorrhage of gold to foreign investors who were worried about the dollar that it “could cause a worldwide financial collapse similar to that which made the depression of the 1930s so severe.”33

  Similar apocalyptic visions filled Nelson’s criticisms of Kennedy’s nuclear arms policies. Kennedy’s insistence on keeping U.S. control over nuclear weapons in Europe was a “delusion” that “keeps us from exercising leadership in the crucial area of strategic doctrine.” This, he told the American Newspaper Publishers Association, was a “prescription for chaos.”34

  By October, Nelson struck the anvil of anticommunism again. He could barely give lukewarm support to Kennedy’s test-ban treaty with the Soviets, advocating “a strong and aggressive program of underground testing” backed up with “preparation of a series of stand-by atmospheric tests for the contingency of cancellation of the treaty.”35

  Finally, after criticizing Kennedy for allowing President Sukarno of Indonesia to regain West New Guinea from the Dutch, he tackled the question of Vietnam. Here, on the question of U.S. withdrawal, Rockefeller and Goldwater could agree. “Pulling out cannot ever be considered,” said Nelson in October36 after the president authorized Defense Secretary McNamara to announce plans to pull 1,000 U.S. Marines out of Vietnam by the end of the year. Nelson was sharply critical of Kennedy’s suspension of U.S. military aid to Ngo Dinh Diem after Diem used troops to raid Buddhist temples and repress the legal opposition to his rule.

  “We have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of the U.S. Government apparently encouraging a military revolt and otherwise undermining the existing government in a way that can only further the objectives of the communist campaign.”37 Nelson was hinting, as Kenneth Keating had done a year before with regard to the presence of Cuban missiles, that he had knowledge of government secrets: A coup was in the making.

  The military coup—urged on the president by Averell Harriman, the NSC, and the CIA—took place on November 1. Kennedy was in a meeting in the Cabinet Room when word arrived that President Diem and his brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been murdered.

  The president was stunned. He had wanted Diem out of the way so that a more popular government around General Duong Van “Big” Minh would allow him to disengage U.S. combat troops after the 1964 election. But he had not wanted Diem dead. He had ordered Harriman to send explicit instructions to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon to warn the CIA station that the United States could not be involved in assassination. The death of an allied head of state in a U.S.-backed coup was terrible news for other U.S. allies. It was also terrible news for Kennedy: His twenty-eight-month-long effort to regain the president’s constitutional authority over the CIA had failed.

  “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” General Maxwell Taylor recalled.38 When he was gone, some NSC members amused themselves by mulling over the president’s naïveté in encouraging a coup without realizing that assassination was always a likely prospect.

  No one understood this likelihood better than Nelson’s old friend, J. C. King. Although Cuba had been taken out of his hands after CIA Director Allen Dulles’s fall and been given to Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms, King had tried to reassert control over Cuban affairs after the Bay of Pigs failure caused a power vacuum in the CIA’s Cuban operations. King’s original proposal to assassinate Cuba’s leaders was being followed up with vigor by the CIA. Despite the president’s explicit order that assassinations were not to be U.S. policy, despite Robert Kennedy’s termination of General Lansdale’s MONGOOSE assassination plots after the Cuban missile crisis, and despite the president’s authorization of the Department of State’s William Atwood to open negotiations with Cuba about normalizing relations, the CIA was pursuing Fidel Castro’s death.

  Years later, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, would deny any knowledge of what was under way, but he clearly had grave differences with his commander in chief. He had lent CIA analysts to Senator John Stennis’s effort to kill Kennedy’s nuclear test-ban treaty.39 And as a former large stockholder and director of Standard Oil of California, he may have differed with Kennedy on the president’s recent threat to reduce the oil-depletion allowance, a move that would cost oil companies an estimated $280 million a year. He certainly had not liked the president’s July 1961 recommendation to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to dismember the CIA. He had been unhappy with Kennedy’s directives making the military responsible for all large covert operations like the Bay of Pigs and the CIA’s “Secret Army” in Indochina. And, of course, he had favored Diem in Vietnam.

  But he always followed the president’s orders. Had he not removed J. C. King from any control over Cuban affairs as his first act after taking over as director of the CIA?40 And had he not given the intelligence division more oversight over covert operations, setting up a special study group to restructure the CIA, appointing as one of its members General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, executive assistant to Governor Rockefeller?41

  THE BROKEN CROWN

  In November, two days after his brother declared himself the candidate for John Kennedy’s job, David Rockefeller announced the formation of the Business Group on Latin America. The president, who had encouraged David to organize the Business Group, graciously put out a
statement congratulating David on its founding. He was hoping that the Business Group might signal a rapprochement between himself and business over the Alliance for Progress.

  It did not. David was still opposed to rapid social reforms in Latin America and government-to-government loans. This sentiment was strong in the corporate world, and Kennedy was the object of increasing criticism from that quarter. The missile showdown had restored his popular support, and he was looking forward to taking on Barry Goldwater. But not Nelson Rockefeller. His candidacy remained Kennedy’s greatest fear. “I never saw more concentrated attention given to any political subject,” said Roswell Gilpatric.42

  It was understandable. On November 17, 1963, Nelson delivered his first major speech since formally announcing his candidacy. Kennedy, he said, was “jeopardizing the peace and demoralizing America’s allies with a weak, indecisive foreign policy.”43

  Nelson’s criticisms struck home precisely because they exploited a series of reversals in Kennedy’s Latin American policies. Military coups had badly rocked Latin America that year, shaking the administration’s confidence in the prodemocracy ideological foundation of its Alliance for Progress. The blows came in rapid, violent succession: Argentina and Guatemala in March, Peru and Ecuador in July, the Dominican Republic in September, and finally Honduras in October. Patterns were discernible. With the CIA’s nodding, if not prodding, the military had prevailed in Argentina and Ecuador.44 In Honduras, President Ramón Villeda Morales vacillated too long on Cuba. That, and his inability to crush Cuban-trained Nicaraguans who were passing across the Honduran border to fight dictator Luis Somoza, cost him his job.