The one
to keep an eye on is Gen. Lauris Norstad …
Lyndon Johnson’s Top Three Picks for the Warren Commission were in
order: ALLEN DULLES, JOHN J. MCCOY, and former
NATO Commander GEN. LAURIS NORSTAD.
From
Robert Morrow 512-306-1510
Lyndon Johnson - on the verge of being destroyed by the
Kennedys in the fall of 1963
J. Edgar Hoover- who the Kennedys were going to let face
mandatory retirement in 1965 when Hoover turned age 70.
Gen. Lauris Norstad - who JFK fought with over control of
nuclear weapons and who JFK removed from command and replace with Gen. Lyman
Lemnitzer. Norstad was Supreme Commander of NATO from 1956 to Jan. 1, 1963.
John J. McCloy - personal friends with Clint Murchison, Sr.,
an LBJ insider who absolutely hated the Kennedys. In fact, McCloy and Murchison
went dove hunting together in Mexico on Murchison, Sr.’s ranch in summer 1963.
Mae Newman, the Irish maid for the Murchisons in November, 1963 is on the
record saying the Murchisons were overjoyed, happy and celebrating the death of
JFK and the ascension of LBJ to the White House.
The nato commander, General Lauris Norstad, and two Air
Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power, stubbornly opposed White House
directives that reduced their authority to decide when to go nuclear. The
54-year-old Norstad confirmed his reputation as fiercely independent when two
high-profile Kennedy emissaries, thought to be Secretary of State Dean Rusk and
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, visited nato’s strategic military command in Belgium. They
asked whether Norstad’s primary obligation was to the United States or to its
European allies. “My first instinct was to hit” one of the Cabinet members for
“challenging my loyalty,” he recalled later. Instead, he tried to smile and
said, “ ‘Gentlemen, I think that ends this
meeting.’
Whereupon I walked out and slammed the door.” Norstad was so clearly reluctant to concede his commander
in chief’s ultimate authority that Bundy urged Kennedy to remind the general
that the president “is boss.”
(7) Telephone conversation between Lyndon B.
Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover (1.40 pm, 29th November, 1963)
Lyndon B. Johnson: Are you familiar with this proposed group that
they're trying to put together on this study of your report and other things -
two from the House, two from the Senate, somebody from the Court, a couple of
outsiders?
J. Edgar Hoover: No, I haven't heard of that. ... I think it would
be very, very bad to have a rash of investigations on this thing.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Well, the only way we can stop them is
probably to appoint a high-level one to evaluate your report and put somebody
that's pretty good on it that I can select... and tell the House and the
Senate not to go ahead... because they'll get a lot of television going and I
thought it would be bad.
J. Edgar Hoover: It would be a three-ring circus.
Lyndon B. Johnson: What do you think about Allen Dulles?
J. Edgar Hoover: I think he would be a good man.
Lyndon B. Johnson: What do you think about John McCloy?
J. Edgar Hoover: I'm not as enthusiastic about McCloy... I'm not
so certain as to the matter of the publicity that he might seek on it.
Lyndon B. Johnson: What about General Norstad?
J. Edgar Hoover: Good man.
Lyndon B. Johnson: I thought maybe I might try to get Boggs and
Jerry Ford in the House, maybe try to get Dick Russell and maybe Cooper in the
Senate.
J. Edgar Hoover: Yes, I think so.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Me and you are just going to talk like
brothers. ... I thought Russell could kind of look after the general
situation, see that the states and their relations -
J. Edgar Hoover: Russell would be an excellent man.
Lyndon B. Johnson: And I thought Cooper might look after the
liberal group.... He's a pretty judicious fellow but he's a pretty liberal
fellow. I wouldn't want Javits or some of those on it.
J. Edgar Hoover: No, no, no. Javits plays the front page a lot.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Cooper is kind of border state. It's not the
South and it's not the North.
J. Edgar Hoover: That's right.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Do you know Ford from Michigan?
J. Edgar Hoover: I know of him, but I don't know him. I saw him on
TV the other night for the first time and he handled himself well on that.
Lyndon B. Johnson: You know Boggs?
J. Edgar Hoover: Oh, yes, I know Boggs.
Lyndon B. Johnson: He's kind of the author of the resolution.
That's why. Now Walter tells me - Walter Jenkins - that you've designated Deke
(Cartha DeLoach) to work with us, like you did on the Hill, and I tell you I
sure appreciate that. I didn't ask for it 'cause ... I know you know how to run
your business better than anybody else... We consider him as high-class as you
do. And it is a mighty gracious thing to do. And we'll be mighty happy We
salute you for knowing how to pick good men.
J. Edgar Hoover: That's mighty nice of you, Mr. President, indeed.
We hope to have this thing wrapped up today, but could be we probably won't get
it before the first of the week. This angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal
of trouble because the story there is of this man Oswald getting $6,500 from
the Cuban embassy and then coming back to this country with it. We're not able to
prove that fact, but the information was that he was there on the 18th of
September in Mexico City and we are able to prove conclusively he was in New
Orleans that day. Now then they've changed the dates. The story came in
changing the dates to the 28th of September and he was in Mexico City on the
28th. Now the Mexican police have again arrested this woman Duran, who is a
member of the Cuban embassy... and we're going to confront her with the
original informant, who saw the money pass, so he says, and we're also going to
put the lie detector test on him.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Can you pay any attention to those lie detector
tests?
J. Edgar Hoover: I wouldn't want to be a party to sending a man to
the chair on a lie detector... We've found many cases where we've used them -
in a bank where there's been embezzlement - and a person will confess before
the lie detector test is finished. They're more or less fearful of the fact
that the lie detector test will show them guilty psychologically... Of course,
it is a misnomer to call it a lie detector because what it really is is the
evaluation of the chart that is made by this machine and that evaluation is
made by a human being.... On the other hand, if this Oswald had lived and had
taken the lie detector test and it had shown definitely that he had done these
various things together with the evidence that we very definitely have, it
would just have added that much more strength to it. There is no question but
that he is the man now - with the fingerprints and things we have. This fellow
Rubenstein down there - he has offered to take the lie detector test but his
lawyer has got to be, of course, consulted first and I doubt whether the lawyer
will allow it. He's one of these criminal lawyers from the West Coast and somewhat
like an Edward Bennett Williams type - and almost as much of a shyster.
Lyndon B. Johnson: (laughs) Have you got any relationship between
the two yet?
J. Edgar Hoover: No, at the present time we have not. There was a
story down there...
Lyndon B. Johnson: Was he ever in his bar and stuff like that?
JFK vs. the Military
By Robert Dallek for the Atlantic 2013
President
Kennedy faced a foe more relentless than Khrushchev, just across the Potomac:
the bellicose Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for the deployment of nuclear
weapons and kept pressing to invade Cuba. A presidential historian reveals that
Kennedy's success in fending them off may have been his most consequential
victory.
every enlisted man dreams of it: pulling rank on the
military’s highest brass. The heroics of John F. Kennedy, lieutenant, junior
grade, in the South Pacific after his PT‑109 was sunk in 1943
eased his way, 17 years later, to being elected the nation’s commander in
chief. In the White House, he fought—and defeated—his most determined military
foes, just across the Potomac: the members of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of
Staff. “Here was a president who had no military experience at all, sort of a
patrol-boat skipper in World War II,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman
Lemnitzer later said of Kennedy. Mutual respect, from the first, was in short
supply.
In
comparison, Nikita Khrushchev was a pushover, at least during the events that
brought President Kennedy’s most-notable achievements. By persuading the Soviet
leader to remove missiles from Fidel Castro’s Cuba and agree to a ban on
nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space, Kennedy
avoided a nuclear war and kept radioactive fallout from the air and the oceans,
thereby earning the country’s enduring regard for his effectiveness as a crisis
manager and negotiator. But less recognized is how much both of these
agreements rested on Kennedy’s ability to rein in and sidestep his own military
chiefs.
From
the start of his presidency, Kennedy feared that the Pentagon brass would
overreact to Soviet provocations and drive the country into a disastrous
nuclear conflict. The Soviets might have been pleased—or understandably
frightened—to know that Kennedy distrusted America’s military establishment
almost as much as they did.
The
Joint Chiefs of Staff reciprocated the new president’s doubts. Lemnitzer made
no secret of his discomfort with a 43-year-old president who he felt could not
measure up to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former five-star general Kennedy
had succeeded. Lemnitzer was a West Point graduate who had risen in the ranks
of Eisenhower’s World War II staff and helped plan the successful
invasions of North Africa and Sicily. The 61-year-old general, little known
outside military circles, stood 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, with a
bearlike frame, booming voice, and deep, infectious laugh. Lemnitzer’s passion
for golf and his ability to drive a ball 250 yards down a fairway endeared him
to Eisenhower. More important, he shared his mentor’s talent for maneuvering
through Army and Washington politics. Also like Ike, he wasn’t bookish or
particularly drawn to grand strategy or big-picture thinking—he was a
nuts-and-bolts sort of general who made his mark managing day-to-day problems.
To
Kennedy, Lemnitzer embodied the military’s old thinking about nuclear weapons.
The president thought a nuclear war would bring mutually assured destruction—mad, in the shorthand of the day—while
the Joint Chiefs believed the United States could fight such a conflict and
win. Sensing Kennedy’s skepticism about nukes, Lemnitzer questioned the new
president’s qualifications to manage the country’s defense. Since Eisenhower’s
departure, he lamented in shorthand, no longer was “a Pres with mil exp
available to guide JCS.” When the four-star general presented the ex-skipper
with a detailed briefing on emergency procedures for responding to a foreign
military threat, Kennedy seemed preoccupied with possibly having to make “a
snap decision” about whether to launch a nuclear response to a Soviet first
strike, by Lemnitzer’s account. This reinforced the general’s belief that
Kennedy didn’t sufficiently understand the challenges before him.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, the
59-year-old chief of naval operations, shared Lemnitzer’s doubts. An Annapolis
graduate with 37 years of service, Burke was an anti-Soviet hawk who believed
that U.S. military officials needed to intimidate Moscow with threatening
rhetoric. This presented an early problem for Kennedy, in that Burke “pushed
his black-and-white views of international affairs with bluff naval
persistence,” the Kennedy aide and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later
wrote. Kennedy had barely settled into the Oval Office when Burke planned to
publicly assail “the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast,” according to Arthur
Sylvester, a Kennedy-appointed Pentagon press officer who brought the proposed
speech text to the president’s attention. Kennedy ordered the admiral to back
off and required all military officers on active duty to clear any public
speeches with the White House. Kennedy did not want officers thinking they
could speak or act however they wished.
Kennedy’s
biggest worry about the military was not the personalities involved but rather
the freedom of field commanders to launch nuclear weapons without explicit
permission from the commander in chief. Ten days after becoming president,
Kennedy learned from his national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, that “a
subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could
start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative.” As Roswell L.
Gilpatric, Kennedy’s deputy defense secretary, recalled, “We became
increasingly horrified over how little positive control the president really
had over the use of this great arsenal of nuclear weapons.” To counter the
military’s willingness to use nuclear weapons against the Communists, Kennedy
pushed the Pentagon to replace Eisenhower’s strategy of “massive retaliation”
with what he called “flexible response”—a strategy of calibrated force that his
White House military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, had described in a 1959
book, The Uncertain Trumpet. But the brass resisted. The
stalemate in the Korean War had frustrated military chiefs and left them
inclined to use atomic bombs to ensure victory, as General Douglas MacArthur
had proposed. They regarded Kennedy as reluctant to put the nation’s nuclear
advantage to use and thus resisted ceding him exclusive control over decisions
about a first strike.
The nato commander, General Lauris Norstad, and two Air
Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power, stubbornly opposed White House
directives that reduced their authority to decide when to go nuclear. The
54-year-old Norstad confirmed his reputation as fiercely independent when two
high-profile Kennedy emissaries, thought to be Secretary of State Dean Rusk and
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, visited nato’s strategic military command in Belgium. They
asked whether Norstad’s primary obligation was to the United States or to its
European allies. “My first instinct was to hit” one of the Cabinet members for
“challenging my loyalty,” he recalled later. Instead, he tried to smile and
said, “ ‘Gentlemen, I think that ends this
meeting.’
Whereupon I walked out and slammed the door.” Norstad was so clearly reluctant to concede his commander
in chief’s ultimate authority that Bundy urged Kennedy to remind the general
that the president “is boss.”
General
Power, too, was openly opposed to limiting the use of America’s ultimate
weapons. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?”
he asked the lead author of a Rand study that counseled against attacking
Soviet cities at the outset of a war. “The whole idea is to kill the
bastards … At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one
Russian, we win.” Even Curtis LeMay, Power’s superior, described him as “not
stable” and a “sadist.”
The
54-year-old LeMay, known as “Old Iron Pants,” wasn’t much different. He shared
his subordinate’s faith in the untrammeled use of air power to defend the
nation’s security. The burly, cigar-chomping caricature of a general believed
the United States had no choice but to bomb its foes into submission. In World
War II, LeMay had been the principal architect of the incendiary attacks
by B‑29 heavy bombers that destroyed a large swath of Tokyo and killed about
100,000 Japanese—and, he was convinced, shortened the war. LeMay had no qualms
about striking at enemy cities, where civilians would pay for their
governments’ misjudgment in picking a fight with the United States.
During
the Cold War, LeMay was prepared to launch a preemptive nuclear first strike
against the Soviet Union. He dismissed civilian control of his decision making,
complained of an American phobia about nuclear weapons, and wondered privately,
“Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were secretary of defense?” Theodore
Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and alter ego, called LeMay “my least favorite
human being.”
The
strains between the generals and their commander in chief showed up in
exasperating ways. When Bundy asked the Joint Chiefs’ staff director for a copy
of the blueprint for nuclear war, the general at the other end of the line
said, “We never release that.” Bundy explained, “I don’t think you understand.
I’m calling for the president and he wants to see [it].” The chiefs’ reluctance
was understandable: their Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan foresaw the use of
170 atomic and hydrogen bombs in Moscow alone; the destruction of every major
Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European city; and hundreds of millions of deaths.
Sickened by a formal briefing on the plan, Kennedy turned to a senior
administration official and said, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
FIASCO
IN CUBA
The
tensions between Kennedy and the military chiefs were equally evident in his
difficulties with Cuba. In 1961, having been warned by the CIA and the Pentagon
about the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s determination to export communism to
other Latin American countries, Kennedy accepted the need to act against
Castro’s regime. But he doubted the wisdom of an overt U.S.-sponsored invasion
by Cuban exiles, fearing it would undermine the Alliance for Progress, his
administration’s effort to curry favor with Latin American republics by
offering financial aid and economic cooperation.
Nuclear tensions, and the bumbling at the
bay of pigs, convinced Kennedy that a primary task of his presidency was to
bring the military under strict control.
The
overriding question for Kennedy at the start of his term wasn’t whether to
strike against Castro but how. The trick was to topple his regime without
provoking accusations that the new administration in Washington was defending
U.S. interests at the expense of Latin autonomy. Kennedy insisted on an attack
by Cuban exiles that wouldn’t be seen as aided by the United States, a
restriction to which the military chiefs ostensibly agreed. They were
convinced, however, that if an invasion faltered and the new administration
faced an embarrassing defeat, Kennedy would have no choice but to take direct
military action. The military and the CIA “couldn’t believe that a new
president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face,” Kennedy later
told his aide Dave Powers. “Well, they had me figured all wrong.” Meeting with
his national-security advisers three weeks before the assault on Cuba’s Bay of
Pigs, according to State Department records, Kennedy insisted that leaders of
the Cuban exiles be told that “U.S. strike forces would not be allowed to
participate in or support the invasion in any way” and that they be asked
“whether they wished on that basis to proceed.”When the Cubans said they did,
Kennedy gave the final order for the attack.
The
operation was a miserable failure—more than 100 invaders killed and some 1,200
captured out of a force of about 1,400. Despite his determination to bar the
military from taking a direct role in the invasion, Kennedy was unable to
resist a last-minute appeal to use air power to support the exiles. Details
about the deaths of four Alabama Air National Guard pilots, who engaged in
combat with Kennedy’s permission as the invasion was collapsing, were long
buried in a CIA history of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (unearthed after Peter
Kornbluh of George Washington University’s National Security Archive filed a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2011). The document reveals that the
White House and the CIA told the pilots to call themselves mercenaries if they
were captured; the Pentagon took more than 15 years to recognize the airmen’s
valor, in a medal ceremony their families were required to keep secret. Even more
disturbing, this Bay of Pigs history includes CIA meeting notes—which Kennedy
never saw—predicting failure unless the U.S. intervened directly.
Afterward,
Kennedy accused himself of naïveté for trusting the military’s judgment that
the Cuban operation was well thought-out and capable of success. “Those sons of
bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,”
Kennedy said of the chiefs. He repeatedly told his wife, “Oh my God, the bunch
of advisers that we inherited!” Kennedy concluded that he was too little
schooled in the Pentagon’s covert ways and that he had been overly deferential
to the CIA and the military chiefs. He later told Schlesinger he had made the
mistake of thinking that “the military and intelligence people have some secret
skill not available to ordinary mortals.” His lesson: never rely on the
experts. Or at least: be skeptical of the inside experts’ advice, and consult
with outsiders who may hold a more detached view of the policy in question.
The
consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn’t an acceptance of Castro and his
control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by
stealth. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger
brother and closest confidant, echoed the thinking of the military chiefs when
he warned about the danger of ignoring Cuba or refusing to consider armed U.S.
action. McNamara directed the military to “develop a plan for the overthrow of
the Castro government by the application of U.S. military force.”
The
president, however, had no intention of rushing into anything. He was as keen
as everyone else in the administration to be rid of Castro, but he kept hoping
the American military needn’t be directly involved. The planning for an
invasion was meant more as an exercise for quieting the hawks within the
administration, the weight of evidence suggests, than as a commitment to adopt
the Pentagon’s bellicosity. The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified
Kennedy’s doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the
State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.
TAKING
CONTROL
During
the early weeks of his presidency, another source of tension between Kennedy
and the military chiefs was a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia. Laos
looked like a proving ground for Kennedy’s willingness to stand up to the
Communists, but he worried that getting drawn into a war in remote jungles was
a losing proposition. At the end of April 1961, while he was still reeling
from the Bay of Pigs, the Joint Chiefs recommended that he blunt a North
Vietnamese–sponsored Communist offensive in Laos by launching air strikes and
moving U.S. troops into the country via its two small airports. Kennedy asked
the military chiefs what they would propose if the Communists bombed the
airports after the U.S. had flown in a few thousand men. “You [drop] a bomb on
Hanoi,” Robert Kennedy remembered them replying, “and you start using atomic
weapons!” In these and other discussions, about fighting in North Vietnam and
China or intervening elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Lemnitzer promised, “If we
are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” By
Schlesinger’s account, President Kennedy dismissed this sort of thinking as
absurd: “Since [Lemnitzer] couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would
have to promise us victory.”
The
clash with Admiral Burke, tensions over nuclear-war planning, and the bumbling
at the Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that a primary task of his presidency was
to bring the military under strict control. Articles in Time and Newsweek that
portrayed Kennedy as less aggressive than the Pentagon angered him. He told his
press secretary, Pierre Salinger, “This shit has got to stop.”
Still,
Kennedy couldn’t ignore the pressure to end Communist control of Cuba. He
wasn’t ready to tolerate Castro’s government and its avowed objective of
exporting socialism to other Western Hemisphere countries. He was willing to
entertain suggestions for ending Castro’s rule as long as the Cuban regime
demonstrably provoked a U.S. military response or as long as Washington’s role
could remain concealed. To meet Kennedy’s criteria, the Joint Chiefs endorsed a
madcap plan called Operation Northwoods. It proposed carrying out terrorist
acts against Cuban exiles in Miami and blaming them on Castro, including
physically attacking the exiles and possibly destroying a boat loaded with
Cubans escaping their homeland. The plan also contemplated terrorist strikes elsewhere
in Florida, in hopes of boosting support domestically and around the world for
a U.S. invasion. Kennedy said no.
Policy
toward Cuba remained a minefield of bad advice. By late August 1962,
information was flooding in about a Soviet military buildup on the island.
Robert Kennedy urged Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs to consider
new “aggressive steps” that Washington could take, including, according to
notes from one discussion, “provoking an attack against Guantanamo which would
permit us to retaliate.” The military chiefs insisted that Castro could be
toppled “without precipitating general war”; McNamara favored sabotage and
guerrilla warfare. They suggested that manufactured acts of sabotage at
Guantánamo as well as other provocations could justify U.S. intervention. But
Bundy, speaking for the president, cautioned against action that could
instigate a blockade of West Berlin or a Soviet strike against U.S. missile
sites in Turkey and Italy.
The events that became the Cuban missile crisis
triggered Americans’ fears of a nuclear war, and McNamara shared Kennedy’s
concerns about the military’s casual willingness to rely on nuclear weapons.
“The Pentagon is full of papers talking about the preservation of a ‘viable
society’ after nuclear conflict,” McNamara told Schlesinger. “That ‘viable
society’ phrase drives me mad … A credible deterrent cannot be based on an
incredible act.”
The October 1962 missile crisis widened the
divide between Kennedy and the military brass. The chiefs favored a full-scale,
five-day air campaign against the Soviet missile sites and Castro’s air force,
with an option to invade the island afterward if they thought necessary. The
chiefs, responding to McNamara’s question about whether that might lead to
nuclear war, doubted the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear response to any U.S.
action. And conducting a surgical strike against the missile sites and nothing
more, they advised, would leave Castro free to send his air force to Florida’s
coastal cities—an unacceptable risk.
Kennedy rejected the chiefs’ call for a
large-scale air attack, for fear it would create a “much more hazardous” crisis
(as he was taped telling a group in his office) and increase the likelihood of
“a much broader struggle,” with worldwide repercussions. Most U.S. allies
thought the administration was “slightly demented” in seeing Cuba as a serious
military threat, he reported, and would regard an air attack as “a mad act.”
Kennedy was also skeptical about the wisdom of landing U.S. troops in Cuba:
“Invasions are tough, hazardous,” a lesson he had learned at the Bay of Pigs.
The biggest decision, he thought, was determining which action “lessens the
chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.”
Kennedy told his
paramour something he could never have admitted in public: “I’d rather my
children be red than dead.”
Kennedy decided to impose a
blockade—what he described more diplomatically as a quarantine—of Cuba without
consulting the military chiefs with any seriousness. He needed their tacit
support in case the blockade failed and military steps were required. But he
was careful to hold them at arm’s length. He simply did not trust their
judgment; weeks earlier, the Army had been slow to respond when James
Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi touched off
riots. “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and
their split-second timing, but it never works out,” Kennedy had said. “No
wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” Kennedy waited for three days after learning
that a U-2 spy plane had confirmed the Cuban missiles’ presence before sitting
down with the military chiefs to discuss how to respond—and then for only 45
minutes.
That meeting convinced Kennedy that he had been
well advised to shun the chiefs’ counsel. As the session started, Maxwell
Taylor—by then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—said the chiefs had
agreed on a course of action: a surprise air strike followed by surveillance to
detect further threats and a blockade to stop shipments of additional weapons.
Kennedy replied that he saw no “satisfactory alternatives” but considered a
blockade the least likely to bring a nuclear war. Curtis LeMay was forceful in
opposing anything short of direct military action. The Air Force chief dismissed
the president’s apprehension that the Soviets would respond to an attack on
their Cuban missiles by seizing West Berlin. To the contrary, LeMay argued:
bombing the missiles would deter Moscow, while leaving them intact would only
encourage the Soviets to move against Berlin. “This blockade and political
action … will lead right into war,” LeMay warned, and the Army, Navy, and
Marine Corps chiefs agreed.
“This is almost as bad as the appeasement at
Munich,” LeMay declared. “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the
present time.”
Kennedy took offense. “What did you say?”
“You’re in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay replied,
refusing to back down.
The president masked his anger with a laugh.
“You’re in there with me,” he said.
After Kennedy and his advisers
left the room, a tape recorder caught the military brass blasting the commander
in chief. “You pulled the rug right out from under him,” Marine Commandant
David Shoup crowed to LeMay. “If somebody could keep them from doing the
goddamn thing piecemeal—that’s our problem. You go in there and friggin’ around
with the missiles, you’re screwed … Do it right and quit friggin’ around.”
Kennedy, too, was angry—“just choleric,” said
Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric, who saw the president shortly afterward.
“He was just beside himself, as close as he ever got.”
“These brass hats have one great advantage,”
Kennedy told his longtime aide Kenny O’Donnell. “If we … do what they want
us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
BETTER “RED THAN DEAD”
Jackie Kennedy told her husband that if the
Cuban crisis ended in a nuclear war, she and their children wanted to die with
him. But it was Mimi Beardsley, his 19-year-old intern turned paramour, who
spent the night of October 27 in his bed. She witnessed his “grave”
expression and “funereal tone,” she wrote in a 2012 memoir, and he told her
something he could never have admitted in public: “I’d rather my children be
red than dead.” Almost anything was better, he believed, than nuclear war.
Kennedy’s civilian advisers were elated when
Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles. But the military chiefs refused to
believe that the Soviet leader would actually do what he had promised. They
sent the president a memo accusing Khrushchev of delaying the missiles’
departure “while preparing the ground for diplomatic blackmail.” Absent
“irrefutable evidence” of Khrushchev’s compliance, they continued to recommend
a full-scale air strike and an invasion.
Kennedy ignored their advice. Hours after the
crisis ended, when he met with some of the military chiefs to thank them for
their help, they made no secret of their disdain. LeMay portrayed the
settlement as “the greatest defeat in our history” and said the only remedy was
a prompt invasion. Admiral George Anderson, the Navy chief of staff, declared,
“We have been had!” Kennedy was described as “absolutely shocked” by their
remarks; he was left “stuttering in reply.” Soon afterward, Benjamin Bradlee, a
journalist and friend, heard him erupt in “an explosion … about his
forceful, positive lack of admiration for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Yet Kennedy could not simply disregard their
advice. “We must operate on the presumption that the Russians may try again,”
he told McNamara. When Castro refused to allow United Nations inspectors to
look for nuclear missiles and continued to pose a subversive threat throughout
Latin America, Kennedy continued planning to oust him from power. Not by an
invasion, however. “We could end up bogged down,” Kennedy wrote to McNamara on
November 5. “We should keep constantly in mind the British in Boer War,
the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the
North Koreans.” He also worried that violating the understanding he had with
Khrushchev not to invade Cuba would invite condemnation from around the world.
Still, his administration’s goal in Cuba had not
changed. “Our ultimate objective with respect to Cuba remains the overthrow of
the Castro regime and its replacement by one sharing the aims of the Free
World,” read a White House memo to Kennedy dated December 3, which
suggested that “all feasible diplomatic economic, psychological and other
pressures” be brought to bear. All, indeed. The Joint Chiefs described themselves
as ready to use “nuclear weapons for limited war operations in the Cuban area,”
professing that “collateral damage to nonmilitary facilities and population
casualties will be held to a minimum consistent with military necessity”—an
assertion they surely knew was nonsense. A 1962 report by the Department of
Defense on “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” acknowledged that exposure to
radiation was likely to cause hemorrhaging, producing “anemia and death …
If death does not take place in the first few days after a large dose of
radiation, bacterial invasion of the blood stream usually occurs and the
patient dies of infection.”
Kennedy did not formally veto the military
chiefs’ plan for a nuclear attack on Cuba, but he had no intention of acting on
it. He knew that the notion of curbing collateral damage was less a realistic
possibility than a way for the brass to justify their multitudes of nuclear
bombs. “What good are they?,” Kennedy asked McNamara and the military chiefs a
few weeks after the Cuban crisis. “You can’t use them as a first weapon
yourself. They are only good for deterring … I don’t see quite why we’re
building as many as we’re building.”
In the wake of the missile crisis, Kennedy and
Khrushchev both reached the sober conclusion that they needed to rein in the
nuclear arms race. Kennedy’s announced quest for an arms-control agreement with
Moscow rekindled tensions with his military chiefs—specifically, over a ban on
testing nuclear bombs anywhere but underground. In June 1963, the chiefs
advised the White House that every proposal they had reviewed for such a ban
had shortcomings “of major military significance.” A limited test ban, they
warned, would erode U.S. strategic superiority; later, they said so publicly in
congressional testimony.
The following month, as the veteran diplomat
W. Averell Harriman prepared to leave for Moscow to negotiate a
nuclear-test ban, the chiefs privately called such a step at odds with the
national interest. Kennedy saw them as a treaty’s greatest domestic impediment.
“If we don’t get the chiefs just right,” he told Mike Mansfield, the Senate
majority leader, “we can … get blown.” To quiet their objections to
Harriman’s mission, Kennedy promised them a chance to speak their minds in
Senate hearings should a treaty emerge for ratification, even as he instructed
them to consider more than military factors. Meanwhile, he made sure to exclude
military officers from Harriman’s delegation, and decreed that the Department
of Defense—except for Maxwell Taylor—receive none of the cables reporting
developments in Moscow.
“The first thing I’m going to tell my
successor,” Kennedy told guests at the White House, “is to watch the generals,
and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions
on military matters were worth a damn.”
Persuading the military chiefs to refrain from
attacking the test-ban treaty in public required intense pressure from the
White House and the drafting of treaty language permitting the United States to
resume testing if it were deemed essential to national safety. LeMay, however,
testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, could not resist
planting doubts: Kennedy and McNamara had promised to keep testing nuclear
weaponry underground and to continue research and development in case
circumstances changed, he said, but they had not discussed “whether what [the
chiefs] consider an adequate safeguard program coincides with their idea on the
subject.” The Senate decisively approved the treaty nonetheless.
This gave Kennedy yet another triumph over a
cadre of enemies more relentless than the ones he faced in Moscow. The
president and his generals suffered a clash of worldviews, of generations—of
ideologies, more or less—and every time they met in battle, JFK’s fresher way
of fighting prevailed.
The Close Ties of Clint
Murchison, Sr with key players in JFK assassination and cover up
In my opinion, Clint Murchison, Sr., along with Lyndon Johnson,
were 2 two of the key ringleaders of the JFK assassination. John J. McCloy was
one of the key architects of the cover up of the 1963 Coup d'Etat. McCloy was
so close to both Texas oil barons and the pinnacle of US intelligence, folks
like Allen Dulles, that he MUST at least be considered a suspect in the JFK
assassination plotting.
You can read about the business and personal relationships between
John J. McCloy and Clint Murchison, Sr. in the Kai Bird biography of John
McCloy: The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American
Establishment. In 1954 McCloy helped to broker a big railroad take over deal in
New York that Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson were investors. (pp. 431-432).
Then there is
this nugget from 1963 which shows the close personal ties between John J.
McCloy and Clint Murchison, Sr.:
"That summer, McCloy relaxed more than he
had for many years. He hunted whitewings with Clint Murchison on the
Texas oil man's Mexico farm." [Kai Bird, The Chairman, p. 542]
That is the
SAME John McCloy who Lyndon Johnson appoints to the Warren Commission on
11/29/63 later in that year.
Now check out
this passage from the biography Clint: Clint Williams Murchison by Ernestine
Orrick Van Buren who was Murchison's personal secretary for 20 years. Note 3
things: 1) Murchison is in "cold disbelief" at the idea of Lyndon
Johnson on the ticket with John Kennedy. 2) The author completely skips over
the Kennedy years. 3) Clint turns down an LBJ presidential phone call to resume
a nap. That shows hierarchy. Very few folks turn down a presidential phone
call.
"Clint was in La Jolla during the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, in July 1960, and he avidly followed the
proceedings on television. The avalanche of superb organization which gave John
F. Kennedy the nomination on the first ballot was a huge disappointment. When
the word was flashed that Lyndon Johnson had accepted the vice-presidential
spot on the Kennedy ticket, Clint Murchison listened in cold disbelief.
In December 1963, soon after Lyndon Johnson became president
following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there was a soft rap on the
bedroom door where Clint was napping. It was Warren Tilley, butler at Gladoak
Farms. "Washington calling, Mr. Murchison. The president [Lyndon Johnson]
wants to speak with you.
A brief silence followed. Then through the closed door came
the muffled voice of Clint Murchison. "Tell the president I can't hear
him." Clint resumed his nap."*
*Virginia Murchison Linthicum Interview, September 20, 1980
[Ernestine Orrick Van Buren,
Clint, pp. 317-318]
