Washington Decoded

Concocting the Dots

Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder
By Gus Russo and Stephen Molton 
Bloomsbury. 484 pp. $32.50

Print

By Brian Latell

    Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researcher Gus Russo. In his 1998 book, Live by the Sword, and now in Brothers in Arms, written with Stephen Molton, Russo labors to implicate Castro in the murder in Dallas.[1]

    It is not an unreasonable postulation. No one had more compelling motive to eliminate the president than the Cuban leader who had known of CIA and White House plots against his life since at least 1961. His regime was the target of unrelenting American assaults—sabotage operations, assassination plots, support for guerrillas, and encouragement of military coup plotters—that began with the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, persisted after the missile crisis in October 1962, and lasted the entirety of the Kennedy administration.

    On the receiving end, Castro had no illusions about the source of all this or how determined his enemies were to annihilate his revolution. He feared Kennedy and had  every reason to plot against him in a similar fashion. In early September, 1963, during an impromptu press conference in Havana, Castro even warned the Kennedy administration that “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”[2] Never one to issue idle threats, or to let enemies conspire against him with impunity, Fidel, at a minimum, must have considered retaliation in kind.[3]

    By the early 1960s, Castro was amply experienced in plotting and ordering assassinations of adversaries. As a university student in the late 1940s, he was implicated in three or four attempts, once even seriously proposing the murder of Cuba’s president during a visit with other students to the presidential residence.[4] As a revolutionary in Mexico in 1956 he ordered his brother Raúl to execute a Cuban who was no longer trusted. Once in power in 1959, Fidel ordered many other executions and murders of foes at home and abroad. And by late 1963, as the conspiratorial czar of Cuban intelligence, he had built up one of the world’s most proficient and lethal covert capabilities.

    These capacities encompassed all manner of medidas activas (active measures), including sophisticated disinformation campaigns devised to point the finger of suspicion for Kennedy’s death anywhere but toward Havana. Within a few days of the assassination, Castro went to his speaker’s platform and launched a propaganda campaign to suggest that right-wing conspirators, probably linked to the CIA, were really responsible. Later, two international conferences sponsored by Cuban intelligence pushed the same exculpatory line. Indeed, to this day the Castro regime is responsible for a ceaseless stream of books, feature articles in the controlled-Cuban press, and other publications that have one thing in common: they all attempt to pin the Kennedy assassination on a right-wing conspiracy.[5]

    But explaining away Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban connections has not been easy for Cuban intelligence. As an impressionable young Marine in California in 1958, he fantasized about going AWOL to join Castro’s guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. He hung Fidel’s picture on the wall of his apartment in New Orleans. He mused about naming his unborn first child Fidel. The alias he used when he bought the assassination rifle (A. Hidell) rhymed with Fidel. He tried to talk his wife Marina into helping him hijack a plane to Cuba so he could fight for “Uncle Fidel.” He read copious amounts of print propaganda about his idol and was adept at repeating it.

Harvard Does Dallas

Print

By Max Holland

    David Kaiser’s The Road to Dallas, as John McAdams’s March review makes abundantly clear, is scarcely different from dozens of conspiracy-mongering books on the Kennedy assassination that have been published in the last 44 years.

    The over-ingenious fantasy Kaiser conjures up—that the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and right-wingers conspired to kill Kennedy—is better written than some of the buff literature, viz., A Farewell to Justice, Joan Mellen’s hagiography of Jim Garrison. Yet ultimately, The Road to Dallas exhibits all the familiar defects of the conspiratorial mindset. Kaiser is credulous about the dubious, and skeptical about the obvious.

    Still, Kaiser’s book arguably deserves to be in the public marketplace of ideas, despite the small amount of genuinely new material in it. Given the conceptual quality of the book, however, one would think a second-tier publisher was responsible for foisting it onto the public. Instead, the name on the spine is Belknap Press, the prestigious imprint of Harvard University Press (HUP), one of the most venerable academic publishers in the nation—and this is what sets Kaiser’s book jarringly apart.[1]

    The publishing of the book is much more interesting than the book itself, as critic Scott McLemee was the first to point out, akin to a “mutation in the cultural genome.” As McLemee asked in his March 19 Inside Higher Ed column, “Why did one of the country’s most distinguished scholarly publishers decide to contribute to a genre that has flourished mainly on the cultural margins for almost five decades?”[2]

    The scholarly sheen given The Road to Dallas is not wholly unprecedented, to be sure. A few other fallacious books about the assassination have received the academic stamp of approval.[3] Still, that begs the question: How did The Road to Dallas ever survive the gauntlet of peer-review at the august Harvard University Press, which is part of an industry that likes to think of itself as “a bulwark against the confusions of error and unsupported opinion, of ideology masquerading as fact, magic as science, and prejudice as theory.”[4]

    Neither Kaiser nor HUP was willing to answer questions about the editorial vetting The Road to Dallas underwent. “Any such questions would have to be addressed to the Press,” Kaiser responded when asked, and HUP refused to disclose information about its editorial process in general, or as it pertained to Kaiser’s book specifically.[5] Indeed, insofar as HUP is concerned, the rotating membership on its Board of Syndics—or what other university presses call their editorial or publications committee, and readily make public—is top secret.[6]

    Some reticence and confidentiality about the editorial process, of course, is understandable and normal. Peer-review can be highly politicized, and no author would relish having the process laid bare for everyone to ponder. The published book, after all, is what finally matters, not the sometimes twisted and torturous path to publication. Still, when a press as distinguished as HUP publishes a book that makes a bald claim about a controversial matter—“the assassination . . . was an appalling and grisly conspiracy”—some transparency would seem advisable.

    Put another way, if HUP were to put its reputation on the line by publishing a book that “proved” 9/11 was an inside job, wouldn’t some kind of explanation be in order?

An Objective Historian

    Before HUP’s editorial process is explored, one of the fictions at the heart of Kaiser’s book merits exposure.

    The book is advertised as the first to be written by a credentialed historian who has researched newly-available archives; in addition, the book features a back-jacket blurb, written by G. Robert Blakey, which asserts that Kaiser came to the task without prejudice or an ax to grind:

Finally, a historian, without preconceptions, has looked at the voluminous, once secret documents produced by the CIA, the FBI, and other government agencies in response to the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992. Kaiser’s nuanced conclusions on Oswald’s guilt and the ominous issue of conspiracy will command respect from even those who disagree with them.

    Yet, far from being someone who began the project without a predisposition, Kaiser has demonstrated a bias toward a conspiratorial explanation for at least 25 years, and HUP surely knew about his predilection when it undertook the project in 2004.

Road to Nowhere

Despite its scholarly trappings, The Road to Dallas is a run-of-the-mill conspiracy book.

The Road to Dallas: The Assassination
    of John F. Kennedy
By David Kaiser
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 509 pp. $35

Print

By John McAdams

    At first glance, David Kaiser’s book promises to be one of the more sensible volumes on the JFK assassination. Published by an esteemed press, it is written by a reputable, experienced historian. Kaiser, moreover, is one of the first from his profession to plumb the voluminous collection of once-secret documents assiduously collected, at some cost to the US taxpayer, by the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.

    In several respects, Kaiser does not disappoint. He cheerfully concedes that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president in Dealey Plaza, and accepts the single bullet explanation.[1] He supplies a solid account of Kennedy-era assassination plots against Fidel Castro (which originated under President Eisenhower), and he provides a workmanlike narrative of the Kennedy administration’s campaign against organized crime. Unlike so many authors writing about the assassination, Kaiser is not in Camelot’s thrall, and he does not whitewash any of the questionable actions of the Kennedy brothers.[2] Among other things, he describes the tactics of the Senate “Rackets” Committee, of which Robert Kennedy was the top staffer, as “reminiscent of” those used by the far more notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as Joe McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee on investigations.[3]

    But not far into the book, Kaiser’s judgment deserts him. He tries to make the case that the Kennedys’ anti-Castro plots and crusade against organized crime climaxed in the president’s assassination, and he hammers the facts until they fit this thesis. The result is a clanking, Rube Goldberg-style conspiracy contraption that falls of its own weight. Far from uncovering an “appalling and grisly conspiracy,” as the book’s catalog copy asserts, Kaiser merely recycles hoary claims that have been debunked for decades, while putting back into circulation innuendo and unproven allegations. Kaiser ignores very stubborn facts whenever they are inconvenient to his smoke-and-mirrors history.

Links Where There Are None

    Kaiser has a penchant–one fatal to serious history–for the most unreliable evidence and the most implausible scenarios.

    Take, for example, his attempt to link Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, to the Mafia in a way that might implicate Ruby in a conspiracy to kill JFK. Kaiser claims that in 1959, Ruby visited Santo Trafficante in Trescornia prison in Cuba not long after Castro’s overthrow of the Batista dictatorship. If true, the encounter would seem to be highly significant, because it would tie Ruby to a high-level mobster soon to be involved in the CIA’s efforts to eliminate Castro.

    Kaiser correctly cites John Wilson-Hudson, a British journalist, as the source for this claim. But Wilson-Hudson could hardly be more unreliable as a source, and he is also the sole source for the alleged visit. Years before the assassination, one CIA document from 1959 labeled Wilson-Hudson as being “mentally unbalanced.”[4] Another document, from 1963, reported that “altho[ugh] Wilson [is] intelligent, erratic behavior indicates mental unbalance”; in addition, he was deemed “violently anti-US.”[5] Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was all but determined to pin the assassination on the Mafia regardless of the evidence, treated Wilson-Hudson’s claim gingerly. HSCA’s final report refused to embrace Wilson-Hudson’s allegation, most likely because a committee staffer reviewed the journalist’s CIA file, which included other evaluations such as “believe on first returns from FBI check he [is] likely [to] be [a] psychopath.”[6]

    Yet for Kaiser, none of these red flags matter sufficiently. Wilson-Hudson’s story is too pivotal to the conspiracy Kaiser is determined to construct, no matter how flimsy the foundation.

    Another key piece of evidence Kaiser presents to implicate Ruby involves long-distance phone calls Ruby made to various mob-upped people around the country in the days immediately prior to the assassination. Ruby’s contemporaneous explanation was that he was having trouble with the strippers’ union, the mob-connected American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). The Warren Commission left it at that, but in the late 1970s, HSCA reopened the matter and it analyzed these calls in detail. Its investigators found that most of them could easily be accounted for by Ruby’s problems with the AGVA, although HSCA did leave the door open for some of the calls having been suspicious.[7] Subsequently, author Gerald Posner investigated three calls that HSCA thought might be worrisome, but he only found that they, too, were related to Ruby’s labor troubles.[8]

    None of this bothers Kaiser, who prefers innuendo.[9] He somehow fails to notice that there were too many calls for them to be conspiratorial. Are we supposed to believe that six or eight hoodlums, from all over the country, were being directed to catch a plane to Dallas and show up in time to help cover-up the killing of Kennedy? Of course, Kaiser might say that only one or two of the calls were conspiratorial. Even so, he has to admit that a large number were exactly what Ruby and the people who received them said they were: appeals for help in dealing with the AVGA. And if most of the calls were, it’s perfectly plausible that all of them were.

Civics Lesson

The Commission: The Uncensored History
    of the 9/11 Investigation
By Philip Shenon
TWELVE. 457 pp. $27

Print

By Max Holland

The citizens who lost beloved ones on September 11, 2001 were once like most Americans: politically disengaged if not disenchanted, preoccupied with family and friends, earning a living, and life’s pleasures. On 9/10, a majority of them would undoubtedly have been hard pressed to name George Bush’s national security adviser. “Is it Colin Powell?” But her identity hardly seemed to matter outside the beltway until precisely 9:03:11 AM on September 11. At that moment a second passenger jet crashed into the World Trade Center, and it instantly became apparent that the federal government had failed miserably in a most fundamental obligation.

    There are a hundred different ways to write about 9/11’s impact, but surely one of the most revealing is the unwanted civics lesson the bereaved families received after the terrorist attacks. For many of them, their last exposure to how federal government works was probably a high school class, and they only dimly remembered “how a bill becomes law.” But they naturally wanted answers and accountability from their government in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Why had fathers, sons, and brothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—non-combatants all—been killed, most of them pulverized beyond recognition, for the crime of showing up on time?

    What these families received instead of prompt answers was an advanced and protracted course in high-stakes Washington politics. To denizens of the nation’s capital, who have devoted their lives to working in or covering government, none of this came as a particular surprise. To the families, particularly the so-called “Jersey Girls” who spear-headed the search for answers and accountability, it was in many ways a bitter education.[1]

    This clash is at the heart of Philip Shenon’s book on the 9/11 Commission. Shenon, who was the lead reporter on the panel for The New York Times, has written an account of the commission’s 20-month investigation from start to finish. In the process, The Commission unavoidably lays bare the difference between what we are taught to think about how the government works, and the actual, often deflating, reality. After reading it, one cannot help but think back to Attorney General Janet Reno’s response to the 1993 debacle at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Reno did the unimaginable: she promptly took responsibility for a decision that turned out to have terrible consequences. But her public contrition was the exception that proved the rule. In Washington, the single hardest thing to do is to get a government official or agency to own up to a mistake—the finely-honed strategies of avoidance would tax the imagination of any great novelist.

    Shenon skips the first semester in the education, i.e., the protracted political wrangling that lasted more than a year before President Bush reluctantly signed the legislation creating the commission on November 27, 2002.[2] The White House’s opposition was comprehensible if untenable, and almost certainly reflected the then-dominant mentality of Vice President Dick Cheney. Experienced Washington hands know that commissions tend to take on a life of their own and can be unpredictable. Besides, any bipartisan commission would be an irresistible vehicle for Democrats bent on making the Bush administration bear the lion’s share of responsibility for 9/11. And if they succeeded, George Bush could presumably kiss good-bye his chances of being re-elected.

    Shenon’s basic argument, however, is that rather than becoming an instrument of Bush’s demise, the commission helped reelect George Bush. As the panel’s general counsel, Daniel Marcus, a liberal Democrat, put it to Shenon, the August 2004 final report, by “pulling its punches” to achieve unanimity, mainly served to remind Americans of a dire threat to their security and well-being.[3] It thus played into the hands of the White House’s re-election strategy, which was to depict George Bush as far more reliable and steady than John Kerry in the face of this existential menace.

    At least one commissioner, though, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey (D), takes strong exception to the view Shenon posits. Kerrey argues that the 9/11 Report provided plenty of fodder for the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, and that the real problem was John Kerry’s failure to exploit fully what was in the final report. Rather than harp on the warnings that went unheeded inside the White House, Kerry stupidly (from a political point of view) concentrated on trying to express more enthusiasm for the report than did the White House, which abruptly decided it liked the final document after all. Kerry was also content with trying to outbid Bush in terms of the haste with which a Democrat would implement the panel’s recommendations.

    Bob Kerrey may have a point. Any Democratic nominee with a sure instinct for the jugular—say, John F. Kennedy, who based his 1960 campaign on a non-existent “missile gap”—might easily have turned the 9/11 Report to partisan advantage. That John Kerry did not says more about his political instincts than about the report.

    Shenon ignores this nuance, perhaps because it clashes with his major theme, which is a very dramatic one: that the commission’s ability to report the truth was neutered and neutralized by an executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was allowed to serve despite deep conflicts-of-interest, as well as surreptitious ties to the White House, including with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Although there are other revelations, the book’s axis of criticism is almost entirely about Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Shenon’s book is a blistering critique of Zelikow’s performance, and a not-very-veiled criticism of the commission co-chairmen (Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton) who hired him in the first place, and then allowed Zelikow to stay on even after his multi-faceted conflicts-of-interest were fully revealed under oath.

    Kean and Hamilton’s seeming obliviousness to appearances, which can be more important than private realities when the political and historical stakes are so high, certainly gnawed at the 9/11 relatives, several of whom called for Zelikow’s resignation or recusal from the most sensitive aspects of the inquiry about half-way through the commission’s term. In this regard, Shenon’s critique closely parallels the perspective of these 9/11 families, who believe the investigation they had to fight for tooth and nail was fatally compromised after Zelikow assumed the commission’s most important job.

    Shenon goes to some pains to refute the most extreme interpretation of Zelikow’s hiring: that he was a “mole” emplaced by the White House to thwart the issuance of a devastating report. In fact, his name was put into play by former Senator Slade Gorton (R-Washington). Zelikow then quickly dazzled the co-chairmen, Tom Kean (R), a former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton (D), a former Indiana congressman, who were responsible for hiring an executive director. One measure of the suspicion generated by Zelikow’s appointment, however, is that this “mole” allegation is widely circulated and given credence (particularly on conspiracy-oriented websites) despite its falsity.

    Shenon’s portrait of Zelikow is depressingly familiar to anyone who has worked under him, as I did.[4] A lawyer and foreign service officer before entering academia, Zelikow has many of the traits once ascribed to a young Henry Kissinger, minus the accent and Central European charm. Zelikow is routinely described, and rightly so, as having a keen and quick mind. He speaks in complete paragraphs, and has a striking capacity for boiling down a complicated problem, conveying its essence, and proposing a solution. He is also, as Shenon depicts, tightly wound, arrogant, unctuous, and prone to bullying. Kissinger himself probably summed up Zelikow best when Kean asked him what he thought about appointing the University of Virginia professor. “[Zelikow’s] one of the most brilliant men I know,” Kissinger responded. “But you will not like him. Nobody does.”[5]

Five Best Books on the Conspiracy Mindset

These works help untangle the mysterious popularity of conspiracy theories

Print

By Max Holland

1. The Paranoid Style in American Politics
     By Richard Hofstadter, Knopf, 1965

    First conceived as a university lecture, Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay—the title work in this collection—remains the place to begin any discussion of conspiracy theories. “Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” are hallmarks of the paranoid style, writes Hofstadter (1916-70). To paranoia’s purveyors, “history is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.” Hofstadter was writing about extreme right-wing groups, such as the John Birch Society, that flourished in the early 1960s. It’s a pity that he is not here to analyze today’s extreme leftists who promote the line that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 terror attacks.

2. Enemies Within
     By Robert Alan Goldberg, Yale, 2001

    Of the nearly dozen books that have been published in the past decade about the rise of conspiracism, historian Robert Alan Goldberg’s Enemies Within is unrivaled. He explores five conspiracy theories that have gained popularity in the past half-century: the cover-up of a UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico; the plot against black America; the rise of the anti-Christ; the establishment of the New World Order; and, of course, the assassination of JFK. Goldberg expertly illuminates the political and social conditions that have allowed conspiracy-mongers, once consigned to the lunatic fringe, to creep into the mainstream.

3. The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies
     By William Hanchett, University of Illinois, 1983

    To understand conspiratorial thinking, it is instructive to study how explanations for a historical event evolve over time. No work is more useful in this regard than William Hanchett’s The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies. Lincoln’s assassination was, of course, part of a real conspiracy aimed at decapitating the federal government. Most of the schemers were caught and executed. But the chief mover, John Wilkes Booth, was killed before he could be arrested, denying the country the catharsis of a courtroom drama and a definitive account of what occurred. Thus competing theories about the assassination began to appear. By tracing them during the century following Lincoln’s death, Hanchett illustrates an immutable truth: Ultimately, conspiracy theories tell us more about their authors and about human nature than they do about the event itself.

4. Praise From a Future Generation
    By John Kelin, Wings Press, 2007

    This work deserves to be read—but not for the purpose the author intended. According to John Kelin, a few hardy souls in the late 1960s dared speak truth to power and turned the American public against the government’s “unacceptable” Warren Report of 1964 investigating JFK’s assassination. The real history is more complicated, and large chunks of it are missing from this book. You will not learn from Kelin, for instance, that Mark Lane—a New York lawyer who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s self-appointed chief defender—was secretly subsidized by the KGB. Yet because Kelin draws heavily from primary sources—mostly private letters between “assassination buffs,” as writer Calvin Trillin dubbed them back then—this book is a fascinating portrait of how conspiracy theories about JFK’s death were nurtured mostly by liberals desperate to find an alternate explanation for the murder of President Kennedy by an avowed Marxist.

5. Presidential Commissions & National Security
    By Kenneth Kitts, Lynne Rienner, 2006

    When a monumental event occurs that transcends the power of the courts to uncover the truth, the US government turns to special commissions—most recently for the investigation into the 9/11 terror attacks. The findings are usually well received, but over time the authority of these efforts often wanes. In Presidential Commissions & National Security, Kenneth Kitts shows why federal panels are imperfect and why they often inadvertently spur the conspiracy thinking they are designed to minimize. The Roberts Commission report on Pearl Harbor, for instance, begot countless books alleging that President Roosevelt knew in advance about the attack. No matter how lofty their aims, Kitts says, government-commission reports are inevitably political documents and will come to be seen as such.

     Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal © 2008, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

               All rights reserved.

McCarthy, According to Evans (and Novak)

Blacklisted by History:
   The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy
   and His Fight Against America’s Enemies
By M. Stanton Evans
Crown Forum. 663 pp. $29.95

Print

By John Earl Haynes

    Eight years after Arthur Herman, here comes Stan Evans with another effort to pull off what most historians would regard as a Herculean (if not Sisyphean) task: the rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy.

    As did his predecessor, Evans does an excellent job of correcting excesses in the historical record — the unthinking, near-hysterical, and far too common demonization of McCarthy. Indeed, Evans’s book is more detailed, and he conducted more original and diligent research into primary documentation than did Herman in his account of “America’s most hated senator.”[1]

     So comprehensive is Evans’s research that it will be a foolish historian who does not consult Blacklisted by History when a question arises over some person or event that comes into the McCarthy story. Unlike Herman, however, whose bottom-line appraisal was positive but qualified, Stan Evans’s defense is more full-throated. While granting that McCarthy was “a flawed champion of the cause he served,” Evans judges that the cause needed a “warrior” like McCarthy, and finds that McCarthy had a highly positive impact on public opinion, on America’s Asian policy, and on government security policy.[2]

    The American Communist Party was a clear and present danger, as McCarthy and Evans would have it, in the early Cold War. But its chief threat was that of political subversion, not espionage, and therein lies the dividing line between a positive view of McCarthy and a negative appraisal. Had American Communists and their allies retained the influence they had achieved in the labor movement and the broad New Deal coalition, it is difficult to imagine that the United States would have undergone the political mobilization necessary in the crucial, early years of the Cold War. And the absolutely vital, perhaps irreplaceable, political elements in this mobilization were the leaders who would come to be derided in the 1960s as “Cold War liberals.”

    From 1946 to 1950, a civil war raged within labor and liberal institutions over the postwar direction of their movement. Initially, it looked as if Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, with its secret Communist leadership, might wrest Roosevelt’s mantle from a faltering Harry Truman and the Democratic Party. But after an uncertain start, Truman reformulated the New Deal for the postwar era, and adopted a policy of confronting Moscow that transformed him into the greatest of the Cold War’s liberal presidents. By the time the 1948 election was over, Wallace and his followers had ceased to be a viable alternative to Truman and the Democrats. Soon afterwards, the last bastions of Communist institutional strength were leveled when the CIO expelled its Communist-led unions.

    In addition to ideological rejection of Communism, one must note a practical aspect of the Democratic Party’s embrace of Cold War liberalism. From 1945 onward Republicans had been unrelenting in their criticism of the covert presence of Communists in the New Deal coalition. Many Democratic professionals realized that in the context of the developing Cold War, continued tolerance of the Communist presence opened the party to devastating Republican attack.

    The heroes in this political marginalization of the extreme left were such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt from Americans for Democratic Action; liberal Democratic politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas; and labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Philip Murray. Yet they were not McCarthy’s allies — indeed, these were the kind of people against whom McCarthy railed.

    By the time McCarthy’s Wheeling, West Virginia speech in February 1950 launched what came to be labeled “McCarthyism,” an anti-Communist consensus dominated the American landscape. The Democratic Party was firmly in the hands of Cold War liberals; the CIO free of Communist influence; and only remnants remained of the once-significant Communist role in mainstream politics, civic institutions, and the labor movement. Yet McCarthy threatened the anti-Communist consensus that liberals had helped create because he attempted to make anti-Communism a partisan cudgel.

    His chief means to this end was the shockingly high level of Soviet infiltration of US government agencies that had existed during World War II. By the time McCarthy was making his allegations, however, the most significant Soviet espionage networks had been all but destroyed and/or neutralized thanks to defections, American counter-intelligence, the FBI’s full-court press against the CPUSA, and President Truman’s loyalty-security program for government employees. Still, McCarthy not only persisted, but sought to paint FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal as a disguised Communist plot, while depicting such prominent administration officials as Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall as participants in or dupes of a Communist conspiracy.

    To be sure, though it is often alleged that Wisconsin’s junior senator never uncovered a single Communist, McCarthy did identify a number of party members in the US government, including Annie Lee Moss, a civilian Army employee, who is discussed at some length in Evans’s book (and for good reason, as Moss is frequently cited as an example of McCarthy at his worst). But McCarthy did not establish his national standing by correctly identifying this low-level Army employee as a security risk. He made it, to quote McCarthy in a speech on George Marshall, by thundering in June 1951:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . .[3]

    Certainly, several US officials, including some very high ones in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, displayed great naïveté toward Soviet espionage, and internal security policies until the late 1940s were notably weak. But there is no evidence to justify McCarthy’s allegation of wholesale administration or Democratic complicity in this treachery. Officials (like Alger Hiss) who spied or attempted to influence US policy on behalf of the Soviet Union, also betrayed Roosevelt, Truman, their administrations, and their colleagues, in addition to violating the nation as a whole.

    Normal democratic politics cannot proceed when one side regards and depicts the other as the enemy of fundamental values, and somehow illegitimate. Yet that is what McCarthy attempted to do, via demagoguery and malign partisan zeal. That he did not succeed, or even come close, hardly mitigates the fact that his role was an irretrievably negative one. It is true, and Stan Evans makes the case, that McCarthy was not a satanic monster who terrorized the nation and seriously threatened its democratic values. But he was a hindrance, rather than an asset, to a rational anti-Communist consensus, and is not deserving of the vindication that Evans seeks to confer.

Sins of Omission and Commission

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
By Tim Weiner
Doubleday. 702 pp. $27.95

Print

By Jeffrey T. Richelson

    Every author hopes for a news event that will draw attention to the subject matter of his or her book. But few actually enjoy the kind of exquisite timing that benefited Tim Weiner.

    In late June, after 34 years of fending off requests, the Central Intelligence Agency released 702 pages of documents that constitute the agency’s fabled “Family Jewels,” in actuality, a hodge-podge of memos and reports. The “Family Jewels” were gathered in response to James Schlesinger’s 1973 directive that all agency components inform him, as director of central intelligence, of any activities which might have been undertaken in violation of the agency’s charter. Even though very few of the disclosures were new, release of the “Family Jewels” was major news for a full week.[1]

     The publisher of Weiner’s book sought, quite naturally, to capitalize on the publicity windfall and immediately rushed Legacy of Ashes, which had been originally scheduled for an August release, into bookstores. This seemed to be one occasion, moreover, where timing and substance were happily joined. Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has spent a considerable part of his career on the intelligence beat, covering the CIA for the most prestigious newspaper in the country, The New York Times.

    The nearly-unanimous praise that greeted Legacy of Ashes underscored the presumption that here was a book which would convey an extraordinary understanding of the agency. Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten described Legacy of Ashes as “about as magisterial an account of ‘the agency’s’ 60 years as anyone has yet produced,” drawn “from more than 50,000 documents.” In The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, the author of a well-received volume on some of the CIA’s early stalwarts, praised Legacy of Ashes as “engrossing” and “comprehensive.” Thomas noted that it painted “what may be the most disturbing picture yet of CIA ineptitude,” a claim made all the more credible since Weiner’s reportedly drew from “tens of thousands of documents.” Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, also writing in The New York Times, described the book as a “deeply researched new chronicle of the Central Intelligence Agency” which could not be simply dismissed as “an anti-CIA screed.” In The Wall Street Journal, Edward Jay Epstein, an author of numerous books and articles on intelligence, informed his readers the “prodigiously researched” book was a “fascinating and revealing history.”[2]

    There was very little critical commentary within the laudatory reviews. David Wise, the dean of journalists writing about intelligence, did observe in The Washington Post Book World, “If there is a flaw in Legacy of Ashes, it is that Weiner’s scorn for the old boys who ran the place is so unrelenting and pervasive that it tends to detract from his overall argument. He is unwilling to concede that the agency’s leaders may have acted from patriotic motives or that the CIA ever did anything right.” Still, Wise concluded, “Legacy of Ashes succeeds as both journalism and history.”[3]

    The near-universal praise is perplexing, if only because Tim Weiner’s book cannot be even remotely characterized as a history of the CIA.

    During its 60-year existence, the agency has been engaged in five significant types of activities: human intelligence (the proverbial spying); technical collection (and other scientific and technological activities); analysis (efforts to interpret the present and divine the future); counterintelligence (actions taken to defeat adversaries’ intelligence services); and covert action (a grab-bag of activities, all of which are intended to produce political outcomes deemed beneficial to U.S. interests). Weiner’s book gives very limited space to the first four of those activities, while devoting the lion’s share of attention to the CIA’s covert action operations. It is not surprising given that covert actions—such as the efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro—tend to be the most sensational and controversial. But the fixation is more than strange, given the subtitle to Weiner’s book, together with his assertion that Legacy of Ashes “describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service.”[4]

    How does one make such a sweeping conclusion without making a reasonable effort to examine the CIA’s performance in the areas of intelligence collection (human and technical) and analysis? Weiner’s calculated neglect of these activities is hardly the only problem with the book—but it is the primary one.

HUMINT

    The ungainly acronym HUMINT  (for human intelligence) includes everything from classic espionage operations (i.e., getting foreign nationals to turn over their nation’s secrets), to recruiting travelers to share information (particularly during the early Cold War), to the interrogation of prisoners, including (most recently) “high value” detainees held in the CIA’s “black sites.” Targets of the agency’s HUMINT operations include enemies and allies alike, from the Soviet Union and Iraq, to France and Israel.

    The HUMINT dimension is not entirely absent from Weiner’s account. He dredges up well-worn anecdotes familiar to any student of intelligence history, such as the KGB’s compromise of the first CIA officer ever posted to Moscow, while presenting some novel ones. One of the book’s genuine revelations is Weiner’s disclosure of a program designated GLOBE, described as the “CIA’s first worldwide cadre of deep-cover officers . . . [who passed] as international lawyers or traveling salesman for Fortune 500 companies.”[5] There is also an extensive discussion of the Aldrich Ames case (about which Weiner wrote an earlier book), which befits Ames’s devastating betrayal, easily the worst ever suffered by the CIA. Ames not only compromised valuable intelligence operations, but was surely responsible for sending a number of agency assets in the Soviet Union to their deaths even as the Cold War was winding down. These episodes, even the thread-bare ones, are certainly a valid part of any objective history of the agency.

    Weiner also describes a number of the CIA’s successes against the Soviet and Soviet bloc targets. He mentions intelligence received in the 1950s from Major Pytor Popov, “the CIA’s first spy of any note inside the Soviet Union,” who “knew a thing or two about tanks and tactical missiles and Russian military doctrine.” The CIA could, Weiner writes, “claim with conviction that Popov saved the United States half a billion dollars in military research and development.”[6] Legacy of Ashes also acknowledges the contribution in the early 1960s of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a member of the GRU (the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff), who met CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers on trips abroad and also “smuggled out some five thousand pages of documents, most of them providing insight into military technology and doctrine.” Weiner rightly characterizes Penkovsky as the “secret hero of the Cuban missile crisis,” because the manuals he provided enabled agency analysts to estimate precisely the capabilities of the Soviet missiles spotted by the CIA’s U-2s.[7]

    Weiner also refers to more recent CIA assets who provided significant intelligence during the late Cold War, namely, Ryzard Kuklinski and Adolf Tolkachev. A Polish military officer, Kuklinski gave the United States “a long hard look at the Soviet military,” including Soviet plans for use of tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a war in Europe. Tolkachev, who was regarded as the “CIA’s greatest source in twenty years,” is described as a “military scientist who had for four years delivered documents on cutting-edge Soviet weapons research.”[8]

    But this is also almost everything Legacy of Ashes tells us about these cases, because Weiner is very parsimonious when it comes to describing successful CIA endeavors. A history of the agency, according to Weiner, need only provide the vaguest details about the intelligence these assets supplied, and even less about its value and impact. Kuklinski’s information about possible Soviet intervention in Poland and internal Polish government developments goes wholly unreported—as does the salient fact that Kuklinski’s intelligence served as a catalyst for U.S. warnings to Moscow against intervention. None of this once highly-sensitive information is hard to come by now. But Weiner chose not to exploit such easily available primary sources as the transcripts of Penkovsky’s London debriefings, or the TOP SECRET Military Thought essays he turned over to Washington. Nor does Weiner even utilize well-regarded secondary sources, such as CIA officer Barry Royden’s detailed account of the Tolkachev case that appeared in Studies in Intelligence, or well-researched books on the Penkovsky and Kuklinski cases that relied heavily on primary documents.[9]

     Weiner’s parsimony, in fact, is such that a number of Soviet-era spies of import are completely missing from his account. There is no mention whatsoever of Dmitri Polyakov, Anatoli Filatov, or Aleksandr Dmitrevich Ogorodnik. Polyakov, according to David Wise, provided information on Soviet strategic missiles, anti-tank missiles, nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare, and civil defense. Filatov approached the CIA in the mid-1970s while stationed in Algiers, and in the fourteen months before being transferred back to GRU headquarters provided Washington with a great variety of Soviet intelligence and military secrets. His service to the CIA continued for a year after his transfer back to Moscow, until he was detected making a dead drop. Ogorodnik became an agency asset in 1974, while serving in the Soviet embassy in Colombia. In 1975 he returned to Moscow and took a position in the foreign ministry’s Global Affairs Department. The information that routinely passed through Ogorodnik’s office included KGB intelligence reports and the year-end, comprehensive report from every Soviet ambassador. Such agents would seem worthy of at least some mention in any book that purports to be a thorough history and reaches sweeping judgments.[10]

    Also, apart from the case of Colonel Chang Hsien-yi, the deputy director of Taiwan’s Institute for Nuclear Energy Research – who defected in the 1980s, after twice providing critical information about Taiwan’s nuclear weapons intentions to the CIA– Weiner’s history essentially ignores espionage operations against non-Soviet targets, including rogue nation nuclear programs and al-Qaeda. Thus, there is no real discussion of the agency’s apparent penetration of A.Q. Khan’s proliferation network and how the intelligence helped force Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program.[11]

     As stunted as Weiner’s history is, he does not shy away from raising all kinds of criticisms, some of which are quite curious upon close examination. In his author’s note, for example, Weiner writes that all of the agency’s key Soviet assets were “volunteers, not recruits.”[12]

    This complaint seems trenchant until one recalls the Soviets were no more successful. The great majority of Americans—or at least the valuable ones we know about—who spied for Moscow were also walk-ins, a list that includes Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, James Nicholson, and Edward Pitts. Both sides during the Cold War obtained far more from volunteers than from recruits. In addition to denigrating the agency unfairly, though, Weiner completely disrespects the hard work of the case officers who ran the Soviet and East European nationals who volunteered their services. Successfully recruiting an agent from a “denied area” probably paled next to the genuinely hard work of running one, as the latter ranged from the technical tradecraft involved in obtaining information from the source without detection, to the emotional and material support necessary to those who risked their lives to provide the United States with valuable intelligence. Such skills were, and are, hardly trivial, and the agency’s ability to train such officers was not an insignificant accomplishment. But to ignore it is in keeping with Weiner’s proclivity to cast virtually any agency success in a negative light.

    Weiner also voices criticism of the quality of the agency’s Soviet assets, apart from how they were gathered. The CIA “never possessed a single one who had deep insights into the workings of the Kremlin,” he writes. None of the 20 sources the CIA’s Soviet Division were running in 1956 “could have any idea of what made the Kremlin tick,” Weiner later adds, before concluding that the agency “never came close to providing a big picture of the Soviet Union.”[13]

    Again, the critique sounds better than it turns out to be. Weiner never specifies what would constitute a “deep insight” into the workings of the Kremlin, or why he believes there was some great secret—beyond Marxist ideology, a lust for power and privilege, and the personalities of those who ran the country—that, if known, would have provided the key to unlocking the Kremlin. His complaint about the inadequacies of the CIA’s 1956 Soviet sources is supposedly justified by a recounting of their lowly positions in the Communist state: the wife of a guided missile research scientist, a low-ranking naval engineering officer, a laborer, a telephone repairmen, a garage manager, a veterinarian, a high school teacher, a locksmith, a restaurant worker, and one who had no position at all.

    What Weiner fails to acknowledge or appreciate is that while such individuals may not have had any special knowledge of what drove the Soviet leadership, they may still have been able to provide valuable intelligence. There is a difference between status and access. A naval engineering officer, even a low-ranking one, might well supply critical information about Soviet naval systems, just as Christopher Boyce—a $145-a-week communications clerk—turned out to be one of the most damaging American spies ever simply because he was able to provide the KGB with a detailed manual about a top-secret U.S. signals intelligence satellite system.[14]

The Quiet Vietnamese

 

Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of
    Pham Xuan An, TIME Magazine Reporter and
    Vietnamese Communist Agent
By Larry Berman
Smithsonian Books/Collins. 328 pp. $25.95

Print

By Merle L. Pribbenow

 

    What goes on in the heart of a spy? What makes him tick? Can a spy truly have friends? How does a spy decide between his loyalty to his secret masters and his loyalty to his friends? How does he live with himself? And how do his friends react when they find that the friend and colleague they had known, trusted, and even loved, lied to them betrayed their confidences, and may have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of other friends and countrymen?

    These are some of the questions Larry Berman poses in a fascinating new book, Perfect Spy. Berman, a political science professor at the University of California-Davis and the author of three previous books on Vietnam, has made a formidable contribution to untangling the twisted skeins of truth and lies that made up the life, and the myth, of a man whom the Vietnamese Communists now proclaim as their most important and productive spy during the Vietnam War’s American phase.

    Despite the author’s conscientious efforts—which included dozens of trips to Vietnam to interview Pham Xuan An and a number of An’s espionage associates and controllers, along with prodigious archival research in the United States and extensive interviews with An’s American friends and colleagues—much about Pham Xuan An’s life still remains shrouded in mystery. An, like the professional intelligence officer that he was, set strict limits on his cooperation with Berman. An refused to name most of his sources of information, and while eager to discuss his journalistic career, he was almost maddeningly vague about many aspects of his parallel covert life as a Communist spy. The Vietnamese government provided Berman only very limited assistance and support, and the files on An held by the Vietnamese intelligence service and by the many other intelligence services with officers An admittedly contacted (the CIA, the South Vietnamese, the French, the British, and the Taiwanese, among others) remained closed to Berman, and to all outsiders.

   Because of these vital limits, which the author freely admits, this book does not provide the complete story of Pham Xuan An’s espionage activities. That story will have to await the opening of Vietnam’s intelligence archives. Until that time—if indeed, it ever comes—Berman’s book will stand as the definitive, first-hand account of An’s life as a Communist undercover operative.

    It is now well known that thousands of Communist officers and agents were active in all branches of the old South Vietnamese regime during the Vietnam War. After the war ended, however, the victorious Communist regime concluded that three individuals out of this vast army of spies had made such important contributions to the  cause that they deserved to be promoted to the rank of “major general” in the Vietnamese military intelligence service. One of the three, Vu Ngoc Nha, had penetrated the inner sanctum of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace before he was caught and imprisoned in 1969. Another, Dang Tran Duc, had worked for more than a decade as a mid-level officer in South Vietnam’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) before he was exposed and forced to flee to the jungle a year before the war ended. Pham Xuan An, the third Communist “super-spy,” worked as a journalist for Western news organizations, and in contrast to his two colleagues, An’s efforts went undetected for the duration.

   In the mid-1950s, after the United States replaced France as the primary obstacle to Hanoi’s dream of putting all of Vietnam under Communist control, the Vietnamese Communist military intelligence service realized that it needed a window into the American camp, someone who could provide information about what the Americans were thinking and doing. Berman describes how Pham Xuan An, a low-level Communist agent who happened to be one of the very few South Vietnamese at that time who spoke English, was offered an opportunity to go to the United States to study in 1957, and how and why An’s Communist superiors leapt at the opportunity. A question-mark still lingers about this period, however:  Why did a senior American CIA officer, General Edward Lansdale, and the head of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem’s intelligence organization, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, both decide to support and assist An’s application to study at an American college? The reader is left with hints, but no satisfying answers.
 
    Reading about An’s two years at Orange Coast College is almost a surreal experience, only because one cannot forget that nearly two decades after welcoming An, Orange County, California would become a refuge for tens of thousands of Vietnamese fleeing Communist control. Berman paints an almost idyllic picture of An’s student life in the United States. An “embraced all aspects of collegiate life” as it existed in the late 1950s, from learning how to square dance to writing editorials that admonished students to clean up after themselves in the cafeteria. The notion that he was a disciplined intelligence officer was beyond anyone’s ken, as was the strife in Vietnam itself.

    When An returned to South Vietnam in 1959, he briefly served in Dr. Tuyen’s intelligence organization before going to work full-time as a journalist, employed first by a British, and later, by several American news organizations. Throughout his journalistic career, An maintained regular “contact” with Dr. Tuyen’s intelligence organization and its successor, the South Vietnamese CIO, according to Berman. An also told Berman that his CIO contacts became the primary source of the secret U.S. and South Vietnamese internal documents that he would supply to his Communist espionage handlers throughout the war.

    Though no fault of Berman’s, the book does not provide a clear explanation of the precise nature of An’s relationship with South Vietnamese intelligence. An would only admit to being an occasional “consultant” to the CIO. Despite An’s demurrals, however, it seems likely that his connections with South Vietnamese intelligence went much deeper.

    Intelligence organizations do not dole out favors and information willy-nilly – for the CIO to have maintained a relationship with An for so long (15 years), and to have given him as much classified information as An claimed, suggests that the CIO must have been getting something it deemed substantial from An in return. What that information could have been is anyone’s guess. The most likely possibility, to my mind at least, is that An probably gave the CIO information on An’s American journalist employers and colleagues, but then I have always had a reputation as something of a cynic.

    At the heart of Perfect Spy is the account of An’s career as a journalist working for the Americans and the friendships he formed during the course of his employment, all the while putting first and foremost his duties as a covert Communist spy. An clearly was a very intelligent, perceptive, and engaging man, a witty and even brilliant raconteur. Berman provides excellent descriptions of An’s relationships with a number of Americans, ranging from journalists Robert Shaplen, Neil Sheehan, and Robert Sam Anson (the book’s first chapter is devoted to the risks An took to secure Anson’s release when Anson was captured by Communist forces in Cambodia in the summer of 1970) to Edward Lansdale and Lou Conein of the CIA, the latter an officer in the Saigon station who was deeply involved in the 1963 coup d’état against Ngo Dinh Diem.

    The most authentically fascinating element of the story is how few of An’s American friends and colleagues seem to have felt betrayed when they found out, not long after the war was over, that An had been a senior officer in Hanoi’s military intelligence service all along. (One notable exception to this general equanimity, Berman notes, is Beverly Deepe, who employed An and depended on him greatly when she was the Saigon correspondent in the mid-1960s for the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune). An himself adamantly insisted, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that he never betrayed his American friends and that his espionage activities had never caused any deaths or physical harm to anyone. He claimed this despite his own admission that he provided the Vietnamese Communist military command with much of the information they needed to plan the Saigon aspects of the 1968 Tet offensive. During the second phase of this attack, John Cantwell, one of An’s own colleagues at TIME magazine, and three other foreign journalists (one British and two Australian) were killed by Communist troops in a single ambush.

    An also admitted to Berman that he provided Hanoi with advance warning of the early 1971 South Vietnamese and American offensive into southern Laos. On the third day of this operation, North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns—weapons that had been moved into position based, in part at least, on the warning that An provided—shot down a South Vietnamese helicopter carrying a team of foreign newsmen who had flown up from Saigon to cover the operation. Those killed in this incident included the noted Life magazine photographer Larry Burrows and several other of An’s colleagues from Saigon, including an American photographer for UPI.

   Since An is now dead, it will never be known whether or not An himself actually believed that his espionage activities never harmed anyone. The psychology of espionage is a tricky business. Spies often are forced to compartmentalize their lives in order to be able to “live their cover” and to survive the tensions of living in two different worlds. Frequently, they also develop the ability to perform some bizarre mental gymnastics to justify their actions, even to themselves, or perhaps, most importantly to themselves.

Camelot and Cuba

Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
By David Talbot.
Free Press. 478 pp. $28

   
Editor’s Note: David Talbot’s book on John and Robert Kennedy, Brothers, has garnered almost as much attention as Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive book on the assassination of President Kennedy, Reclaiming History. Bugliosi staunchly defends the finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the president, while Talbot is squarely in the camp of those who believe JFK was killed by men breathing together.[1]

Both books cannot be true, so which one is false? Two major reviews of Talbot’s book, one in The New York Times and the other in The Washington Post, were both hedged and overly credulous, written as they were by authors who could not challenge Talbot based upon a superior knowledge of the facts. Washington Decoded thought it was time to subject Brothers to examination by an author, Don Bohning, with expertise in some of Brothers’ subject matter.

Bohning covered Latin America for The Miami Herald for almost four decades. His first-hand knowledge of the Cuban exile community, the CIA, and their anti-Castro activities from the late 1950s into the late 1970s is probably unrivaled among American journalists. Before and after retiring, Bohning spent 10 years researching the U.S. government’s secret war against Cuba, and in 2005 published a reliable and unsparing book about Washington’s fixation on Cuba from 1959 to 1965.

While Bohning does not address the assassination conspiracy issue head-on, it is reasonable to extrapolate that the defects he identifies in Brothers apply to the book as a whole.

Print

By Don Bohning

    David Talbot believes John F. Kennedy’s assassination was not the deranged act of a lone gunman, but the result of a much larger conspiracy.

    Talbot’s prime suspects are identified in Brothers’ opening pages: “The CIA, Mafia and Cuba—Bobby [Kennedy] knew they were intertwined. The CIA had formed a sinister alliance with underworld bosses to assassinate Fidel Castro, working with mob-connected Cuban exile leaders.”[2] Consequently, immediately after the assassination of his brother the president, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began hunting for the responsible party within this trio of possible culprits, according to Talbot.

    A central thesis of Brothers is that Robert Kennedy only gave lip service to the U.S. government’s official verdict. While publicly endorsing the Warren Commission’s findings of a lone gunman, RFK believed the assassination was a conspiracy and quietly dedicated himself to identifying those responsible. This quest, in turn, helped fuel his 1968 presidential run, which ended tragically with his own assassination in June of that year. Talbot was a teen-age volunteer in that campaign in which RFK won the California primary, only to be mortally wounded minutes after his victory speech. Undoubtedly, this was a formative moment in Talbot’s life; unfortunately, he shows little evidence of having moved on from a 16-year-old’s starry-eyed view of the Kennedys.

    An inextricable sub-theme of Brothers involves the U.S. government’s efforts, beginning in late 1959 under President Eisenhower and persisting until 1965, to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. Essentially, Talbot contends that unintended consequences from these efforts, or “blowback” in intelligence lingo, precipitated John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

    I do not profess to be a student of the Kennedy presidency or the assassination per se, yet I do know something about the U.S. government’s secret war against Cuba. And when it comes to the subject of Cuba and the Kennedys, Brothers is not only a disappointment, but strives to turn that history upside down. Talbot attempts to do this via a familiar tactic: he draws from the recollections of staunch Kennedy friends and insiders, with proven track records of bending the historical record so that it reflects kindly on the Kennedy brothers. But in a new twist, Talbot also dredges up on the most dubious sources imaginable to further his argument.

    An example of the latter is Angelo Murgado Kennedy, a Bay of Pigs veteran who claims to have been close to Robert Kennedy.[3] Had Talbot asked any of Murgado’s fellow veterans, he would have heard him described as a “persistent liar,” “a charlatan,” and a man with “no credibility”—and these are the printable comments.[4]

    Murgado’s name first surfaced in Joan Mellen’s risible, mind-numbing conspiracy book, Farewell to Justice, in which she defended the indefensible—the 1967-69 persecution of Clay Shaw by an out-of-control New Orleans prosecutor named Jim Garrison. Prior to Mellen’s 2005 book, Murgado had been virtually unheard of amongst the Cuban fighters identified in the rather robust literature about the Bay of Pigs.[5] Yet in Mellen’s book Murgado suddenly appeared as a member of the inner circle—he was part of RFK’s intelligence “brain trust” on Cuba.[6]

    Curious about Murgado’s bona fides, right after Mellen’s book appeared I asked Erneido Oliva, the deputy commander of the Bay of Pigs brigade, and the late Rafael Quintero, one of the first Cuban nationals to enlist in the brigade, about Murgado. Oliva and Quintero (who died in October 2006) were both known for having grown close to Robert Kennedy in the aftermath of the debacle. They told me then they had never heard of Murgado. Oliva went further and wrote in an e-mail that Mellen’s description of Murgado as having been part of RFK’s  “brain trust” was BS, and spelled it with capital letters. When asked again about Murgado in light of Talbot’s book, Oliva repeated that he had never heard of Murgado until I brought up his name in 2005.

    Murgado is not instrumental to Talbot’s tale, but he is exceptionally useful. Through him Talbot buttresses the notion that hard-line Cuban exiles hated President Kennedy, presumably to the point where they were motivated to kill him. Murgado, elaborating on the tale he first told Mellen, was so alarmed by the murderous talk in Miami’s exile community that he approached RFK and offered to keep an eye on the most dangerous exile elements for the attorney general. Murgado told Talbot how he and two other prominent Cuban exiles met with RFK at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach. “I was thinking we have to control and keep a sharp look on our Cubans, the ones that were hating Kennedy,”  Talbot quotes Murgado as saying. “I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy. Bobby told us to come up with a plan and do it . . . . He was fanatic about his brother, he would do anything to take care of him.”[7]

   In the summer of 1963, Murgado’s alleged surveillance work led him to New Orleans, of all places, where he came across a “curious gringo” named Lee Harvey Oswald.[8]  Murgado’s team, Talbot writes, “came to the conclusion that Oswald was an FBI informant,” and after returning to Florida the dutiful Murgado reported on his surveillance targets, including “the mysterious Oswald.”[9]

   Are we really supposed to find this bunkum credible? To believe Murgado is to believe that Robert Kennedy preferred to entrust his brother’s security to an obscure Cuban exile rather than the one agency actually charged with protecting the president, the U.S. Secret Service. More to the point, Murgado is a former building inspector for the city of Miami who plead guilty in 1999 to accepting bribes in return for zoning favors.[10] Even criminals sometimes tell the truth, of course, but surely Murgado’s word is subject to a big discount, and his claims are not to be believed absent rock-solid corroboration. In place of confirmation, however, Talbot suggests that Murgado should be believed because his story has “not been refuted.”[11]

   Everything about Talbot’s credulous use of Murgado can also be applied to Talbot’s use of unproven assertions allegedly made by E. Howard Hunt, the recently deceased former CIA officer most noted for leading the Watergate break-in during the 1972 presidential campaign. Talbot supplies information that was not even directly propagated by Hunt, but comes from his long-estranged son, St. John Hunt, a meth addict for 20 years, meth dealer for 10 of those years, and twice-convicted felon.[12]

   St. John Hunt claims to have been privy to a death-bed confession by his father.  E. Howard Hunt allegedly recalled that in 1963, he was invited by Frank Sturgis (later, a member of Hunt’s Watergate team) to a clandestine meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami. During the alleged meeting, a group of men discussed “the big event” coming up, which was a plot to kill President Kennedy. Late in the meeting, Sturgis ostensibly asked Hunt, “Are you with us?”[13]

   There are only a few problems with this story. Hunt, even when he was still alive, was not known for his veracity. And Sturgis, whom I personally knew quite well in Miami when he went by the name Frank Fiorini, was one source never to be believed or trusted, someone who was rather notorious even in a field brimming with con men and blowhards, most of whom hinted they were working for the CIA.[14]

   Another example of Talbot’s creative use of innuendo involves the late Dave Morales, a CIA officer of Hispanic origin who has been frequently linked by conspiracy theorists to President Kennedy’s assassination. Guilt-by-innuendo is a familiar tactic of buffs seeking to associate the CIA with the assassination. It’s exceedingly easy, given that the careers of officers in the clandestine service, like Morales, were shrouded in secrecy. It’s also cost-free. The libel is usually leveled when the target is dead, and like others who have been fingered as complicit, Morales is deceased and cannot defend himself.

   Talbot eagerly joins in the well-trod defamation of Morales. “He has been connected to a bloody trail of CIA exploits,” writes Talbot, “from the 1954 Guatemala coup, to the hunting and execution of Che Guevara in 1967, to the violent overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. (Morales later stated that he was in the palace when Allende was killed.)”[15]

   Having been part of the The Miami Herald’s coverage of both Guevara’s demise in Bolivia and the Chilean coup d’état, I found Talbot’s assertion puzzling since I had never heard of Morales being involved in either of these dramatic events. I contacted Tom Clines, Morales’s friend and CIA colleague in the 1960s at both the JMWAVE (Miami) station and later, in Southeast Asia. Clines stated flatly that Morales was neither involved in Guevara’s capture in Bolivia, nor in Chile at the time of the coup against Allende.[16]

   Clines’s denial was seconded by Larry Sternfield, the CIA station chief in La Paz at the time of Guevera’s capture, and someone who most certainly would know if Morales had been involved. Sternfield said during a recent telephone interview that “definitely no,” Morales was not in Bolivia.[17]

   Talbot’s thinly-sourced book (given the weighty allegations) provides no citation for the claim that Morales was in Bolivia. With respect to Chile, Talbot cites Anthony Summers’s 2000 book The Arrogance of Power.[18] Since both Talbot and Summers exhibit a similar, elastic definition of the facts, citing Summers is not much of a reference. But it’s actually worse than that.

   Summers’s cited sources were Robert Dorff, a novelist and self-styled expert on the JFK assassination, who reportedly once interviewed a childhood friend of Morales; Gaeton Fonzi, who worked for the House Assassinations Committee as an investigator; and Noel Twyman, a retired industrial engineer.[19] Dorff’s work is rightly considered fictional, and his interview amounts to unsubstantiated hearsay.[20] In 1979, the House panel flatly rejected all of Fonzi’s theories about CIA involvement, although that did not stop him from propagating them in a 1993 book, The Last Investigation. In any case, Fonzi does not put Morales in Chile.[21]  Twyman’s revelation was contained in a deservedly obscure 1997 book called Bloody Treason. And Twyman’s source for the ostensibly damning allegation about Morales? Well, Twyman simply doesn’t cite a basis for his assertion that Morales’s involvement in CIA activities “included heavy-duty assassination operations such as murdering President Allende of Chile in 1973.”[22]

   In this manner history is written, or at least Talbot’s version of it. Allegations never proven in the first place are recycled, as if repeating them enough times will turn them into the truth.

   Notwithstanding these problems, there is something more troubling about this book than Talbot’s factual errors, use of innuendo, and credulous reliance on such questionable sources as Murgado and the Hunts. And that is Talbot’s persistent failure to provide the full context of several pivotal events during the height of U.S. efforts to topple Fidel Castro. Via the exclusion of many inconvenient facts, and the misrepresentation of specific events, he leaves the reader with a distorted perception of what actually occurred. The pattern is so persistent it appears to be calculated.

Assassination Chronicle

Reclaiming History: The Assassination
    of President John F. Kennedy
By Vincent Bugliosi
W.W. Norton. 1612 pp. $49.95

Print

By Max Holland

   

    What exactly happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

    You may have thought that the debate over the Kennedy assassination was settled long ago. Vincent Bugliosi would disagree, although he’d like to settle it now. Reclaiming History is less a work of historical reclamation than a very, very long — and passionate — argument about what historians and investigators have claimed and counterclaimed over the years.

     The argumentative design should not be surprising because, as an attorney, Mr. Bugliosi comes to the subject steeped in the adversarial process as the finest way to arrive at the truth. His fascination with the Dallas murder, in fact, began in 1986, when a British TV company asked him to be the prosecutor in a mock trial of the presumed-guilty-but-never-tried assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Bugliosi, the Los Angeles district attorney who famously prosecuted Charles Manson and his cult, won a unanimous verdict in that case in 1971 and went on to write a book about it, the best-selling Helter Skelter. Now, after 20 years of intermittent effort investigating the JFK assassination, he is prosecuting this case in the court of public opinion.

     It took that long partly because Reclaiming History is unlike any other book on the assassination ever produced by a single author. Rather than compare Mr. Bugliosi’s work with, say, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) — another effort by a lawyer to, well, close the case — it is probably much fairer to shelve Reclaiming History alongside the two massive federal investigations of the assassination.

    The first, of course, was the Warren Commission’s final report and 26 supplementary volumes, published in 1964, and the second was the final report and 12 supplementary volumes issued by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979. Mr. Bugliosi is a much better and more curious writer than the legal teams that produced these federal texts, and while his output might first appear modest by their standards, for a lone author writing about a lone gunman the output is staggering. (I should note that Mr. Bugliosi mentions my work in his book, mostly favorably but not always so.)

    The printed text of Reclaiming History alone runs 1,612 pages. The book includes a CD-ROM with an additional 958 pages of end-notes before the whole prolix enterprise comes to a merciful end with a mere 170 pages of source notes. If printed like a regular book, in a normal-size font and on regulation paper, Mr. Bugliosi’s work would take up 13 volumes. At $49.95, this encyclopedic work is a bargain.

Fidel Catastrophes

The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations
    Against Cuba, 1959-1965
By Don Bohning
Potomac Books. 307 pp. $29.95

Print

By Max Holland

   

    Don Bohning’s new history of covert operations against the regime of Fidel Castro, is admirably conceived. Much of the literature about U.S. policy toward Cuba in the 1960s is segmented and, consequently, unbalanced. Authors interested in presidential and/or CIA debacles have focused on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs expedition, often to the exclusion of the rest of the story. Other writers, intent on showcasing John F. Kennedy’s finest hour -- and one of the CIA’s -- have concentrated on the Cuban missile crisis while attenuating the significance of what transpired before and after. Meanwhile, the anti-climactic coda to this sometimes comic story -- namely, U.S. policy following President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 -- is seldom, if ever, written about. Bohning’s first contribution is that he tries to tell the story whole, as it should be.

    Bohning, a journalist, brings interesting credentials. He began covering Latin America for the Miami Herald in 1964, including the large Cuban community in South Florida. This is a great advantage because so much of the story is bound up with Cuban exiles. In 1962-63, the covert “station” in Miami (aka “JMWAVE”) was the largest CIA outpost in the world, other than headquarters in Langley. According to Bohning, JMWAVE’s budget ran as high as $50 million (in 1960s dollars), The station controlled between 300 and 400 front companies at one time or another, and up to 15,000 Cubans were connected to the covert war at its height.

    Some of Bohning’s best insights come from interviews with several key CIA officers who worked at the operational level -- i.e., where airy concepts and neat plans met reality. The perspectives of Ted Shackley, the JMWAVE station chief from 1962 to 1965, and Sam Halpern, an operations officer at CIA headquarters who worked the Cuba account, make for a fascinating look at “MONGOOSE,” a largely fruitless effort conducted from 1961 to 1962. It was the first and last covert operation overseen by an attorney general (Robert Kennedy), and probably the most ill-conceived clandestine operation ever until the Iran-contra folly some 25 years later.

    Although Bohning is not the first author to track down Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins, the CIA project chief and chief of the paramilitary staff respectively during the Bay of Pigs invasion, no one has made better use of their recollections. Their bitterness over a mission that was preordained to fail is palpable. If a person can ever be held responsible for that debacle, it has to be Richard M. Bissell, the deputy director for plans in 1961. The doctrine of “plausible deniability” is not supposed to lead to a situation where a president is kept unaware of the consequences of his decisions. Yet, on the basis of his interviews with Esterline and Hawkins, Bohning makes a convincing case that Bissell lied up and down the chain of command, as if only he needed to know.

     If Bohning’s history has a flaw, it is in his larger depiction of certain events. He gives short shrift to the primary reason why the Soviet Union implanted missiles in Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev could have turned Cuba into an island bristling with conventional weaponry if his main impulse was to foil Operation MONGOOSE and/or prevent another invasion (which Washington had no intention of mounting absent a good-size revolt). Instead, the Soviet premier sought to redress, in one swift and surreptitious deployment, a serious imbalance in the nuclear balance of terror. And since the subtext of Bohning’s book is intelligence-agency blunders, why not point out that the missile deployment represented a monumental intelligence failure on Havana’s part (not to mention Moscow’s)? Nothing before or since has put Castro’s revolution at such risk.

     Bohning also shies away from some new interpretations he might have offered based on the evidence he presents. Since the mid-1970s, for example, it has been a cliche to speak of the Kennedys’ vendetta against Castro. But as new biographies and histories have shown, President Kennedy, while reckless in some aspects of his life, was anything but when it came to Cold War hot spots such as Berlin and Cuba. He consistently tried to defuse, if not avoid altogether, situations where the superpowers were pitted directly against one another. JFK cannot be absolved of responsibility for what was undertaken during his administration, but fixations do not seem to have been his style. “Europeans think we are slightly demented on the subject of Castro,” he commented, in a typically detached remark during the missile crisis.

    The obsession with Castro that Bohning writes of radiated from Robert Kennedy, as one episode vividly illustrates. According to Bohning’s interview with a Cuban exile prominent in the CIA’s covert war, after the island had been quarantined, the attorney general personally advised the exile to provoke an incident that might spark a war. “[Y]ou Cubans, if you really want to help,” Kennedy reportedly said, “what you have to do is get yourself a boat and try to sink one of those Russian ships trying to break the blockade.”

    At the time, of course, President Kennedy was doing everything in his power to enforce the quarantine without provoking a confrontation.

     Make no mistake: Robert Kennedy was no Jack Kennedy.

This book review first appeared in The Washington Post, 7 July 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland

The Docudrama That Is JFK

Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board
U.S. Government Printing Office. 208 pp. Free

Real Answers: The True Story
    of the John F. Kennedy Assassination
By Gary Cornwell
Paleface. 205 pp. $24.95

Live by the Sword: The Secret War
    Against Castro and the Death of JFK
By Gus Russo
Bancroft. 512 pp. $26.95

With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald
    and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit.
By Dale K. Myers
Oak Cliff. 702 pp. $35

No More Silence: An Oral History
    of the Assassination of President Kennedy
By Larry A. Sneed
Three Forks. 601 pp. $35

Print

By Max Holland

    The advance text of John F. Kennedy’s Trade Mart speech was generating, on the morning of November 22, 1963, more of a buzz in the press than usual, even among the jaded White House contingent. This was no boilerplate presidential address. The President was going to deliver it in Dallas, after all, the virtual capital of his right-wing opponents and the one large municipality that had chosen Nixon over Kennedy in 1960 and was predicted to favor Goldwater in 1964. Not coincidentally, Dallas was also a fount of anti-Communist paranoia and the wellspring for some of the ugliest anti-Kennedy bile in circulation. “We’re heading into nut country today,” the President told his wife that morning in Fort Worth, where she donned her pink suit. And the press knew it, half expecting, perhaps half hoping, that some newsworthy incident would occur during the motorcade en route to the Trade Mart. What better than a display of local venom to juxtapose against the President’s speech, which would pointedly criticize “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties”?

    Thirty-five years later, because John Kennedy never delivered that speech, we have the following result: The October issue of George, edited by the President’s son, features an article by Oliver Stone. Although he strikes a vaguely leftish pose, Stone in fact uses the familiar rightist logic of those who mutter darkly about black helicopters, fluoridation of the water and one-world government, not to mention precious bodily fluids. Kennedy was “calling for radical change on several fronts--the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam,” writes Stone. “If nothing else, a motive for murder is evident.” Until this article in George, the Kennedy family had steadfastly refused to dignify conspiracy buffs. Now Kennedy fils lends respectability to one of the worst purveyors of the kind of paranoid nonsense eschewed by his father, vigorous anti-Communist though he was.

    It is not just John junior who validates Stone, of course. A special feature of Film & History (Vol. 28, Nos. 1-2) devoted to Stone says this of the director:

    In many respects, then, Stone is one of the most influential “historians” in America today....
    In calling Stone a historian we are, of course, expanding upon the familiar definition.... In the modern age of film and video, producers and directors are acting historians, too, and their productions often make a significant impact on the public’s perceptions of history.

    A subsequent article in the same issue speaks of how students may benefit from “evaluating specific pieces of conflicting evidence from the Warren Commission and Stone’s JFK.” [Emphasis added.] No one should dismiss for a moment Stone’s reach and influence, pernicious as it is, and surely Stone’s JFK deserves rigorous study in the classroom, for he is as emblematic of his age as Leni Riefenstahl was of hers. But Stone is no historian.

    In seemingly stark contrast to this Wonderland, where words mean whatever people say they mean, stands Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian as predictable as an old shoe. Schlesinger uses words to convey commonly accepted meanings, except that he manipulates them as if he were a lifetime employee of the Kennedy White House, his eloquence in the writing of history rivaled only by his skill at dissembling it. Readers of Schlesinger’s 1978 biography of Robert Kennedy will be forgiven if they reach the last page not realizing that the attorney general forced out the one advocate, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, of a genuine alternative to arrogant and blinkered anti-Communism. With Bowles’s elimination, there was no one left in higher councils to argue that Cuba represented a thorn in the US flesh, not a dagger in its heart, and RFK was free to become the “wild man...out-CIAing the CIA.”

    One can almost set a clock by Schlesinger’s rebuttals. The latest, published in the December Cigar Aficionado, dismissively treats RFK’s central role in the post ­Bay of Pigs, government-wide obsession to overthrow Castro as not being the attorney general’s “finest hour.” The professor also trots out a very tired rogue elephant: There is no direct evidence that President Kennedy “authorized or knew of the assassination plots” (note the absence of Robert Kennedy’s name), and that the CIA’s involvement occurred because it “believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents.”

Commission the Truth

Presidential Commission & National Security:
    The Politics of Damage Control
By Kenneth Kitts
Lynne Rienner. 194 pp. $49.95

Print

By Max Holland

    Presidents frequently resort to blue-ribbon com­mis­sions to help them find a way through, or at least temporary shelter from, political storms. High-level commissions took on the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 surprise attacks, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and any number of lesser crises, such as the Iran-contra scandal during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. Their reputation, however, is decidedly mixed. More than four decades after JFK’s murder, for example, the Warren Commission’s report remains the object of widespread ridicule. Yet such panels continue to appeal to presidents. Kenneth Kitts, an associate provost and political science professor at South Carolina’s Francis Marion University, sets out to explain why.

    He focuses on five panels, all concerned with national security: the Roberts Commission on Pearl Harbor (1941–42); the Rockefeller Com­mis­sion on the CIA’s domestic activities (1975); the Scowcroft Commission on MX missile deployment (1983); the Tower Commission on Iran-contra (1986–87); and the 9/11 Commission (2002–04). Four of the five (the exception being the Scowcroft Commission) came into being in response to catastrophes or apparent scandals, and were ostensibly established to uncover what happened, who was to blame, and how recurrences might be avoided.

    Kitts makes a solid attempt to draw back the curtain of mystery behind which these commissions typically operate. He rightly emphasizes the paramount importance of who is selected to serve on them, and provides many insights into the political intrigue behind the scenes. His sketches of the members of the Roberts Commission investigating Pearl Harbor—four military men and a Supreme Court justice—demonstrate that the panel was congenitally flawed. Major General Frank McCoy, for example, was compromised by his friendship with Secretary of War Henry Stimson; and the panel’s chairman, Justice Owen Roberts, was notable for an almost childlike naiveté.

    Some of Kitts’s omissions are curious, though. For example, he notes that the Tower Com­mission on Iran-contra portrayed President Reagan as confused and out of the loop, a president who had allowed National Security Council aides to run amok and cross-wire two covert oper­ations (arms to Tehran in exchange for American hostages and cash, with the cash then diverted to the Nicaraguan contras). By contrast, two separate  investigations, one by a joint congressional committee and another by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, found that Reagan, in Kitts’s words, “had actively presided over an illegal and politically unsound policy.” Kitts seems inclined toward the latter explanation, though he brings no new information to bear either way. Could President Reagan’s Alzheim­er’s disease, unrecognized at the time, help account for the dis­parate accounts? Kitts doesn’t even mention the possibility.

    The outlier here is the Scowcroft Commission, which came into being because President Reagan wanted blue-ribbon sanction for his plan to de­ploy a new land-based missile. Though com­missions are frequently convened to legit­imize pre-cooked decisions, Kitts would have been wise to dispense with this one and devote more of his relatively short book to mining the history of the other, more controversial panels.

    Kitts concludes that in appointing these commissions, presidents tend to be concerned more with protecting their own interests than with ferreting out the facts. At the very least, commis­sions buy time until their reports come out and establish one axis for debate. That’s true enough, though congressional investigations—which Kitts generally takes at face value—are no less tainted by self-interest and political agendas. Still, and despite its limitations, Presidential Commissions & National Security succeeds in turning a spotlight on a phenomenon that deserves scrutiny: the efforts of temporary panels, their life spans measured in months, to investigate the permanent government and its failings.

This book review first appeared in the Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006
© 2006 by Max Holland

The Kennedy Assassination Tapes:HNN Review

The Kennedy Assassination Tapes:
    The White House Conversations of
    Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination,
    the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath
By Max Holland
Alfred A. Knopf. 453 pp. $26.95

Print

By Mel Ayton

    Max Holland first established his credentials as a JFK assassination expert through his painstaking research into how conspiracy theorists had misled the public about the role the CIA and other intelligence agencies played in the assassination. He was also one of the first researchers to provide evidence which established that a Soviet disinformation campaign had been responsible in creating many myths about alleged US Government involvement in the death of JFK. Holland’s research concerning Soviet efforts in the dissemination of false information about CIA involvement in the assassination is bolstered by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, which establishes the nature of KGB disinformation techniques in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s.

     Holland’s research into New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s bogus investigation of the assassination has never been seriously challenged. Together with Patricia Lambert’s thorough examination of Garrison’s investigation (False Witness) Holland’s work has done much to demolish long-standing myths associated with the alleged New Orleans-based conspiracy to kill JFK. Through his excellent articles (in The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic and American Heritage) detailing how conspiracy theorists had skewered the truth about the assassination, Holland has provided the American public with an understanding of how and why conspiracy ideas captured the imagination of the American public for the past four decades. His research into the work of the Warren Commission also established how conspiracy theorists had wrongly concluded that Commission members deliberately sought to cover up the truth about the assassination. His forthcoming book about the Warren Commission is eagerly awaited.

    It was therefore surprising to read a review of Max Holland’s new book , The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, that did not recognise the author’s previous contributions to the subject. I am always suspicious of anonymous reviews by newspapers and weeklies which cover subjects as complex as the JFK assassination. What credentials and authority do the reviewers possess and how much time have they spent researching the subject? With this in mind I read Publishers Weekly review of Max Holland’s book .

    It should be clear to many JFK assassination researchers that Publishers Weekly has not understood the importance of Holland’s work and how it has advanced the knowledge and understanding of LBJ’s role in the events of November 22, 1963. The magazine’s writer maintains that “…much of Holland’s book is redundant with Michael Beschloss’s recent and better executed Taking Charge ….the bulk of the tapes in question…have for the most part, already been thoroughly digested, parsed and summarised…”

    However, Publishers Weekly has misrepresented Holland’s contribution.The writer is obviously unaware of the author’s unique expertise in matching the contents of the tapes with his own erudition in the field of JFK assassination studies, an erudition that does not extend to most writers who previously used the LBJ presidential recordings. What differentiates Holland from previous writers is the way he combines his extensive knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent government enquiries with his own work transcribing and interpretating the presidential recordings.

    Although the books written by historians Michael Beschloss and Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt) have been rightly acclaimed they are, in part, flawed. Both writers have taken crucial assassination-related conversations out of context in their books Taking Charge and Mutual Contempt. Holland’s superior knowledge and intimate familiarity with the presidential recordings has allowed him to correct the record. This can be no better exemplified than in the way Holland provides the correct context to many of the statements LBJ made about the assassination, the Warren Commission investigation and the endless speculation that went on between 1963/69 about the possibility of a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy.

    Holland correctly relates how LBJ’s oft-repeated assertions about a ‘JFK conspiracy’ have, over the years, led conspiracy advocates to lay claim to having ‘proof’ that a conspiracy existed. But Holland’s background knowledge of the assassination and also his knowledge of the way LBJ verbalised his thoughts is crucial. As he demonstrates, comments made by Senator Richard Russell to LBJ – ‘I don’t believe it’ – and LBJ’s reply ‘I don’t believe it either’ – have been misused by numerous writers to imply that both men rejected the conclusions of the Warren Commission investigation. However, as Holland correctly points out, both men were discussing the single-bullet theory, not the conclusions of the Warren Commission investigation. Holland also corrects previous interpretations by showing how both men’s rejection of the single-bullet theory was not based on considered judgements but simple opinion. At the time of the conversation in question both men had not been privy to the ballistics evidence which supported the theory. And LBJ’s manner of speaking, Holland states, his ‘well-known penchant to exaggerate and speak for effect’, has long been recognised by LBJ historians.

     Furthermore, Holland, unlike Beschloss, puts the assassination-related conversations all in one volume together with his extensive added commentary. The result is a clearer understanding of what transpired when LBJ became embroiled in the conspiracy controversy and the related Warren investigation. Holland also takes the story to the waning days of LBJ’s presidency.

     This excellent book quickly and decisively silences the conspiracy critics who believe that LBJ had a hand in the murder of his predecessor. And, whilst conceding that LBJ may have harboured fears that foreign involvement in the assassination was a clear possibility, Holland nevertheless presents LBJ’s musings in the correct context of Cold War realities and the fears the conflict engendered; fears that led LBJ into speculation about whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald had been acting alone. LBJ had been conflicted as to whether or not conspirators murdered JFK. However, he was never able to substantiate his suspicions beyond simple guesswork. In the end he merely speculated that Castro was likely to blame.

    This book is by far the most lucid and compelling account of the role President Johnson played in the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination. His book should be read not only by JFK assassination researchers but also future LBJ historians.

Mel Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination: Dispelling the Myths & Challenging the Conspiracy Theorists (Woodfield, 2002); A Racial Crime: James Earl Ray and the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (ArcheBooks, 2005), and The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Potomac, 2007).

This review first appeared on History News Network, 20 October 2004

Presidential Tapes and Historical Interpretation: RAH on The Kennedy Assassination Tapes

The Kennedy Assassination Tapes:     The White House Conversations of     Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination,     the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath By Max Holland Alfred A. Knopf. 453 pp. $26.95 Print

                                                               By Sheldon M. Stern

Max Holland’s book is important for two key reasons. First, it increases our understanding of the impact and legacy of one of the most searing events of twentieth-century American history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. second, the book raises significant questions about listening to and transcribing presidential tapes. Any scholarly assessment of this book that fails to address these methodological issues would be, at best, incomplete, or at worst, pointless.     Holland’s work proves, in a level of detail never before possible, that Lyndon Baines Johnson’s succession to the presidency on November 22,1963, was the most traumatic in American history-more so than earlier presidential assassinations (1865, 1881, and 1901) because television permitted the American people and the world to become virtual participants in the event. An American born in 1850 could, by age 51, personally remember the assassinations of three presidents. But, by 1963, relatively few Americans could recall the shooting of William McKinley and the elaborate protection of the president seemed to rule out another assassination.     Fortunately for historians, beginning on the evening of the day he took the presidential oath in Texas, Lyndon Johnson recorded nearly all his telephone conversations. It is almost impossible to communicate, in mere words, the degree to which these tapes capture LBJ’s persona and leadership skills. Many historians have tried, for example, to describe the legendary “Johnson treatment.” But, Holland’s transcription of these tapes makes it possible to be a virtual ear-witness to that phenomenon. The “treatment” could include flattery, guile, humor, appeals to self-sacrifice and patriotism, deceit, arm-twisting, and intimidation, but ultimately relied on LBJ’s instinctive understanding of human nature. Johnson recognized that politics was first and foremost a living network of human relationships. He embodied, a former aide recalled, “the finest quality of a politician. It was a sense of the direction of political power.. . . He did not merely content himself by getting ahead of those forces. He mastered the art of directing them.”[1]     These insights are hardly new: biographers Robert Dallek and Robert Caro have plumbed the depths of Johnson’s character, and historian Michael Beschloss has already transcribed and annotated many of the LBJ tapes. Max Holland, however, makes a unique contribution by focusing exclusively on the Johnson tapes relating to the JFK assassination-demonstrating conclusively, and tragically, that LBJ was never able to put behind him the terrible circumstances of his accession to the presidency. Johnson’s inability to escape that legacy began within hours of the deadly shots in Dallas. LBJ’s relationship with Robert Kennedy-who had enjoyed unique status in his brother’s administration-had been a festering sore since RFK had humiliated Johnson by trying to reverse JFK’s decision to select the proud Texan as his running mate in 1960. LBJ had faded into the background during the Kennedy era, convinced that he did not have the respect of many JFK intimates. A devastating joke circulating in Washington in the summer of 1963, that eventually got back to Johnson himself, said it all: “Lyndon who?”

Just a Shot Away

Reporting the Kennedy Assassination:
    Journalists Who Were There Recall Their Experiences
Edited by Laura Hlavach and Darwin Payne
Three Forks Press. 174 pp. $10

Print

By Max Holland

    The best antidote to paranoid speculation is truth in small, indisputable doses. Herein lies the great value of Reporting the Kennedy Assassination. All Americans sentient on Nov. 22, 1963, remember the instant they heard about the president’s assassination and the reporters fated to cover that story reacted no differently. But then professional news-gatherers, unlike most other Americans, had to subsume their shock, fear and disbelief and get to work. Four arduous days of indelible, incredible memories followed. This volume mostly records what has not been set down elsewhere: telling, eyewitness accounts by men and women trained to observe. They did not flinch or embellish then and steadfastly refuse to do so 33 years later, even though there is plenty of money to be made by exploiting a tragedy that still gnaws at the American psyche.

    Several young reporters who covered that awful weekend went on to prominent jobs in American journalism, in some cases on the basis of their performance in the Dallas crucible: Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Robert McNeil, Ike Pappas and Bob Schieffer, to name a few. Aside from Pappas, however, none of these big talents attended the 1993 conference at Southern Methodist University upon which this book is based – indeed, literally transcribed.

    But little is lost by their absence. The 60 or so reporters, editors, photographers and cameramen who did participate were all from local newspaper, radio and television outlets in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And damned if they were going to be beaten by any of the 250 media outsiders who descended on Dallas in the wake of the assassination. Precisely because it was their town, Dallas reporters made themselves ubiquitous and keen observers of all the dramas that weekend: from the shots in Dealey Plaza and the painstaking search of the Texas School Book Depository, to the agonizing wait at a movie theater and finally, of course, the first live, nationally televised murder.

    The one-day SMU conference evoked a number of fascinating vignettes and what-might-have-beens as the reporters remembered. Take the story of Mary Woodward Pillsworth, a society reporter for the Dallas Morning News. She had no reportorial role to play that day but dearly wanted to see Jacqueline Kennedy. She decided to watch the motorcade on her lunch hour and positioned herself on Elm Street just steps from the depository. That made her the closest media spectator to the president when the shots rang out. After she and her colleagues collected themselves, they headed back to the newsroom, whereupon long before the official announcement was made, Pillsworth insisted, “He’s dead. I know he’s dead, or else I hope he’s dead because his head’s blown open.” But front-page editors did not believe their society reporter – or perhaps just didn’t want to believe – until the official announcement.

    While Pillsworth eventually wrote an exclusive eyewitness report for her paper on Friday afternoon, Bob Jackson, a photographer for the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, felt he had just missed the picture of a lifetime. Jackson had been riding in a convertible assigned to the motorcade, about six cars behind the president’s limousine, when three rifle shots rang out. Jackson saw a rifle sticking out of a sixth-floor window of the depository and realized he could catch the assassin in the act. But then he remembered he had just started to reload his camera and still wasn’t finished. By the time his colleagues caught up with Jackson’s eye, the rifle was withdrawn. Two days later, Jackson was assigned to photograph the transfer of Oswald to the Dallas County Jail. He decided to focus on a spot where Oswald was likely to pass and was looking through the lens as the accused assassin approached. Milliseconds after Jack Ruby fired his revolver, Jackson fired his camera as planned- and captured the vigilante murder in one of the great spot pictures of all times – an a Pulitzer Prize to boot.

    In the realm of what-might-have-been, Reporting the Kennedy Assassination, also shows how chance and circumstance influence history far more than the paranoid explanations so popular now in Hollywood. Darwin Payne, one of the book’s editors and a journalism professor at SMU, was the night policy reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in November 1963. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, Nov. 24, Payne received a call from a city desk editor. The CBS radio network was carrying a report (by Dan Rather) that Dallas police had in custody an eyewitness who could identity Oswald as the man who pulled the rifle trigger. What did Payne know about that? Nobody at police headquarters could confirm the story, so Payne reluctantly called Jesse Curry at his home at 1:30 in the morning. Exhausted and sound asleep, the police chief made little sense at first. But finally, Payne correctly surmised there was no basis to the Rather story.

    More than a year later, with the publication of the Warren Report, Payne learned of his incidental impact on history. As threats to do Oswald bodily harm mounted through the night, Sheriff Bill Decker decided that it would be better to move the accused murderer surreptitiously. Decker attempted to call Curry to tell him that “we got to transfer [Oswald] tonight. We can’t wait.” But the telephone was constantly busy and operators finally advised Decker the line was out of order. In fact, the policy chief had taken his phone off the hook after Payne’s call, and Oswald’s rendezvous with Jack Ruby in a grimy police garage was the result.

    There are poignant moments in the book too. Tony Zoppi, normally the entertainment columnist for the Dallas Morning News, was drafted into emergency duty like everyone else and told to get down to Parkland Hospital immediately. He made his way to the emergency dock, where he was promptly stopped by Secret Servicemen. But then an ambulance rolled up carrying a heavy bronze casket, so heavy that Zoppi’s help was enlisted and the same agents now waved him through the door. Zoppi then spontaneously did something that to this day he finds hard to explain. “As we’re rolling that casket into the hospital, I reached underneath it and I put my fingerprints as hard as I could on the bottom of that casket … I figured, well, he’s going to be in this casket and I want him to know that Tony Zoppi helped carry this casket in.”

    If this volume has one major shortcoming, it is that the book – or rather the conference on which it was based – was all too brief. Each of the various panels was limited to only one hour, and that was not enough time.

    Forty years ago, the best films and TV dramas took aim at the conformity and paranoia that gripped many Americans during the McCarthy era.

    How many “Twilight Zone” parables illustrated that the most fearful human emotion is fear itself? Today, by contrast, Hollywood producers often choose to nourish the appetite for conspiracy, and Oliver Stone is invited to lecture about postwar history at American University. That’s why this book, albeit modest, is a worthwhile contribution to the literature on that tragic weekend. It tells us the way it was, and the way it wasn’t.

This review appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, 24 November 1996
© 1996 by Max Holland

 

 

Castros and Kennedys

“One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro,
     and Kennedy, 1958-1964
By Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali
W.W. Norton. 420 pp. $27.50

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963:
Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath
Edited by Edward C. Keefer, Charles S. Sampson,
    Louis J. Smith, Office of the Historian,
    Department of State
US Government Printing Office. 934 pp. $48

Print

By Max Holland

    It’s been one long Christmas for historians of the cold war since it ended. Communist-bloc documents have been bursting out all over since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. First came Stasi files from East Germany; subsequently, as regimes collapsed, access to state and party archives in those countries became possible. Then, with the implosion of the Soviet state in August 1991, came the biggest prize of them all: the promise of “open access” to documentary records from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Defense and Foreign Ministries, the Kremlin, even the KGB.

    Fundamental as well as titillating revelations aplenty have issued from a steady stream of documents. The Bulletin of the Washington-based Cold War International History Project, which functions as a clearinghouse for documentation, has grown in five years from a modest thirty-two pages to 400-plus pages in its latest incarnation. But Soviet archives have often been opened in an incomplete, haphazard or preferential manner, and even gaining access to previously opened materials can be a byzantine experience. Scholarly access has been granted or restricted, as Raymond Garthoff tells us in Diplomatic History, “to serve current political objectives [or sometimes] nothing more than venal considerations.”

    “One Hell of a Gamble” has to be considered in this context. It would be easy enough to reinforce all the superlatives on the dust jacket, for the book contains raw, new riches from Soviet sources about the Havana-Moscow-Washington triangle from 1958 to 1964. Not Only are ministerial, Politburo, Communist Party and KGB records cited, but the authors had unprecedented access to records of the GRU, the intelligence service of the Soviet armed forces, which played a larger role in this history than anyone in the West ever knew. On these grounds alone “Gamble” qualifies as a “must-have” book on the “Caribbean crisis,” as the Soviets preferred to label it, reflecting Moscow’s claim that the real issue was not missiles in Cuba, but survival of a fraternal socialist state.

    Yet a caveat seems necessary because of the complexities regarding access. Aleksandr Fursenko, by reputation a cautious historian who made no waves during the Soviet era, was not able to rummage through all the cited archives at will and decide firsthand what was important. Under such circumstances, he and co-author Naftali had an obligation – which they do not discharge – to describe precisely the terms and scope of their unprecedented, privileged access to the inner sanctum. Even casual readers, and “Gamble” is obviously calculated to reach a popular audience, are entitled to know if the book is solely the product of the authors’ selectivity and enterprise or if other factors intruded, as they did. Until access is transparent, the situation amounts to a continuation of the cold war by the only means available these days.

    The centerpiece of the book is undoubtedly the Cuban missile crisis, and the meaning of the Soviet-sourced information will be debated by students of that clash for years to come. At least one controversy about the period leading up to the crisis, however, would seem settled for good. The notion that a ham-handed US policy alone drove Havana into Moscow’s embrace is hard to sustain after reading Fursenko and Naftali’s account. Fidel Castro was not a card-carrying Communist when his July 26th movement seized power in January 1959; the Cuban Communist Party considered him bourgeois and undisciplined. But the hard-liners on his side, like his brother Raúl and Che Guevara, never had anything less than a Marxist-Leninist revolution and a Moscow alliance as goals, and struggled to bend developments in that direction while Fidel vacillated. “There is no other road [to independence] but the construction of a socialist society and friendship with the socialist camp,” Guevara told Aleksandr Alekseev in October 1959, when the senior KGB operative arrived – unbeknown to the CIA – to establish contacts with the top levels of the Cuban leadership. With the 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala uppermost in mind, and via back channels and shell corporations, Raúl Castro immediately set out to obtain Communist-bloc help in bolstering the revolution, while simultaneously purging it of less than reliable elements. This zeal to remake Cuban society, combined with Fidel Castro’s will to power, determined Havana’s course to the point where, in August 1960, the KGB enthusiastically changed its code name for Cuba from YOUNTSIE (Youngsters) to AVANPOST (Bridgehead).

    “Gamble” also makes a dramatic contribution to understanding US policy toward Moscow during the Kennedy Administration. President Kennedy wanted to finesse the views and participation of his foreign policy team. So he turned to his most trusted confidant – Attorney General Robert Kennedy – to establish a back channel to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, hoping and informal exchange of views would allow the two leaders to be more flexible than they could be otherwise. Existence of this confidential channel has been known at least since 1995, when former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin published his memoirs. But no one has ever had access to the gist of the more than fifty meetings that occurred between Robert Kennedy and Georgi Bolshakov, nominally head of the Washington bureau of TASS, the Soviet press agency, but actually a GRU colonel. This back channel is a fine example of what McGeorge Bundy aptly called the “non-sharables,” the secret things the Kennedy brothers kept between themselves.

    Ultimately, however, the narrative often seems driven by the next event about which there is a Soviet document. The temptation to toss out information from Soviet files rather than plumb its meaning is most evident in the chapter on Dallas. Given Lee Harvey Oswald’s sojourn in Minsk, the Soviet Union was mortified at the prospect of being blamed for the assassination of President Kennedy, and its propaganda organs worked overtime spewing out disinformation. At the same time, the assassination was a political Rorschach, and Moscow tried to make sense of the event by putting it in understandable, self-referential terms. Thus, according to KGB analysts, an anti-Soviet coup d’etat had in fact occurred, “organized by a circle of reactionary monopolists in league with pro-fascist groups of the US with objectives of strengthening the reactionary and aggressive aspects of US policy.” It’s one thing to convey what ruling circles in the Soviet Union thought about the assassination. But the authors make almost no effort to distance themselves from the tripe about an oil depletion allowance conspiracy, nor do they stop to consider the implications of an intelligence service so hidebound by ideology that it cannot report objectively about a critical event in the adversary’s camp.

    Not coincidentally, access to new Soviet sources has its counterpart on the American side. Tangible evidence comes in the form of the latest volume in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), a historical series initiated by President Lincoln during the Civil War. Beginning in the mid-1980s, FRUS volumes came under justified attack by diplomatic historians. The series is supposed to be the official documentary record of US foreign policy and activity. Yet despite ample public evidence to the contrary, new volumes were implying that covert action had played no role in US diplomacy vis-à-vis such countries as Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954. In 1991 Congress stepped in and passed a statute requiring that FRUS volumes be thorough, accurate and reliable – which was another way of saying they had to include covert actions of major proportions.

    Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, is an impressive step in this direction. The book painstakingly documents American decision-making over the removal of the missiles, the less heralded “bomber crisis” and the protracted negotiations that never reached any formal agreement ending the standoff. There was never a flat “no invasion” pledge, just a limited assurance by Washington full of loopholes. The active role of then-Director of Central Intelligence John McCone is documented, but the new US openness is truly on display when covert action against Castro’s rule resumes. Notwithstanding the Bay of Pigs debacle and the failure of Operation MONGOOSE, the Kennedy administration embarked on an “Integrated Program of Action toward Cuba” in June 1963. The covert program sought to make Cuba’s economy scream, circa 1963, and employed the full panoply of clandestine tools. President Kennedy apparently had no illusions about its chances of success, but it represented a domestic as much as a foreign policy – promulgated with the November 1964 election clearly in mind. The administration simply had to give the impression of “busyness in Cuba,” as McGeorge Bundy put it.

    The FRUS volume also reveals at the highest level of government an unusual preoccupation in 1963 with the possibility of Castro’s death. Contingency planning, of course, is normal. But the number of references to Castro’s death indicates this line of thinking wasn’t all that wishful and is further circumstantial evidence that the assassination plots were yet another of the Kennedy brothers’ “non-sharables.”

This article first appeared in The Nation, 14 July 1997

© 1997 by Max Holland

Paranoia Unbound

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
By Peter Dale Scott
University of California Press. 413 pp. $25

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald
    and the Assassination of JFK
By Gerald Posner
Random House. 607 pp. $25

Who Shot JFK?: A Guide
    to the Major Conspiracy Theories
By Bob Callahan
Fireside. 159 pp. $12

Print

By Max Holland

    It is instructive to contrast the mythology surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with the public and scholarly attitudes toward Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor – the other “flashbulb” event that seared America’s collective memory. Like the assassination of Kennedy, the surprise attack was the subject of an executive branch investigation followed by congressional hearings. As with the assassination, explanations based on conspiracy have dogged the official story about Pearl Harbor. (The latest accusation surfaced only three years ago.)

    But distortions of the record and questionable logic have always helped relegate Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories to the political fringes; the official story remains intact. The phenomena surrounding the JFK assassination could not present a starker contrast. There the passage of time has only heightened public disbelief in the official account of the assassination, commonly known as the Warren Report. After the Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964, a Gallup poll indicated that 56 percent of Americans believed the report’s main finding: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was President Kennedy’s assassin. Today, however, approximately 90 percent of the public believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK.

    This figure includes some who toil in the halls of academe. Among the plethora of new offerings on the 30th anniversary of the assassination is Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this work. Indeed, its outstanding characteristics put it squarely in the tradition of most books about the assassination. Deep Politics is an unreadable compendium of “may haves” and “might haves,” non-sequiturs, and McCarthy-style innuendo, with enough documentation to satisfy any paranoid. The assassination, Scott writes (in typically opaque prose), was “the product of ongoing relationships and processes within the deep American political process.” What is this deep process? A virtual political Disneyland: the CIA, drug dealers, Somoza, Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, Oliver North. And that’s just from two pages.

    The manuscript apparently went unpublished for years, and one is mightily tempted to say that it should have remained so. Astoundingly, though, the book won the majority approval of the 20 professors, including four historians, who served on the University of California’s editorial committee in 1991-92.

    To understand the JFK phenomenon, it helps to revisit the classic lecture “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” delivered at Oxford 30 years ago by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (and published in a book of essays by the same title in 1965). The most prominent qualities of the paranoid style, according to Hostadter, are “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Propagators don’t see conspiracies or plots here and there in history; they regard “a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.”

    To be sure, as Hofstadter noted, the paranoid style isn’t unique to America. Witness Germany under Hitler or the Soviet Union under Stalin, where it actually came to power. But it is an old and recurring mode of expression in American public life, as evinced by the anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s, the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, Populists’ claims about an international banking conspiracy in the 1900s, and Senator Joe McCarthy’s “immense conspiracy” of the 1950s. Purveyors often feel threatened by sweeping change, whether it be waves of new immigrants or a revolution in the economic order. At other times, they articulate an acute sense of dispossession, such as that felt by the far Right from the 1930s into the early 1950s.

    Although the Kennedy conspiracy choir has some voices on the Right, the great preponderance of books (450 since 1963) and articles (tens of thousands) have been written from the liberal/left perspective. Factual disputes have much less to do with this than one might think. “Catastrophe . . . . is more likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric,” Hofstadter wrote. And putting aside venal reasons, clearly the liberal/left outpouring is related to its sense of political dispossession since 1963. (Democrats were out of power for 20 of the next 30 years.) Indeed, every wrong in America is considered traceable to the presidency that was aborted and the future that died on November 22, 1963.

    Still, what is markedly different about this phenomenon from previous manifestations of paranoia is that the distrust is so deep and pervasive. Glancing through Who Shot JFK? one can find a conspiracy theory for practically every contingency and political belief: The Mafia did it; Robert Kennedy did; Jackie was upset because her husband had extramarital affairs, so she did it. The KGB, Cubans (both anti- and pro-Castro), the CIA and/or FBI, right-wing Texas oilmen, tsarist Russians, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun – and on the zany list goes. The “friendly fire” theory holds that a Secret Service agent riding in the limousine behind JFK fired the fatal shots, by accident. And apparently the latest trend among conspiracy theorists is to bash one another for believing in the wrong conspiracy.

    Commentators usually ascribe the public’s paranoia to the disturbing events that followed Kennedy’s murder: Vietnam, other assassinations, Watergate, exposure of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1970s, and finally the Iran-contra scandal, all of which undermined Americans’ trust in their elected government. But a more complicated argument can be made. The assassination and its aftermath have never been firmly integrated into their place and time, largely because of Cold War exigencies. Consequently, Americans have neither fully understood nor come to grips with the past.

    But the assassination is very much a part of the Cold War, an unintended consequence of U.S. Policies. And once bolted down, it ceases to be unfathomable and becomes another defining post-World War II event, as much as Vietnam or the Cuban missile crisis.

    In a letter to The New York Times last year, William Manchester, author of The Death of a President, identified the key source of the public’s incomprehension:

     To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an aesthetic principle here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and one of the other side put the Nazi regime – the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state – you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.

     But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

     A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely.

    Actually, though, Oswald carries more weight than Americans have dared admit to themselves. As the Warren Report showed and Gerald Posner, a former Wall Street lawyer, reiterates in Case Closed, Oswald was a highly politicized Marxist sociopath. Disappointed with Soviet-style communism, he returned to the United States in June 1962 and began to see Cuba as the purest embodiment of communist ideology, the only truly revolutionary state. In New Orleans, he started his own “Fair Play for Cuba” chapter and walked the streets with a “Viva Fidel” placard.

    Oswald, who fervently read left-wing periodicals and monitored Radio Havana, was acutely aware of the depth and nature of U.S. hostility toward Cuba. In all likelihood, he believed the worst rumors of U.S. attempts to overthrow – even assassinate – Castro, information that was later kept from the Warren Commission. After leaving New Orleans, Oswald tried to obtain a visa to Cuba to enlist in the country’s defense. But the Cuban embassy failed to see him as a “friend of Cuba,” and he returned to Dallas, embittered.

    A month later, Kennedy came to town. The opportunity to subject Kennedy to the same dangers plaguing Castro presented itself. As Posner writes, Oswald, who had failed at almost everything he tried, “was suddenly faced with the possibility of having a much greater impact on history.” Jack Ruby was equally emotional, violent, and opportunistic, though not political.

    Because of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI did not inform the Warren Commission about the covert operations to remove Castro. Such information, the agencies reasoned, would not contradict the central conclusion and therefore could be, and was, kept secret. Consequently, the Warren Report depicted Oswald as acting upon inchoate feelings (compounded by marital troubles) but without acute political motives.

    Twelve years later, however, Senator Frank Church’s select committee on intelligence revealed the extent of anti-Castro plotting and the fact that the CIA and FBI had lied by omission to another arm of government. This shattered whatever trust remained in the official story and ripped the lid off a Pandora’s box of conspiracy theories. A slightly amended version of the official story should have become the new dogma by the late 1970s: The Kennedys’ fixation with Castro had inadvertently motivated a political sociopath. Instead, the disturbing truths were again obfuscated by Cold War exigencies, and by Kennedy partisans, who tried to disavow JFK and RFK’s knowledge of the plots.

    The 30th anniversary of the assassination, especially since it coincided with the end of the Cold War, should have been marked by attempts to integrate the assassination into history. Of all the offerings, Posner’s Case Closed would seem the most suitable. But though Posner exhaustively debunks every canard proposed to date about the assassination, he largely ignored the contextual history of Oswald’s act and provides little more insight than the Warren Commission did as to why Kennedy became Oswald’s target. In addition, Posner’s stamina fails him when he writes about events after 1964, and the aftermath is almost as important in understanding the assassination as the act itself. (In his new biography, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Richard Reeves doesn’t shrink from depicting Kennedy as a Cold Warrior, intend on overthrowing Castro. Yet he fails to draw any connections to the assassination; indeed, Oswald is not even mentioned in the book.)

    So long as it lacks historical coherence, the official story will probably never be believed, and Americans will continue to ask questions based on cunningly manufactured falsehoods. To be sure, every nation is sustained by its own myths, which occasionally collide with reality. But when myths are as divorced from reality as these are, they become dangerous. Americans are encouraged to feel nostalgia for a past that ever was, wax dreamily about what might have been, or indulge in elaborate paranoid fantasies about their own government. Such states of mind hardly conduce to a rational consideration of America’s role in a new world.

This article first appeared in The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1994

© 1994 by Max Holland

King Oil

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
By Daniel Yergin
Simon & Schuster. 877 pp. $24.95

Print

By Max Holland

    Every author dreams about good timing, some stroke of luck that will distance his book from the pack of 50,000 titles published annually in the United States. During the seven years he worked on The Prize, Daniel Yergin may have imagined some sort of crisis in the oil-rich Middle East that would make his book a hot property when it was published. But even in his wildest reverie, Yergin could not have dreamed that publication of his oil saga would coincide with the greatest American military expedition since the Vietnam War.

    But coincide it did. Five days after Yergin delivered his epilogue to Simon & Schuster, Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait. The publisher immediately embarked on a crash publishing schedule. In four months, or one-third the time it normally takes to publish a book, The Prize was in bookstores.

    Critics of the war have pointed to a base motive behind American policy ever since George Bush uttered the words, “This will not stand.” If Kuwait exported, say, artichokes instead of oil, the United States would have cared considerably less about the fate of the emirate. But readers of The Prize will recognize an enduring principle at stake. In our century, oil begets national wealth, which begets state power. Americans differed over whether the resort to force was premature or wise. But unless one had been a pacifist or considered Saddam Hussein a benign force, the case for doing nothing would have been hard to make. American inaction would have been as grievous a miscalculation as was its involvement in Vietnam. A nation’s foreign policy is, after all, a matter of making distinctions.

    But no one should conclude that Yergin’s book lets the United States off the hook. Many of the loudest advocates of force had earliest dismissed the criticism, popular in the mid-1970s, that indiscriminate arms sales in the Persian Gulf would eventually come to haunt America. Yergin also reminds us that, even as US forces battled in the Middle East, Americans were consuming far more gasoline per capita, and paying far less for the privilege of doing so, than anyone else in the world.

    Yergin, the author of Shattered Peace (1977) and Energy Future (1982), here sets himself his most ambitious task to date: nothing less than a history of petroleum, and all that oil has achieved and despoiled since its modern discovery in the Pennsylvania hills. The word modern is significant because black ooze seeping up through the ground has been used since at least 3000 B.C., mostly as a medical nostrum. But the Industrial Revolution found new and ever more uses for petroleum – beginning with artificial lighting – until oil has become the key ingredient that makes modern society work.

    At the outset, Yergin announces the three themes that he will explore in The Prize. These are the ways petroleum has been perceived in this century: first as a business, then as a strategic resource, and finally as a factor affecting the environment.

    Oil became a big business and fortunes were made almost from the day that first Pennsylvania well hit pay dirt in 1859. Speculators in one early well earned $15,000 in profit for every dollar they invested. By the 20th century oil had become the world’s biggest business, virtually inextricable from modern capitalism, multinational enterprise, the international economy, and business-government relations. Seven of today’s top 20 Fortune 500 companies are oil conglomerates.

    World War I, with its new petroleum-powered fleets and tanks, transformed oil from merely a commodity that generated immense wealth into an essential resource for nation-states. A young Winston Churchill was among the first to realize that strategic mastery itself was the prize conferred by control over oil. Churchill’s insight sounds the second theme of The Prize, in which Yergin correlates national power with control of oil resources. Oil-rich Iraq seems to prove this proposition: With a population of only 17 million, Iraq was able to support the fourth largest military force in the world. Yergin also reminds the reader how much American power is oil power. After World War II, in crises extending from the Korean War to the Six Day War in 1967, America’s capacity to maintain its oil supply through international production and its ability to guarantee the international transport of oil to its allies played a major role in cementing the Western alliance under US leadership.

    Yergin makes this argument correlating oil and power persuasive, perhaps too persuasive, because he fails to treat what seem significant exceptions. His thesis does not explain, for example, why the Soviet Union, the world’s largest oil-producing country, has failed economically, or why Germany and Japan were able to become great powers without oil resources. (It can be argued of Japan and Germany, however, that their defeat in World War II was in no small part due to oil shortages).

    The struggle for control of oil has created, paradoxically, an environment out of control: The follies and shortsightedness of Hydrocarbon Man is Yergin’s final theme. From global warming to the pollution and congestion in cities from Mexico City to Eastern Europe, oil has contributed to conditions of life that threaten human health, endanger other species, and possibly imperil the planet. Yergin’s look at the high-energy way of life is, in many respects, the most sobering aspect of the entire book. What emerges, after putting aside all the struggles for individual, corporate, or national wealth and power, is an unflattering picture of human incapacity to manage a non-renewable resource with even a modicum of enlightenment.

    With such themes, and cast of characters ranging from John D. Rockefeller to the shah of Iran, Yergin could hardly have produced a dry, lifeless book. Yet for all its detail, The Prize leaves several important threads dangling, never fully exploring what the oil saga tells us about the business-state relationships, or the mix of oil money with politics. It is only after 100 pages of discussion that the reader is informed, almost incidentally, that John D. Rockefeller’s great success as an oilman depended in no small part on Standard Oil’s ability to pass and block legislation.

    Yergin’s narrative becomes more politically oriented when it comes to the Depression. He shows why the Roosevelt administration agreed to ration production and keep oil prices at or above $1 per barrel during the 1930s. Grateful oilmen responded by becoming the only major industrialists to back the Democrats. Even if, eventually, more dollars from oil flowed to the Republican Party, the Democrats continued to receive competitive contributions. (Certainly virtually no other industry was as generous to the Democratic Party in the period from the 1930s to the ‘60s.) Oklahoma and Texas campaign contributions were a financial pillar of the New Deal coalition. They made the infamous oil-depletion allowance politically invincible. Yet even here Yergin expends more words on petroleum’s contribution to the rise of the motel than in explaining this stunning tax break.

    Even when Yergin seems ready to get down to business, he often drops the ball. He devotes deserved space to one of the most revealing episodes in the entire post-war era: that struggle which began in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized British oil holdings. After a British-imposed embargo failed to deter Mossadegh, the US Central Intelligence Agency sponsored a coup in 1953 that overthrew him and placed the shah in power. The previous year, when Truman had sent Averell Harriman to negotiate with Mossadegh, the prime minister had claimed he could not compromise because of the power of Ayatollah Seyed Kashani. Harriman had then sought out Kashani, only to be told – in words that anticipate a later ayatollah – that all foreigners were evil, and foreigners interested in oil were candidates for butchering. Yergin fails to do justice to the lawyer and democrat Mossadegh, who quite legitimately wanted Iran to have control of its own resources. Mossadegh is portrayed here as something of an unreliable clown, irrational in his obstinacy.

    The ramifications of Mossadegh’s defeat still resound today. The coup, its supporters say, brought 25 years of stability in Iran and provided America a key ally in the Cold War. But others note the irony with which this episode has come full circle: American opposition to Mossadegh ushered in the regime of the shah; internal Iranian opposition to the shah eventually brought about the theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The United States, to oppose Kohomeini’s Iran, supported and built up Saddam Hussein during the 1980s – and the rest is history. Ironies and tragic elements abound in the all-too-human struggle over petroleum and all it confers, but too often they are missing from Yergin’s account.

    Some early readers criticized The Prize, feeling that Yergin had ascribed too much significance to oil, inflating its importance in events big and small. In fact, his opus omits too much of the real history. One is left with the sense that, while The Prize sketches the outlines of the complex tale, neither Yergin nor anyone else has completely mastered this epic drama.

This article first appeared in the Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1991
© 1991 by Max Holland

Inside KKR’s Buyout Boutique

The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power & Profits
By Sarah Bartlett
Warner Books. 345 pp. $24.95

Print

By Max Holland

    Move over, Michael Milken and Drexel, Lambert. In The Money Machine, author Sarah Bartlett nominates a serious rival for their dubious reputations. The financiers who epitomize the excesses of the 1980s, Bartlett convincingly argues, are actually named Henry Kravis and George Roberts, from the firm of Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts (KKR).

    In less than a decade, Kravis and Roberts parlayed a financing technique known as the leveraged buyout into one of the largest corporate empires in the world. They did it by weaving a web of greed, deceit, and conflict of interest that stretched from Wall Street to Washington, and all the way to Oregon. Their web attracted several of the nation’s biggest banks, insurance companies, pension funds and a dozen esteemed investment houses and law firms along with scores of CEOs.  What’s more, every deal engineered by KKR was legal, or has stood up in court when tested. And that, Bartlett contends, is what finally makes Kravis and Roberts more characteristic of the era than Milken. The 1980s were not about illegality on Wall Street, although there was plenty of that. First and foremost it was about the stunning lack of business ethics by America’s best and brightest while they flipped corporations like hamburgers.

    By zeroing in on KKR, Bartlett clearly aims to follow in the footsteps of such influential (and successful) books as Connie Bruck’s The Predator’s Ball and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. Bruck was the first to expose the inner workings of Milken’s Drexel, and Burrough and Helyar took readers on a financial roller-coaster ride by recreating the biggest deal of them all, the leveraging of RJR/Nabisco. Not coincidentally, the winner of that deal was KKR, making a book about this particular buyout boutique overdue.

    Bartlett, a financial reporter for The New York Times, advances our understanding of the 1980s by showing how KKR raised the huge pools of capital necessary to leverage corporate America. When state pension funds arrived on the investment markets in the 1970s, they were hailed as a stable source of capital for the revitalization of the economy, their arrival serendipitous because Americans’ savings rate was declining. Bartlett shows how KKR’s buyout artists wooed and dined pension fund managers who controlled hundreds of millions of dollars, and how KKR contributed thousands of dollars to influence obscure, but pivotal, state races. A manager who helped KKR tap into public pension funds, such as Roger Meier, chairman of the Oregon Investment Council, was amply rewarded. Meier funneled a cool $500 million KKR’s way by the mid-1980s, and in return KKR handed him seats on the board of companies it acquired like so many $15,000 trinkets. Later, in what can only be interpreted as a quid pro quo for putting KKR on the map, Meier was even permitted to become an investor in certain deals from KKR’s portfolio.

    This pattern of corruption by inclusion marked many of KKR’s relationships, and goes a long way toward explaining why KKR became a financial juggernaut and the most imitated firm on Wall Street in the 1980s. Longstanding pillars of that elite community, such as the venerable law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, home to former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, even proved vulnerable to KKR’s calculated largesse. With KKR generating enormous fees for Simpson Thacher, the law firm allowed partner Richard Beattie, a prominent Democrat who handled the KKR account, to invest in his client’s deals. Again, this was nothing illegal. It only violated a longstanding ethical notion that lawyers should not invest in their clients’ businesses. Although Bartlett did not make the connection, with liberals like Richard Beattie it’s no wonder the Democratic Party is in shambles. Beattie, who was general counsel of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Joseph Califano during the Carter Administration, has pulled the laboring oar for the most virulently anti-union, anti-worker phenomenon on Wall Street in recent history.

    Despite her considerable achievement in exposing KKR’s means of ascent, Bartlett’s book has serious flaws and omissions. The Money Machine strives for an intimate tone and ends up long on gossip and short on substance. Admittedly, much of the personal information goes to the heart of “Henry’s” and “George’s” lack of character and the sources of their ambition (the book annoyingly refers to Kravis and Roberts by their first names). Yet something is out of kilter when the manipulation of the corporate tax code, which makes or breaks so many deals, is referred to only in passing, while paragraphs are spent on the sexual preferences of Kravis’s elder brother. It’s as if the book were written by a reporter from People magazine rather than one of the chief financial journalists for the Times.

    Even more regrettable is Bartlett’s apparent failure to investigate what happened at some or any of the scores of companies that were subject to KKR’s financial engineering. After all, if this is a story about two arrogant financiers who became conspicuously rich, why bother? Bartlett approvingly cites one critic towards the end of the book: “Acquisitions of companies are . . . serious matters. They are economic events that affect the lives and fortunes of investors, employees, suppliers, and customers.” A Wall Street Journal reporter just won a Pulitzer prize for revealing the dark side of KKR’s Safeway buyout. Bartlett sheds no additional light on this decisive question, however, aside from referring to a few deals that have gone sour from the investors’ point of view. This reportorial lapse is an inexplicable omission, especially given that Bartlett castigates colleagues in the financial press for being intimidated or suckered by KKR.

    Bartlett’s instincts were sound as could be. But the book on KKR, and Wall Street speculation in the 1980s, still waits to be written.

This article first appeared in Washington Post Book World, 14 July 1991
© 1991 by Max Holland

 

Mailer Tracks Down the Lone Assassin

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
By Norman Mailer
Random House. 848 pp. $30

Print

By Max Holland

    In a 1992 letter to The New York Times, William Manchester put his finger on why the Kennedy assassination continues to fascinate and puzzle us. It may seem odd, Manchester wrote, but there is an aesthetic principle at root. Put “the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, [and] it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning . . . ”

    In his 26th book Norman Mailer accepts – no – embraces the aesthetic challenge Manchester identified. It is a challenge, interestingly enough, that Manchester (along with the Warren Commission) had no small part in creating. Rereading The Death of a President almost 30 years after its publication, one is struck by the author’s palpable, barely suppressed fury at Lee Harvey Oswald for killing the most powerful man in the world and robbing Manchester’s generation of its first president. The assassin is beneath contempt, a callow nonentity with a mail-order rifle. Could even the most talented writer rescue Oswald from this fate and give this killer back his humanity?

    Mailer and his collaborator, Lawrence Schiller, did just that for Gary Gilmore 16 years ago in The Executioner’s Song. But the task here is even more difficult, given the layers of cant and crud that have accumulated over 30 years. The best part of Oswald’s Tale, covering the 2½ years he spent in Russia (1959-1962), recalls the movie Citizen Kane, for the approaches are similar. Like Welles, Mailer cleanses his subject by refusing to adopt an authoritative narrative; the account is an exploration rather than a solution, and the posture works brilliantly. Mailer painstakingly draws upon may voices and sources – interviews with friends and family, KGB reports on this strange American, diplomatic cables, and Oswald’s self-described “historic” diary – to assemble a compelling mosaic. No one of these rough, sometimes irregular pieces presents Oswald in the round, but the accumulated effort, when one draws back, is stunning. Perhaps it is an illusion shared by the writer and reader, but Oswald does begin to be comprehensible, a tragic rather than absurd figure.

    Mailer/Schiller spent six months in Moscow and Minsk gathering information and impressions; it was what Mailer calls “the equivalent of an Oklahoma land-grab for an author.” They were armed with a promise from the Belorussian KGB that it would open its files on Oswald in Minsk, and although the materials were less comprehensive than promised (or imagined?), they enabled Mailer to reconstruct an important and largely undocumented part of Oswald’s life. Oswald lived in a bell jar, and before the state security organs decided that he was boring, no movement, conversation, or contact was too insignificant to be recorded by the KGB – literally. Observation reports and tape recordings of Mariana and Lee are used sparingly but to great effect. The end of the Cold War also meant that the Oswalds’ Russian and Belorussian acquaintances were free to talk about the defector in their midst, and these testimonies are persuasive more than 30 years after the KGB warned friends, former lovers, and enemies alike to keep their mouths shut.

    Shortly after Oswald leaves Minsk, however, the book begins to falter. So much so that one is tempted to believe that the author’s original conception was Oswald in Minsk rather than Oswald’s Tale, and that Mailer began the project fully expecting the Soviet archives to reveal that Oswald was working for a secret agency  (CIA or KGB). But Mailer became utterly convinced that no one sent Oswald to spy on Russia, and that the KGB had no interest whatsoever in recruiting him once he arrived uninvited. The only secret power center Oswald worked for was the one “in the privacy of his own mind,” Mailer writes.

    Conceptions often must be altered in midstream, of course, and Mailer musters a good argument for forging ahead. He likens the chapters on Moscow and Minsk to a base camp, from which he will launch an assault on the “greatest mountain of mystery in the 20th century.” Yet that expedition proves to be nothing more than a running, occasionally amusing or interesting, commentary on testimony excised from the exhaustive Warren Commission hearings – some of which is reprinted – along with so many excerpts from Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 biography, Marina and Lee, that she deserves a royalty cut. There is, literally, nothing new here.

    To Mailer’s credit, he cast aside his initial prejudices and wrote a work that concludes, albeit grudgingly, that Oswald “had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably did it alone.” This was not virgin territory, after all, for Mailer. He has publicly praised different conspiracy theories for years, and Oliver Stone in particular for supposedly driving out nonsense (“the mind-stultifying myth of the lone assassin”) with superior nonsense. Yet ultimately Mailer lacks the guts to say what needs to be said besides the fact that Oswald was the assassin: The Warren Commission got it right.

This review first appeared in Civilization, May/June 1995
© 1995 by Max Holland

Inside Casino Capitalism

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
By Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Harper & Row. 528 pp. $22.95

Print

By Max Holland

    In 1898, Adolphus Green, chairman of the National Biscuit Company, found himself faced with the task of choosing a trademark for his newly formed baking concern. Green was a progressive businessman. He refused to employ child labor, even though it was then a common practice, and he offered his bakery employees the option to buy stock at a discount. Green therefore thought that his trademark should symbolize Nabisco’s fundamental business values, “not merely to make dividends for the stockholders of his company, but to enhance the general prosperity and the moral sentiment of the United States.” Eventually he decided that a cross with two bars and an oval – a medieval symbol representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the base and material – should grace the package of every Nabisco product.

    If they had wracked their brains for months, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar could not have come up with a more ironic metaphor for their book. The fall of Nabisco, and its corporate partner R.J. Reynolds, is nothing less than the exact opposite of Green’s business credo, a compelling tale of corporate and Wall Street greed featuring RJR Nabisco officers who first steal shareholders blind and then justify their epic displays of avarice by claiming to maximize shareholder value.

    The event which made the RJR Nabisco story worth telling was the 1988 leveraged buyout (LBO) of the mammoth tobacco and food conglomerate, then the 19th-largest industrial corporation in America. Battles for corporate control were common during the loosely regulated 1980s, and the LBO was just one method for capturing the equity of a corporation. (In a typical LBO, a small group of top management and investment bankers put 10 percent down and finance the rest of their purchase through high-interest loans or bonds. If the leveraged, privately-owned corporation survives, the investors, which they can re-sell public shares, reach the so-called “pot of gold”; but if the corporation cannot service its debt, everything is at risk, because the collateral is the corporation itself.