The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [313]
As the first director of the Peace Corps, Sarge Shriver was forming an advisory council to include the novelist Gore Vidal, who was not only a Democratic activist but also Jackie’s stepbrother. “I can’t remember whether it was the president or his brother,” Wofford recalled, “but one of them got the full story that he was gay … and they canceled him from being on the advisory council.”
Shortly before the inauguration, Allen Dulles, the legendary director of the CIA, had dinner with a small group of Kennedy aides, among them Sorensen and Feldman. Dulles told the men that during the Eisenhower years the president had not known everything the agency was doing. Dulles’s seemingly casual remarks were often the vehicle for his most crucial, calculated utterances. Although Kennedy’s men were unsettled by Dulles’s comments, the CIA director was suggesting to the new administration that his agency should be left alone to work its will on a dark, troubled world.
A week after the inauguration the president and his top foreign policy advisers met with Dulles for a briefing on Cuba. Kennedy felt an emotional affinity with Dulles and other top CIA officials. The CIA leaders belonged to the old upper-class Protestant world to which the Kennedys had long aspired. These men were doubly elite: members of the American establishment, they were also from a private world that worked its will without following any of the prissy necessities of law and politics that governed other men. Their successes, be it overthrowing governments in Iran or Guatemala or manipulating elections in France or Italy, were all secretly accomplished and privately celebrated. They were men who walked as easily into a secret rendezvous in Tehran or Lima as they did into the Somerset or Metropolitan Club.
These CIA leaders were for the most part sophisticated men who were not terrified by words like “socialist” and “social democrat,” so-called progressives who seemed to want the same world that the president wanted. One of the president’s favorites, and his putative choice to become the next director when sixty-seven-year-old Dulles retired, was Richard Bissell, the CIA director of covert operations. An economist, Bissell was an accomplished man who had come into government during the New Deal as a protégé of the liberal Chester Bowles in the Office of Price Administration. Fifty-year-old Bissell had developed the U-2 program, which, until the Russians shot down Francis Gary Powers in 1960, had been indispensable in getting accurate information about Soviet defenses and missile sites.
Dulles described a Cuba that had become “for practical purposes a Communist-controlled state” in which there was “a rapid and continuing buildup of Castro’s military power, and a great increase also in popular opposition to his regime.” For months the United States had underwritten a series of covert actions, including sabotage, infiltration, and propaganda, while training an insurgent guerrilla force in Guatemala. Most of this Kennedy already knew before the election, and he had learned the rest immediately afterward when Dulles briefed him.
The tweedy, pipe-smoking CIA head explained that there was a renewed urgency to these efforts. The Soviet Union was shipping tons of munitions to the island. Cuban pilots had gone off to Czechoslovakia to train. Castro was steadily garroting his people’s liberties until soon the populace might hardly have the strength to rise up, and his agents were provoking revolution throughout Latin America. As the agency realized the magnitude of the challenge, the program of covert actions kept expanding: from the original $4.4 million the year before Kennedy took office, the budget for fiscal year 1960/61 grew to more than $45 million.
Kennedy had met with Eisenhower on the day before the inauguration, when the Republican president had bequeathed his covert Cuba program and admonished his successor to push