Arthur Schlesinger

[Michael Hogan]

In a Salon.com review of The Cultural Cold War (The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters) by Frances Stonor Saunders, Robert S. Boynton writes:

The most startling aspect of "The Cultural Cold War" is the comprehensive list Saunders has compiled of those who took CIA funds: Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Hook, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Lowell, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Mark Rothko, Bertrand Russell,

Arthur Schlesinger

, Edward Shils. At times it seems as if few critics, composers or artists of any talent resisted. With the CIA's operations in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961) and Vietnam, the question of how much one knew became as much a moral as an epistemological one.

http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/200..._war/index.html

A Counterpunch review by Lenni Brenner of the same book:

Occasionally she buries a quote in a footnote instead of developing it in the story proper.

Arthur Schlesinger's

admission about serving "as a periodic CIA consultant," is too important for minor treatment. Nevertheless she certifies him a prime Agency accomplice in its suborning of the intellectual world.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner01112003.html

In a review for the Washington Monthly, Robert DeNeufville writes:

The linchpin of this effort, from 1950 until its link to the CIA was exposed in 1967, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Through the Congress and parallel organizations, the CIA secretly underwrote international conferences, art expositions, music festivals, and more than 20 magazines, including the highly respected Encounter, which was edited originally by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. The CIA campaign was so extensive that, at its height, it would not be wrong to say that the agency acted as a secret ministry of culture. Nearly every prominent Western intellectual in the early years of the Cold War was, wittingly or unwittingly, involved with some CIA-backed program. Among those most notably implicated were historian

Arthur Schlesinger Jr

., French social theorist Raymond Aron, novelist and essayist Arthur Koestler, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. According to a U.S. government oversight committee, by the mid-'60s almost half the grants given out by various philanthropies--including some by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations--involved some CIA money.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m131..._32/ai_62215216

[William Kelly]

CIA Director told RFK “there were two people involved in the shooting.”

JFKcountercoup: CIA Director told RFK Two People Shooting at JFK

In Dallas on the night of the assassination, one copy of the Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy was hand delivered to the Grand Prarie Naval Air Station where a jet pilot flew it to Washington D.C.

The film was taken to Secret Service headquarters and it was reviewed, but since the Secret Service wasn’t in the business of analyzing films, two Secret Service agents took the film to the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) at the Navy Yard where it was turned over to Dino Brugioni. Brugioni’s team analyzed it and made still blow ups of select individual frames that were mounted on briefing boards. They worked on the film throughout the night and in the morning the director of the NPIC, Art Lundal, took the briefing boards to the CIA Headquarters.

Lundal’s October 1962 briefing to JFK on U2 photo evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba set off the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was so impressed with Lundal’s briefing he sent Lundal to London and Paris to brief the US Ambasador (David Bruce), the Prime Minister and DeGaul. The content of Lundal’s briefing to CIA director John McCone is unkown, but it ostensibly was based on the NPIC analysis of the Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret Service agents who witnessed the assassination.

But when McCone went to the White House to brief the President, not only on the assassination but on international affairs, he found LBJ in the basement Situation Room monitoring reports from Dallas. When LBJ saw McCone, he waved him off, he didn’t need to know anything the CIA had to say about the assassination or anything else.

Brugioni wrote: "McCone found Lyndon Johnson colorless and crude in intelligence matters and, as president, clumsy and heavy-handed in international affairs. Instead of personally carefully considering prepared intelligence memorandums on intelligence matters, he preferred to be briefed by trusted advisors. Increasingly, the president sought intelligence information almost exclusively from Secretary McNamara and the Defense Department. McCone's advice simply was no longer actively sought by the president. His role diminished, his influence faded, and the ready access he had enjoyed during the Kennedy administration became very limited…"

While LBJ wasn’t interested in what the CIA had to say about the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy was interested, and a few weeks later, on December 9, RFK crossed paths with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a close aide and advisor to President Kennedy. When Kennedy’s casket was moved from the White House to the Capitol for the state funeral, RFK asked Schlesinger if the casket should be opened or closed. Schlesinger looked at the dead president’s lifeless body and waxed face and said it should be closed, and RFK agreed.

When they met on December 9^th, Schlesinger asked RFK what he thought about the assassination, and in his journal Schlesinger wrote: “I asked him, perhaps tactlessly about Oswald. He said there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty, but there still was argument whether he did it by himself or as a part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters. He said the FBI people thought he had done it by himself, but that McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting.” (published in 2007 as Journals 1952-2000 (Penguin Press, Diary entry December 9, 1963 page 184),

That the Director of the CIA would tell the Attorney General he thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” was not just a belief or an opinion, but was a determination based on the NPIC analysis of the Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret Service agents that witnessed the assassination who said that the President and Governor Connally were hit by separate shots, which indicated there was more than one gunman.

[Michael Hogan]

......In 1961 Schlesinger was appointed the president's special adviser on Latin America. In this post he became aware of JFK's secret negotiations with Fidel Castro (via William Attwood).

February 11, 1961 Memorandum from Schlesinger to President Kennedy:

As you know, there is great pressure within the government in favor of a drastic decision with regard to Cuba.

There is, it seems to me, a plausible argument for this decision if one excludes everything but Cuba itself and looks only at the pace of

military consolidation within Cuba and the mounting impatience of the armed exiles.

However, as soon as one begins to broaden the focus beyond Cuba to include the hemisphere and the rest of the world, the arguments against this decision begin to gain force.

However well disguised any action might be, it will be ascribed to the United States. The result would be a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States). Worst of all, this would be your first dramatic foreign policy initiative. At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.

It may be that on balance the drastic decision may have to be made. If so, every care must be taken to protect ourselves against the inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out.

1. Would it not be possible to induce Castro to take offensive action first? He has already launched expeditions against Panama and against the Dominican Republic. One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime. If only Castro could be induced to commit an offensive act, then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start.

2. Should you not consider at some point addressing a speech to the whole hemisphere setting forth in eloquent terms your own conception of inter-American progress toward individual freedom and social justice? Such a speech would identify our Latin American policy with the aspirations of the plain people of the hemisphere. As part of this speech, you could point out the threats raised against the inter-American system by dictatorial states, and especially by dictatorial states under the control of non-hemisphere governments or ideologies. If this were done properly, action against Castro could be seen as in the interests of the hemisphere and not just of American corporations.

3. Could we not bring down Castro and Trujillo at the same time? If the fall of the Castro regime could be accompanied or preceded by the fall of the Trujillo regime, it would show that we have a principled concern for human freedom and do not object only to left-wing dictators.

If the drastic decision proves necessary in the end, I hope that steps of this sort can do something to mitigate the effects. And, if we do take the drastic decision, it must be made clear that we have done so, not lightly, but only after we had exhausted every conceivable alternative.

http://history.state...s1961-63v10/d43

Edited April 4, 2013 by Michael Hogan

[William Kelly]

More on Schlesinger and RFK

JFKfacts » CIA chief told RFK about two shooters in Dallas