every president he served in high office.
Dulles would serve John F. Kennedy for less than a year, but their briefly entwined stories would have monumental consequences. Clearly outmatched in the beginning by the savvy spymaster, who beguiled Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK proved a quick learner in the Washington power games. He became the first and only president who dared to strip Dulles of his formidable authority. But Dulles’s forced retirement did not last long after Kennedy jettisoned him from the CIA in November 1961. Instead of easing into his twilight years, Dulles continued to operate as if he were still America’s intelligence chief, targeting the president who had ended his illustrious career. The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy.
Walking through Georgetown on that warm September evening, Willie Morris was perplexed to hear Dulles erupt with such scorn at the mere mention of Kennedy’s name. But there was a reason that—nearly two years after JFK’s bloody end—Kennedy’s hold on the public’s imagination still disturbed Dulles. He knew who the real “god” was—and it was not Jack Kennedy.
After their stroll, the two men returned to Dulles’s home for drinks and dinner, and then more work on his article, which was to be titled “My Answer to the Bay of Pigs.” There was a sad stillness to the Dulles residence: Clover was away, at the family’s summer retreat on Lake Ontario; their son, Allen Jr., a brilliant young man who had suffered a grievous head wound in the Korean War, was in and out of sanitariums; their grown daughters Joan and Toddie had their own worries and misfortunes. There was nothing to distract Morris and Dulles besides the fleeting presence of one or two servants. Morris proved a good companion, a son of Mississippi who knew how to keep up his end when the bourbon and conversation began flowing. And he was the most touted magazine editor of his generation, on his way to becoming the youngest editor of the venerable Harper’s at age thirty-two. Under his leadership in the late ’60s, Harper’s would glow with the vibrant writing of Norman Mailer, William Styron, and David Halberstam.
But, in the end, even with Morris’s expert hand, Dulles could not wrestle his manuscript into shape, and the old spook withdrew it from publication. By the time Dulles finally gave up, after months of toil, the article had gone through multiple drafts, adding up to several hundred coffee-stained pages. The drafts, now stuffed into boxes at a Princeton library where the Dulles papers are housed, are a window into Allen Dulles’s tortured relationship with the young president. In finally abandoning the massive project, which one historian later called “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen Dulles,” the old spymaster seemed to conclude that he was saying both too much and too little about what he had been through with Kennedy.
By writing the article, Dulles had set out to rebut charges made by JFK loyalists Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that Kennedy had been tricked by his intelligence advisers into the disastrous Cuban adventure. But instead, the spymaster’s scribblings—in between angry eruptions at Kennedy and his White House circle of “doubting Thomases” and “Castro admirers”—revealed the myriad ways that Dulles’s CIA had indeed contrived to lure the young president into the Cuban sand trap.
When the Bay of Pigs operation was under way and “the chips were down,” Dulles wrote, he was confident that JFK would be compelled to do the right thing and send in the awesome power of the U.S. military to rescue the invasion. That’s the way the CIA game was played: there was a certain amount of hoodwinking and massaging of White House anxieties, and then the president fell in line. But this time, the president, despite his youth and the collective browbeating of his gray-haired national security ministers, stood his ground. Kennedy said no to expanding an operation that he had felt all along was sordid. And the long reign of Allen Dulles came crashing down.
At least, that’s the way Dulles’s story is told in biographies and CIA histories. The truth is that Dulles’s reign went on, deeply cloaked, toward an even more catastrophic conclusion.
In the first days and weeks after his ouster, Dulles’s world caved in. Suddenly unmoored from the daily routines of power he had known ever since he was a budding young spy in the service of Woodrow Wilson, Dulles seemed “a very tragic man,” in the words of one CIA colleague. He shuffled around his Georgetown home, with his gout-ridden feet softly coffined in bedroom slippers. But Dulles’s “tragic” period did not last long. He soon began meeting with a surprising range of CIA officers—men from the top rungs of the agency, as well as agents from the field. They paraded in and out of the brick manor on Q Street, huddling with him in his book-lined study and on sunny days quietly chatting on his walled-in terrace. His day calendar was filled with yet more meetings at his favorite Washington retreats, the Alibi Club and the Metropolitan Club, where he dined with the same generals and national security wise men with whom he had done business at the CIA. It was, in fact, as if he had never left the spy agency.
Dulles would turn his Georgetown home into the center of an anti-Kennedy government in exile. As time went by, the Dulles circle became ever more disenchanted with JFK’s foreign policy, which they considered appeasement of the Communist enemy. Dulles grew bolder in his opposition. He met with a controversial Cuban exile leader named Paulino Sierra Martinez, a former henchman for the deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Sierra, whose anti-Castro activities were underwritten by the Mafia and U.S. corporations with a stake in Cuba, later fell under Secret Service suspicion in a conspiracy against President Kennedy. The topic of Sierra’s meeting with Dulles in April 1963 remains a mystery.
By October 1963, Dulles felt confident enough to speak out against Kennedy’s foreign policy in public, ignoring the Washington etiquette that deemed it bad form to criticize a president whom you recently had served. Dulles declared that the Kennedy presidency suffered from a “yearning to be loved by the rest of the world.” This “weakness” was not the mark of a global power, insisted Dulles. “I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us.”
In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the flurry of meetings at Dulles’s home intensified. Among the CIA men coming in and out of Q Street were several who later came under investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations and other probes for their possible connection to the president’s murder. And on the weekend of the assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as “the Farm,” despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier. Such was the odd swirl of activity around the “retired” Dulles.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Dulles would again push himself into the Washington spotlight, lobbying President Lyndon Johnson to appoint him to the Warren Commission. Dulles was so actively involved in the official investigation of Kennedy’s murder that one observer remarked it should have been called the Dulles Commission. He worked carefully behind the scenes with his former CIA colleagues to steer the inquiry away from the agency itself and toward “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald.
How did a bitter political enemy of President Kennedy wind up playing a lead role in the official investigation into his death? It was just one more mystery in a lifetime full of enigmatic twists and turns. Just as puzzling is why the American press never troubled itself to explore this intriguing question.
Over half a century later, many questions about JFK’s violent end remain “unspeakable,” in the words of Kennedy biographer James W. Douglass—at least in the carefully controlled arena of media discourse. It is even more unthinkable in these circles to explore the suspicion that Allen Dulles himself—a towering
