What Truman Wrote About The CIA After JFK Was Taken Out

Last Friday Judge Napolitano had a fascinating exchange on the intel roundup with Ray McGovern—a former very high level analyst at the CIA. It seems that former president Truman published an op-ed, dated December 22, 1963, in the WaPo. That date is one month to the day after JFK was taken out in Dallas. McGovern took the occasion to make the case for a contention that he, apparently, has made in the past—namely, that Truman’s op-ed basically alleged that the CIA assassinated JFK. He focuses especially on the fact that Truman’s op-ed appeared in the morning edition of the WaPo but disappeared as of the afternoon edition—surely at the urgent request of the CIA.

I’ll be reproducing Truman’s op-ed below, but before I go further I want to make one thing clear—I’m quite open to that basic idea of a CIA role in the JFK take out. Nevertheless, I don’t buy that Truman was making that allegation. There are two flaws in McGovern’s argument that I think are telling. First, McGovern leaves out the historical context of the op-ed, which is important: In the immediate aftermath of the JFK take out the USSR was pointing a finger at the CIA as responsible—perhaps for good reason, but that’s another story. Second, McGovern, in his remarks to Judge Nap, gives the impression that Allen Dulles—and let’s be clear, Dulles was a true psychopath—almost immediately after the op-ed appeared flew out to talk Truman back from his call for the CIA’s operational side to be abolished. Truman refused but, as we’ll see, the timing is different than what McGovern implies.

So, first we have a transcript of the conversation between the Judge and McGovern. What emerges is that Truman had been following the CIA’s activities during the Eisenhower years, was extremely upset by what all this meant for the nation, and took great care in writing the op-ed. He consulted with Admiral Souers while writing it and it’s totally fair to say the the JFK take out spurred Truman to put pen to paper:

[24:32]

Ray, you remember the op-ed in the Washington Post written by former President Truman in the days when the Washington Post had two editions, and suddenly that op-ed didn't appear in the second edition, because the Washington Post's masters in Langley wanted to quash it. What did Truman say in that op-ed? What did he regret? What did Eisenhower do in the Mossadegh--or whatever other overthrows there were--that caused Truman to regret what he did in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act into law?

Judge, what he said was, 'This is not what I set the CIA up to do. I didn't want it set up to mislead presidents into war--read: Bay of Pigs--and I certainly didn't want them to be doing cloak and dagger stuff all over the place without much control.' Now, we know the background of that op-ed, because Admiral Souers [first Director, CIA]--who was his chief of intelligence--and he exchanged correspondence as Truman was drafting this, and it appeared--not incidentally--on the first, on 23 December, one month after the [Kennedy] assassination [11/22/63]. It did not appear in any other editions. It was pulled. It didn't appear in any other media, except the Missouri Independent, Truman's newspaper, and it was just dissed off the public memory. This was an indictment of what happened by the president who knew what he had created, and you're right--he said, 'I didn't I didn't mean to create this kind of monster.' And we know that he carefully prepared this kind of thing.

Now what happened after that? Allen Dulles goes out to see Harry Truman on a pretext--he's making a speech in Kansas City, right?--and he says, 'You didn't really mean that, did you?' And Truman said, 'Of course I did!' Allen Dulles dictates a memo for the record to the General Counsel, Larry Houston [Lawrence R. Houston], of the CIA, and he says: 'Truman has recanted this he said in really want to say that,' puts that memo in the record. Next month, Life Magazine [or Look magazine?] asks Truman, 'Did you mean that?' 'Of course I meant it!' So, what's the reason for the memo for the record? Just in case someone looks into what Truman had said--let's say he dies--'Well, he told *me*, Allen Dulles, in, you know, it's right in the record there.’ Yeah, Larry Houston was the General Counsel for the first 30 years of the CIA. So, it's all very ingrown, it's all very corrupt, and Truman to his credit said, 'You know, this is beyond the Pale! Assassinate the President? I don't think that should happen!' And he let it go, and nobody took note.

As we’ve seen, the historical context for this op-ed was—and you’ll see this reflected in the op-ed itself—was that the CIA was being identified as behind all kinds of “cloak and dagger” ops—regime changes, assassinations, etc. As a result, the American brand, if you will, was being tarnished. This, I contend, is what Truman was addressing in his op-ed. He was determined to distance himself from what the CIA had become and took pains to insist that he had never intended to set up a Deep State. His recommendation was not to abolish the CIA outright, but to specifically abolish its operational arm, retaining the intelligence arm.

McGovern shamelessly puts words into Truman’s mouth. Truman never accused the CIA of assassinating JFK. In an article 10 years ago McGovern also provides the actual time line for Dulles’ trip out to Kansas—it was four months after the op-ed occurred. I submit that if Dulles thought Truman had actually—or even implicitly—accused him of masterminding the JFK take out Dulles would have been on Truman’s doorstep virtually overnight. Not four months later. I would argue that Dulles was concerned to defuse calls for the CIA’s operational functions to be abolished.

This excerpt from McGoverns 2013 article stops short of alleging a CIA role in the assassination and instead focuses on the CIA’s “operational duties”:

Truman’s True Warning on the CIA

By Ray McGovern, CONSORTIUMNEWS

Published December 23, 2013

… [Truman] said the CIA’s “operational duties” should “be terminated.”

In short, JFK’s assassination prompted Truman to call for the CIA’s abolition.

There can be little doubt that the circumstances of Kennedy’s murder prompted Truman’s radical proposal. The former president, living in Missouri, began writing his Post article nine days after Kennedy was killed, according to an excellent 2009 piece by former CIA officer Ray McGovern (who says he was relying on JFK researcher Ray Marcus).

In handwritten notes found at the Truman Library, the former president noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.”

Four months later, former CIA director Allen Dulles paid Truman a visit. Dulles tried to get Truman to retract what he had written in the Post.

“No dice, said Truman,” according to McGovern/Marcus.

But four days later, in a formal memo for Lawrence Houston, the CIA’s general counsel, Dulles fabricated a retraction. He claimed that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”

Truman denied it. In a June 10, 1964, letter to Look magazine, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”

So now we turn to Truman himself. I’ll comment up front that Truman comes across as perhaps a bit naive.

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence by Harry S Truman

The Washington Post

December 22, 1963

Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency— CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

These next paragraphs are what I find naive.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions— and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his— then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

That final phrase appears to me to be at the center of Truman’s concerns. The man who authorized the use of nuclear bombs against Japan was not an early human rights crusader. Certainly, Truman’s reference to Dulles as a man of “the highest character … and integrity” puts to rest any misconception that Truman was concerned about actual CIA actions out of humanitarian concerns. Rather, Truman was concerned about “perception management” and—probably—the lack of presidential control over CIA ops. This becomes clear in the next paragraph:

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity— and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field— and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.