Photo Back Story #1, the White House meeting

While photographs are normally added to a book to help the reader visualize the story, the process of obtaining several of the photographs in my book actually contributed to the research.  This Back story #1 is about the two photographs of the December 19, 1963, meeting at the White House with President Johnson. 

            I discovered them after writing the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Texas and asking for permission to use a photograph it had online of the CIA’s Richard Helms.  The library’s photo staff gave me permission and, with words authors love to hear, said there was no charge.  I had not been able to find any photograph of Desmond FitzGerald and asked if the library might by chance have a photograph of him as well.  The staff said that his name was not in its database but that if I knew a date when he was at the White House, they might have a photograph.  “December 19, 1963,” I wrote back in an email.  That worked.  The library sent me six photographs of the meeting, two of which are in the book.

            Suddenly, I could see the faces of all the men – and they were all male – that I had been reading about in declassified Top Secret memoranda for the record.  There was FitzGerald, Helms, General Carter, Cyrus Vance, and the others.  I eventually was able to put names to all the faces.  I compared these names with other records of who attended.  There are differences as I note in the book.

            You see FitzGerald standing at the table in a room that isn’t full yet.  He apparently has just walked in.  This would fit with what he wrote in his memorandum about the president starting the meeting before everyone had arrived and while the White House photographer was still taking pictures.  Spies hate to have their picture taken, and FitzGerald’s memorandum suggests displeasure. 

            FitzGerald’s memorandum records that LBJ said someday they, including Johnson, would have to answer to the “grand jury of public opinion” for what had been going on.  He presumably meant the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro.  And in the one photograph, the president appears less than happy.  Maybe the photographer captured the very moment FitzGerald was writing about of Lyndon Johnson venting his feelings about the CIA’s Murder, Inc.  (Click to enlarge images).