John McCone's Memoranda of Meetings with President Johnson Immediately After Assassination Part 2

      In this second part, I want to comment on the McCone MFRs as a whole. The first thing that stands out is how trivial some of the discussions are. The CIA had provided John Kennedy a daily "checklist." This was like a one-page, daily newspaper of events in the intelligence world. In hindsight, it seems silly, a James Bond token of the Cold War. Why did the president need such details? One answer was that it allowed the CIA to justify all the money spent on it. The checklist made the president aware of the CIA's existence. But the released documensts disclose that on November 23, Lyndon Johnson told McCone he wanted personal briefings. Maybe LBJ didn't like to read, or, more probably, he wanted a chance to take a measure of the man running the CIA.

       In the first meeting on November 23, LBJ focuses on Vietnam and he does this again at the November 25 meeting. Johnson hints at his dislike of the Kennedys in his remark that JFK had "encouraged" the November 1 coup in the country that had resulted in Diem's murder whereas LBJ was "unhappy" about the then-pending coup. His unfavorable view of Robert Kennedy is suggested in the memo of November 25-26 where he says the Department of Justice is pushing for an independent investigation of the JFK assassination, but he, Johnson, exhibited "considerable contempt" for that. No good explanation has ever been advanced as to why LBJ was so opposed to a Warren Commission, this memo say that when he heard that the Washington Post ws going to publish an editorial calling for an independent investigation, LBJ called publisher Katherine Graham and had it "killed."  

       John McCone was close to Robert Kennedy, so it is interesting to read that on December 2 LBJ sounded McCone out on whether Kennedy was going to stay at Justice. In a classic case of giving the highest classification to political rather than national security matters, McCone classified this December 2 memo, which deals with personnel matters, Top Secret EYES ONLY. On the other hand, McCone doesn't put that classification on his December 6 memo even though he uses "unconscionable" and "trickery" to describe his opinion of the Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.  Nor does he give such a high classifications to his December 13 memo, where he advises LBJ on how to deal with Robert Kennedy.

       But it is with regard to Cuba that the reader sees the greatest difference between LBJ and JFK. While LBJ and McCone use the word "invasion" in their discussions of Cuba, Johnson clearly doesn't see Cuba as important as JFK did. Kennedy was communicating with the CIA on almost a daily basis in the last week of his life whereas it comes up only two or three times in McCone's discussion with Johnson.

       Kennedy pressured the CIA to find hard evidence that Castro was exporting the revolution to Latin America, and on November 19, Helms rushed to the White House with "hard evidence" of a weapons cache in Venezuela. Yet LBJ seems to see it as no more important than a steel mill in Romania. Johnson is interested in Venezuela but mainly because four Americans, including Colonel Channault, were being held hostage by some Communists there. (He was freed without harm).

       Finally, the most striking thing is that although the specious Gilberto Alvarado allegations, that Oswald was seen conspiring with the Cubans, were talked about, McCone never brought to LBJ's attention that the CIA had received far more serious and credible allegations about Gilberto Lopez on December 5.