Not surprisingly, these revelations triggered another flurry of condemnations and recriminations, with the editors of Encounter quarreling bitterly about who among them was the witting asset (the finger clearly pointed at Melvin Lasky) and Victor Reuther trying to salvage his reputation by describing the occasion on which he had rejected Braden’s attempts to recruit him as an agent.99 (The most robust response came from the redoubtable George Meany who, after implausibly protesting his unwittingness, proclaimed his “pride in the work that we have done overseas” and resentment “that the CIA is trying to horn in on it.”)100 The article also caused further dismay within the Agency itself. “I think Tom meant well but obviously it is going to be very damaging,” Cord Meyer wrote Allen Dulles on May 1, enclosing an advance copy of Braden’s piece. “I really can’t understand why he did it.” Braden’s former boss was appalled by what he viewed as a violation of both personal loyalty and professional commitments. When Joan Braden, Tom’s wife, tried to mend bridges between the two men a month later, the now frail Dulles regretfully told her that he could no longer have any dealings with his former deputy. “If he felt he could do this, how could he expect to be trusted in the future with work requiring discretion and confidence? He has hurt many of us and my feelings for Tom have been deeply affected.”101 Dulles died in January 1969, the rift with Braden still unrepaired.
Braden’s article had all the appearances of an unauthorized action by a famously maverick operator, even to those who had once managed him at the CIA. However, some clues point to a different interpretation of the Saturday Evening Post piece. Meyer’s intimation to Dulles that Braden was acting independently of, and even contrary to, the wishes of the Agency is implicitly contradicted by an apparently insignificant document held at the Lyndon Johnson Library in Texas, a memorandum from National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow to President Johnson dated April 19, 1967. “I assume you know of the forthcoming Braden article on the CIA in the Saturday Evening Post, ” the note reads. “Here is the story from Dick Helms.”102 Although the attached report by the DCI is missing,
246
T H I N G S F A L L A PA R T
Rostow’s covering memo suggests that the Agency not only had sufficient advance warning of the article’s appearance for it to invoke Braden’s secrecy oath and thereby prevent publication, it might even have played a part in the piece’s planning, along with a knowledgeable and supportive White House. Two other pieces of circumstantial evidence point to the same tentative conclusion. One is the fact that the CIA had planted stories in the Saturday Evening Post before, with the help of one of its editors, Stewart Alsop.103 According to Braden’s later recollection, Alsop also collaborated in the drafting of his article (the two men had a history of writing together, going back to their coauthored 1947 celebration of the OSS, Sub Rosa).104 Second, much press coverage of the article’s impact dwelled disproportionately on the embarrassment of the non-communist leftists identified as witting assets by Braden, especially Victor Reuther. For example, reports of the affair by labor columnist Victor Riesel, who had cooperated secretly with the Agency since the early 1950s, reveled in the irony that the charges of accepting covert subsidies that Reuther had previously leveled against Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown “will reverse—
perhaps boomerang.”105
It was a well-worn technique of the CIA to blow the cover of covert operations when they were no longer considered desirable or viable, and there were a number of reasons why, by April 1967, the Agency might have tired of its alliance with the non-communist left. For one, the NCL
had become a far less reliable instrument of U.S. foreign policy than it had been a decade earlier. With their propensity for criticizing the war in Vietnam, ADA-style left-liberals such as the Reuther brothers were increasingly perceived in Washington as a hindrance rather a help in the prosecution of the Cold War. This view had, of course, long been held by conservatives such as James Burnham, but it had now come to be shared by the Johnson White House, with the president himself deeply re-sentful of liberal anticommunists who had once supported U.S. policy in Vietnam and now opposed it. (Compared with his predecessors, LBJ had never been very enthusiastic about front group operations, nor for that matter about the CIA itself, which he suspected vaguely of having played some role in the Kennedy assassination.) The fact that Victor Reuther had also made several hostile, public statements about covert CIA involvement in American labor organizations would no doubt have been noticed in Langley. (An internal White House memorandum, written in
J O U R N A L I S T S
247
