Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the CIA, and Me
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A couple months ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a name lost for decades, floated briefly to the top of our information sea. Years, decades ago, I read a number of Arthur’s books and articles. In the even dimmer recesses of memory, I had met and spoke with him. Arthur was once a pillar of the American establishment. He was one of the keepers of the faith of the post-World War II New Dealers. In 1961, he had accompanied Jack Kennedy into the White House as confidant and counsel. In that capacity, he attended every White House meeting during the Cuban Missile misadventure, where more than a few advocated blowing up the world.
Arthur’s name bobbed to the surface for a memo he wrote, at the president’s request, instigated by the Bay of Pigs, the circus-like CIA Cuban invasion fiasco that inaugurated Kennedy’s administration. Caught in the president’s assassination investigation, the memo was kept classified, finally released in March. It remains an amazingly relevant short history of the agency, and calls for reform, though unfortunately with less than great ideas on how to accomplish that. The only reason it was kept unreleased for sixty years is how embarrassing much of it is concerning the agency’s composition and actions.
Written two months after the agency’s botched incursion of the Cuban shores, the memo begins,
“...an agency dedicated to clandestine activity can afford damned few visible errors. The important thing to recognize today, in my judgment, is that the CIA, as present named and constituted, has about used up its quota. Its margin for future error is practically non-existent. One more CIA debacle will shake faith considerably in US policy, at home as well as abroad.”
Of course Schlesinger couldn’t have been more wrong about this. Six decades since, the agency’s composition and autonomy became greater and all the more unaccountable. Its actions endlessly embarrassing and damaging to the interests of the republic. Arthur astutely indicts, “The argument of this memorandum is that the CIA’s trouble can be traced to the autonomy with which the agency has been permitted to operate.”
He writes of the agency’s composition,
“CIA has developed a whole series of functions paralleling already existing functions of the State Department, and of the Defense Department as well. Today it has its own political desks and military staffs, it has in effect its own foreign service; it has (or has had) its own combat forces; it even has its own air forces. Its annual budget is about __ times that of the State Department. The contemporary CIA possesses many of the characteristics of a state within a state.”
It’s amusing that in 1961, one of the top counselors to the president can’t provide an exact number on the CIA’s budget. Of course the description of the CIA as a “state within a state” demonstrates even then the agency was antithetical to any notion of self-government. He does add the incredible figures of the “CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as State – 3900 to 3700.”
Then writes,
“Though the CIA’s autonomy developed for historical reasons, it has been able to endure because there is no doctrine governing our conduct of clandestine operations. The problem for the CIA is the extent to which its various clandestine missions are compatible with a free and open society.”
The simple fact is such “missions” are completely incompatible with any notions of a free and open society. The CIA was instituted and grew from the exact opposite notion, institutionalizing the American empire, beginning with the passage of the 1947 National Security Act.
JFK must have known a few Jesuits and Arthur gives an awesomely Jesuit rationalization of the agency's operations: "I would think, the conclusion that secret activities are permissible so as they do not corrupt that principles and practices of our society, and that they cease to be permissible when their effect is to corrupt these principles and practices.” Unfortunately, despite Arthur’s best adroit parsing, such activities, conducted by a defacto clandestine organization, define corruption of the principles and practices of self-government.
What the CIA did, and continues to do, was not carry out government policies adopted by the Congress or even the wants of the Imperial Presidency – Arthur’s decade later indictment of institutional republican corruption – but the agency created and implemented its own policies. This is best represented by its “paramilitary” endeavors of which the Bay of Pigs was one. Such operations have continued across the globe, unencumbered and unaccounted ever since. He writes, “As Allen Dulles wrote in his 1947 memorandum to the Senate Armed Services Committee, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency should have nothing to with policy.’ Yet, in the years since, CIA has, in effect, ‘made’ policy in many parts of the world.”
Then, one of the great political statements ever made in any memo to any president,
“Paramilitary warfare, I gather is regarded in some quarters as a purely technical matter, easily detachable from policy and therefore a proper function of the Department of Defense. Yet there is almost no CIA function more particularly dependent on the political context than paramilitary warfare.”
Using Mao as his authority, Schlesinger writes,
“”Without a political goal,’ wrote Mao Tse-Tung, ‘guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and if their sympathy, cooperation and assistance cannot be gained.’ He added, ‘Do we want the support of the masses? If we do, we must go among the masses; arouse them to activity; concern ourselves with their weal and woe.’”
Arthur concludes, “For these reasons, paramilitary warfare cannot be considered as primarily a military weapon. It is primarily a political weapon and must therefore be subjected to close and careful political oversight.” There is no democratic politics without democratic accountability. The US constitution squarely places the decision to use military power purposely and irrefutably in the hands of Congress, not the presidency or any clandestine organization like the CIA, which the founders, most anyway, would have had a hard time even imagining.
Which gets to the nut. The CIA is a political operation, doing politics, with no accountability to the government and completely removed from any influence of the citizenry. With no argument, the CIA represents the antithesis of all notions of self-government, yet its actions, if ever given the least scrutiny, are always promoted as done in America’s self-interest.
A dozen years before Schlesinger’s memo, the great advocate of democratic reform, scientist and technologist Norbert Wiener wrote, “We will have to do this unhampered by the creeping paralysis of secrecy which is engulfing our government. Because secrecy means we are unable to face situations as they are, that people who have to control situations are in no position to handle them.” No better description could be ascribed to the CIA’s future perpetual, brutal, and bloody bungling. Wiener wrote the year of the CIA’s inception.
Arthur's memo provides an amusing anecdote about the CIA’s already cluster-fuck bureaucracy,
“The trouble with the Cuban operation, for example, was not that intelligence and operations were combined, but precisely that the Cuban operation evaded systematic intelligence judgment. The intelligence branch (DOI) of CIA was never informed of the existence of the Cuban operation. ...There existed, in short, the ridiculous situation that the knowledge of the Cuban operation, flaunted in Miami bars by any number of low-level agents in the operations branch of the CIA, was denied to even top officials of the intelligence branch. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the Department of State knew even less about the Cuban operation.”
12 years later, G. Gordon Liddy, his partner former CIA agent Howard Hunt, and the rest of the plumbers would perfectly represent the agency in all its bungling.
Arthur concludes to no avail, “The argument of this memorandum implies a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” Instead, CIA became ever larger, ever bungling, incessantly blowing things up across the world, with a special emphasis on the Middle East over the last couple decades. The agency remained entirely unaccountable and amusingly, if you have the stomach, enamored by their own press. As Schlesinger writes, “A gross and repeated CIA failing has been its occasional readiness to succumb to the temptations of favorable publicity. The Guatemalan and Iranian operations were almost nullified by the flood of self-congratulatory publicity which followed them.” To this day, there's denial the CIA had any hand in the overthrow of the Guatemalan and Iranian governments, operations for which we still pay dearly.
The most disappointing aspect of Arthur’s memo are his reform recommendations. He is, sadly, clueless, though certainly not alone, in understanding the CIA as representative of the end of self-government in America. Instead, he looks for guidance to the British imperial model supporting empire. His generation and those that followed, all enthusiastically embraced empire despite history unequivocally showing, despite any and all rationalizing, empire is always a brutal bloody business. Completely lost to his generation, and those that followed, is the great lesson of Rome. The Roman republic was crushed by the weight of the empire it created, ironically, a lesson understood by many more of the American republic’s founders than anybody today.
Nonetheless, the memo remains an important read for today, while Arthur is best remembered, ok, really, Arthur is not remembered at all, but if he was, by a few, for his New Deal advocacy. In reading the CIA memo, I recalled in 1980, in the Chicago campaign office of Ted Kennedy for President, I met Arthur, bow tie and all. Myself and a couple others talked with Arthur for a half-hour. He was virulently against the anti-inflation economic policies of the incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter. He rightly suspected theses policies were the beginning of the end of the New Deal. The problem, as it became apparent over the course of a decade and three presidencies, the New Deal had been created in response to the deflationary 1930s and had few answers for the inflationary 1970s.
Forty years on, Arthur’s concerns about the end of the New Deal proved completely correct, just as had his memo concerning an out of control CIA twenty years before. The Reagan Revolution and the Clinton Capitulation with the dismantling of Glass-Steagall for one, would bury the New Deal. Today, Social Security unsteadily wavers as the last remnant. Yet, just like with CIA reforms, Schlesinger and his generation lacked any real ideas about reforming the New Deal. At best, experts are experts on what was or is, not on what can be.
Arthur’s resurrection inspired me to look up a couple things he wrote. I found a New Yorker article from 1989 about his excellent 1945 history, The Age of Jackson. The book was written as an historical justification of the New Deal, which its designers were always loathe to accept the damage it inflicted to the republic’s democratic organization. What struck me hardest in Arthur’s essay was how the politics of this once pillar of the American establishment would be considered beyond radical today. He writes,
“The Age of Jackson further contended that Jacksonian democracy constituted the second phase, Jeffersonianism having been the first, of the perennial struggle between the business community and the rest of society for control of the state, a struggle I saw as the basic meaning of American liberalism and as the guarantee of freedom in a capitalist democracy.”
This reminded me of Machiavelli’s insight in Discourses on Livy that across its existence, the dynamism of the Roman republic first and foremost could be attributed to the incessant struggle between the plebs and patricians. The end of this conflict was the end of the republic. As legitimate politics, the same struggle ended in these United States decades ago, while today the weight of empire, the other boot that fell and crushed Roman democracy, hangs precariously above our collective heads.
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