John Scali Oral History Interview JFK#1, 11/17/1982 Administrative Information Creator: John Scali Interviewer: Sheldon Stern Date of Interview: November 17, 1982 Place of Interview: Washington D.C. Length: 14 Biographical Note John Scali (1918-1995) was a journalist who worked for the Associated Press from 1944 to 1961 and for ABC News from 1961 to 1971. This interview focuses on the coverage of the Kennedy administration and Scali s role as a liaison between the White House and the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, among other topics. Access Open Usage Restrictions Copyright of these materials has passed to the United States Government upon the death of the interviewee. Users of these materials are advised to determine the copyright status of any document from which they wish to publish. Copyright The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excesses of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Direct your questions concerning copyright to the reference staff. Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the Library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.
Suggested Citation John Scali, recorded interview by Sheldon Stern, November 17, 1982 (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.
Oral History Interview Of John Scali Although a legal agreement was not signed during the lifetime of John Scali, upon his death, ownership of the recording and transcript of his interview for the Oral History Program passed to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library. The following terms and conditions apply: 1. The transcript is available for use by researchers. 2. The tape recording shall be made available to those researchers who have access to the transcript. 3. Copyright to the interview transcript and tape is assigned to the United States Government. 4. Copies of the transcript and the tape recording may be provided by the Library to researchers upon request for a fee. 5. Copies of the transcript and tape recording may be deposited in or loaned to institutions other than the John F. Kennedy Library.
John Scali JFK #1 Table of Contents Page Topic 1 Contact with John F. Kennedy [JFK] as a congressman 2 Covering the Bay of Pigs invasion 3 Covering JFK s trip to Vienna and the Berlin Wall 5 JFK s relationship with Dean Rusk 6 JFK s decision to not appoint Adlai Stevenson Secretary of State 7 Cuban Missile Crisis 8 Concerns that Khrushchev had been overthrown 9 Meetings with Aleksander Fomin after the Cuban Missile Crisis 10 Being approached about the Cuban Missile Crisis 11 JFK s direction on Vietnam 12 View of the Kennedy administration 13 Suggestion that Robert F. Kennedy become Lyndon B. Johnson s Secretary of State
Oral History Interview with JOHN SCALI November 17, 1982 Washington, DC By Sheldon Stern For the John F. Kennedy Library STERN; For the period before JFK [John F. Kennedy] became president you were a diplomatic and roving correspondent for Associated Press. I assume that when JFK was a senator and before that a congressman, I assume you must have had some contacts with him during that period and I wondered if you might be able to relate what those were. I knew John Kennedy as a congressman because I had gone to school at Boston University and had graduated from there, so I always thought of him as a friend. I also had met him at the House of Representatives on many occasions and indeed had talked with him and helped cover his campaign in the race for the presidency. Our relationship was reporter to news source, although there was a good deal of respect and friendship in our relationship. He knew me at a glance and I knew him, but we never had any real socializing together, whether we chatted at various news occasions informally and kidded back and forth. I did fly to Hyannisport once with him on a plane where we chatted about the world in general, but that's about it. Ah, during the.. did you cover any of the primaries when he was seeking the nomination in 1960? No, I just covered some of the preconference, preconvention doings where he appeared. I think I must have covered half a dozen meetings that he had with his constituents and various stops I can't remember now where he was seeking to meet and influence the public.
2 How about the convention, were you at Los Angeles [California] when he was nominated? Yes, I was at the convention when he was nominated. I was one of the ABC [American Broadcasting Corporation] reporters on the floor at that time. Do you have any specific recollections of the convention and particularly of the selection of Lyndon Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson] as vice-president? No, I don't. Ah, how about in the--during the campaign itself, ah, particularly given your specialty in foreign affairs, did you.. what differences did you perceive between Kennedy and Nixon [Richard M. Nixon] on foreign affairs issues? Having known Richard Nixon and having covered him in various occasions, including his overseas visits, I had developed a healthy respect for what I thought was a very sensible foreign policy approach. I didn't see any great difference in the foreign policy that Nixon favored and that which I was fairly sure John Kennedy would follow, if and when he became president. Did you, for example, on the basis of the debates feel that there was any substantial difference between them? Yes, I thought there was in terms of approaching the public. To my way of thinkng, John Kennedy clearly came out of the debates with the enhanced reputation for being solidly grounded in the basic principles of foreign policy and having outlined what I thought was a very sensible stand on the key issues. So, all in all, I didn't think that the difference between the two on foreign policy was that crucial On the, ah--some of the major issues that developed, of course, after he took office. Did you cover, for example, the Bay of Pigs? And what was it like to cover that situation? Yes, I did cover the Bay of Pigs. I broadcast numerous stories about it at the time and afterwards, particularly in covering the Administration's, the Kennedy Administration's explanation of what went wrong. I vividly remember, for example, one background news conference that Ted Sorenson [Theodore c. Sorenson] gave at the White House for a select number of correspondents. I was among them. And I knew from that rather formalized session and from private meetings, none
3 with the president himself but with the people around him, I knew how deeply embarrassed and angry President Kennedy was at the outcome. I also think he learned a lot about the need to make extra careful precautions. And I think also he developed a skepticism of the assurances from his own military which stayed with him from that point on as president. Did you accompany him, for example, on the trip to Vienna (Austria] in June of '61 when he met Khrushchev [Nikita s. Khrushchev]? Yes, I did. I went with him on the whole trip which started in Paris [France], went to Vienna, and wound up in London (England]. There was nothing that stands out on that except that I knew, after the fact, that the president had been pretty shaken up by Nikita Khrushchev and that he passed the word to the reporters who were in the pool on the way back from Vienna that his mood was somber. I remember how Bill Lawrence (William H. Lawrence] of ABC, who described the president's mood, agreed that in fact he was somber and that Nikita Khrushchev had made it clear that there was going to be not only rivalry but something approximating a hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States at that time. The president was quite sure, in his mind and I agreed with his assessment, that Khrushchev had sought to scare him and that the period from then on would be a testing time. And I think the--i think that initial meeting with Khrushchev reinforced his determination that, in the wake of the embarrassment at the Bay of Pigs, the president had to hang tough in any future confrontation and that he expected Khrushchev to seek to undertake some kind of direct challenge to test his manhood. Now, of course, just two months later the Wall went up in Berlin, and there were those, including some journalists, who say that they thought the administration did not respond adequately; should have taken some more--used force perhaps and knock it down. How did you feel about it, covering it? Well, I was with Dean Rusk in Paris at the time the Wall went up, and I am familiar with what his reaction was. And that is that it wasn't necessarily a bad development because the East Germans were fleeing to West Germany in such numbers that the East German government had become panicky about losing not only several thousands, but it--but at the prospect that it would lose the elite, the German technicrats, industrialists, and the people that the East Germans needed to rely on most. And, if I recall corrrectly, Dean Rusk said, "If this can reassure the East German authorities that they are not going to lose all of their key people, it will play the part of a sort of safety valve and keep the situation from escalating to the point where there could be a very grave crisis between East Germany and the soviet Bloc and the West, which he saw building up. I think those
4 reporters who, in retrospect, believed that we should have done something more forceful to demonstrate our opposition, are being irresponsible. Because until and unless you know what that kind of action by the United States would bring on and where the road ends once you start escalating, you had better be very cautious. Rusk was very conscious of the fact that the East Germans and the East German authorities inparticular were becoming not only panicky, but felt that their own national survival was at stake. And so that any reply and any counteraction by the West would be sure to create a crisis situation. So he, I think with the approval of the other Western foreign ministers at that time, thought the wisest action was to do nothing, while making it very clear that all of them were repulsed and deeply off ended by the Wall and that it was eloquent proof of the inability of another communist regime to keep its citizens happy enough to have them agree to remain within their borders. Did you hear at all the argument which I know was advanced, for example, by George [C.] McGhee in the state Department at the time, that in a sense the Wall was a moral victory for the West; that it demonstrated the bankruptcy of the regime in Germany and therefore in a sense was propaganda, good propaganda for us? Yes, I heard that. I didn't agree with it. I felt that it was a confession of weakness on the part of the East German government, but I don't necessarily think that the, along with it came a logical claim that it was a victory for the West in any way. There were those who were saying at the time that the speech that Kennedy had given on--long before--on Berlin [East Germay /West Germany] had emphasized only West Berlin rather than all of Berlin in terms of a four power agreement, and thus in a way he might have wittingly or unwittingly almost given them this sort of, ah, door, in a sense, given them the sense that we would not act. Although, of course, nobody can really say., I think that argument is pure crap. It in a way reminds me of the accusations that were directed against Dean [G.] Acheson.. About Korea... in 1950. About how, when he drew the border of the American vital interest in the Asian theatre, he omitted mention of Korea and thus invited the North Koreans and the Chinese to invade South Korea. I didn't agree then that this was what Acheson had in mind, nor do I believe that it was an important part of the North Korean decision to invade. I think the invasion had already been decided upon and was a
5 deliberate act of the kind that they were prepared to launch even before the actual, the first troops crossed the border. So I don't think in any way that John Kennedy, because he concentrated on proclaiming West Berlin as a symbol of freedom deep in the heart of the communist world, in any way influenced the decision to build the Wall. You obviously knew Secretary Rusk quite well, and I wonder if you would comment on some of those historians who could claim that the Rusk-Kennedy relationship was not terribly good and that Kennedy was probably going to get rid of him in the second term. Did you ever see any sign of that; or what was your perception of the way they related? You have to remember that Kennedy did not know Rusk personally at the time he selected him to be secretary of state. I think that he was looking for an experienced foreign policy specialist who was basically a centrist in his foreign policy views because this was where John Kennedy stood most of the time. I think he also wanted a professional whom he could rely on to run the everyday foreign policy while he, the president, concentrated first hand on the key decisions in the major areas, particularly where they dealt with the Soviet Union. So, despite this, I believe that President Kennedy developed a healthy respect for both the judgement of Dean Rusk and his thorough professionalism. Rusk did not seek to challenge the president on any important policy decisions, nor did he seek to grab his share of the headlines. His stewardship was very much influenced by the time that he had with [General] George [C.] Marshall. As you remember, he was a top aide to General Marshall and almost idolized him. And I think this was the kind of relationship Rusk had with Kennedy. I think he genuinely respected him; remembered always that he was the secretary of state; and that the president, according to the Constitution, really ran foreign policy and indeed every part of the government, particularly foreign policy. I think that even after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy did not blame Rusk in any substantial way. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I know that he listened very carefully to what he thought was the moderating and careful recommendations that Dean Rusk had. Rusk sought during those discussions, I know, to be a good complete team player, to work quietly, and to express his point of view vigorously. But not in any way to back away from what he saw as an extraordinary challenge and one that demanded a clear and emphatic western reply. At a time when others were bending over backwards to find some peaceful way out of it which would've, in my view, gone too far, Rusk resolutely backed the president in the readiness to contemplate the use of American force if what he considered the honorable opportunities to bring the Russians away from a crisis position failed. He was ready, I believe, to approve and to recommend an invasion if necessary, along with air strikes against the Soviet missile positions as a preliminary; either as a policy, which was a prelude to an invasion, or as an act of
6 retaliation in and of itself. Did.. In a sense, I think what you're saying about the choice of Rusk would explain why Kennedy apparently was so reluctant to appoint Adlai [E.) Stevenson as secretary of state which I think... Stevenson certainly had his own constituency; he would have been, in a sense, almost a rival to the president in that position. And that Rusk was the perfect choice in the sense that he was--he had the experience, but he was not a public figure, and he was not--he certainly did not have his own constituency, which from Kennedy's point of view was vital. I think that the president felt that Stevenson clearly was a more difficult and prickly personality. Perhaps more brilliant in a way, but a man who had more that his share of ego and might cause many problems in that it would be likely that he would assert his own point of view very vigorously and would be known as "the" secretary of state. It's very much like why Henry [A.] Kissinger has not been chosen by Ronald [W.J Reagan to be the super ambassador to the Middle East. He ' s already well aware of Kissinger's personality and his desire to have at least his share of the credit and more. And so in both cases when he chose a secretary of state he chose Al Haig [Alexander M. Haig Jr. ), who was less of a spotlight grabber and who had equal experience if not the glamour reputation. And after Haig developed personality problems and became difficult, then went for [George P.] Schultz, another low-key man whom he had reason to believe would not seek to strut out into the open to the point where he would have to worry about whether he was conducting his own independent policy or seeking to grab the spotlight in a way that would diminish the president's role in foreign policy. On the subject of Cuba. In general from the Bay of Pigs- -between the time of the Bay of Pigs and up to the Cuban Missile Crisis--did you have, as someone who was obviously very much in touch with what was going on in Washington, did you have any inkling at all of the covert things that were going on, the "Alpha 66," "Mongoose?" Was there anyone in Washington who suspected that that sort of thing was happening? You are talking about before the Bay of Pigs? Before--well, between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis? I knew, from the day that Kennedy took office, that President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower had made it known to him that he foresaw Cuba developing as a major crisis for the United States in the not too distant future. And he'd broken diplomatic relations just before Kennedy took off ice.
7 Yes. But he also knew, and so did I, that there was a continuing and rather large scale covert operation being directed against Cuba by the United states government. Eisenhower briefed Kennedy on the nature of this; recommended that it be continued as a self-defense kind of action, but not necessarily as the cadre of a full fledged invasion force because the emphasis then was in helping the various anti-cuban refu- anti-castro refugee groups who had fled into many of the adjoining countries and indeed into Florida and other parts of the South. I see. I understand your reluctance, of course, to go through all the material on the Missile Crisis which you went through up in Boston [MA]. I was wondering, though, if you could answer two questions about it. one, what your perceptions were in the days up to the point that the president made the speech? In other words when you were in the dark like everybody else. And then up to the point when [Aleksander] Fomin contacted you, What was your assessment of what was happening? For example, did you think it was Berlin, as they were trying to make many journalists think? Well, I was deeply depressed by the fifth day. The Soviet ships bound for Cuba had already stopped dead in the water and several of them had turned back. But after the Soviets had floated their proposition through me I began to have some kind of hope that they had blinked first as Rusk said to me after he analysed the Soviet proposal. But on Saturday, after the Soviets then broadcast from Moscow the letter to Kennedy which did not mention the offer that they had advanced through me, I thought that I had been involved and had allowed myself to be used in a skillful and treacherous Soviet delaying action which was meant to stall to give the Soviet military in Cuba time to arm the missiles and to get them operational so that they then would have the option either of threatening to fire them at the United States or indeed going ahead. And so from that point on until the Soviets broadcasted their acceptance on Sunday, I thought that it was quite likely, particularly after the U-2 was shot down, that at a minimum we would seek to reply by having the U.S. Air Force bomb that missile site. And the air force knew exactly which missile site had been the one that shot down the plane. By the missile site I mean the anti-aircraft missile site. I also began to worry more and more by late Saturday that the Soviets were determined not to back down and that there would be--and the odds were at least fifty-fiftythat there would be an invasion by American troops by Tuesday. So, all the time, you have to remember, I was reporting the ebb and flow of developments while continuing to keep secret all of my own involvement and the developments that were flowing from that. So that I was exhausted; I was angry because I thought I had been used; I was angry because I also thought that it was beginning to take up too much time--too much of my personal time--and that I was
8 caught up in something that was soaring far beyond me. And that I was almost helplessly standing on the sidelines involved in a secret operation which was going to go down in history as having hurt the United States rather than helped it. That's how you were feeling until almost the moment of the, of the resolution? Yes. And after I had the confrontation with Fomin in the deserted ballroom at the Statler Hotel where I denounced him for being involved in the stinking doublecross, I felt that events were moving out of our control. One of the reasons I was also more and more worried is when you compared the off er that they relayed through me and the text of the letter to President Kennedy that was broadcast on Saturday morning, they not only bore no relation to one another, there seemed to be a completely different style of writing. And this led some of the experts in the State Department to speculate that perhaps there had been a coup and that Khrushchev had been overthrown and that a new group was really calling the shots and that they were a far harder line. And that maybe Khrushchev's attempt to find a peaceful way out had been what triggered the coup. So we were operating partly in the dark on this, and this suspicion was enhanced by what Fomin told me about why it was that he thought my--that, no--why he thought that his messages to Khrushchev had either been delayed because of an incredible glut that had jammed all of the cable and communications outlets. But when he said to me, "So many people are writing letters for the prime minister"--no--"for the chairman" was the word he used. So he too, A) was puzzled, B) I think indicated by that remark that he felt.that something drastic had happened in Moscow [U.S.S.R.]. Because if not there would have been some kind of reaction to the information he had relayed. so, when I saw the president after he had approved the message, his final message to Moscow, the president was in a somber mood. And when he asked me how I felt I said, "Well," I said, "lousy." And then that's when he asked me whether I went to church and how both of us had better pray. I know I was disturbed enough to go to church, and I did pray. Was this also the conversation in which he asked you to keep your role secret, or did that come later? Oh, that came later. Ah, did you ever. Hold on a minute. [Interruption] I was curious, then, to ask you a few weeks ago, did you ever see Fomin again after that last meeting? I know you said you continued to have meetings with him over some period of time, and have you seen him at all over the last decade?
Have you ever had a chance to talk to him about this? 9 No. No. But his role and mine has been,. came back in a very unexpected way. Fomin--I met with Fomin for maybe half a dozen times or so after the Cuban Missile Crisis was settled. The president wanted me to continue talking with him in an effort to persuade the Soviets to get the jet bombers out. So we met at various restaurants thereafter for half a dozen times until the bombers left and then Fomin suddenly just disappeared after about March of '63. Right. He suddenly just was gone, and the expanation was that he had gone back to the Soviet Union for reassignment. I don't know how I found out, I know I asked and I don't know who told me, but I was told that he had returned to Moscow and would undoubtedly be given a very good position because of his role in averting war. The United States government lost track of him; I lost track of him; that was the last I heard of him. However, in 1972, his name popped up again when I went with President Nixon to Moscow for the off ical visit. The first event was a big dinner that was given for the president and his party at the Kremlin. If I recall correctly there must have been about eighty people there. It was place-carded. I noted this rather grey-haired soviet official assigned to me on my left as a neighbor, and he looked familiar but I couldn't remember who it was. It turned out that he was the number three man in the Soviet embassy in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. Directly under Fomin then? No. Now Fomin was K.G.B. (Komitat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti]. Right. Now this man could have been K.G.B. too, but I suspect that he was from the foreign office. And I can't even remember his name now. I just, it's just slipped my memory, but he was well recognized as a man who was assisting the ambassador in many a chore; used to come to the State Department with him on X number of occasions. I guess he was about sixty years old back in 1972. The dinner had no sooner gotten underway then he said to me quietly, "Mr. Scali, do you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?" What a question.
10 I said, "Yes, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis." I said, "Those were very hectic and dangerous days." He says, "Well, do you remember Aleksander Fomin?" I said, "Oh yes, I remember him very well." I gathered then that we were going to talk about this, and I was anxious to find out what he wanted to say and I didn't want to give him any easy way to say it, so I ended the conversation at that point. Then he said to me, "You know, Mr. Scali, much has been written about your role in the crisis." I said, "Yes, I know, but I was not the author, nor did I reveal my role. It came about through a decision by Mr. (Roger] Hilsman to write a book which mentioned my role, and that he did this despite my objections." "Well," he said, "your role and the proposal." I said, "Which role and which proposal?" He said, "Well, the proposals that you brought from the White House. You know, those proposals were never, never relayed to Moscow." "Oh," I said, "I find that rather interesting. Why not?" "Well," he said, "they were not considered important." And I said, "Oh, they were not?" I'm trying to remember this conversation now. "Yes," he said, "you know, Fomin told us that the proposals that were discussed and which everybody talked about did not come from him or the Soviet side but that they came from you and that they were your idea." "Oh," I said, "I find this most interesting." I said, "What you're saying is that John Scali was the author of the plan by which the Soviets were to remove the missiles, accept the United Nations inspection, and promise never to reintroduce the missiles, in return for a public pledge by President Kennedy not to invade Cuba." "Well, he says, "yes. " I said, "I wish it were true because I would love to believe that I was that much in tune with a plan that could avert this crisis. I would love to believe that I was the author of it. But, alas, I cannot take credit because I am not wise enough. I have to say as I did then, and say what I know to be true, namely that these proposals were mentioned by, the first time, by Mr. Fomin in his conversation with me, and there was never any doubt that they represented the Soviet view. " He said, "Well," he says, "I was with the president--with the ambassador--all the time and I can tell you that they were never cabled to Moscow." And I said to him in reply that I thought that we were being rather disingenuous in this conversation and I resented it because, "You," I said, "know, and I knew, that Mr. Fomin had his own independent communications. And that if the embassy communications were tied up it was not at all certain that his would be too. As a matter of fact," I said, "I would very much deny--1 would be very much inclined to believe that he could reach Moscow instantly if he wished." "Well," he said, "that is not the way it happened, and I want you to know that we--un--we know what the truth was." What do you make of that? I said, "You know, this is an astonishing conversation so many years later. I just wonder why, after all of this
11 time, you have found it necessary, sitting here beside me, to come to this dinner clearly with the intention of talking to me about this." "Oh," he said, "we are just talking." I said, "Yes, I know we are just talking. But if you're trying to create a record after the fact, which would challenge the accepted interpretation, namely that your government made this proposal because it wanted to compromise and because it wanted to end the crisis, and that in order to do so, made some very significant concessions," I said, "if you're trying to challenge that by now telling me what you have just said," I said, "I don't think it's going to work." I said, "The facts are as I stated them. I had no reason to lie. I continue to tell you, those proposals came from Mr. Fomin. He was the first to advance, and there was no question that they represented not just his personal views. " Where upon the conversation ended, and we sat there in silence during the rest of the dinner. You have to understand that he mentioned this to me in the first twenty minutes. So I could conclude only that they're trying to--even so long after the fact, ten years later they just didn't want it to go down in history as an example of an important crisis where the Soviets had to retreat. I just have one brief area [unintelligible]. on Vietnam [unintelligible]. This is a hard one to answer and maybe there really isn't a way. But I would just like to know what your sense was of Kennedy's direction and what you feel if he had lived. That he would've followed a course similar to that of Johnson's or do you think it would be different? There's a lot of difference of opinion on this, of course, that's all. Did he ever say anything to you about it? Or talk to you about it? No, we never really talked in any important detail about Vietnam, but I had the feeling that the president had moved into a tiny corner of Vietnam by sending American military advisors, with no clear idea that they would--that it would ever lead to a large scale war with hundreds of thousands of American troops. However, I thought that he was willing to go far beyond just mere advisors, and that he had confronted in his own mind the possibility that there would be considerable shooting. However, having forced the Soviets to back down over Cuba, he felt that he was on a winning streak and that he knew how to handle the Soviets and indeed could face them down by making it clear that the United States was ready to use military force and to do it in stages. You have to recall that he was very proud of the--his capacity and the administration's backstage decisions to use paramilitary forces in other parts of the world. He had, he had contempt, really, for the inability of the French to hold on to Vietnam. And he felt that only the United States would know how to turn things around in Vietnam after the French had fucked it up. So he had unlimited belief in the effectiveness of this backstage effort to. [Interruption] No, I do have a judgement on that. I think, inevitably, even though he hadn't wanted it, he would've been sucked in..
12 He didn't think so.... to a major war, just like Lyndon Johnson. Because even though he had developed a healthy skepticism for the judgement of our military leaders, once you got stuck there I think that he would've made the initial decision to move more manpower in. In other words, to put more of an American chip into the pot, feeling all along that the Russians and the Chinese would back away. Of course people who knew him well are largely divided on this. It's one of those dilemnas in terms of interpretation. I was wondering in terms of your specific job as diplomatic correspondant, how did it change when Kennedy died, when Johnson succeeded? Things. was it different covering the White House when Johnson became president? And was your role specifically altered in the course of the connection you had had with Kennedy on--during the Cuban Missile Crisis, et ceterea? Well, you have to remember up until August 1963, nobody knew that I'd had any role in there. That's right, that's right. So I just continued covering both the White House and the State Department, and foreign affairs generally, while seeking to get permission to tell my story. There was within the administration, from the president and the secretaty of state and for the key people who knew what my role was, added respect for one John Scali. I, on the basis of that, came up with stories and could report with additional information on developments that I could not have fathomed before. But nothing in the way of any extra special rewards. Okay, my last point. As you look back now--and next week will be the nineteenth anniversary of the end of the Kennedy administration--do you see J.F.K. and the Kennedy presidency differently now than you did then? Has your own perspective altered in the light of what has happepned over the last nineteen years? No. In retrospect and having thought about whether John Kennedy was destined to be a good president or not and what he might have done differently, particularly in Vietnam, I've concluded that he was on the way to being not only a good president, but a brilliant one. One who would rival the achievements and the adulation that was showered on F.D.R. [Franklin D. Roosevelt]. I thought, and still think, that he would have been re-elected by a massive margin in 1964, and I also saw in him every liklihood that he would grow in stature as he
13 continued in the presidency. And that we as a people and much of the free world would have been the better for it. I have this as an unshakeable conviction. I'm familiar with all of the afterthe-death stories which have sought to make him look like less than he appeared to be. I think a lot of this is understandable afterthe-death-now-it-can-be-told stories, but I'm not impressed by any of them. I think that when you compare him now with what we have in the White House, Ronald Reagan; when you compare him to a Lyndon Johnson, a Nixon, a Gerry Ford, and a Jimmy carter, he towered over them; and that his image and his reputation would have grown. Is there anything that, on an anecdotal nature, of an anecdotal nature, or anything subsitive that you might recall ever having witnessed in terms of his relations, his relationship with his brother, Robert [~] Kennedy? Obviously it was a very unique kind of relationship. Did you know Bobby well at all? Yes, I did. Outside of the fact that I knew he both respected and loved his brother and thought that his instincts were superb, I didn't know much about them. I became friends, a close friend, of Bob Kennedy's and I remember at one point suggesting to him that one of the ways to take care of his future without angering Lyndon Johnson--who even then saw him as a possibility, saw the possibility that he would seek to become the Democratic nominee in 1 64--was to go to Lyndon Johnson and in effect offer to become secretary of state. I said, "This should appeal to Lyndon because you would be out of the way; he would be your boss; and you at the same time, "I said, "could use your great reputation and standing to give added dimensions to a foreign policy," I said, "which has gone very flat." I said, "At the same time you could build your reputation because you would be getting into a foreign policy area and giving yourself extra credentials, but basically you would be working for Lyndon Johnson. You would be his first cabinet minister, to be sure, but you would have removed yourself as a threat to him. He sat and listened very carefully. He said, "Well, John, I can say two things to that. You probably know after the Cuban missile crisis that I've become more interested in foreign policy." He says, "It's a position I think that will continue to interest me very much. But," he said, "I can't make this happen by myself." And then he dropped it. Isn't that, that's intriguing. You know, I assume, that he did off er to go to Vietnam as ambassador.. Yeah... which Johnson turned down, he claimed, because he was so concerned that something might happen to Kennedy there. I'm sure there were other reasons as well. Yeah.
14 Do you have anything you'd like to add? No I don't. Thank you very much.