Free Ike's Spies by Stephen E. Ambrose Page A

debt of our children and grandchildren, and thereby debase our currency, let them so confess.” 22
    Kennedy won the election. As President, he began a crash program to build ICBMS . When Ike left office, the United States had about two hundred ICBMS . When Kennedy was assassinated, the number was one thousand and growing daily. Four years later Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, confessed that there never had been a “missile gap,” or if there had, it was in America’s favor. By then it was too late; the modern arms race was under way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ike and His Spies
    THE LONG BLACK LIMOUSINE pulls up outside the CIA’S headquarters building. Sitting in the back seat are the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. The door opens. Slowly, painfully, Dulles gets out. The limousine drives off.
    Dulles’ shoulders are slumped. He is very dejected, deeply depressed. He has just finished another in a series of morning meetings with the committee that is investigating the Bay of Pigs disaster. Created by John Kennedy and chaired by Maxwell Taylor, the committee’s real purpose, according to Howard Hunt, is “simply to whitewash the New Frontier and to lay the blame on the CIA .” In Hunt’s view, Dulles is “being harassed by Bobby Kennedy, harassed by the President, by Dean Rusk, and Bob McNamara.”
    Back with his own people at CIA headquarters, free for the remainder of the day from the hostility of the New Frontiersmen, Dulles’ spirits revive. Turning away from Kennedy’s departing limousine, his pace quickens, his step becomes a little lighter.
    HUNT RECALLED , “By the time he emerged on the third floor from his private elevator and walked into the office, he would have a cheery grin on his face. He’d be rubbing his arthritic hands together, and would be cheerful and outgoing, giving none of us any reason to believe that he was under strain, that he was depressedabout the fate that awaited him, and the very harsh and unwarranted criticism that the agency was being subjected to.
    â€œAnd he would come into the mess for lunch (we would be already inside and seated) and give a shoulder-pounding to somebody, and shake hands here and there, and take his place at the head of the table and begin commenting on the World Series game the day before, ask for news of one thing or another. Very little business—mostly on events in the outside world. He was a pretty avid sports fan, so that is what he chatted about.” 1
    ALLEN DULLES became the scapegoat for the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy accepted his resignation. After that, his health failed rapidly. Within a few months he had a stroke.
    More bad news followed. Dulles’ son had been living with him in Washington. The boy had been a brilliant student at Princeton but had suffered a grievous wound in the Korean War, where he served in the Marine Corps. A Chinese bullet had blown away a good portion of his head. Dulles’ son’s condition naturally preyed on his mind. The burden became intolerable when the boy became extremely violent. Dulles had to have him taken off to a sanitarium in Switzerland.
    As Hunt summed up, “The last years of Allen Dulles’ life were very sad and unrewarding ones, although he and his wife maintained their beautiful Georgetown home in their customary style, with gracious hospitality. But he was at the end, a very tragic, sad, and unfulfilled figure of a man.” 2
    HE HAD BEEN IKE’S CHIEF SPY FOR EIGHT YEARS . More than any other individual, he had shaped and molded the CIA . For better or for worse, it was his agency. He gave it a sense of importance and a sense of mission. The CIA under Allen Dulles fought on the front lines of the Cold War, its purpose nothing less than to save the world from the Communists. Morale was consistently high inside the