John A. McCone

John McCone
Director of Central Intelligence
In office
November 29, 1961 – April 28, 1965
President John F. Kennedy
Lyndon Johnson
Deputy Charles P. Cabell
Marshall Carter
Preceded by Allen Dulles
Succeeded by William Raborn
Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission
In office
July 14, 1958 – January 20, 1961
President Dwight Eisenhower
Preceded by Lewis Strauss
Succeeded by Glenn T. Seaborg
United States Under Secretary of the Air Force
In office
June 15, 1950 – October 12, 1951
President Harry Truman
Preceded by Arthur S. Barrows
Succeeded by Roswell Gilpatric
Personal details
Born John Alexander McCone
(1902-01-04)January 4, 1902
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died February 14, 1991(1991-02-14) (aged 89)
Pebble Beach, California, U.S.
Political party Republican
Education University of California, Berkeley (BS)

John Alexander McCone (January 4, 1902 – February 14, 1991) was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.[1][2]

Background

John A. McCone was born in San Francisco, California on January 4, 1902. His father ran iron foundries across California, a business started in Nevada in 1860 by McCone's grandfather. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, beginning his career in Los Angeles' Llewellyn Iron Works.[1]

He rose swiftly and in 1929, when several works merged to become the Consolidated Steel Corporation, he became executive vice president. He also founded Bechtel-McCone.[3]

He also worked for the ITT corporation. In 1946, Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office implied that McCone was a war profiteer, testifying that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000."[4] McCone's political affiliation was with the Republican Party.[3]

A prominent industrialist, McCone also served for more than twenty years as a governmental adviser and official, including head positions at the Atomic Energy Commission in the Eisenhower Administration in 1958-1961 and with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Kennedy Administration and the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration in 1961-1965.

However, it would be his service in 1950-1951, as the 2nd United States Under Secretary of the Air Force that John McCone got his first taste of duty in the senior levels of the U.S. Government during the Truman Administration.

Atomic Energy Commission

In 1958, he became chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, in December 1960, while still Atomic Energy Commission chairman, McCone revealed CIA information about Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons plant to The New York Times. Hersh writes that President John F. Kennedy was "fixated" on the Israeli nuclear weapons program and one of the reasons that contributed to McCone's appointment as CIA director was his willingness to deal with this and other nuclear weapons issues – and despite the fact that McCone was a conservative Republican.[5]

Director of Central Intelligence

After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, president John F. Kennedy[6] forced the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles and some of his staff. McCone replaced Dulles as DCI on November 29, 1961.[7]

He married Mrs. Theiline McGee Pigott on August 29, 1962 at St. Anne's Chapel of the Sacred Heart Villa in Seattle, Washington.[8]

McCone was not Kennedy's first choice; the president had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, his personal lawyer, who politely refused (Clifford would later serve as Secretary of Defense for Lyndon Johnson); and then to Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer with experience in government service during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Hamilton accepted, but when a problem developed at the Agency for International Development, he was shifted there.[9] Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone.[10]

He was a key figure in the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Honeymoon telegram of September 20, 1962, he insisted that the CIA remain imaginative when it came to Soviet weapons policy towards Cuba, as a September 19 National Intelligence Estimate had concluded it unlikely that nuclear missiles would be placed on the island. The telegram was so named because McCone sent it while on his honeymoon in Paris, France, accompanied not only by his bride, Theiline McGee Pigott but by a CIA cipher team.[11]

McCone's suspicions of the inaccuracy of this assessment proved to be correct, as it was later found out the Soviet Union had followed up its conventional military buildup with the installation of MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) and IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles), sparking off the crisis in October when they were later spotted by CIA's Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights.

While McCone was DCI, the CIA was involved in many covert plots, including ones involving Laos (with the Hmong), Ecuador, Brazil, and Cuba. He apparently disapproved of Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He would later tell DCI Stansfield Turner that the CIA actions in Chile were the work of Richard Helms, who did not tell McCone what he was doing. However he was involved in the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état; he was friends with ITT president Harold Geneen whose company stood to lose its Brazilian subsidiary if president João Goulart nationalized it. McCone would later work for ITT.[3]

McCone represented the CIA's opposition to U.S. support of a coup in South Vietnam against President Ngo Dinh Diem, but such objections were overruled by November 1963, when the State Department managed to convince Kennedy to allow the coup to proceed.

In 1964 he was awarded the Hoover Medal.[12]

McCone resigned from his position of DCI in April 1965, believing himself to be unappreciated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, he complained, would not read his reports, including on the need for full-fledged inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities.[13] Before his resignation, McCone submitted a final memorandum regarding the war in Vietnam to President Johnson, arguing that Johnson's plan of attack was too limited in scope to successfully defeat the Hanoi regime; he further asserted that public support (in the United States and abroad) for any effort in North Vietnam would erode if the plan went unchanged:

Dear Mr. President:

I remain concerned, as I have said before to you, Secretary Rusk and Secretary McNamara, over the limited scale of air action against North Vietnam which we envision for the next few months.

Specifically I feel that we must conduct our bombing attacks in a manner that will begin to hurt North Vietnam badly enough to cause the Hanoi regime to seek a political way out through negotiation rather than expose their economy to increasingly serious levels of destruction. By limiting our attacks to targets like bridges, military installations and lines of communication, in effect we signal to the Communists that our determination to win is significantly modified by our fear of widening the war.

...

If this situation develops and lasts several months or more, I feel world opinion will turn against us, Communist propaganda will become increasingly effective, and indeed domestic support of our policy may erode. I therefore urge that as we deploy additional troops, which I believe necessary, we concurrently hit the north harder and inflict greater damage. In my opinion, we should strike their petroleum supplies, electric power installations, and air defense installations (including the SAM sites which are now being built).

...

I am not talking about bombing centers of population or killing innocent people, though there will of course be some casualties. I am proposing to "tighten the tourniquet" on North Vietnam so as to make the Communists pause to weigh the losses they are taking against their prospects for gains. We should make it hard for the Viet Cong to win in the south and simultaneously hard for Hanoi to endure our attacks in the north. I believe this course of action holds out the greatest promise we can hope for in our effort to attain our ultimate objective of finding a political solution to the Vietnam problem.

— John A. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, (Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Vol. XXXII. Top Secret)[14]

Other

Throughout his career, McCone served on numerous commissions that made recommendations on issues as diverse as civilian applications of military technology and the Watts riots.[15]

In 1987, McCone was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.

Death

John A. McCone died on February 14, 1991 of cardiac arrest at his home in Pebble Beach, California. He was 89 years old.[1]

In fiction

McCone was portrayed by Peter White in the 2000 docudrama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days and by actor Matt Craven in the 2011 film X-Men: First Class. An unnamed fictionalized version of McCone also appears in the 2004 video game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Glenn Fowler (February 16, 1991). "John A. McCone, Head of C.I.A. In Cuban Missile Crisis, Dies at 89". New York Times.
  2. ↑ "DCI John McCone Creates the Directorate of Science and Technology".
  3. 1 2 3 Burn Before Reading, Stansfield Turner, 2005, Hyperion, chapter on JFK
  4. ↑ Halberstam, David (1972). The Best and the Brightest. Random House. p. 153. ISBN 0394461630.
  5. ↑ Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, 72-73, 105, 120.
  6. ↑ Excerpted from Gus Russo, Live by the Sword (Baltimore: Bancroft, 1998), pp. 31- 36., from David A. Reitzes jfk-online.com
  7. ↑ "Adept New C.I.A. Chief. John Alex McCone". New York Times. September 28, 1961.
  8. ↑ "John A. McCone And Mrs. Pigott Marry in Seattle; Director of C.I.A. Weds University Regent at Sacred Heart Villa". New York Times. August 30, 1962.
  9. ↑ David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, page 152
  10. ↑ David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, page 152
  11. ↑ http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_secretgov_5i.htm
  12. ↑ "McCone Awarded Hoover Medal". New York Times. December 4, 1964.
  13. ↑ Seymour Hersh, 151.
  14. ↑ McCone, John (1965). "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1964–1968, VOLUME II, VIETNAM, JANUARY–JUNE 1965; 234. Letter From Director of Central Intelligence McCone to President Johnson". United States Department of State. Washington: Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  15. ↑ Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (1965-12-02). "Violence in the City -- An End or a Beginning?". John McCone, Chairman, Warren M. Christopher, Vice-Chairman. Archived from the original on 2006-01-14. Retrieved 2007-04-06.

References

Political offices
Preceded by
Arthur S. Barrows		 United States Under Secretary of the Air Force
1950–1951 		Succeeded by
Roswell Gilpatric
Government offices
Preceded by
Lewis Strauss		 Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission
1958–1961 		Succeeded by
Glenn T. Seaborg
Preceded by
Allen Dulles		 Director of Central Intelligence
1961–1965 		Succeeded by
William Raborn
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