President Kennedy was aware of McCone’s less than enthusiastic embrace of his administration. As reported by Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard, “In March, the president’s secret White House recording system picked up a heated conversation between the Kennedy brothers about their increasingly disloyal CIA director. McCone, Bobby informed his brother, was going around Washington feeding anti-Kennedy information to the press. ‘He’s a real bastard, that John McCone,’ responded JFK. ‘Well, he was useful at a time,’ observed Bobby. ‘Yeah,’ replied the president ruefully, ‘but, boy, it’s really evaporated.’”[iv]
Source: Read — 2017 JFK
Here’s the JFK/RFK phone call in question….
“Bastard” Excerpt:
https://app.box.com/s/qsehzo56sew6gkw5prt1
Complete Phone Call (And Other Calls):
McCone was a mistake. Even though JFK fired the top three, Dulles, Bissel and Cabbell and about a third of the other cia employees. He still did not succeed in “splintering it and casting it to the winds”. Though McCone was an outsider to the cia he was an insider to the power elite of the east coast establishment. He toe’d the line for them in his ignorance as director. Dulles still ran the covert side from his home, clubs and restaurants and Langley itself on 11/22/63.
I honestly don’t see the point of this book and its vilifying of Allen Dulles unless it’s intended to be controversial and bring more attention to the killing of JFK. Allen Dulles is no more guilty than people like Joseph Milteer.
David Atlee Phillips was the architect of the JFK assassination. I know that a biography of him would not be as controversial/newsworthy or sell as well as a book about Dulles, but that doesn’t change the reality of what happened.
As my daughter would say, OMG, did you read the book, or much before? Phillips still answered to Angleton and Dulles, not McCone in spite of Dulles firing. he still ran the covert side after his “retirement”
While there is some evidence that Philips was running Oswald that does not mean that he was the architect of the assasination or that he was even a conspirator.
With regard to the JFK assassination, I would caution any commentator to take great care with ‘certainty’ about any aspect of it, who was its architect, etc. Those Cold War times were about as crazy as it’s possible for times of human lives to be. Nuclear war was made possible and averted only at the last minute a number of times. If the prospect of killing hundreds of millions of people was acceptable to some to win, then how much of a stretch was it to consider eliminating a President who appeared to be ‘too soft’ on the ‘enemy. Remember, Dulles had dealt with both the Nazis and Soviets in detail. In those dark worlds, the standards we expect reasonable people to adhere to would be considered to be naive at best and laughable to most inhabitants. Rob