John A. McCone
John Alexander McCone was an American businessman and government official who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.
Background
John A. McCone was born in San Francisco, California, on January 4, 1902. His father ran iron foundries across California, a business founded in Nevada in 1860 by McCone's grandfather. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, beginning his career in Los Angeles' Llewellyn Iron Works. 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.He also worked for ITT. In 1946, the General Accounting Office implied that McCone was a war profiteer, stating that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44 million on an investment of $100,000. McCone's political affiliation was with the Republican Party.
McCone served for more than twenty years as a governmental adviser and official, including positions on the Atomic Energy Commission in the Eisenhower Administration in 1958–1961 and with the Central Intelligence Agency in the Kennedy Administration and the Johnson Administration in 1961–1965.
However, it would be his service in 1950–1951, as the second United States Under Secretary of the Air Force, that 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.Director of Central Intelligence
After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, President John F. Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles and some of his staff. McCone replaced Dulles as DCI on November 29, 1961.He married Theiline McGee Pigott on August 29, 1962, at St. Anne's Chapel of the Sacred Heart Villa in Seattle, Washington.
McCone was not Kennedy's first choice; the President had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, his personal lawyer, who politely refused ; 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. Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone.
As an agency "outsider" McCone lacked knowledge of how the CIA operated, as a result he relied heavily on his Deputy Director Dick Helms. He was not informed by the CIA of everything they were doing, despite being the Director of Central Intelligence. For instance, he was never told about mafia involvement in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. He only found out about it in August 1962, when a Chicago Sun-Times reporter rang CIA headquarters asking if such plots had occurred. Nor was he told about the CIA's domestic surveillance program, HTLINGUAL.
McCone was a key figure in the Executive Committee of the National Security Council 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.
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 and IRBMs, sparking off the crisis in October when they were later spotted by CIA's Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, McCone received a call from the President's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking McCone to come and see him. When he arrived McCone was asked if the CIA had killed his brother, Kennedy would say that he asked the question "in a way that he couldn't lie to me, and they hadn't". McCone kept information from the Warren Commission, which had been set up to investigate President Kennedy's assassination. He never informed the commission about CIA assassination plots against Castro or the mafia's participation in these plots.
While McCone was DCI, the CIA was involved in many covert plots; according to Admiral Stansfield Turner, these included:
McCone was also 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.
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.
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. 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 for any effort in North Vietnam would erode if the plan went unchanged:
In 1975 he testified before the Church Committee on CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro.
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.In the 1970s, he helped found the Committee on the Present Danger.
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.Honors and awards
- McCone Hall at the University of California, Berkeley campus is named in McCone's honor.
- McCone Hall at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey is named in honor of McCone and his wife, Theilline. McCone served on the Board of Trustees here.
In popular culture