Harry Truman's Salvo Against the CIA Following the JFK Assassination

"There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it."

Image Credit: Flickr-Tommy Japan1 | CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

History is full of quirks, anomalies, and surprises. Some things, like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, are so full of serendipity—the event that triggered World War I started with a wrong turn—that it almost feels pre-destined.

Other events seem shrouded in mystery even though clues are hiding in plain sight.

The JFK assassination remains one of the great mysteries of American history. Why Kennedy was killed and by whom remains a subject of great debate today. One of the reasons for this is that certain pieces to the puzzle are often ignored.

Most Americans, I suspect, have little idea that following the Kennedy assassination Harry Truman wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing it was time to limit the CIA’s “role to intelligence.”

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.

…

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

…there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

The timing and tone of Truman’s letter speaks volumes.

In the wake of a presidential assassination that had rocked the country, a former US president was publicly questioning the role of the CIA and its faith to maintaining a “free and open society.”

The op-ed is by no means a smoking gun, but it was meant to be a salvo against an agency that had grown out of control—and it certainly caught the CIA’s attention.

Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA, would secretly work to undermine Truman’s letter. After failing to persuade Truman to publicly walk back or soften it, Dulles would claim in a letter to CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston that privately Truman told him the article “was all wrong” and “it had made a very unfortunate impression.” Dulles worked to portray Truman as a senile ex president “quite astounded” by his own words, laying the ground work for the CIA to claim the Truman letter was penned by a rogue aide.

“The Dulles letter to Houston—which was clearly intended for the CIA files, to be retrieved whenever expedient—was an outrageous piece of disinformation,” concludes author David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard.

The reality is Truman was of sound mind when he wrote the letter and stood by his assertion that the CIA needed to be reined in. Indeed, other recorded correspondences and conversations make it clear Truman was proud of taking a public stance against the CIA.

We don’t know Truman’s precise suspicions about the CIA. He was speaking publicly about a sensitive matter and doing so in a cagey way. But it’s not unreasonable to assume he was implying the CIA knew more about the JFK assassination than they were letting on, and may have even played a role in it.

This sounds conspiratorial today, and there’s a reason for that. But historians make it crystal clear that the CIA is hiding something, which is why they continue to refuse to release all documents related JFK’s assassination six decades after his death in defiance of the law.

“The only thing you can conclude, if you’re hiding something for so long in defiance of the law, is you have something to hide,” Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and JFK historian recently told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “Are they hiding incompetence or are they hiding complicity or malfeasance in the case of the assassination of the president.”

It’s also worth noting that world leaders privately were quite candid in sharing their belief that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and unlike Truman they were not merely hinting about it.

I’ll share one European president’s private reflections next week, which were published decades after his death.