Kennedy

The Talbot-Croft Archive: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

A portrait of David Talbot at The Green Arcade bookstore, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, in San Francisco, Calif. Talbot shares his experiences following his stroke in his new book, Between Heaven and Hell.

The Assassination Archives and Research Center, in cooperation with the Mary Ferrell Foundation, announces an extraordinary research resource: The Talbot-Croft Archive. This archive features the recorded conversations and transcriptions that were developed as primary sources in researching David Talbot’s books, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007) and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (2015).

This project is made possible with the permission of the author, David Talbot and his long-time research associate, Karen Croft, whose participation and involvement was integral to the creation and collection of these materials.

Interviews preserve and document perhaps our most precious resource, the stories of those who have made history as told in their own words. It is through the dedicated efforts of historians, authors, the men and women who practice objective and accountable investigative journalism, by which we may delve most deeply into our past. For those to whom history is more than the record and analysis of documented events, little can be of greater value than the candid reflections of those whose lives have influenced its shaping. History may have many authors and many voices, but once those figures have passed and those voices stilled, we are left to study what remains: the documented record of their words and deeds.

“The greatest brotherly duo in American political history. They gave their lives for the country — and they died for a reason, not simply at the hands of two ‘lone nuts.’ Those who know the true story of the Kennedy brothers’ lives (and I’m not talking about the PBS version) know how truly heroic they were.”

— David Talbot speaking about John and Robert Kennedy, (2016)

This introduction addresses two equal sides reflected within this project for which David Talbot is responsible. The first pertains to the unique value of unscripted and unrehearsed personal interviews with historical figures. The second, of course, must recognize the strength of David’s ethics, his social conscience, his deeply compassionate conception of literary and social objectives which convey his concerns about where things have gone terribly wrong and how, if we are all properly informed (hidden history-wise), we can work together to make our society better for all. In considering essential points that should be communicated in this introduction, we acknowledge the inseparable connection between the stories he chooses to explore, his intrinsic determination to focus his attention upon darkly complex and meaningful subjects and the absolute integrity of his personal and professional character. It is sometimes said that great works are the product of great souls. David’s life and his works exemplify the best of what it was to which John and Robert Kennedy, and the band of brothers who served them, were so passionately committed: Full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

His works are a gift to all of us who are haunted by living in a society that emerged after our hopes, and perhaps our destinies, were disrupted by gunfire.

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

(Ulysses, Tennyson)

Special thanks to AARC president, Dan Alcorn and MFF president, Rex Bradford; courtesy of David Talbot and Karen Croft, we are honored to present The Talbot–Croft Archive.

Dedicated to the memory of John and Robert Kennedy and to all those who continue to seek a newer world.

INTERVIEW 02

Audio: Peter Maheu

Transcript: Peter Maheu

Peter Maheu (10 June, 1942 – 6 April, 2016) was a businessman and former employee of CIA and Howard Hughes. He worked for his father, Robert Maheu, who was an extremely well-connected American businessman and lawyer, and for billionaire Howard Hughes. In 1963 Peter Maheu worked within CIA’s Office of Security. He was a licensed private investigator in Nevada and California, became a world leader in assuring regulatory compliance in the gaming industry. He wrote articles and lectured extensively on preventing business fraud. And he became involved in the emergence of overseas gaming, focusing on keeping organized crime out of casinos in those burgeoning markets.

Peter Maheu delivered lectures before some of the world’s most prestigious groups. Among them were the World Presidents’ Organization, the International Masters of Gaming Law Conference, the International Association of Gaming Attorneys Conference and the North American Gaming Regulators Association.

Early on, Peter worked for his dad’s company, Robert A. Maheu and Associates, where Peter played a major role in the management of not only Hughes’ gaming properties but in Hughes’ vast Nevada real estate and mining interests. Much of what are now high-end residential communities in northwest Las Vegas were built on land Hughes purchased as barren desert.

After breaking out on his own, Peter Maheu founded — and was president of — Trademark Protection Services, where he specialized in preventing trademark and copyright infringement on his clients’ brands.

TPS was said to have been at one time the nation’s largest firm of its type, with 30 offices nationwide that each employed a cadre of investigators and attorneys. Maheu’s clients included such business giants as 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co., Mirage Studios and Hard Rock Café.

He was known for his work with the Honor Flight Network of Southern Nevada, a non-profit group that sends World War II veterans to Washington, D.C., to visit memorials created in their honor. He was also involved in the business investigation company, Global Intelligence International.

ADDENDUM from AARC President Dan Alcorn: Peter Maheu’s father, Robert Maheu’s first job for CIA was to block Aristotle Onassis from shipping the Saudi oil. Maheu installed a telephone tap on an Onassis phone in New York. CIA favored Stavros Niarchos for the contract. CIA’s Al Ulmer went to work for Niarchos in London in 1962. Niarchos was a client of Werner von Alvensleben.

*****

INTERVIEW 01

Audio: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Transcript: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger’s work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and “court historian” to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president’s state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote a popular biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, several years later. He later popularized the term “imperial presidency” during the Nixon administration in his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency.

RELATED: 30 June 1961 Memo for the President

CIA Reorganization, RIF 176-10030-10422

Schlesinger Memo 176-10030-10422

BLOG: The David Talbot Show

Jean Daniel, Leading French Journalist and Humanist, Dies at 99

In France, where news and opinion are blurred, Mr. Daniel, a self-described non-Communist leftist, used journalism as a means of advocacy.

Credit…Jean-Luc Luyssen/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

By Robert D. McFadden

Feb. 20, 2020

A half-century before President Barack Obama ordered a restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014, Jean Daniel, a French journalist on a secret mission to Havana in the autumn of 1963, delivered a proposal by President John F. Kennedy to Fidel Castro.

It was an offer to explore a rapprochement.

Despite the distrust and raw feelings of the Cuban missile crisis, which had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war a year earlier, Mr. Daniel, a confidant of political leaders in many capitals during the Cold War, found Castro surprisingly, if cautiously, receptive to Kennedy’s overture.

Three days later — it was Nov. 22, 1963 — over lunch at Castro’s seafront retreat on Varadero Beach, they were still discussing the offer when the phone rang with urgent news. Castro, the Cuban leader since 1959, picked up the receiver.

“Herido?” he said. “Muy gravemente?” (“Wounded? Very seriously?”)

Mr. Daniel — who died on Wednesday at 99 at his home in Paris, according to L’Obs, the left-leaning weekly newsmagazine he co-founded — recalled the dramatic scene with Castro in an article in The New Republic days after it happened.

“He came back, sat down and repeated three times the words: ‘Es una mala noticia.’ (‘This is bad news.’)” They tuned into a Miami radio station as the reports trickled out of Dallas. Mr. Daniel paraphrased them: “Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead.”

Both knew instantly that rapprochement had died with the president. “Then Fidel stood up,” Mr. Daniel related, “and said to me: ‘Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.’”

In the swirl of investigations and conspiracy theories that followed the assassination — many of them linking the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Castro — Kennedy’s offer became a footnote to history, and Mr. Daniel moved on to other crises in a career that touched major conflicts of an era: the French-Algerian war, Israeli-Palestinian clashes, Indochina, the Cold War and, more recently, terrorism

merlin_169195881_981287ef-2b3b-4ffa-a26a-9be28d44fefa-articleLarge Jean Daniel, Leading French Journalist and Humanist, Dies at 99

Credit…Georges Bendrihem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Daniel, a self-described Jewish humanist and non-Communist leftist, was one of France’s leading intellectual journalists, a friend and colleague of the philosopher-writers Jean-Paul Sartre, who rejected his 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Albert Camus, who accepted his 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature. Like Camus, Mr. Daniel was born in Algeria.

In France, where news and opinion are blurred and journals typically report and interpret events with a political or cultural bias, Mr. Daniel used journalism as a means of advocacy. He also had influence in high government circles. He was a friend of David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist who became Israel’s founding prime minister in 1948, and for 60 years he supported Israeli interests.

But Mr. Daniel also defended Palestinian and Arab rights. He condemned the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 as an unwarranted expansion by Israel. In lightning airstrikes and ground assaults, Israel inflicted heavy losses on the Arabs and seized the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and cities and territory on the West Bank.

From 1954 to 1964, he was a correspondent and editor of the leftist weekly newsmagazine L’Express, which opposed French colonialism in Indochina and Algeria. He was also a confidant of Pierre Mendès-France, the French premier who withdrew French forces from Indochina after their defeat by Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

As a correspondent in Algiers, Mr. Daniel supported Algeria’s war of independence from French colonialism. But he also deplored torture and atrocities on both sides, which continued for decades after the brutal six-year war formally ended in independence for Algeria in 1962. Mr. Daniel was close to Ahmed Ben Bella, the revolutionary who became Algeria’s first president, in 1963.

In 1964, Mr. Daniel quit L’Express and co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur, a reincarnation of the left-wing newsmagazine France Observateur. Le Nouvel Observateur was later sold and renamed L’Obs. Under his direction for 50 years, Le Nouvel Observateur became France’s leading weekly journal of political, economic and cultural news and commentary. His editorials opposed colonialism and dictatorships, and ranged over politics, literature, theology and philosophy.

Mr. Daniel, who was also a correspondent for The New Republic in the late 1950s and early ’60s, wrote for The New York Times and other publications for decades. He was the author of many books on nationalism, communism, religion, the press and other subjects, as well as novels and a well-received 1973 memoir, “Le Temps Qui Reste” (“The Time That Remains”).

His book “The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism” (2005, translated by Charlotte Mandell) suggested that prosperous, assimilated Western Jews had been enclosed by three self-imposed ideological walls — the concept of the Chosen People, Holocaust remembrance and support for Israel.

“Having trapped themselves inside these walls,” Adam Shatz wrote in The London Review of Books, “they were less able to see themselves clearly, or to appreciate the suffering of others — particularly the Palestinians living behind the ‘separation fence.’”

merlin_169205550_06c58bc5-ad47-479c-a6ef-380609f8449b-articleLarge Jean Daniel, Leading French Journalist and Humanist, Dies at 99

Credit…Pool photo by Etienne Laurent

Jean Daniel Bensaïd was born in Blida, Algeria, on July 21, 1920. His father, Jules, was a flour miller. As a young man, Jean moved to France, studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and enlisted in the Free French Forces during World War II. He fought at Normandy, in Paris and in Alsace.

In 1947, he founded the literary review Caliban, adopted the pen name Jean Daniel and was the editor until 1951. In 1948, with permission, he republished essays by Sartre, Camus and other intellectuals that had first appeared in the polemical journal Esprit. Camus wrote an introduction to Mr. Daniel’s first novel, “L’Erreur” (1953).

Mr. Daniel married Michèle Bancilhon in 1966. She survives him, as does a daughter, Sara Daniel, a reporter at L’Obs.

In the late 1950s, Benjamin C. Bradlee, a future executive editor of The Washington Post who was then a correspondent in France for Newsweek, became acquainted with Mr. Daniel through mutual contacts in the Algerian guerrilla group FLN. It was Mr. Bradlee, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s, who suggested Mr. Daniel when the president needed a private go-between to carry his proposal to Castro in 1963.

In a meeting at the White House, Kennedy asked Mr. Daniel to convey his view that improved relations were possible, and that the president was willing to authorize exploratory talks. Mr. Daniel met Castro in Havana on Nov. 19. He said that Castro had listened with “devouring and passionate interest” and expressed cautious approval of such talks.

Three days later, after learning that the president had been slain, Castro told Mr. Daniel, “They will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly; otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.”

After the announcement of Oswald’s arrest, Mr. Daniel recalled, “The word came through, in effect, that the assassin was a young man who was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, that he was an admirer of Fidel Castro.”

The Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination concluded in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy and that Jack Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald two days later. Its report has been challenged and defended over the years.

The stalemate between Cuba and the United States, meanwhile, was continued by eight American presidents until Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, agreed on Dec. 17, 2014, to establish diplomatic relations, sweeping aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.

It lasted until President Trump announced in 2017 that he would keep a campaign promise and roll back the policy of engagement begun by Mr. Obama. He later reversed key portions of what he called a “terrible and misguided deal.”

Constant Mehéut contributed reporting from Paris.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.