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Chapter 7 End of the Trail The “Interim” Report B y April 4, two weeks after McCone’s final testimony and after receiving additional answers promised for the record by all the witnesses, James Kendall finished a first draft of the SPIS report.1 Stennis wanted a stepby -step chronological account of how the build-up had occurred and what efforts had been made to detect it. The draft also included a section compiled by Charles Donnelly, a former colonel working at the Library of Congress. This concerned the extent and nature of subversive activities promoted by Cuba in the hemisphere.2 On April 5, 9, and 24 the subcommittee held executive meetings, with no transcripts being made.3 It is clear from other documentation that, as a result of the meetings, some changes in language were incorporated into the draft. Still, the substance and thrust of the report remained more or less intact.4 On April 10, very much after the fact, Stennis learned about the vetting of the prepared statements of the service intelligence chiefs by higher-ups. He was stunned and immediately contacted McNamara. “I was greatly dismayed to learn that the intelligence chiefs . . . were compelled to submit their formal prepared statements to your office for review and screening,” he wrote. “Quite frankly, I cannot understand why these officers should not be permitted to come before us in closed sessions and give the facts as they know them without prior review. I feel so strongly about this matter that I am seriously considering making a statement . . . on the floor of the Senate.”5 During the April 24 meeting, at which the SPIS members reviewed the “final” language of the interim report, one of the first things to come up concerned two paragraphs about the vetting. Strom Thurmond had argued vigorously that the report should mention the screening of the statements. Upon reflection, however, Stennis decided that the paragraphs in question “would tend to weaken rather than strengthen the interim report.” He wrote Thurmond, “It might suggest to those not familiar with the details of the inquiry that we 100 chapter 7 did not get the real facts. I think you will agree that such an impression would be both unfortunate and unjustified in view of the fact that all of the witnesses were subjected to extensive questioning under oath.”6 Stennis added that he was in complete agreement about getting unvarnished testimony before the subcommittee in executive session and intended to pursue the matter with McNamara. Thurmond reluctantly agreed to drop the paragraphs, and Stennis informed McNamara of the change, though warning that SPIS reports “will make mention of this practice should it recur . . . under similar circumstances .” Rather belatedly McNamara assured Stennis that the Pentagon had not subjected the statements to review by State Department officials.7 He said nothing about reviews by the White House. Coming into the April 24 SPIS meeting, at least one Republican senator , Margaret Chase Smith, had sufficient reservations to make a unanimous report unlikely. Smith was a unique legislator in many ways, not the least of which was that only one other woman, Maurine Neuberger (D-OR), served in the Senate (as a very junior member) in 1963. Smith had been in the House for almost a decade before her election to the Senate in 1948. “Mrs. Smith, slight, attractive and gray-haired, is a lieutenant colonel in the Women’s Air Force Reserve. She frequently has given high-ranking generals appearing before the Armed Services Committee a hard time,” one reporter wrote in 1963.8 Smith was skeptical about the administration’s actions concerning Cuba. In February she told her constituents, “Americans held their heads high the morning of October 23, 1962, after the President made his speech the night before announcing that we would fight if Khrushchev did not remove the Russian missiles in Cuba.” But now there was a national “feeling of resentment of the possibility of having been misled with reports that were too rosy and too sugar-coated.” Her characterization of the SPIS investigation must have made John Stennis squirm: “This action of investigation drowns out the heated denials of the Kennedy administration—for the American public recognizes that the Cuban situation has gotten so bad that a member of President Kennedy’s own Democratic Party has ordered a congressional investigation of the matter.”9 Smith’s normally smooth relations with Richard Russell and Leverett Saltonstall had become difficult over the preceding year. She had assumed...

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