Tricks Are for Kids?

By Rick Horowitz

If I'm John Glenn -- I'm not -- I'm probably feeling just a bit ticked off right about now. Bad enough that I've had to spend most of the year sitting in a hearing room defending the good name and creative fundraising techniques of one William Jefferson Clinton -- a stretch, even for a politician.

But now I discover that this isn't the first time I've been in prime position to carry water for a president. Another administration was thinking of using me for its own purposes 35 years ago -- and all I had to do was crash and burn.

We interrupt our current historical preoccupation -- wallowing in Watergate, naturally -- to bring you another blast from the past: those fun-loving Kennedy years. Not that the latest Nixon tapes aren't totally thrilling, wonderfully awesome in their own highly aromatic way. If it were possible to think any less of Richard Nixon -- it's not -- these tapes would certainly do the trick.

Turns out the guy was into Watergate, or things that reeked every bit as much as Watergate, sooner, deeper, more profanely, more gleefully than anyone had a right to dream. How do we know? His own voice tells us so. No wonder he fought so long, so hard to keep this stuff from ever being heard.

Appalled? Of course we're appalled. Surprised is something else again.

But John Kennedy -- until recently, John Kennedy still had a few shreds of reputation intact. Lately, though, we've had to face a growing pile of evidence of high-grade recklessness, including, for instance, reports that our 35th chief exec was not just disinclined but constitutionally incapable of keeping his zipper up. That while Nixon got his jollies sticking it to his enemies, Kennedy got his jollies --

Anyway. What's this got to do with John Glenn?

Just this: When sex wasn't on Kennedy's mind, Fidel Castro was. They wanted Castro gone, John and Robert Kennedy did, the sooner the better. And before he was ever Senator John Glenn, some of the people working for Kennedy saw astronaut John Glenn as a perfect way to make it happen. Assuming Glenn happened to get himself blown up in his space capsule.

That's the story, at least, from some newly declassified Pentagon documents. One of the stories, that is; apparently Kennedy's Defense Department spent all sorts of time dreaming up ways to harass and embarrass Castro, if not to toss him out on his Cuban ear altogether.

There were the proposals to fake the destruction of an American warship or warplane, or even a passenger plane supposedly carrying innocent college students: Blame it on Castro and send in the Marines. There was the proposal to create turmoil on the island by air-dropping one-way airline tickets to Mexico or Venezuela. There was even the proposal to air-drop doctored photos of a fat Fidel in the curvaceous company of "two beauties," right next to a table "brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food."

"My ration is different," the caption would say, and incensed Cubans would rise up in revolt. No, really.

And then there was the John Glenn proposal. "Operation Dirty Trick," the Pentagon called it in 1962, just before Glenn attempted to become the first American ever to orbit the earth. Those early space flights were risky business, and just in case things went...poorly, the Pentagon wanted to be prepared. In fact, the Pentagon wanted to be ready to show -- "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence" -- that electronic interference from Cuba had done Glenn in. Blame it on Castro and --

You get the picture.

Now, none of these proposals was ever carried out (or so we're told), though they did bubble up as high as the Secretary of Defense, which is saying something. Besides, Glenn had the gall and good fortune to survive his mission, which wouldn't have given the provocateurs much to work with anyway.

But just picture him sitting up there in that tin can perched on that time bomb, while down below, the brass is trying to figure out how to turn lemons into lemonade.

Hey, it shouldn't be a total loss, right? We might as well get something out of it!

Just keep telling yourself: the best and the brightest. The...

11/25/97