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put on a show for the whole world. But now, as the year turned, it was all silent running until we could put something up we could brag about. The army was making ominous noises about events in Southeast Asia. The more the army pushed to get troops on the ground, the more the Kennedy administration refused to get involved. The army was telling the President we would eventually be sucked into a war we could not win and the events would control us instead of our controlling them. Later that same year, | would be offered the job of director of intelligence for the Army Special Forces units already operating in the Southeast Asian theater. At about the same time the army said it was going to name Gen. Arthur Trudeau as the commander of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam. As our names were being circulated, General Trudeau confided to me that he doubted we would get the jobs. And if we did, he said, it would be a toss-up as to who would be the most unhappy, the Vietcong or the U.S. Army. "If they send us over there, Phil, " he said after one of our morning briefings, "one of two things will happen. Either we'll both get court martialed or we'll win the damn war. Either way the army's not going to like the way we do business. " As usual, General Trudeau was right. Before the end of 1962 and right about the time the old man was making up his mind whether to retire or not, his name was vetoed as the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam and | was told to stay at my desk. The handwriting was on the wall: Vietnam was going to be a political war run by the disinformation specialists at the CIA and fought under a cloud of unknowing. Unfortunately, history proved us to be correct. By the time Richard Nixon surrendered to the Chinese and we crawled out of Southeast Asia a few years later, we would learn, | hope for the last time, what it was like to be humiliated on the battlefield and then eviscerated at the negotiating table. The new year brought J. Edgar Hoover over to the Pentagon. The FBI director was growing increasingly anxious at all the Roswell stories circulating like ice cold currents deep under the ocean throughout NASA and the civilian intelligence agencies. Somebody was conspiring about something, and that meant the FBI should get involved, especially if the CIA was messing around in domestic issues. Hoover didn't like the CIA and he especially didn't like the cozy relationship he thought President Kennedy had with the CIA because he believed his boss, the President's brother, was keeping him on a short leash when it came to taking on the agency about territorial issues. Hoover knew, but didn't believe, that after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had become very suspicious of the intelligence information he was getting from the CIA. By the end of 1962, the President would learn from his own brother, who would learn from me, just how deliberately flawed the information coming out of the CIA was. And | would also learn, when | worked for Senator Russell on the Warren Commission in 1964, how that had sealed his fate. But in 1962, still near the height of his power, J. Edgar Hoover was as territorial as any lifetime bureaucrat in Washington could be. And when somebody stepped on his toes, or when he thought someone had stepped on his toes, he kept kicking them until the guy was dead. Even his own agents knew what it was like to get on his bad side. | was as territorial in my own way as the FBI director was in his, and during my years at the White House under President Eisenhower, we had established a professional relationship. If he needed to know something that bore on some KGB agent nosing around the government, | helped him out. If | needed to find something out on the qt. about somebody | needed to take out of the bureaucratic loop, he would tell me what he knew. We never established any formal relationships in the 1950s, but we let each know who we thought the bad guys were. In the 1950s, Hoover got interested in the rumors about Roswell because anything the CIA got their teeth into made him nervous. If it were only the military running a cover-up, he could live with that, although he thought the military never should have run the OSS during World War Il. But once he suspected the CIA was part of the Roswell story, he wanted in. But in my years on the White House staff, there wasn't much | could tell him. It wouldn't be until 1961 that | got my hands on what really happened at Roswell, and then | didn't have to contact him. He called me. We found we could help each other. Besides being territorial, J. Edgar Hoover was an information fanatic. If there was a bit of information floating around, whether it was rumor or truth, Hoover was obsessive about putting it into his files. Information was such a valuable commodity to him, he was willing to trade for it with anybody in government he trusted. | wanted information, too. | was going out to meetings with scientists and university researchers whose loyalties | couldn't verify. | had to be very circumspect about the technological information | was delivering, and many times | needed to know whether a particular chemist or physicist had ever been suspected of dealing with the Communists or, worse, was on the payroll of the CIA. In retrospect | can see how all this smacks of the thinking of Senator Joe McCarthy, but | was at the White House during the army McCarthy hearings and | can tell you straight out that Joe McCarthy - unwittingly - was the best friend the Communists ever had in government. Single handedly, Senator McCarthy helped give respectability to a bunch of people who would never have had it otherwise. He turned behaving in contempt of Congress into a heroic act by his very tactics, and the Communists in government were laughing at the free rein 88