CIA director who alone warned that Soviet missiles were coming to Cuba
He warned that a surprise attack on Cuba would leave the United States with a 'Pearl Harbor indictment,' and argued that Castro and Khrushchev should be given 24 hours' warning before any airstrike.
An American businessman and Republican, he was appointed CIA Director by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Throughout the summer and fall of 1962, he repeatedly warned that the Soviets would place nuclear missiles in Cuba, warnings the intelligence community dismissed, and on September 20, in the 'honeymoon telegram' sent from Paris, he demanded imaginative analysis of the Soviet buildup; on October 14 he ordered the U-2 overflights that discovered the missile sites. He served under President Johnson after Kennedy's assassination but resigned in 1965 over disagreements about the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1929Executive VP, Consolidated Steel Corporation
- 1937Co-founder, Bechtel-McCone Corp.
- 1941–1945President, California Shipbuilding Corp.
- 1950–1951US Under Secretary of the Air Force
- 1958–1961Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission
- 1961–19656th Director of Central Intelligence
Related historical events
From Industrialist to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, 1937–1961
Before entering public life, McCone worked as an engineer and businessman in California. After taking a BS in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1922, he worked as a construction engineer at Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles, rose through management when the firm was absorbed by Consolidated Steel Corporation in 1929, and became its executive vice president and a director in 1933.
In 1937 he left Consolidated Steel and, with Stephen Bechtel, formed Bechtel-McCone Corporation, serving as its president; the engineering firm designed and built power plants and oil refineries in the Americas and the Middle East. With the onset of World War II the business expanded into shipbuilding and aircraft production, and he became president of the separately formed California Shipbuilding Corporation in 1941. That yard earned $44 million during the war on an investment of $100,000, drawing congressional suspicions of war profiteering, which he refuted.
After the war he served on Truman's Air Policy Committee, was named special deputy to the Secretary of Defense in 1948, and was Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1950 to 1951. In this period he emerged as a leading proponent of a strong U.S. strategic missile program and grew close to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then NATO's supreme commander, over strategic air power and NATO's nuclear capability. In 1958 Eisenhower appointed him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a post he held until January 1961.
As chairman, he repaired relations with the Democratic-controlled Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, strained under his predecessor, Admiral Lewis Strauss, and gave the committee regular intelligence briefings on Soviet nuclear capabilities. He frankly acknowledged his personal opposition to Eisenhower's unilateral moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing, and insisted that any nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union include effective safeguards against cheating. By the time he returned to private life in January 1961, his tough-minded, principled positions had earned him the respect of defense experts in both political parties.