Kermit Roosevelt Jr.

Early life and training

Kermit Roosevelt Jr.—called "Kim" as was standard for the alternating generations of Kermits in the Roosevelt family—was born to Kermit Roosevelt Sr. and Belle Wyatt Roosevelt (née Willard) in Buenos Aires in 1916, where Roosevelt Sr. was an official for a shipping line, and then a manager of the Buenos Aires branch of the National City Bank. The Roosevelt family returned to the U.S., and Kim, his two brothers, Joseph Willard and Dirck, and his sister, Belle Wyatt, grew up in Oyster Bay, N.Y., a homestead near to Sagamore Hill, the Long Island home of the Theodore Roosevelt clan.

Kim attended Groton School as a young man. He graduated from Harvard University in 1937, a year ahead of his class, and married Mary Lowe Gaddis shortly thereafter.

Early career

At the time of Roosevelt Jr.'s death, Mrs. Roosevelt recounted in a NYT interview that after graduating from Harvard, her husband had "tried to teach history to the techy boys at Cal Tech." With the outbreak of the second world war, Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt Jr. then joined the military, serving with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the principal agency that was a forerunner to the CIA. He did not discuss his wartime service with his wife; his son, in the same interview, suggested that Kim had been "involved in planning the invasion of Italy." In June 4, 1943, when Kim was 27, his father, Kermit Sr., a man who drank heavily, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at Fort Richardson in Alaska where the senior Roosevelt was posted. Roosevelt Jr. remained with the OSS after the war, writing and editing its history to date.

After the war, Roosevelt went on to serve on the advisory board of the largely Arab organization, The Institute of Arab American Affairs (IAAA, 1944-1950), a New York City-based organization—alongside Dean emeritus of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, Prof. Walter T. Stace of Princeton, Rev. John H. Lathrop, Prof. Albert H. Lyber of Illinois, Benjamin H. Freedman, and others—publishing in 1948, first in essay form in The Middle East Journal, later as an IAAA pamphlet reprint, his views on American Zionism and his arguments regarding the partition of Palestine. In February 1948 Roosevelt joined other like-minded individuals—more than 100 individuals—to form a "Christian group" to aid the fight of the largely rabbinical American Council for Judaism to reverse the ongoing partition of Palestine into exclusive, separate Jewish and Arab states; the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP) was founded on March 2, 1948, with Dean emeritus Gildersleeve serving as CJP chair, former Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin as vice-chair, and Roosevelt as executive director.

In 1951, Roosevelt, Virginia Gildersleeve, Dorothy Thompson, and a further group of 24 American educators, theologians, and writers (including Harry Emerson Fosdick) founded the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a pro-Arabist organization often critical of U.S. support for Israel. The CJP that Roosevelt had helped form in 1948 was subsumed into AFME in 1951, and Roosevelt served as AFME executive secretary for this group of intellectuals and spokespersons, for a time. Historians Robert Moats Miller, Hugh Wilford, and others have stated that from its early years, AFME was a part of an Arabist propaganda effort within the U.S. "secretly funded and to some extent managed" by the CIA, with further funding from the oil consortium, ARAMCO.

Intelligence duties before Operation Ajax

By the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was a senior officer in the CIA's Middle Eastern division.

Role in Operation Ajax

Kermit Roosevelt played a highly critical role in Operation Ajax as the ground operational planner, especially in getting the Shah to issue the 'firman', or decrees, dismissing Mossadegh. He established networks of anglophiles and Shah sympathizers in Iran that were willing to take part in various aspects of the coup. These tactics aided in dividing and dissolving Mossadegh’s political power base within the National Front, the Tudeh, and the Clerics. However, the first attempt at the coup failed, likely because Mossadegh had learned of the impending overthrow. Despite the CIA sending Roosevelt a telegram to flee Iran immediately, he began work on the second coup. He circulated a false account that Mossadegh attempted to seize the throne and bribed Iranian agents. The coup was a success and hence was adapted for use in other third world countries during the Cold War. Eisenhower secretly awarded Roosevelt the National Security Medal in 1954 for his work. In 2014, the National Security Administration released telegrams and accounts of the CIA operation, many of which are revealing to the part he played in the operation.

As described by Roosevelt

Twenty-six years after the Mossadeq coup, Kermit Roosevelt took the unusual step of writing a book about how he and the CIA carried out the operation. He called his book Countercoup to press home the idea that the CIA coup was staged only to prevent a takeover of power by the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh) closely backed by the Soviet Union, and to imply that the exile of the Shah constituted the initial coup, and that he was merely restoring the rightful leader to power. According to Roosevelt, he slipped across the border under his CIA cover as "James Lockridge" on June 19, 1953, was put up in Tehran in a place rented by British intelligence, and as Mr. Lockridge, became a regular at the Turkish Embassy where he played tennis and golf, allegedly scoring a hole in one during a game with the Turkish Ambassador; no one suspected that Mr. Lockridge was the grandson of the 26th US President, though at times he came close to blowing his cover.

Historian Hugh Wilford attempts to describe Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt Jr.'s motivations and views underpinning his intelligence efforts, stating that:

"[Roosevelt Jr.] had this notion of America forming an alliance with the Arab countries as they emerged from under the sway of Britain and France. He was very concerned with backing Arab nationalists in the region. He saw that as the best way of keeping it within the American orbit, as the Cold War was gathering momentum …".

Critique of historical presentations

Roosevelt submitted his Countercoup manuscript to the CIA for pre-publication approval, the agency proposed various alterations, and in the perspective of a CIA reviewer: "Roosevelt has reflected quite faithfully the changes that we suggested to him. This has become, therefore, essentially a work of fiction," a conclusion that allowed release of the book; a catalog of the actual changes made during the review is available.

Former senior adviser to the Obama administration and Council on Foreign Relations Iran expert, Ray Takeyh, writing in 2014, states that "Contrary to Roosevelt's account [in Countercoup], the documentary record reveals that the Eisenhower administration was hardly in control and was in fact surprised by the way events played out." Darioush Bayandor, a former United Nations official and Iranian diplomat (under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), has presented U.S. Department of State archival material and the CIA internal account of the coup events, noting that they contradict Roosevelt's narrative. Author William Blum criticized Roosevelt for providing no evidence when he "argu[ed] that Mossadegh had to be removed to prevent a communist takeover" of Iran. Per Blum, Roosevelt posed Mossadegh was a danger due to his seizure of the oil industry, other Socialist reforms, and his cooperation with the Tudeh Party; Blum argued, on the other hand, that Mossadegh's role was much more nuanced. Blum states that this view was shared by many in the intelligence community, that the head of CIA station in Iran resigned rather than participate in the coup, and that intelligence outsiders, including some in the Truman administration, felt that Mossadegh should have been kept in power to prevent a Communist takeover. Abbas Milani, Stanford's director of Iranian Studies and co-director of the Hoover Institution's Iran Democracy Project, writing in The New Republic, expressed his opinion that "Roosevelt's memoir inflated his own and, in turn, America's centrality to the coup. He tells the story with the relish of a John le Carré knock-off. … Eisenhower, for one, [Milani asserts] considered reports like this to be the stuff of 'dime novels.'"

Frederic P. Hitz, the Weinberg Goldman Sachs Professor of International Relations at Princeton University, has noted that Countercoup reveals "how covert actions were authorized in those days, without oversight. It was just a group of people sitting around in an office …". Historian Hugh Wilford describes three key players involved in middle east matters at the time of the founding of the CIA in 1947: "The cousins ... Kermit and Archie Roosevelt, both grandsons of Theodore Roosevelt ... [and] the third member of this … triangle … Miles Copeland … from Alabama—a very smart, dynamic young man. [The Roosevelts] … took him under their wing, and between them they led the American intelligence efforts in the Middle East." He goes on to elaborate the views of these three that underpinned their intelligence efforts, stating that:

"[I]t was definitely about keeping the Middle East out of Soviet hands [and] about Western access to oil. I think there was also an element of idealism. These were very young guys in their 20s and 30s, and they had almost a romantic view of the good that America could do in the region."

The views of the CIA Arabists were not in isolation; Wilford notes that the "Eisenhower administration [including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was] initially quite sympathetic towards … Roosevelt's Arabist agenda" and willing to oppose Middle Eastern regimes seen "as backing the Soviet Union rather than the U.S."; ultimately, the emergence of American public support for Israel and the administration's evolving framework to respond to its principle Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, would lead to failure of the Arabist agenda of Roosevelt and his colleagues. In discussing Roosevelt's role, Wilford describes him as being among "the most important intelligence officers of their generation in the Middle East."

Intelligence duties after Ajax

Foster Dulles asked Roosevelt to lead the CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala, which deposed the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Roosevelt refused: "AJAX had succeeded, he believed, chiefly because the CIA's aims were shared by large numbers of Iranians, and it was obvious that the same condition did not obtain among Guatemalans." Noting that Árbenz's resignation was forced in large measure by rumors "that a full-scale U.S. invasion was imminent," Roosevelt later remarked: "We had our will in Guatemala, [but] it wasn't really accomplished by clandestine means."

General legacy

John Waller, an intelligence colleague of Roosevelt Jr. at the CIA, made special note of Churchill's approval of Roosevelt's effort in Operation Ajax, and described Roosevelt thus: "Kim was in that Churchillian mode of a 19th-century warrior… [and] was a man of the times and a good man to have around during the cold war."

Personal life

Kim Roosevelt married Mary Lowe "Polly" Gaddis shortly after his early graduation from Harvard, in 1937, and they had three sons, the eldest Kermit (Kermit Roosevelt III, born April 7, 1938), the second Jonathan (1940-2013), and the third Mark (born 1955), and a daughter, Anne (born 1952). Roosevelt Jr.'s last days were spent at a retirement community in Cockeysville, Maryland. He was survived by his wife, his children (his daughter now Anne Mason), a brother, Joseph Willard Roosevelt, and seven grandchildren, including Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor.

Roosevelt Jr.'s published works

Presented by date, all single author unless otherwise noted: