This Coup Was Brought to You By PepsiCo

The Perils of Ensuring Corporate Security

“For the first time in my life I realized that my government actively was involved in planning to kill people.” Charles Radford, a Navy clerical employee with hopes of becoming an officer, was assigned in the fall of 1970 to work on the National Security Council (NSC), the White House’s main body responsible for foreign policy decision making. Admiral Rembrandt Robinson, in assigning him to this new post to act as aide and secretary to the NSC staff, wanted military personnel to replace civilian staff as a security measure. Radford gained the trust of his superiors, including Robinson and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and he was given an inside look at high level decisions in the U.S. government. He was shocked at what he discovered.

One of the decisions being discussed was what to do with Chile, the “errant child” whose citizens had voted the wrong way in recent elections, selecting Salvador Allende as their next President against U.S. interests. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was a real blow,” Radford recalled. He saw during the course of his work an options paper on assassinating Allende. The document “discussed various ways of doing it,” he stated. “Either we have somebody in the country do it or we do it ourselves.” All options were on the table and this was only weeks after Allende’s election, before he had officially taken power. “I was stunned; I was aghast,” Radford remembered. “It stuck in my mind so much…”

Friends in High Places

Richard Nixon was no longer Vice-President of the United States, but his time as VP had solidified his elite status. His wealthy friends ensured that he was well taken care of between his runs for the White House and following his defeat in the California gubernatorial race of 1962. The following year, Elmer Bobst, chairman of the pharmaceutical corporation Warner-Lambert, and Donald Kenndall, CEO of Pepsi-Cola, convinced the legal firm Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd to add Nixon to their roster. To sweeten the deal, Kendall moved a large part of Pepsi’s legal work to the firm. Nixon was provided an annual salary of $250,000 ($2.5 million today) to do some occasional legal work as a consultant fitting this into his own schedule, as long as he made himself available to a certain extent. Following his move to New York City, within six months he would be eligible to take the bar exam and become a named partner in the firm.

In October 1963, Nixon traveled to Paris to conduct some work for Pepsi-Cola and then on November 20, he flew to Dallas to attend a meeting with the Pepsi board. A former U.S. defector to Russia named Lee Oswald had previously fired a rifle shot at General Edwin Walker a few months prior and was planning to kill Nixon on his Dallas trip, but was talked out of it by his wife Marina.

The morning of the 22nd, on the way to the airport Nixon saw American flags line the route for the Presidential motorcade expected that day. Arriving back in New York City that day, Nixon hailed a cab which drove him through Queens, stopping at a traffic light. A man approached from the curb, asking “Do you have a radio in your cab? I just heard that Kennedy was shot.” Returning to his building, the doorman approached him with tears streaming down his face: “Oh, Mr. Nixon, have you heard, sir? It’s just terrible. They’ve killed President Kennedy.” Later in the day, Nixon phoned J. Edgar Hoover. Nixon wasted no time in asking: “What happened? Was it one of the right-wing nuts?” The FBI Director replied: “No, it was a Communist.” Hoover told him months later about the Oswald’s plot to also assassinate Nixon in Dallas: “only with great difficulty had [Oswald’s wife] managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so,” he recalled in his memoirs.

A Strange Animal

The U.S. government, since the early 1960s, had been attempting to control election outcomes in Chile through funneling money to candidates and propaganda efforts. Upon becoming U.S. President in 1969, Nixon’s contempt for the Eduardo Frei government in Chile at the time was no secret. Nixon cut back U.S. aid to Chile and had a tense meeting in June with Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s foreign minister. An attendee recounted that Valdés “spoke of the impossibility of dealing with the United States within the regular framework of inter-American relations; the differences in power were too great.” For every dollar in U.S. aid, Latin America returned $3.80, Valdés claimed, citing a study from an American bank. The U.S. officials were irritated, Valdés recalling that “Kissinger was looking at me as if I were a strange animal.”

The next day at the Chilean Embassy, Kissinger attempted to put Valdés in his place: “Mr. Minister, you made a strange speech,” Kissinger began. “You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.”

“Mr. Kissinger,” Valdés countered, “you know nothing of the South.”

“No,” Kissinger replied, “and I don’t care.”