South Vietnam. In his position with the Kennedy administration, Gilpatric later signed off on the overthrow of the Diem government. Gilpatric was also a member of a special task force which hatched "Operation Mongoose", a dirty tricks campaign aimed at destabilizing the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. At the same time, Gilpatric showed that he could be intellectually flexible on occasion. When it came to the admission of China into the United Nations, for instance, Gilpatric argued forcefully in a letter to The New York Times, written during his Eisenhower years, that the United States should stop trying to block the Communist country's admission into the international governing body. "By no longer trying to block Communist China's admission to the United Nations the United States might be able to bring about a reduction in tensions in southeast Asia that would lessen the chances of further Communist 'nibbling' or 'brush-fire' type of aggression." Gilpatric did not always face an easy task while acting as go-between for the Pentagon generals and the White House. For example, Kennedy developed such an intense dislike of General Curtis Lemay that every time his name came up, Kennedy went ballistic. "I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay", Gilpatric recalled, "because, you know, LeMay couldn't listen or wouldn't take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered ... outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the President never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay, as he did on the whole question of an air strike against Cuba. And he had to sit there. I saw the President right afterwards. He was just choleric." It was Gilpatric's calm demeanor and good judgment, wrote Robert F. Kennedy, that led his brother the President to rely on Gilpatric, especially in times of crisis. When McNamara met the Brooklyn-born lawyer at Kennedy's suggestion, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he found Gilpatric "easy, resourceful and intelligent, and the partnership was immediately sealed." Gilpatric made himself an "indispensable" figure in the Kennedy administration, wrote longtime JFK aide Ted Sorensen. As an attorney, Gilpatric represented aviation inventor and high-tech pioneer Sherman Fairchild, who left Gilpatric a bequest in his will. Gilpatric was awarded an honorary degree by Bowdoin College in