Dr Doug Died Today

Those of you who have followed this blog have read about Dr Doug by me (and he contributed quite a few posts, himself). I have shared his videos and told you that he is the best guitarist I ever knew personally (and better than most I knew from TV and concerts).

Nuclear Winter

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He was one of the most brilliant rednecks I ever knew. He caught on quick when it came to my rantings and because he trusted me, he knew he could follow up with something I shared and expound on it far more than I ever could. He told me several times that I helped wake him up. But he honed my abilities more than I ever explained to him.

I remember when he was a teen and picked up the guitar. He always wanted to be like his idol at the time, Hobbo, who was a fantastic guitarist until he let alcohol ruin him. Dr Doug became far better than Hobbo ever dreamed of.

I lost contact with Doug for nearly 20 years. But we made contact after he moved back to our hometown and married Beckie, the love of his life. He became my best friend.

He was that one person (not family) that I could share anything with. He was my confidant. He was the person I ran my crazy thoughts and rantings by first. He was the one that I called when I needed someone to talk to.

But the truth is that he had many “best friends” who loved him and looked up to him.

He was the one person, that had you called me to tell me he had died in his sleep, I wouldn’t believe it. There are only a few of the old hands left and any of them would not surprise me. But Doug, I thought, would live far longer than I.

I will write more about him later, but I want the world to know what a fine person they lost today.

He told me during one conversation a month or so ago, as his father was dying, that he wanted to just go in his sleep… no car wreck, no pain/suffering, no vegetable hooked up to lines and machines that just kept him breathing with no quality of life.

He did precisely that.

At 47.

Fuck.

Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination by Robert Morrow

Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination

On the night of New Year’s Eve Dec. 31st, 1963, at the Driskell Hotel, Lyndon Johnson and Madeleine Brown, one of his longtime mistresses, had an interesting conversation. Madeleine asked LBJ if he had anything to do with the JFK assassination. Johnson got angry; he began pacing around and waving his arms. Then LBJ told her: it was Dallas, TX, oil executives and “renegade” intelligence agents who were behind the JFK assassination. LBJ later also told his chief of staff Marvin Watson that the CIA was involved in the murder of John Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson would often stay at the Driskill (room #254 today) and LBJ is confirmed by his presidential schedule as being present at the Driskill Hotel the night of 12/31/63

History is proving that Lyndon Johnson played a key role in the JFK assassination. An important book is LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (2011) by Phillip Nelson.  Roger Stone, an aide to Richard Nixon, is writing a book pinning the JFK assassination on LBJ. Stone quotes Nixon as saying:

“Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.”

By 1973 Barry Goldwater privately telling people that he was convinced that LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.

Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys hated each other. So why was LBJ even put on the 1960 Demo ticket in first place? The old wive’s tale is that it was to balance the ticket and win the electoral votes of Texas. The reality is that JFK was set to pick Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri and had already had a deal with Symington to be VP that was “signed, sealed & delivered” according to Symington’s campaign manager Clark Clifford. Then something strange happened on the night of July 13, 1960, in Los Angeles. According to Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s longtime secretary, LBJ and Sam Rayburn were using some of Hoover’s blackmail information on John Kennedy to force JFK to put Johnson on the ticket in a hostile takeover of the vice presidency.

JFK told his friend Hy Raskin:

“They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems. I’m going to have enough problems with Nixon.”

LBJ & Hoover were very close and literally neighbors for 19 years in Washington, DC, from 1943-1961. Both men were also plugged in socially and professionally to Texas oil executives such as Clint Murchison, Sr, H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd.

From that point on, for the next 3 and 1/3 years the Kennedy brothers and LBJ were engaged in a sub rosa war, even though they were ostensibly a political team. On the day of the ’61 inauguration, LBJ protege Bobby Baker told Don Reynolds that JFK would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death.

For his part, Robert Kennedy spent the remainder of JFK’s term trying to figure out a way to get rid of the power-grasping LBJ. The first opportunity to do this was the Billie Sol Estes scandal of 1961. Estes was a cut out for LBJ doing business and had received $500,000 from LBJ (which tells us how important Estes was). LBJ and his aide Cliff Carter manipulated the federal bureaucracy for Estes to ensure that he got exclusive grain storage contracts and numerous other special and highly lucrative favors. Estes says that he funneled Johnson over $10 million in kickbacks.

Henry Marshall was a US agricultural official who was investigating the corruption of Estes, particularly his abuse of a cotton allotment program. In January, 1961, LBJ, Cliff Carter, Estes and LBJ’s personal hit man Malcolm Wallace had a meeting about what to do about Henry Marshall. LBJ said:

“It looks like we will just have to get rid of him.”

Side note: the first person I know who accused Lyndon Johnson of committing a murder was Gov. Allan Shivers who in 1956 personally accused LBJ of having Sam Smithwick murdered in prison in 1952. Smithwick was threatening to go public with information about the Box 13 ballot stuffing scandal of 1948 which gave LBJ the margin of victory over Coke Stevenson in the Democratic primary.

Henry Marshall was murdered on June 3, 1961. He was shot to death 5 times with a bolt action gun and his death was astoundingly ruled a suicide at the time. The Marshall murder & cover up shows the depth, breadth and absolute ruthlessness of the LBJ organization. Billie Sol Estes died recently on May 14, 2013.

Historian Douglas Brinkley has said that by 1963 JFK and his vice president LBJ had no relationship at all. That is not correct; in fact a sub rosa war was being waged between the Kennedys and LBJ. It was an adversarial, death struggle relationship.

In the fall of 1963, the Bobby Baker scandal exploded into the national media. Bobby Baker, who as the secretary of the Senate was a virtual son to Lyndon Johnson, was being investigated for a vending machine kick back scam and numerous shady deals. Baker was known for providing booze & women to the senators. LBJ denied any relationship with Baker (who had named two of his kids after LBJ) while at the same time sending his personal lawyer Abe Fortas to run (control) Baker’s defense. Evelyn Lincoln told author Anthony Summers that the Kennedys were going to use the Bobby Baker scandal as the ammunition to get rid of LBJ.

Robert Kennedy had a two-track program to get rid of LBJ. Phil Brennan was in DC at the time: “Bobby Kennedy called five of Washington’s top reporters into his office and told them it was now open season on Lyndon Johnson. It’s OK, he told them, to go after the story they were ignoring out of deference to the administration.” James Wagenvoord, who in 1963 was a 27-year old assistant to LIFE Magazine’s managing editor, says that based on information fed from Robert Kennedy and the Justice Dept., LIFE Magazine had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. This expose was set to run within a week of the JFK assassination. LBJ aide George Reedy said that LBJ knew about the RFK-inspired media campaign against him and was obsessed with it.

RFK’s other “get rid of LBJ” program was an investigation by the Senate Rules Committee into LBJ’s kickbacks and other corruptions. Burkett Van Kirk was a counsel for that committee and he told Seymour Hersh that RFK had sent a lawyer to the committee to feed them damaging information about LBJ and his corrupt business dealings. The lawyer, Van Kirk said, “used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn’t know, and two, give it to me.” The goal of the Kennedys was “To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the east,” said Van Kirk to Hersh.

Literally at the very moment JFK was being assassinated in Dallas on 11-22-63, Don Reynolds was testifying in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee about a suitcase of $100,000 given to LBJ for his role in securing a TFX fighter jet contract for Fort Worth’s General Dynamics.

Three days before the JFK assassination, JFK told Evelyn Lincoln that he was going to get a new running mate for 1964.

“I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, “Who is your choice as a running-mate.’ He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, ‘at this time I am thinking about Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.’”

At this point I should add that I think the CIA/military intelligence murdered John Kennedy for Cold War reasons, particularly over Cuba policy. The fact that the Kennedys were within days of politically executing & personally destroying Lyndon Johnson could very well have been the tripwire for the JFK assassination.

The Russians immediately suspected that Texas oilmen were involved in the JFK assassination. They and Fidel Castro both feared they were going to be framed for it by US intelligence. By 1965 the KGB had internally determined that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination.

Hoover wrote to LBJ about this in a memo that was not declassified by the US government until 1996:

“On September 16, 1965, this same source [an FBI spy in the KGB] reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson’s character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that “now” the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between President Johnson and Robert and “Ted” Kennedy.”

Robert Morrow, a political researcher and political activist, has an expertise in the JFK assassination. He can be reached at Morrow321@aol.com or 512-306-1510.

Notes:

1) Brown, Madeleine Duncan. Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatory Press, 1997. Page 189.

2) Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978. Page 616.

3) Nelson, Phillip. LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.

4) Dickerson, Nancy. Among Those Present: A Reporter’s View of 25 Years in Washington. Random House, 1976. Page 43.

5) Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Back Bay Books, 1998. Page 126 and 407.

6) Epstein, Edward Jay. Esquire Magazine. December, 1966.

7) Estes, Billie Sol. Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend. BS Productions, 2004. Page 43.

8) Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960. Oxford Univesity Press USA, 1992. Page 347.

9) Brinkley, Douglas. Speaking on Hardball with Chris Matthews, 2012.

10) Brennan, Phil. “Some Relevant Facts about the JFK Assassination,” NewsMax, 11-19-2003. http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/18/152526.shtml

11) Reedy, George. Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir. Andrews McMeel Publications, 1985.

12) Wagenvoord, James. Email to John Simkin dated 11-3-09. Web link: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14966

14) Lincoln, Evelyn. Kennedy and Johnson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Page 205.

15) Hoover, J. Edgar. Memo to Lyndon Johnson with FBI leadership carbon copied. 12-1-66. Web link: http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html#d1

From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger (1978):

“In 1967 Marvin Watson of Lyndon Johnson’s White House staff told Cartha DeLoach of the FBI that Johnson “was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt that CIA had had something to do with this plot.” (Washington Post, December 13, 1977)

James Wagenvoord email to John Simkin, dated 11-3-2009:

Posted 04 November 2009 – 07:52 AM

I thought researchers would be interested in reading this email I received last night:

I’ve been reading through you web site and believe that I can add one of the final jigsaw puzzle pieces that affect the timing of JFK’s Dallas trip and the nervousness of LBJ during the weeks preceding the killing At the time I was the 27 year old Editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor. Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developoing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligance agencies and we were used ofter by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public. Life’s coverage of the Hoffa prosecution, and involvement in paying off Justice Department Memphis witesses was a case in point.

The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on Nov.26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been thetop editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/LIFE editorial services and remained in that job until 1968.

How To Gather An Army by Mike

Amnesty = ?

So there is already an effort underway to voluntarily document “illegal’s” for the draft, but how the hell is it possible to enforce compliance with an undocumented populace. It certainly would be difficult and seems rather contradictory in nature.

(Sidenote – I also think there’s some legs to these seemingly disparate stories as well… Open queers in the military… then, women in combat duty… now, illegal’s potentially being forced to register with Selective Service… Me thinks someone is gathering an army because it sure is shit isn’t about “guaranteeing civil liberties and equal rights”…)

So this got me thinking – what does this Amnesty package equal?

—————

Amnesty = 11 million more eligible recipients of government aid (Welfare… Unemployment… Medicare… Straw that broke the camel’s back?)

Amnesty = 11 million more eligible voters (bloc for Marxist-Left – they sure as hell ain’t voting for the 82%-White Republican Party)

Amnesty = 11 million more legalized “cultural” aliens (increased demographic pressure on traditional America – furthering heterogenic tension)

Amnesty = 11 million more legal workers in labor pool (increased competition in a stressed economy – further drive down wages as labor pool increases)

Amnesty = 11 million more draftees (thanks to the recent changes and pending legislation to Selective Service)

————

I may be missing some things, but in what way is Amnesty good for Americans… Honestly, I’d like some feedback.

What Purpose Does The Boston Bombing False Flag Event Serve? Guest Post by Mike

Interesting how the Boston bombing “suspects” turned out to be Caucasians (used in the proper ethnic sense).

I – like you most probably – initially felt this was going to be a rehash of OKC in ’95 for it presented a golden opportunity to go on the offensive against those damn patriot “radicals.” Yet, interestingly enough the story was steered in another direction, though some Good-Goy journalists and their Jew-Counterparts took a few aimless shots.

So this got me to thinking…

What purpose does this event serve?

Our enemy is clearly dimensional in thought. They do not commit “A” to get “B” – no – they commit “A” to get “ALPHABET.” Yet motive can sometimes become blurred with so many moving pieces – and in order to clearly see the game – one sometimes needs to refresh and relook the whole board.

So where am I going with this?

After reading a few articles to the effect of Obama reaching out to Putin for mutual security options as a result of the Boston Bombing (LINK), this tied down a few macro-links I’d been mulling over.

The past two major-media propaganda blitzes have been: North Korea & Boston… Full-Court Big-Money mindfucks in both circumstances…

So what do these two disparate storylines share in common (since anyone with half-a-functioning brain knows the MSM version is bullshite)?

Cover… Domestically-Plausible & Internationally-Convenient Cover for further weapons system and troop deployments (aka “training exercises”)…

Further tightening the noose on the artificial antithesis (SCO v NATO).

This “buildup” seems confirmed by the recent heralded trip Obama made to Jewryland to worship the half-dicks.

The headline of the trip – Peace with Palestinians?!?…

Not a chance – fuck that goyish hippie-jive jack… Instead there was renormalized relations between the Jews & Turks…

Now, the timing of the this seems to be fulfilling several agendas (i.e. dimensional thought) and comes as a hurried result of the FSA (Fuckup-SacOshit-Amateurs) failing to oust Assad in a timely manner. As well as tying nicely to our recent domestic “Chechen” terrorists in Boston.

First

If a conflict were to erupt in the region – Russia’s Navy would have to pass through Istanbul & the Dardanelles (image below). Kind of a huge fucking problem if the Turks are not on your side…

Second

The lucrative natural-gas EU-pipeline being proposed by Turkey & Israel, as relations are now “normalized” (aka publically applauding your own ass-raping by Israel), will serve as substitute for the EU should conflict erupt with Russia (who currently provides over 50% of EU consumption). Conveniently, Cyprus now has the “economic-incentive” to cooperate with this deal, as the pipeline will have to travel through its waters (can you grab your ankles and say “Bail-In”?)…

Third

This relationship will further enclose and isolate Syria from any external aid. With engineered internal-conflict on the horizon between Sunni’s and Shia’s in Iraq (LINK), Shia Iran will have a difficult time aiding Hezbollah & Syria from fall. The Kurd’s in the northeast will not openly aid anyone (Iran nor Russia) unless they’re promised full sovereignty – something the Jews have been quietly doing for years (aided by their large Mossad presence in Mosul). This leaves Turkey in the key position to control the support in and out of Syria. And the “easing” of tensions between the Turks & Kurds (LINK – and you can bet this is working in coordination with the Shylocks) further solidifies this role…

Forth

The Jews know how to play people’s emotions and tendencies to their own advantage. The Turks traditionally hate the Russians (4-Century Russo-Turkish War). The Turks traditionally hate the Greeks (Greco-Turkish War). The Turks traditionally hate the Armenians (Armenian-Genocide). The Turks traditionally hate the Kurds (conflict still ongoing – though “change” is in the air temporarily). These age-old animosities can be called upon by crafty politicians to ”justify” these moves in coordination with Israel.

Yet, any “normalization” requires both parties getting something from the deal or at least leaving with the perception of which…

So what is it the Turks cling to?

The dream of Pan-Turkism (Neo-Ottomanism) which is still alive and well in prominent Turkish political circles, a game the Jew only knows too well (British Israelism, Christian Identity, etc). And this dream can only be “promised” if the perceptive security of Turkey is ensured…

So how does the region look?

Well, to the west, there is disunity in Greece as a result of the sacking of their economy… To the south, civil war in Syria and the destroyed shell of Iraq presents little risk… To the east lies the Kurds, a group whose traditional animosity will not willingly aid the Turks nor Persians (though creating a convenient antagonistic buffer)…

Yet to the north, lingers a rising Mother Russia – a threat the Turks most certainly cannot handle alone.

Now, there have already been repositionings to move missile systems into Turkey back in 2011-2012 (LINK), but this came under heavy international pressure. That said, I’m sure Turkey wants as much of a buffer/cannon fodder between them & Russia as possible so history does not repeat (i.e. Crimean War & WW1 – where Russia invaded through the Caucuses/Georgia). Efforts were already underway to sufficiently arm Georgia (LINK) but this was certainly not going unnoticed by Russia (LINK & LINK)…

What to do, what to do?…

Enter the Boston Bombers with the convenient background (LINK) while Israel is already underway securing alliances with Azerbaijan (LINK)…

Maybe throw in an air base for good measure (LINK)… (ß In the center of Turkey?!?!?)

Like I said – the identity of these bombers provides good cover…

The Turkish leadership is setting their people for up for slaughter in return for a few shekels and pipe dreams. They are the regional pawns who are playing a very dangerous game, particularly with their recent SCO interest being displayed (which is nothing but an effort to create confusion from my point of view)… Once this conflagration kicks off – human nature will look in the direction of bullets fired and forget the deceivers knife lurking behind….

With the rear secured for Jewryland – it’s only a matter of time before our Yid Slavemasters shout the battle cry – “Onward, Christian Soldier”…

—————-

The false-flag for the gun-loving patriots is yet to come…

Me suspects this one will be huge and probably set in Chicago (just like many recent Jewryvision shows – Chicago Code, Chicago Fire, Chicagolicious, The Good Wife, etc.). No matter how many of these shows fail (LINK), they keep coming out with more…

Why?

For every suasive-story must contain a vivid-setting and relatable characters… Because as George Lucas aptly said – “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing”…

—————-

Just my six shekels for whatever it may be worth. This is certainly not all the agenda, merely a small piece of why this was done (N. Korea/West Pacific buildup another matter – image below). But maybe a piece that hadn’t crossed your mind which is why I thought I’d share.

Few Links Regarding Image Above:

Weapons Systems – LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK

Chinese Positioning – LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK

Passionflower

Dedicated to Dr Doug (who I know will appreciate this as much or more than I do). Doug was hit from behind as he sat at a red light. His back is in rough shape and I hope that you will join me as I pray for the best care and his quick healing:

This song is about I plant a grew in my 10-feet-square backyard in the Leeds inner city. I put the seeds in a tiny tub, but it grew like a Roald Dahl story until it took over the whole yard, then one day the sun shone extra hard and 100 flowers all went “Pop!”. It was amazing, so I wrote a song for it.

~ Jon

Thanks to Zen at zengardner.com

Elia Kazan, American Hero by DCDave

Elia Kazan, American Hero

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elia_Kazan

Ben and Norma Barzman were Hollywood screenwriters and unapologetic members of the Communist Party.  As such, they became victims of the Hollywood blacklist and lived and worked in exile in Europe, mainly in France, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s.  The following passage is from Norma’s 2003 book, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (p. 442):

proud Communist Party member
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk

In March 1999, ten years after Ben’s death, the Writers Guild restored screenplay credit to Ben for El Cid and solo original screenplay credit (“Written By”) to me for Luxury Girls.  At the same moment, the Academy announced their intention to bestow an honorary Oscar on Elia Kazan.  Along with Abe Polonsky, Bernie Gordon, Jean Butler, Bobbie Lees, and the other surviving blacklistees and their offspring, I was goosed into action.  I’d been comparatively quiet, attending blacklist retrospectives, promoting Tender Comrades at bookstores and universities.  But I was energized once again.  I collected money for ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, picketed outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with my grandson, Matthew, Daniel’s son; spoke on radio and TV.  A big demonstration greeted Oscar-goers, most of whom did not stand or applaud Kazan.

And what was it about belatedly honoring perhaps the greatest director the American motion picture industry has ever seen that had Ms. Barzman so exercised?  Here, by way of explanation, is how The New York Times began its March 22, 1999, article entitled “Amid Protests, Elia Kazan Receives His Oscar:”

Elia Kazan said ”thank you” tonight at the Academy Awards, and then walked off stage slowly to sustained applause.

It was, in some ways, a bittersweet finale to the controversy over the honorary Oscar for the 89-year-old filmmaker, a controversy dating back to 1952 when Kazan, the director of ”On the Waterfront” and other classics, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communist influences in Hollywood.

After an all-too-sketchy summary of Kazan’s many accomplishments, The Times gave Kazan’s detractors the last word with this conclusion:

But critics of the award to Mr. Kazan said that the director should not be forgiven for the decision he made in 1952. A full-page ad in Daily Variety, signed by some members of the entertainment world as well as lawyers and academics, said that Mr. Kazan ”validated the blacklisting of thousands” and that ”his action did enormous damage to the motion picture industry.”

Only a handful of the hundreds of signatories were well known, among them the actors Sean Penn, Ed Asner and Theodore Bikel.

CNN, in its coverage before the event, even went so far as to publicize the Kazan attackers by printing the Hollywood Reporter ad in its entirety:

“There is the story in our history of a man who was proclaimed a hero of the American Revolution. In one of the battles against the British he suffered a mutilating leg wound. Sadly, after the revolution he became a traitor. It was ruled that for treason he be hanged. But before they hanged him, the leg that was wounded was amputated so that the better part of him be not dishonored.

“Elia Kazan too was a traitor. Some of those betrayed were his close friends. Their lives and futures were destroyed. He became ally and accomplice to an infamous committee which shamed his country. There is no way for the films of Kazan to be amputated from the rest of him. Yet, if there were any decency left in him he should have refused the award so as not to once again sow discord and bitterness among those whose lives and devotion are given to cinema.” Signed, Jules Dassin.

Not to be outdone, in 2003 PBS had this to say about Kazan and his Congressional testimony:

One of Kazan’s defenders is Arthur Miller, much to the disappointment of many on the left. Miller is one of the heroes of the McCarthy Era. He defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1956, and refused, unlike Kazan, to name those whom he knew to be “fellow travelers.” For this he was held in contempt of Congress, fined, and sentenced to jail time.

Miller, who struggled at the time so mightily with his personal moral failing, emerged as the exemplar of courage in face of the Red scare. He has even taken on an aura of saintliness over the years. Kazan occupies the other end of the spectrum: a man defined almost entirely by his decision to name names. For many, Kazan’s brilliant career-all that he contributed to the theater, to film, to letters-will be tainted by a single decision he was forced to make some fifty years ago.

The Continuing Communism Whitewash

What in the world is going on here?  At the time that Kazan gave his testimony, we only knew a small part of the evils of Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin.  Nikita Khrushchev had not yet made his famous speech on the cult of personality and its horrible consequences.  The Soviet historian Roy Medvedev hadn’t published his exposé of Stalin entitled Let History Judge.  Most importantly, The Gulag Archipelago and the other great writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn were still in the distant future.  On the American political scene, the revelations of a number of former Communists had been published in the form of a book entitled The God That Failed three years before, in which the insidiousness of the Communist Party in the United States was put on full display.  Former Communist spies Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had given their Congressional testimony, and one of the people Chambers accused of being a Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, had been convicted of perjury, but there were still a lot of people who believed that he, Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, and other high level Communists and Communist sympathizers were just victims of a witch hunt.  Allen Weinstein, previously a Hiss defender, had not yet written Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, showing to the satisfaction of almost everyone in the history community how right Chambers was about Hiss and the Communist infiltration of the government.

One would think that in 1999, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire, Kazan would be the vindicated one and all those long-time promoters of the Soviet Union like Norma Barzman and her friend Polonsky—who, demonstrating his unreconstructed Stalinist tendencies was quoted as saying on the eve of Kazan’s award, “I’ll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening.”—would be the ones slinking away with their tails between their legs.  Rather, it is the contrary, and they are given reinforcement by our national opinion-molding mainstream.  They are now the unvarnished heroes, while Kazan, politically at least, is the villain.

Consider the shallow and contradictory attacks they make on the man.  He “validated the blacklisting of thousands,” they say.  They don’t say that he supported the blacklisting, which he certainly did not, as he showed with his professional assistance of the pro-Communist Zero Mostel:

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Mostel

It was not until 1950 that Mostel again acted in movies, for a role in the Oscar winning film Panic in the Streets, at the request of its director, Elia Kazan. Kazan describes his attitude and feelings during that period, where, according to biographer Arthur Sainer, “MGM blacklisted Zero Mostel way before the days of the blacklist.”

Each director has a favorite in his cast, . . . my favorite this time was Zero Mostel—but not to bully. I thought him an extraordinary artist and a delightful companion, one of the funniest and most original men I’d ever met. . . I constantly sought his company. . . He was one of the three people whom I rescued from the “industry’s” blacklist. . . For a long time, Zero had not been able to get work in films, but I got him in my film.

Perhaps by choosing the word “validated” they mean that he confirmed that there were, indeed, members of the Communist Party, which he, himself had been for a short time, working in the entertainment industry in key positions.  He named eight former associates who were also Communists.  One of them, the playwright Clifford Odets, he noted, had left the Party the same time as he did.  All of them, as it happens, were already known by the committee to be Communists.  PBS is simply wrong, then, to call them “fellow travelers,” suggesting that they were just sympathizers with some of the things that the Communists purported to stand for and it is doubly wrong to put the expression in quotes, which implies that it might just be someone else’s characterization of them.  Kazan’s critics can’t have it both ways.  He either validated the hunt for genuine Communist Party members in show business or he did not.

Who Was the Traitor?

Jules Dassin’s use of the word “traitor” to describe him is also quite interesting.  The most common understanding of “traitor” is “one who commits treason,” that is, one who betrays his country.  Could one find a better word to describe those who remained loyal to the American Communist Party throughout the Stalin period than “traitor?”  As Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley has put it so succinctly in his very revealing book Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, “…the essence of American Communism was loyalty to Stalin.” (p. 287)  Anyone who was a member of the party for any length of time could see that that was the case, but one hardly had to be a party member to see it.  Just watching how quickly the Communists turned from being the biggest opponents of American involvement in the war in Europe to being the biggest proponents when Hitler turned on his Soviet allies should have been education enough.  In the national loyalty sense of the term, then, the word “traitor” comes a lot closer to describing the people Kazan fingered, with the exception of Odets, who had ended his membership in the Party.

Dassin must mean, then, that Kazan was a traitor in the sense that he betrayed either his cause or his friends and associates.  Since he had long since parted company with the “cause” of the American Communist Party, the charge boils down to his ratting out some of his former comrades, who, unbeknownst to him, had already been effectively ratted out.  For that, the sweeping conclusion is reached that by that deed this great contributor to the film-making art somehow did “enormous damage to the motion picture industry.”

It really is hard to take people seriously who speak in such absurd hyperbole.  Clearly there can be no connection between his confirmation of the Communist Party membership of those few individuals and any damage to the quality of movie making in America.  Maybe it’s somehow just the principle of the thing that they’re talking about.  But when it comes to the question of the principles involved, there is no better authority than Kazan himself.  Here, in the full text of an advertisement he purchased in The New York Times on April 12, 1952:

In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my political position have been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to make my stand clear:

I believe that Communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

I believe that the American people can solve this problem wisely only if they have the facts about Communism. All the facts.

Now I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency.

Whatever hysteria exists — and there is some, particularly in Hollywood — is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.

The facts I have are sixteen years out of date, but they supply a small piece of background to the graver picture of communism today.

I have placed these facts before the House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve and I now place them before the public and before my co-workers in motion pictures and in the theatre.

Seventeen and a half years ago I was a twenty-four-year old stage manager and bit actor, making $40 a week, when I worked.

At that time nearly all of us felt menaced by two things: The depression and the ever growing power of Hitler. The streets were full of unemployed and shaken men. I was taken in by the Hard Times version of what might be called the Communists’ advertising or recruiting technique. They claimed to have a cure for depressions and a cure for Naziism and Fascism.

I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.

I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936, that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.

What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party “discipline.” The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite of their claims of “democracy” and “the scientific approach.”

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.

I got out in the spring of 1936.

The question will be asked why I did not tell this story sooner. I was held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and employment of people who may, like myself, have left the party many years ago.

I was held back by a piece of specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals. It goes like this: “You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the people who attack civil liberties.”

I have thought soberly about this. It is, simply, a lie.

Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists.

Liberals must speak out.

I think it is useful that certain of us had this kind of experience with the Communists, for if we had not we should not know them so well. Today, when all the world fears war and they scream peace, we know how much their professions are worth. We know tomorrow they will have a new slogan.

Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always.

It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.

I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever they are threatened.

The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to direct represent my convictions.

I expect to continue to make the same kinds of pictures and to direct the same kinds of plays.

For anyone who might still believe that Kazan’s attackers hold the moral high ground, I suggest that they just go back and read his statement again, perhaps a little more carefully the second time through.  Who can honestly take issue with a single line in it?  If that doesn’t work, then watch this powerful scene in the Kazan-directed On the Waterfront.

It is hardly noble or admirable, Kazan is telling us, to protect the secrets of murderous, power-lusting thugs in the name of loyalty to one’s associates.  And when it comes to murderousness and power lust, the mobsters who controlled the New York docks in the movie were very small timers compared to the controllers of those he informed on for HUAC.  As he wrote in his autobiography, “On the Waterfront was my own story.  Every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go **** themselves. (Elia Kazan: A Life, p. 529; quoted in Billingsley, p. 244).

The political climate has changed now so drastically, it is very hard for most Americans to appreciate how powerful and insidious the American Communist Party was in the Red Decade of the 1930s and well into the 1940s.  In his statement Kazan says, “I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies,” but the main reason for that is that spies had no reason to infiltrate his line of work, but subversives certainly did.

“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important,” is the quote from Vladimir Lenin that Billingsley uses to lead off his Part I.  Consonant with that dictum, burrowing into Hollywood and taking it over was as important to Stalin’s Communist Party as controlling the docks was to the mob in On the Waterfront.  And it was very successful.  Contrary to the popular notion we might have now that one was taking great risks for his ideals to be a Communist, at the height of the party’s influence, it was actually a career advantage in Hollywood:

For the cinema revolutionaries, wrote Eugene Lyons, Communism was “an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship in super-charity,” a way for the wealthy to posture as proletarian wage slaves.  On the other hand, the Party triumphalist mind-set, the notion that they automatically write better screenplays and belonged to the victorious army of the future, led some to use ideology as a substitute for talent or even effort.  According to Louis Berg, longtime Hollywood journalist Max Youngstein of Universal circulated a memo informing all personnel that being a Communist was no longer sufficient reason to be employed there, and that doing a bit of work would also be required.

Former Communist screenwriter Roy Huggins says that there were a number of “awful writers” who wouldn’t have worked without their politics.  For this type of person, Huggins said, becoming a member of the Communist Party “was just another way of being Sammy Glick,” the hero of Budd Schulberg’s novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (Billingsley, pp. 58-59)

Misplaced Indignation

When it comes to the Hollywood blacklist, nothing could be clearer than that no finger of blame should be pointed in the direction of the great director, Elia Kazan.  Contrary to a popular belief that is perpetuated by people who are at odds with the truth, the blacklist had nothing to do with the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy.  The blacklist was begun by the major studio heads in 1947.  That was the year Senator McCarthy took office.  He exhibited no public interest in the Communist subversion issue until he made his famous speech in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, about Communists in the State Department.  Throughout his investigations, his entire focus and that of his committee staff was on Communists in the federal government.  He never had anything to do with Communists in Hollywood.  Inquiries into that subject originated with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  HUAC was formed in 1938, and its original concern was with Nazi subversion.  Under Chairman Martin Dies, Democrat of Texas, it could not help discovering, though, that Communist subversion was a far bigger problem.

As Billingsley in his book makes abundantly clear, HUAC’s interest in Communist infiltration of Hollywood was hardly an idle one.  There was ample reason for their interest.  The Hollywood blacklist began with the denial of film industry employment to the members of the industry, known popularly as the Hollywood Ten, who refused to cooperate with the committee in October of 1947.

It is wrong to point the finger of blame at HUAC, though.  Perhaps it is a novel idea these days that the United States Congress should show public concern over the subversion of American institutions by a foreign country, whether the subversion be of the government or the opinion-molding industry, but that is precisely what the HUAC inquiries were about.  HUAC was not responsible for the Hollywood blacklist, though.  That was entirely the work of the heads of the major studios, who had a vise-like grip on employment in Hollywood at that time. Seeing how the molders of public opinion have come to characterize everything concerning Communists and Hollywood as just the manifestation of paranoia by grandstanding politicians, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Hollywood moguls’ blacklist was nothing but a ploy.

Like the Soviets, who airbrushed Trotsky and other foes of Stalin out of official photographs, the Hollywood Party replaced fact with legend.  The Communist Party and its involvement with Hollywood was simply left out.  The story only begins when the Committee, a group of black-hatted inquisitors, rides into town tarring anything that moves with a red brush, persecuting noble idealists, censoring artists, and launching the “dark epoch” of the blacklist, part of the “McCarthy era.”  That template, plus the appealing plot of [Dalton] Trumbo, [Michael] Wilson, and others who duped the studios by working through fronts, simply overrode the long and complicated story of the Communist Party’s cultural offensive, the front groups, and the studio labor conflicts.

As for “the industry,” it was not up to admitting that it had played the role of what Lenin called “useful idiots,” duped and bilked by militant Communists.  Though it was the industry, not the government, that blacklisted writers and performers, the blacklist legend allowed the studios to pose as victims themselves, a cover-up too intoxicating to pass up. (Billingsley, pp. 272-273)

Had the movie moguls been really sincere in their newfound anti-Communism we would have seen them producing at least an occasional movie that reveals the truth about the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and afterward.  More than half a century has passed and we have not yet seen anything out of Hollywood that might counteract the impression they left with 1940s movies like Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and The North Star.  That has certainly not been for lack of good potential dramatic material.  Solzhenitsyn alone, we know, has stories galore, but there have been lots of others like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind or the sad stories of Americans in the Soviet Union like Thomas Sgovio, Victor Herman,* or Robert Robinson, whom we mention in our recent review of The Forsaken.  While Hollywood never seems to tire of movies that vilify the Nazis and, more recently, the Arabs and the Muslims, it is yet to produce anything about the Soviet bloc that begins to compare to the French movie, Est-Ouest (East-West), or the German movie, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).

Rather, Hollywood still seems to prefer to romanticize Communism with movies like The Way We Were and Reds and to save its greatest opprobrium for those who called attention to the Communist subversion and infiltration problem.  The most recent example of the latter that comes to mind is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. 

Sen Joe McCarthy

This negative focus upon the Hollywood blacklist in the one instance and upon Senator Joe McCarthy in the other suggests that what we are seeing in action here in both cases is nothing less than the thirteenth of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.  Our opinion molders have successfully changed the subject by creating a distraction.  So now, just as the story of Hollywood subversion by Communists begins with HUAC, the story that M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein recount with their new book Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, as far as the dominant creators of national opinion are concerned, begins with Senator McCarthy’s presumed overly vigorous inquiries into that highly successful subversion.

There is ample reason to feel a sense of indignation at this whole sorry episode of American history.  If it must be directed at one particular American, it should be at the person responsible for consciously allowing Stalin’s subversion to go as far as it did.  Our previous writings have amply demonstrated who that person is.  His profile can be found on the dime, and he is currently being worshipfully portrayed by Asner in a one-man show.

________________________________________________________________________________

*CBS did air a rather poorly done movie version of Herman’s tragic but inspiring epic, Coming out of the Ice, in 1982.

David Martin

March 19, 2013

American Victims of the Soviet Gulag

A Review of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and before that with the revelations of the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others, virtually every educated American not named Oliver Stone or Peter Kuznick now knows that the Soviet Union, particularly during the long period of Joseph Stalin’s absolute dictatorship, was little more than one big killing machine.  Stalin ruled through terror and fear, but also with a cult of personality in which he was regarded as a god-like father figure for the country and for worldwide Communism.  The main instrument of the terror was the precursor of the KGB, the dreaded NKVD.  The major victims were first the losers in the civil war, primarily the aristocracy and the supporters of the tsar, including the Orthodox Christian Church; then the small land owners who resisted the draconian collectivization program or just anyone who owned land; then in the 1930s the revolution turned in on itself with the years of the Great Terror, and literally no one was safe.

The slain of all nationalities numbered in the tens of millions.  Many were summarily executed with a bullet to the back of the head or neck.  A far larger number were done to death by a sentence, of whatever length, to one of the many work camps.  Conditions were often such that the prisoners were hardly expected to survive.  The food was typically inadequate for replacement of the calories used up in the labor, and the clothes often provided insufficient protection from the elements.  That was especially the case at Kolyma, perhaps the harshest of all the labor camps.  One reason author Tim Tzouliadis focuses particularly upon Kolyma is that American memoirist Thomas Sgovio, who managed to survive ten years there because of his artistic skills and amazing good fortune, has left us a very good description of the experience.  It was also the place that one of the heroes of Stone and Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, Vice President Henry Wallace, visited in May of 1944 as part of his NKVD-hosted 25-day tour of the Russian Far East from which he returned with glowing reports on the Soviet pioneer spirit.

The American Common Man’s Route to the Gulag

It might have been a real American pioneer spirit that motivated some of the thousands of people who moved from this country to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s in what Tzouliadis aptly calls a “forgotten exodus.”  For many, with the nation’s economy flat on its back in the throes of the Great Depression, it was simple desperation.  Tzouliadis reports that in the first eight months of 1931 alone, the Soviet trade agency, Amtorg, based in New York, received one hundred thousand American applications for emigration to the USSR.  “Ten thousand optimistic Americans were hired that year, part of the official ‘organized emigration,’ who received their good news with glee closer to lottery winners than economic migrants.”

Another reason why so many people made such an ultimately foolish decision was that they just didn’t know.  Virtually everything they had heard about the Soviet Union was positive, because almost everything anyone in the United States had heard at that time was propaganda.  Almost nothing had been published to counter the favorable impression of the Russian revolutionaries since John Reed’s very influential Ten Days that Shook the World in 1919.  Many had already left for Russia before the man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, but news of that event was highly distorted by no less a powerful news organ than The New York Times, and the flow of migrants continued.

Heavily represented among the emigrants were Americans on the far left of the political spectrum.  Given the state of the economy at that time, though, the radical left perspective had a much broader appeal then than it does now.  For those good, patriotic Americans today who find it impossible to empathize with these thousands of ill-fated migrants to Russia, Tzouliadis has a good corrective at the end of his first chapter:

Few paused to distinguish whether they were being pulled by an ideology or pushed by their need.  Nor were these Americans merely a confederacy of political fanatics, hopeless idealists, or naïve adventurers.  Theirs was a reaction to the actuality and future threat of poverty, and to understand them we must place ourselves momentarily in a similar position of unknowing: when the idea of the Soviet Revolution was still filled with hope, and only the most perspicacious could discern the truth that lay beneath that promise.  It was an era when the political system of communism had yet to be fully tested, just as once upon a time democracy, too, had presented an equally radical affront to conservative opinion.  (p. 11)

That chapter is titled “The Joads of Russia,” after the main characters in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the fictional family that was forced to migrate from Oklahoma to California at about the same time as the migration to Russia took place.

The title of the second chapter, “Baseball in Gorky Park,” captures what the migration experience was like for many in the early days.  There was a brief honeymoon period when the presence of so many Americans was a source of pride for the government and for many of the Russian people.  Baseball was at the peak of its popularity in the United States, and the young Americans brought their game with them.  Teams and leagues were formed.  The review of the book in The Telegraph of London has a heartbreaking photograph of the members of one such team.  It is heartbreaking because there is a very good chance that not a single young man in that photograph made it through the next decade alive, not only that, but their deaths were likely to have been quite agonizing.  The young players at that time, looking happy in the photograph like contented beef cattle clueless as to their eventual fate, could even read about their baseball exploits in the English language Moscow News.  The pro-Soviet Anna Louise Strong was the editor at that time and one of the reporters for a brief period was the later New Deal-connected business writer, Eliot Janeway.

To the extent that Kolyma is representative, there was a certain cruel politico-economic logic to the Great Terror that began in the later 1930s and swallowed up millions of people, including most of the Americans.  The rigidly planned economy produced little that anyone outside Russia wanted to buy.  The only desirable Soviet exports were raw materials.  The most valuable raw material, and the best form of payment for needed imports, was gold.  Much of the gold and many of the other raw materials were located in places with such a cold climate that no amount of money would lure workers to go there.  Prisoners were the solution.  At the same time, rigid political control required arbitrary arrests for the most trivial offenses, or in many cases, for no offense at all.  That assured an endless supply of prisoners.  The collective farms didn’t produce enough to feed both the free and the imprisoned populace, so the prisoners were underfed, died off, and were replaced by constant streams of new prisoners.  The author notes that many of the prisoners were transported to Kolyma in ships donated to the Soviet Union by the United States through the Lend Lease program.

What was done by the American government to rescue its citizens or “former citizens” from this horror?  The answer is precious little.  The government reacts to public pressure, but before there can be public pressure there must be publicity, and there was virtually none.  To be sure there were family and loved ones contacting their Congressmen and petitioning the State Department, but they might was well been the family members of American POWs abandoned in Southeast Asia almost a half a century later.  Even had there been strong domestic pressure, the obstacles faced by the American embassy in Moscow were daunting:

In Moscow, the American diplomats understood very well that low-level negotiation with the Soviet Foreign Ministry was entirely useless, given the fact that the entire Commissariat was petrified of the NKVD and were themselves frequent victims of the Terror.  Clearly more forceful intervention was required at the very highest levels of government.  Had the diplomats been willing, action might still have been taken, and the lives of the American emigrants might well have been saved.

But what was abundantly clear was that if this was about to happen, the “captured Americans” needed a heroically protective figure to intervene on their behalf—someone with the courage of Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg—someone willing to lend sanctuary, to hand out passports, to speak to the president, and to kick up a very loud and very public fuss in a time of peril.  Someone, in short, who might hold a protective hand over them when their lives were so evidently endangered.

What they got, instead, was Ambassador Joseph Davies.  (pp. 106-107)

The Biggest American Villains

In the whole sorry story there are few, if any, American heroes, unless you count the pitifully few survivors.  Certainly there were none in the U.S. government or among the U.S. reporters assigned to the Soviet Union.  Whatever they sent out had to pass through Soviet censors, and they knew that if they managed to smuggle out anything critical of their host country they would be finished as reporters there.  Even Eugene Lyons, whose under-publicized 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, written after his return to the States, finally gave Americans a look at Stalin’s horrors, followed the rules when he was in Moscow and kept the lid on the story of the American expatriates’ virtual imprisonment in the years before they were being sent off to the Gulag.

Paul Robeson

There are American villains aplenty, though.  If one counts Walter Duranty, an Englishman, as an honorary American because he worked for The New York Times when he wrote the award-winning cover-up stories that helped lure the migrants in the first place, the top three would be Davies, Duranty, and the famous black athlete, singer, and actor, Paul Robeson.   (Curiously, the aforementioned Strong, who was a prolific promoter of Soviet Communism, gets a virtual pass from Tzouliadis.  He mentions her only once.*) Davies and his heiress wife at the time, Marjorie Merriweather Post, come across as decadent royalists of the let-them-eat-cake variety.  Davies is best known for his embarrassingly gushing book, Mission to Moscow, which endorsed the Moscow show trials as legitimate and was made into a wartime movie by Warner Brothers, upon the personal insistence of FDR to Jack Warner.  Post, for her part, spent most of her time in Russia buying up art and antique treasures that had been plundered from the murdered or exiled aristocracy.  They now fill up her Hillwood Estate in Washington, DC, open for public viewing.

Robeson is a particularly sad case.  Like Strong, he was brilliant and seemed to have only the very best intentions, but also, like Strong, he was ultimately led astray by rigid adherence to ideology.  He had every reason to know the true story of the Soviet tyranny because he made a number of visits to the country.  On one such visit the black American automobile worker, Robert Robinson, encountered him personally in a desperate attempt to enlist Robeson’s assistance to get him out of Russia, but Robeson gave him the cold shoulder and did nothing.   Worse than that, he defended Stalin’s Soviet Union his entire life.

Paul Robeson’s steadfast campaign for civil rights in America made his acquiescence to Stalinism all the more tragic.  There were many American communists who recanted once they understood the nature of the crimes committed in the USSR.  There remained, however, a psychological conflict among those who understood, yet whose pride or ideology could not allow them to admit their error.  Robeson’s actions and speeches had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least, he was morally culpable. (p. 327)

The Tragedy Hits Home

When it comes to psychological reactions, it is perhaps a natural thing for all of us to want to put some distance between ourselves and unbearable tragedy, whether it be in the Soviet Union or anywhere else..  Tzouliadis makes it harder for Americans to do that than Solzhenitsyn did.  Early on, he tells us that the emigrants came from every state in the union.  From the stories I had heard from my mother about her farm family’s deprivations in North Carolina during the Great Depression I could easily see how she or her siblings would have found an opportunity to go to the purported “workers’ paradise” of Russia attractive.  But then I noticed that nowhere in the book is anyone mentioned among the migrants who came from the South.  As Richard M. Weaver has observed, “Southerners are not a traveled people.”  Steinbeck’s story of the Joads was a lot closer to home to me, both literally and figuratively, than this one was, that is, until I reached Chapter 23 entitled, “Citizen of the United States of America, Allied Officer Dale.”

That chapter is full of reports by witnesses in the Gulag of sightings of American prisoners in the 1950s.  Our government apparently knew that the Chinese were sending prisoners captured in the Korean War to the Soviet Union.  George Kennan, working in the U.S. embassy in Moscow sent a letter to Washington urging that the matter be publicized.  Instead, his letter was stamped “Secret” and eventually buried away in the archives.

Tzouliadis has unearthed minutes from a Politburo meeting with China’s Chou En-lai in which Stalin recommends that the Chinese hold back 20 percent of the Korean War POWs:

In the early 1950s—well before the Sino-Soviet quarrels—if Stalin’s “advice” had called for the retention of 20 percent of UN prisoners of war during the Korean War, then to the Chinese such a “proposal” carried the sanctity of a commandment from the “Great Leader” of the Communist cause.  It was Joseph Stalin, after all, who had armed the sixty Chinese divisions poured into the conflict in Korea.

My mother’s younger brother, William Gray Bell, who went by his middle name, was a draftee who served with the U.S. Army occupation forces in South Korea after the end of World War II.  He got an early hardship discharge of a few months when his father died.  He was needed back on the farm where there were two much younger twin brothers, and an even younger sister and a step-sister.  His mother had died at age 36 during the Great Depression.  When the Korean War broke out, as a reservist, he was called back to active duty and sent into the fray.  Not long after his arrival in Korea he was reported missing in action.  We never heard from him again.  He was, to my recollection and from all I have heard about him, a prince of a man.  I have eulogized him with this short poem.  It chills me to think that he could have been one of the Gulag victims.

The Forsaken’s Tragic Flaw

For all the book’s importance and general praiseworthiness, it does have one major shortcoming.  Interestingly, it is the same shortcoming that I noted in Stalin’s Secret Agents.  We must state it bluntly.  Like M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Tim Tzouliadis covers up for Franklin Roosevelt.  The cover-up is not as central to his book as it is theirs, but it involves the same episode and he is perhaps even more dishonest about it than they are.  Here is what Tzouliadis writes on page 282:

As early as September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, a former American Communist Party member and Soviet military intelligence agent, gave a long interview to Adolf Berle, the assistant secretary of state, revealing the names of several Soviet agents working inside the State Department and other branches of the U.S. government, including Alger Hiss and his brother, Donald.  According to Chambers’ account, Adolf Berle immediately passed this information on to Roosevelt’s secretary, but Berle had been unable to take seriously the notion that the “Hiss boys” were planning to “take over the United States’ government.”

At that point there is an endnote that leads one to p. 466 of Witness: An Autobiography by Whittaker Chambers.  The quote from Berle is indeed there, at the top of page 466, but Tzouliadis has taken it completely out of context so as to virtually reverse its meaning.  Let us look at the full passage, starting at the bottom of page 465 to reveal the trickery:

After midnight, [Isaac Don] Levine and I left.  As we went out, I could see that Mrs. Berle had fallen asleep on a couch in a room to my right.  Adolf Berle, in great excitement, was on the telephone even before we were out the door.  I supposed that he was calling the White House.

In August, 1948, Adolf A. Berle testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities not long after my original testimony about Alger Hiss and the Ware Group.  The former Assistant Secretary of State could no longer clearly recall my conversation with him almost a decade before.  His memory had grown dim on a number of points.  He believed, for example, that I had described to him a Marxist study group whose members were not Communists.  In any case, he had been unable to take seriously, in 1939, any “idea that the Hiss boys and Nat Witt were going to take over the Government.”

At no time in our conversation can I remember anyone’s mentioning the ugly word espionage.  But how well we understood what we were talking about, Berle was to make a matter of record.  For when, four years after that memorable conversation, his notes were finally taken out of a secret file and turned over to the F.B.I., it was found that Adolf Berle himself had headed them: Underground Espionage Agent.

What follows in the second half of page 466 through two thirds of page 469 are the actual notes, which follows with this summing up by Chambers:

These notes are obviously rambling and garbled…

But if the notes are studied carefully, it will be seen that the essential framework of the conspiracy is here even down to such details as the fact that [Vincent] Reno was working as Colonel Zornig’s assistant at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.  It is equally clear that I am describing not a Marxist study group, but a Communist conspiracy.  The Communists are described as such.  The reader has only to ask himself what he would have done, if he had been a security officer of the Government, and such information had come into his hands, or even if he had been told no more than the address for cables to the Soviet apparatuses, which is the meaning of one of the entries, or the fact that a Communist was working on the bombsight.

Contrary to the impression left by Tzouliadis, Berle took the revelations of Chambers every bit as seriously as he should have.  So what happened?  Did that unnamed secretary of Roosevelt sit on the information?  That’s not possible because Tzouliadis has made that part up from whole cloth.  Chambers makes no mention of any intermediary between Berle and the president.  Let’s pick up his story at the bottom of page 470:

The same night that I talked with Berle, I returned to New York.  For the second time in two years, I had laid my life in ruins.  I had only to wait for what would happen next.  One of the things most likely to happen, it seemed to me, was my arrest.

But nothing at all happened.  Weeks passed into months.  I went about my work at Time.  Then, one day, I am no longer certain just when, I met a dejected Levine.  Adolf Berle, said Levine, had taken my information to the President at once.  The President had laughed.  When Berle was insistent, he had been told in words which it is necessary to paraphrase, to “go jump in a lake.”

The thought crossed my mind that the story might have been put out to conceal the Government’s real purpose.  Surveillance and investigation were necessary.  It might be some time before the Government was prepared to act.  Meanwhile, it would watch and check.

I tried to believe that that was the fact.  But I knew that it could not be, for if the Government were checking, it could not fail also to check with me.

What Tzouliadis has done, besides lying about Berle passing the information on to FDR’s secretary instead of FDR himself is that he has collapsed what Adolfe Berle said in his cover-up testimony of August 30, 1948, into how he reacted on the night of September 2, 1939, and immediately afterward.  Why would he do such a thing?  His brief biography in the front of the book might provide the answer:

Tim Tzouliadis is a writer and filmmaker.  Born in 1968, he read philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford and went on to pursue a career in television current affairs and documentary making for the BBC Channel 4, NBC, and the National Geographic Channel. (links added by me, obviously)

Unfortunately, in this day and age, working for such organizations is not a very reputable way to make a living.  The fact that the paperback edition has 33 favorable blurbs for the book from across the mainstream political spectrum is also not the best of signs.  One has to wonder if the book would have been so well received had Tzuoliadis told the full truth about the complicity of Roosevelt in the Soviet horror.  One can be almost certain that no mainstream reviewer has faulted him for what I have pointed out here, a dishonest use of a source that I can only characterize as journalistic and scholarly malpractice.

The Publisher’s Spin?

There is another possibility.  Maybe the publisher—Penguin Books (2008) in this case—changed his original manuscript to cover up for Roosevelt.  This is a possibility that I would not have thought of had I not followed up on a suggestion that Tzouliadis makes in his acknowledgments at the end:

All memoirs from the survivors of the camps are invaluable, but I would like to acknowledge two books in particular as primary sources for this one:  Thomas Sgovio’s Dear America and Victor Herman’s Coming Out of the Ice.  I would encourage all interested readers to search out and read these authors’ firsthand accounts.

I tracked down a reprint of the Herman book.  It is a 1983 paperback version by Freedom Press, Ltd., of Oklahoma City, OK.  The original publisher in 1979 was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  My version has a typewritten message stuck to the inside cover.  It is a jaw dropper.  I have added emphasis where deemed appropriate, and I would remind the readers that Victor Herman came from an American Jewish family.

This book is a special edition of COMING OUT OF THE ICE, prepared especially for Dr. D. James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Ministries.

Expletives have been deleted and replaced with an asterisk (*).  It should be noted, however, that the expletives were not those of the author.  They were inserted by the publisher.

Certain portions of this book are somewhat sensual in nature which we and others may find objectionable.  But, like the affair of David and Bathsheba, these passages need to be considered in the light and context of the entire message.

Please also note that Victor Herman’s original manuscript contained an account of his conversion to Christ.  This portion was deleted by the publisher.

Out of millions of Americans, God raised up this one man to live through this experience and share with us the story of his imprisonment and torture in the Soviet Union.

CORAL RIDGE MINISTRIES

David Martin

February 26, 2013

__________________________________________________________________________________

*”By the winter of 1931, sufficient numbers had arrived for a weekly English-language newspaper to be established in Moscow with the aim of reporting the ‘truth about what the Soviet government is trying to do.’  Staffed by young American journalists keen to salute the progress of the Five-Year Plan, The Moscow News was the ramshackle brainchild of its editor, Anna Louise Strong, a redoubtable progressive and personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt.  On her trips back to the United States, Strong was an occasional guest of the White House, where the ever-curious president would pepper her with questions about Soviet Russia.  How, Roosevelt asked, could Stalin afford to buy all those factories?” (p. 13)

Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 4

Who Killed James Forrestal?  Part 4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Short Version, Synopsis, Letters to Historians, James Carroll’s Dishonesty, Patrick J. Hurley Meets David Ben-Gurion

Britain’s Forrestal

Imagine this scenario:  A powerful, radical Middle East movement, with a record of terrorism, decides to embark upon a program of bombings and assassinations of high government officials in the home territory of a major Western power.  The plot is to be carried out by five teams infiltrated into the Western country, and the primary target is the leading government minister opposing the actions and the aspirations of the radical group.

As luck would have it, the secret service of the Western country discovers the plot, and the terrorist movement has to fall back to a plan of sending 20 letter bombs to various government officers, including the aforementioned leading opponent of the terrorists as well as his predecessor.  The letter bombs also fail to reach their intended targets.

What would the Western power do in response to these bombing and assassination attempts?  You would be right if you answered that it would keep quiet about them for sixty years.  In the meantime, it would be a party to giving the terrorist group everything it hoped to get, and more, from the failed assassination.  It would even help the terrorists to develop their own nuclear weapons.

The scenario is not fanciful.  According to recently declassified British intelligence documents, it actually happened.  The targeted official was British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin.  His targeted predecessor was Anthony Eden.  The terrorists were the Zionist gang Irgun Tsvai Leumi, or Irgun, for short.  Its leader at the time of the assassination attempts in 1946, before the state of Israel had been carved out of Palestine, was Menachem Begin.  Begin would later become Israel’s Prime Minister and would be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1978 for the agreement that he would reach with Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, known as the Camp David peace accords.

The intelligence documents were declassified in early March 2006.  The assassination attempts occurred in 1946 and 1947; the supplying of plutonium to Israel by Britain first occurred in 1966, but it had supplied heavy water, another nuclear weapons ingredient, in the 1950s.  The Times of London reported on the failed assassinations on March 5, and the BBC reported on the illegal nuclear assistance on March 9.

These shocking, extraordinarily important new revelations shed a great deal of light upon what we have virtually proved to be the assassination of America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal.   The parallels in the government careers of Bevin and Forrestal are great.  Although Bevin came up through the labor movement and was a member of the opposition Labor Party, Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made him his Labor Secretary during World War II.  In that capacity, he played a key role in mobilizing Britain’s economy for the war.

Forrestal was a Wall Street investment banker whom Franklin Roosevelt made Under Secretary of the Navy.  A tireless worker, Forrestal was the key liaison person between the Roosevelt administration and the private industrial sector, and he was largely responsible for the transformation of the economy from production for consumption to production for the war effort.

When the Labor Party won a majority after the war, Bevin was appointed foreign secretary in the new government.  Forrestal had been elevated to Secretary of the Navy when the previous Secretary died near the end of the war.  He continued in that position when Harry Truman replaced Roosevelt upon the latter’s death in 1945.  When the National Security Act of 1947 consolidated the armed services, Truman made Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense.

Though both men were very popular and both were very successful in their government careers, each suffered major setbacks over the issue of the creation of a state for Jews in the territory of Palestine.  The Labor Party, heavily influenced by its Jewish members, when out of power during the war actually favored expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine to clear the way for a Jewish state.  As Foreign Minister of the new Labor government, Bevin, repulsed by Zionist terrorist actions directed at British military and government officials in Palestine, steered the British government toward a position more heavily favoring the rights of the Arab residents of the region.  In doing so, he made himself British public enemy number one of the Zionists.

As we have previously noted, Forrestal was enemy number one of the Zionists in the United States.  Near the end of part one of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” we told of the December 4, 1948, letter to The New York Times signed by a number of prominent Jews, including Albert Einstein, warning the American public about Menachem Begin and his terrorist organization upon Begin’s visit to the United States.  At the conclusion of the letter recounting the Begin organization’s murderous activities, we asked this question, “Would men like Menachem Begin and his followers have hesitated at assassinating the most popular, outspoken, and powerful critic of the nascent state of Israel in the United States if given the opportunity?”

How apt that question was has now been made manifest.  We now know that they had no compunction against assassinating Forrestal’s precursor and counterpart in Britain.  The main difference seems to be that the powers that be in Britain did not give them the opportunity, while those in the United States did.  Maybe that is a measure of the relative power of the Zionists in the two countries.  The federal government and the organs for molding public opinion were penetrated at the very top in the United States by the most extreme and violent elements of the Zionist movement, and they continue to be so, or, at least, effectively so.

That is not to say that the Zionists are exactly weak in Britain.  Official Britain hardly reacted with appropriate fury at the outrage.  Rather, the country sat on information about the attempted assassination, and soon fell into line behind the United States in its pro-Israel policies.  It even got a bit ahead of the United States over the nuclear weapons issue, as we have noted, and also during the Eisenhower administration when the British, the French, and the Israelis attempted a power grab known as the Suez Crisis.

Even now, the release of the news of the outrage of the attempted Bevin assassination has been extremely timid.  A search of the Internet some three weeks after the initial revelation shows only one other major newspaper in the world picking up on the story, the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.  It has a slightly different version of events, though, claiming that it was the Stern gang, rather than Irgun, that planned the assassinations, though both stories are ostensibly based upon the same release of British intelligence documents.  The Times, itself, has barely squeaked out the news.  When I telephoned the newspaper, attempting to locate the reporter of the story, Peter Day, the person I talked to was unable to find Day in their directory, nor could he find the article in the hard copy of the March 5 Times.  The online version of the story lists no page number.  The folks at The Times foreign desk, with whom I was then connected, were familiar with the story, which the first contact person was not, but they did not know Mr. Day.  They were able to confirm only that he was not one of their own regular reporters.  Perhaps, as has been asserted in the case of the author of the only critical book on James Forrestal’s death, Cornell Simpson, the name is a pseudonym.*   The topic, after all, is a hot one, and it may not be good for one’s journalism career to be associated with it.  Maybe the publishers of The Times have had some second thoughts about what they have done in letting this news out.  As of April 5, the article could no longer be found on their web site.

The veritable radioactivity of the subject would explain, as well, the complete blackout of this news by the mainstream news organs of the United States.  The news suppression is of a piece with the complete failure of the U.S. press to report that the long secret report on the investigation of Forrestal’s death was finally made public in 2004.  The Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University even sent out a press release,  and the online History News Network of George Mason University made mention of it, but the mainstream press made certain that this very important news, like the news of the attempted assassination of Britain’s foreign minister, never reached the attention of the general public.

That the American press should vigorously suppress this news should hardly surprise us.  As we have seen throughout this series, they were a very active party in selling the story that the far-sighted statesman, Forrestal, the man who saw better than anyone where America’s Middle East policy was leading it, ended his own life.  The last thing such a press would want would be for the public to learn of the existence of powerful evidence that undermines the suicide thesis, and worse, points the finger of blame at Zionist terrorists.

The complete suppression of the news of Irgun’s assassination attempt on Foreign Minister Bevin for all these many years is almost as important as the attempt, itself.  Imagine how much stronger that 1948 New York Times warning letter by Albert Einstein and a number of other prominent American Jews about the murderous proclivities of Menachem Begin and company could have been had they known about Begin’s previous attempt on the life of Bevin.  In all likelihood, no such warning letter would have even been needed.  If Begin was known to have attempted to kill Britain’s most powerful opponent, when Britain was the power over Palestine, he and his organization would certainly have been regarded as a similar threat to Forrestal when the United States had become the main controller of Palestine’s destiny.

Who Knew? 

Although it is apparent that those signers of the warning letter to The New York Times had no knowledge of the previous attempt on the life of Ernest Bevin, one must wonder who, outside the ranks of British intelligence, did know about it.  In particular, we have to wonder if one so connected to the higher reaches of power in the world as Bernard Baruch, when he warned his friend Forrestal in February of 1949 that he had already become too identified with opposition to Israel for his own good, knew more than he was telling about the danger that Forrestal faced.  And when Forrestal complained about being followed and bugged, did he know that the Irgun crowd had come pretty close to snuffing out the life of his British counterpart?  Could such knowledge have been behind his resistance to commitment to Bethesda Naval Hospital and his reported claim that he would never leave the hospital alive when he attempted to get out of the car taking him there?  Might that have been the revelation from Secretary of the Air Force Symington on the day of Forrestal’s departure from office that drove him into his sudden funk?

And after Forrestal’s death, could there have been any doubt in the minds of those aware of the attempt on Bevin who had ultimately been behind the later crime?  Might these have included those powerful friends such as Ferdinand Eberstadt and Robert Lovett, who had failed to visit him in the hospital and then, when the results of the investigation of his death were never made public, failed to register any public complaint?  At the very least, those in the know included the contemporary and future leaders of Great Britain, and the knowledge that the leaders of the United States government had conspired with Zionist thugs in the assassination of the one courageous voice of reason in their midst would very likely have animated their own future Middle East policy.

Zionists and Communists

The Times article on the Bevin assassination attempt has one particularly intriguing passage, which might fill in some more pieces of the puzzle.  That is that Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, believed that Menachem Begin was backed in his terrorist activities by the Soviet Union.  One might wonder whether their belief was founded on solid evidence and, if so, how far this backing went.  Did they just generally encourage him in his murderous endeavors, or were they actually calling the shots?  If MI6 was right, then those like author Cornell Simpson who argue that the Communists killed Forrestal and those who suggest that the Zionists did it are probably both right.

The Soviets, as Simpson explains quite well, certainly had ample reasons to want to be rid of Forrestal.  Not only was he the leading anti-Zionist in the Truman administration, but he was also the leading anti-Communist.  Interestingly enough, the same can probably be said for Ernest Bevin in Britain’s Clement Atlee administration.  Bevin’s anti-Communism carried a particular potency because he came from a British labor movement that was heavily influenced and infiltrated by the Communists.

In many instances in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s pro-Communism and pro-Zionism could be found in the same individuals.  As we noted in the first installment of this series, that appears to have been the case for the very powerful and secretive adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, David Niles.**

With these new revelations, Niles is due even greater scrutiny than before as the most likely coordinator of the Forrestal assassination.  Some measure of Niles’s power can be gained from the following passage in the oral history interview of Truman aide, Stephen J. Spingarn:

David Niles worked with nobody. He was sui generis. David Niles was the oldest senior staff man in point of service. He came over from the Roosevelt administration. His titular jurisdiction was minorities. But, actually, his main job, I suppose you could say, was Jewish problems on the one hand, and the intricate politics of New York City, those two things; maintaining liaison with Dave Dubinsky and Alex Rose and the Liberal Party there, you know, and keeping the White House abreast of that. But David Niles seemed to me to pay very little attention to Negro and other minority matters, so it seemed to me. Philleo Nash was his assistant and Philleo paid a lot of attention, but it didn’t seem to me that Dave paid much. And there was another interesting thing, Dave Niles did not attend the President’s morning staff conferences — ever.

[JERRY] HESS: Can you tell me about those morning staff conferences?

SPINGARN: Yes. The President held a morning staff conference every morning at 9:30 — I think it was 9:30. It was indispensable to a staff man — a senior staff man — to attend that thing, but it was a very delicate matter as to who attended. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sping1.htm

Elsewhere Spingarn makes it clear that Niles was very much a part of Truman’s inner circle, so it would have been natural for him to attend these daily meetings.  The impression one gets is that he was so powerful, and confident of his power, that the staff meetings were actually beneath him.  He didn’t have to go in order to stay on top of the issues that really mattered, and to continue to have the ear of the putative boss, President Truman.  Or perhaps he realized that it wasn’t all that important to have influence with Truman, when he had influence with the people who really mattered.

At this point, the observations of the son-in-law of President Franklin Roosevelt, Colonel Curtis Dall, as relayed by Henry Makow, are apropos:

Dall maintained a family loyalty but could not avoid several disheartening conclusions in his book [FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, 1970].  He portrays the legendary president not as a leader but as a “quarterback” with little actual power.  The “coaching staff” consisted of a coterie of handlers (“advisers” like Louis Howe, Bernard Baruch and Harry Hopkins) who represented the international banking cartel.  For Dall, FDR ultimately was a traitor manipulated by “World Money” and motivated by conceit and personal ambition.

If such a commanding politician as Franklin Roosevelt, a man widely believed to be the most powerful president the United States has ever had, was really little more than a quarterback executing plays called in by the coaching staff, what would that have made the former haberdasher and protégé of the Kansas City machine of boss Tom Pendergast?  Certainly it was not Truman’s idea to have James Forrestal assassinated and very little was required of him for the assassination to be carried out and covered up.  In matters such as this, the President would not have been calling the shots.

David Martin

April 9, 2006

*As I reported in March of 2005, former John Birch Society official, J. Bruce Campbell asserts that the name “Cornell Simpson” is a pseudonym.  I had suspected as much because this “Simpson” is clearly a polished professional writer, but the name, to my knowledge, appears nowhere in any political writing except as the author of The Death of James Forrestal.  Recently, an acquaintance in Washington with Birch Society contacts confirmed that “Cornell Simpson” was the name assumed in this instance by Medford Evans, the father of noted conservative, M. Stanton Evans.  The elder Evans also wrote under his own name an even more obscure book, also published by the Birch Society’s Western Islands Press, The Assassination of Joe McCarthy.

(April 22, 2011 update:  Now the conclusion that “Cornell Simpson” was actually Medford Evans has been called into question by Evans, the younger.  Stay tuned.)

**The following passage from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1953 classic What Price Israel? is very revealing of the person described by Alfred Steinberg in the December 24, 1949, Saturday Evening Post as “Truman’s Mystery Man”:

There were many ways in which Niles served the State of Israel after partition, too.  Early in 1950, when the United States first awoke to the Soviet danger in the Middle East, our Government requested the various Arab countries for information regarding troops, equipment, and other confidential military data.  These statistics were necessary in order to plan possible assistance under the Mutual Security Act.  The Arab nations were naturally assured that the figures, supplied for the Chief of Staff, would be kept secret.

Late that year, military representatives of the Middle East countries and of Israel were meeting with General [W.E.] Riley, who headed the United Nations Truce Organization.  Trouble had broken out over the Huleh Marshes, and charges and countercharges of military aggression were exchanged between Israel and the Arab countries.  The Israeli military representative claimed that the Syrian troops were employed in a certain manner, and General Riley remarked: “That’s not possible.  The Syrians have no such number of troops.”  Whereupon the Israeli representative said, “You are wrong.  Here are the actual figures of Syrian military strength and the description of troops.”  And he produced the confidential figures, top-secret Pentagon information.  General Riley himself had not been shown the new figures given by the Syrian War Ministry to his superiors.

When the question of Egyptian military strength was raised, a similar security leak appeared.  It was obvious that top-secret figures had been passed on to the Israeli Government.  Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army G-2 investigated the security breach but discovered only that these figures had been made available to the White House.  How and through whom they leaked out of the White House remained forever obscure.  However, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, reportedly went to the President and told the Chief Executive that he would have to choose between him (Bradley) and Niles.  Not too long after this reported intervention, David Niles resigned from his post as Executive Assistant to the President and went on a visit to Israel. (Pp. 72-73)

Addendum 1

While doing some additional research on the September 17, 1948, assassination in the new state of Israel of United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, by the Stern Gang (Lehi), I ran across this intriguing entry on the Bernadotte discussion page on Wikipedia:

Contrary to what you say, Lehi being a terror organization is very much disputed. Most (or at least many) Israelis (myself included) do not consider Lehi to be a terrorist organization. Lehi never targeted innocent civillians [sic] in attempt to terrorize them. All of Lehi’s attacks were against military or government targets (including high-ranked officials such as Bernadotte). This is very different than what “proper” terrorist organizations do – attacking random civilian targets such as busses or airplanes.

Avraham Stern’s memorial day is attended every year by Israeli political and government officials. Given Israel’s effort to gain international support for its ongoing war against terrorism of all kinds, you wouldn’t expect Israeli leaders to associate themselves with the memory of someone who led a terrorist organization. Indeed they don’t – like me they believe that Lehi, while sometimes using extreme measures, was not a terrorist organization.

I’m not really trying to convince you that Lehi was not a terrorist organization (you are entitled to your own opinion on that) – only that the issue is disputed. Since it is indeed so, the proper place to discuss it is on the Lehi page – rather than have is stated on every page which mentions Lehi.

This is a perfect example of the attitude toward the attempted Bevin assassination described in the aforementioned London Times article:

Lord Bethell, author of The Palestine Triangle and an expert on Soviet intelligence, said Bevin was detested by Zionist groups. He added, however: “Zionists would be very angry if you compared these people with terrorists now. You have to remember that Irgun were the grandfathers of today’s ruling politicians.

“They would say they were at war with the British and behaved well, fighting under Marquess of Queensberry rules. They would say that they didn’t target civilians.”

James Forrestal, as the leading opponent in the United States government of the new state of Israel would have been regarded as anything but an “innocent civilian,” and that would have made this great American patriot fair game for assassination in Zionist eyes.  Hardly anything could be more incriminating of them than their own words…unless it is their known deeds.

David Martin

April 13, 2006

Addendum 2

On June 13, 2006, Reuters reported that according to the Lebanese Army, a Lebanese man by the name of Mahmoud Rafeh had confessed to a series of assassinations of senior Hezbollah and Palestinian militants over a seven year period on behalf of Israeli intelligence.  If true, it would demonstrate that Israel has continued to use assassination as a weapon for what it considers to be the good of the state.  Any “senior official” in the world whom Israel should regard as a danger to its interests surely must be made uneasy at this latest development.

David Martin

June 14, 2006

Addendum 3

The beat goes on.  This is from the Lebanon Daily Star:

Beirut steps up search for head of terror group tied to Mossad

BEIRUT: Lebanese security forces redoubled their efforts Monday to find Palestinian Hussein Khattab after Mahmoud Rafeh, the reported leader of a recently uncovered Mossad-linked terrorist network, confessed that Khattab was the actual leader of the group.

Judicial sources told The Daily Star that Rafeh admitted receiving a list of names of Lebanese and Palestinian political figures to be assassinated on orders from Israel.

The sources said Rafeh told the authorities Khattab also received the list, and was “leading” assassination operations…

David Martin

June 20, 2006

Addendum 4

Just last year I discovered that the Jewish Stern Gang actually made an assassination attempt against President Harry Truman in 1947.  It seems not to have been reported by any news media at the time and biographers of Truman and other historians have kept the matter a secret even though it was reported in a book by the former head of the White House mail room in 1949 and again by Margaret Truman in her book about her father in 1972.  You can read about that episode in “’Jews’ Tried to Kill Truman in 1947.”

David Martin

February 21, 2013

Homeland Insecurity?

Homeland Insecurity?

It’s a cold Thursday in February in our nation’s capital.  It’s not quite noon, but the lines are already forming by the 13 food trucks parked out on the curb.

 A good sampling of the world’s cuisine, from Korean bibimbab to Middle Eastern kabobs to Ethiopian mesir wat, is available, and all at quite reasonable prices

Drawing particular attention on this day is a truck near the end of truck procession,

which puts it squarely in front a rather large office building.

A popular Vietnamese noodle dish is the truck’s specialty.  Though few of the customers appear to be Vietnamese, they seem to be living up to the truck’s name of Pho Junkies.

Just beyond the building that houses the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Postal Museum—seen in the near background in the middle of this picture

—is Union Station with its large, lower level food court.  The hungry crowd could be there enjoying the warmth, but on this day, the exotic food trucks hold a greater allure.

Welcome to the real workaday Washington, DC, where life can be lived in an increasingly civilized and comfortable fashion.  If the selection of cuisine offered on this one day doesn’t meet with the potential diner’s taste, all he has to do is wait a day and an entirely new selection of international food will be laid out before him.  It’s all there on the Food Truck Fiesta web site (This is the DC – Union Station location).  The scene is being played out in locations all over the DC metropolitan area.  One would hardly realize that we are now well into our second decade of a war, the vaunted Global War on Terror (GWOT).  Don’t these happy diners know that as workers right there in the heart of the government of the country that is “hated for its freedom,” they are all potential targets?  How easy would it be for those ever-present terrorists to simply drive an explosive-filled truck up to the front of the building and blow it up?

But let us get serious.  This is the real Washington, not the make believe capital-under-siege, movie-set Washington that we see around the major tourist attractions like Capitol Hill and the White House.  Had we walked a little bit south from Union Station instead of a block and a half to the west where the food trucks are, we would have found ourselves in this fantasy world pretty quickly.

In this photograph, the building you see in the background is Union Station.

A greater distance behind you are the Russell, Dirksen, and Hart Senate Office Buildings.  Since 2001, access to the entire legislative complex,

from the Senate

Office Buildings on the north

to the House Office Buildings on the south

of the Capitol Building, public access has been severely restricted.

It’s even worse near the White House.  The president’s residence sits quite a ways back from Pennsylvania Avenue, but not in my lifetime has parking been allowed on the curb on either side of the street in front it.  But after the Oklahoma City bombing, even that degree of security was not deemed sufficient, and the entire street for a couple of blocks was closed off to traffic completely.  The full illustration of this fake-siege abomination accompanies my poem, “Washington, DC.”  Even Lafayette Square, which sits across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House is ringed with those expensive obstacles that I have christened “federal poles.”

Now let us return to ordinary Washington, where one would never know that there is an unending war going on.  Who would have guessed it from the complete lack of those grotesqueries known as “security measures” in Washington’s fantasyland, but the food trucks are right on the doorstep of the main U. S. bureaucratic spawn of the GWOT.

Have another look at those flags flying in front of the building.

The blue one is the flag of the Department of Homeland Security.  Confirming it on Wikimapia, we see that this building with its complete absence of external security measures houses these tenants: H.Q. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS); Department of Justice (DOJ) Offices.  One would think that if there really were dangerous terrorists out there with a DC target list, this building would be right at the top of it.  It’s just off the main tourist drag, though, so no siege decorations are required.

Deepening the irony, it turns out that the DHS has chosen to put its USCIS headquarters in close proximity to what has long been a hangout for the DC chapter of one of the oldest terrorist organizations around, the Irish Republican Army (IRA).  We are speaking of the Dubliner, an Irish pub little more than a grenade’s throw away.  You can make out the name in the background just past the back of the kabob truck in this picture,

and a good appreciation of the proximity of the Dubliner to the DHS building can be had with this shot.

Capitol Hill Blue even published an interview it conducted of an IRA man at the Dubliner back in 2003.

Oh, but the IRA terrorists are only a concern of the British, I can hear you say.  Yes, but the Uyghur militants from East Turkestan are only a concern of the Chinese, and that hasn’t stopped us from locking them up at Guantánamo in this phony GWOT of ours.  But that’s a story for another day.

David Martin

February 14, 2013

See also “Groping Granny for Show,” “DC Siege Decorations,” and “The Federal Security Sham.”

So Lance Lied. So What?

So Lance Lied.  So What?

[We must] organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. –  Willi Münzenberg

Leave it to the practitioners of the modern junk-science substitute for religion (Bring in the grief counselors.) that calls itself “psychology” to attempt to put an acceptable face on the contemptible actions of disgraced bicycle racer, Lance Armstrong:

Though we profess to hate it, lying is common, useful and pretty much universal. It is one of the most durable threads in our social fabric and an important bulwark of our self-esteem. We start lying by the age of 4 and we do it at least several times a day, researchers have found. And we get better with practice.

In short, whatever you think about Lance Armstrong’s admission this week that he took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his illustrious cycling career, the lies he told may be no more persistent or outsized than yours, according to psychologists and others who study deception. They were just more public. And the stakes were bigger.

So begins the article entitled, “Like Lance Armstrong, we are all liars, experts say,” by Melissa Healy in the January 19, 2013, Los Angeles Times.

The psychologists are at it again, trying to live up to the assessment that H.L Mencken made of them many years ago.  The following is a complete reprint of an article that I put up on my web site on September 10, 2000:

Mencken on Psychology

I know, I know, Mencken was writing three quarters of a century ago, and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Indeed so. We now know that Mencken greatly over-estimated Freud.

I provided no elaboration on that last point.  You can read a bit of that in an article with the unrestrained title of “Sigmund Freud, Anti-Christ Devil,” by Eustace Mullins, a sample of which follows:

Freud’s reputation as the great inventor of an entire new science rests solely on his discovery that he could get his patients to talk about themselves without the use of hypnosis. Nevertheless, much of the mumbojumbo of psychotherapy was invented in order to create a hypnotic atmosphere. Freud’s discovery freed him from the stigma of the charlatans of hypnosis, and put a great distance between him and his discredited predecessors such as [Franz] Mesmer, the father of Mesmerism. Nevertheless, the practice of psychoanalysis depends heavily on creating and maintaining a pseudo-hypnotic atmosphere in the psychiatrist’s office.  The patient must be persuaded to relax, to place himself completely in the power of the psychiatrist, and to reveal his innermost self. Thus the pseudoscience of psychotherapy functions only because it is pseudohypnosis.  No wonder that Freud is pronounced Fraud!*

Lance Armstrong vs. Bill Clinton

For psychologists to weigh in publicly justifying the miscreant’s behavior in the wake of a scandal involving a prominent public figure has precedents.  I have commented upon it on two occasions, involving the same public figure, President Bill Clinton:

So He Lied, So What?

Last night the people at ABC’s Twenty-Twenty came up with the ultimate fall-back position for our verity-challenged president. They found us a psychiatrist, whose name I can’t recall, who assured us that there is not a thing wrong in the world with lying, that we are all taught to lie at an early age, that we all lie about one thing or another almost all the time, and that it serves the very psychologically useful purpose of making us all feel better. People don’t like to face unpleasant truths like the fact that, as he strongly implied, life has no meaning at all and we are all going to die, not to mention such smaller unpleasant truths that not many of us are all that virile, attractive, or intelligent.

So what if the priapic razorback lies almost every time he opens his mouth, implied the good doctor. It beats having us feel bad about the man we voted for because that would make us feel bad about ourselves, which is practically the worst thing that can ever happen in the value system of today’s psychology profession.

At this very minute there is a trial going on across the river from me in Maryland in which former U.S. Senatorial aspirant, Ruthann Aron, stands accused of arranging to have a hit man kill her husband and his lawyer. She doesn’t deny making the arrangements because she was caught in the act. The “hit man” was an agent of the state. But her lawyers have found members of the psychiatry profession to testify that she was so badly wounded psychologically from having been abused as a child that she is not responsible for her actions. Never mind that if the hit man had been the real McCoy, and good at his work, Dr. Aron and his lawyer would have ended up quite dead and Ruthann would have gone on playing the grieving widow and the upstanding member of the community. No psychiatrists would ever have been likely to have been needed to regale us with tales of Ruthann’s childhood trauma.

Similarly, it was not difficult to find psychiatric “experts” to tell us why the Menendez brothers were driven by their scarring upbringing to shotgun their parents to death as they sat watching TV and eating ice cream, and then to make up a cock and bull story about how they discovered the bodies.

We have also been treated recently to the spectacle of the “suicidologist” Dr. Alan L. Berman, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, telling us for Kenneth Starr that “to a 100 percent degree of MEDICAL certainty, Vince Foster committed suicide.” That conclusion, in turn, was based to a large degree upon recent psychiatric literature that concludes that “perfectionist types,” presumably like Foster, are inclined to do themselves in. One of those so concluding is Yale professor Sidney Blatt.

By this time everyone has probably already heard the three reasons why lawyers are being used to replace laboratory rats:

As you reflect on the examples I have given of modern psychiatrists at work and the following, which concludes part 3 of my four-part series, “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” you might think of substituting “psychiatrists” for “lawyers” in the joke, especially with respect to that third qualification.

Actually, it’s probably even worse than circular reasoning because Dr. Berman seems to have made a bit of a leap to make a warped Felix Ungar type out of a man who simply exhibited high standards. The likely circular reasoning is explained by a letter that I sent to the student newspaper of Yale University on February 8, 1996, with an information copy to the psychologist whose work is the subject of the letter. It was not printed, but I did get a response from the psychologist who simply thanked me for the information. I reproduce the letter to the editor here almost in its entirety. As you read it, bear in mind as well the opening quote from Edward Zehr. It is not just the propagandistic press that concerns him, but the “decay of our basic institutions.”

I might also note that while this long essay began with comparisons between current developments in the United States and those in France a century ago, comparisons to our late lamented cold war superpower rival can hardly be avoided.

In the case of this most recent report of the misleadingly-named Office of the Independent Counsel, as with the newspapers that reported on it, it is certainly a good deal easier to believe.

So He Cheated. So What?

ABC News and the psychology profession are continuing their all-out assault upon the Ten Commandments and national standards of decency and honor in the country. Before, it was a middle-aged, male, father-like psychiatrist on 20-20 telling us that lying is okay because it is commonplace and because the alternative would often make us feel bad. This time the interview, an exceptionally long one on ABC’s Sunday Evening News, right at the dinner hour of God’s special day for most Christians, was of the still rather youngish and exceptionally self-assured female “director emeritus” of the Kinsey Institute. Her message—though she would never use these words for it—is that adultery, cheating, tom-catting, marital infidelity, serial womanizing and the like by married men is also okay because it is commonplace. It is especially commonplace historically among American presidents and the sort of people who have that type of ambition, so that makes it especially okay for them to do it. Also mitigating any disapproval that should accrue to them for their wayward ways is the fact that power is attractive to women, so that the leaders’ increased opportunity to indulge their sexual appetites makes their willingness to do so, regardless of the social strictures that apply to the rest of us, all the more understandable and forgivable.

In sum, the message being conveyed could not have been clearer, “Even if every allegation about Bill Clinton’s womanizing that you have heard is true, what’s the big deal?” That essential message was not challenged by her female interviewer. Rather, she played “straight man,” as it were, appearing only to challenge the exculpating assertions by interjecting, “But this is the president who should set an example and be held to a higher standard, shouldn’t he?” giving the smug psychologist the opportunity to explain that, no, such lusty, larger-than-life leader types really ought to be held to a lower standard in the sexual realm. That was also the between-the-lines message to be gleaned from Primary Colors, the book, and probably from the movie as well. One could almost believe that it would be wrong for such men to deprive American womankind of their favors. “Let’s be realistic and adults about this,” said the Kinseyite in so many words.

Now I am among the first to say that there is something essentially phony about the current media frenzy surrounding the latest revelations about Bill’s sex life. This is the same press that will not tell us about much more serious crimes connected to the Clinton administration, the Waco Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, the murder of Vincent Foster, the cover-up of the real causes of the downing of TWA 800, the ongoing complicity of the CIA in drug smuggling, etc. One must wonder why they should consider these sexual matters so important by comparison. Be that as it may, that certainly does not mean that the sex-related charges related to Bill Clinton are of no consequence. Let us take a critical look at what the Kinseyite psychologist, with her ABC megaphone, was telling us.

Completely lacking was any discussion of concrete specifics, though the subject was indisputably Bill Clinton. The deductive approach that dominates modern social science was very much in evidence. Once the general principle was established to the satisfaction of the speaker—thence presumably the audience—that sexual license among leaders is the American and the historical norm, looking at the dirty details became unnecessary. I saw the method on display at its worst in my profession, economics, with regard to the national debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Economists went on record overwhelmingly favoring it because they favor the principle of free trade. Not only do most of them know nothing about Mexico or the history of U.S.-Mexico relations, they don’t even think it necessary to know anything about that to render a judgment on this public policy issue. What is worse, I would venture to say that most of those economists weighing in on the NAFTA didn’t know very much about the actual details of the NAFTA itself, or even thought it necessary to know them.

When we look at the details of Bill Clinton and sex what we see immediately in every case is gross abuse of power, personal corruption shading over into corruption of the office, itself. Should we really think that such a thing is okay? Let’s take some of those we know about and proceed upon the Kinseyite-conceded premise that the allegations are true:

It gets worse.

Concrete Facts Versus Theoretical Fiction

The pitiful defense by psychologists of Lance Armstrong’s cheating and lying crumbles just as fast when one examines the actual facts of the case.  Listen here to former cycling teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife Betsy talk about the lives that his lies ruined.  And here is a representative excerpt from a Sports Illustrated interview of his former bike mechanic, Mike Anderson:

SI: You’re one of a number of people who were telling the truth and who Armstrong tried either to intimidate or ruin. There has been speculation as to whether he’ll address that with Oprah.

Anderson: And doing it! Not trying, but doing it. He certainly ruined me, and [Greg] LeMond, and Frankie [Andreu], and Emma [O’Reilly].  Professionally. Financially. He did a really good job of polarizing the cycling fans in the U.S. against Greg. He ruined Greg’s bike company. He told me he was going to do it when I worked for him! It’s a cautionary tale, I think, of what happens when people get too much power.

SI: A lot of media figures are now piling on Lance, but when you were in the newspapers after Lance sued you, that certainly wasn’t the case.

Anderson: It really sheds some light on what people in your profession and what readers and the public view as journalistic integrity. So many journalists took the party line. The Sally Jenkinses of the world, the list goes on and on and on. How many just let it go? That was one of the hardest things to deal with. No journalists bothered to contact me [for my side of the story], they just reported. The local paper never bothered to contact me or my lawyers, they just spouted what came from Bill Stapleton. [Lance's team] took a page from Karl Rove’s book on how to deal with detractors. That made my life very uncomfortable in a place like Austin.

This excerpt from the Sports Illustrated interview of Lemond’s wife, Kathy, informs us further about the fruit of behavior that the psychologists would have us believe is acceptable and commonplace:

SI: What about apologizing to Greg?

LeMond: If I don’t hear something tonight, I’m going to be really upset. I spoke with Oprah’s people and I would hope that they would ask that, because Lance did terrible damage to Greg’s reputation. He is owed an apology. The things he’s said, ‘Greg’s an alcoholic, Greg’s a drunk.’ I had a reporter tell me one time, the guy called me and asked if Greg’s a heroin addict. …I want him to address what he’s done to Greg. He didn’t have any problem saying the horrible things to the whole entire world.

SI: It’s thought that Greg’s brand with Trek would have been worth tens of millions if Armstrong had not pushed to have Trek drop Greg.

LeMond: Do you know what a loss that was for us? We lost our income. We lost our company. Greg lost his reputation.

SI: Do you think Greg will eventually take Armstrong’s call?

LeMond: Why would he want to? I mean, if Lance will actually say to him, ‘Yes, I hacked your e-mails. Yes, I had someone following you. Yes, we taped you.’ He has hounded us and harassed us.

SI: USADA head Travis Tygart recently talked on television about getting death threats. Did you get hate mail when Greg spoke out?

LeMond: It’s absolutely terrifying. The fans, you get letters that say, ya know, ‘you better not be riding your bike by yourself on the road.’ It’s scary.

And how about Armstrong’s one-time masseuse, Emma O’Reilly, as told by London’s Mirror?

But on Valentine’s Day in 2004 – when the 1998 Tour winner Marco Pantani, 34, died from heart failure after a drug overdose – Emma decided to speak out.

“It wasn’t about Lance,” she said. “When Marco died that was the catalyst for me. I didn’t want to see anyone else die. I got involved with the book LA Confidential and told my story.”

Just after the book was published later that year and during a Press conference to launch the new Discovery cycling team, Lance launched an attack that Emma will never forget.

She said: “I was sweeping the floor at home when he called me a prostitute and an alcoholic. I remember the Sky news headline.

“I just stood there shocked and angry. I then called my boyfriend Mike and told him to turn on the TV. He was horrified his girlfriend had just been called a drunk and a slapper in front of the world’s media.”

Lance then issued a legal claim against Emma and a Sunday newspaper for £1million.

She said: “I thought Lance was going to ruin me. Take everything I had away from me big-time. My house, my business.”

Now let us return to the professional lying enablers in psychology profession, as relayed to us by the journalist Healy in the Los Angeles Times:

People who are highly creative appear to have the vision and the flexibility of mind to find justifications for their deceptions, and quickly, [Duke University professor Daniel] Ariely said. For Armstrong, whose racing style suggests he was creative and flexible in taking advantage of openings to victory, those same qualities might have allowed him freer rein not only in concocting deceptions, but in justifying them to himself.

Imagine how much the Andreuses or the LeMonds or Mike Anderson or Emma O’Reilly might admire that creativity and flexibility at this point.  I can just hear the good Israeli-American Professor Ariely extolling Bernie Madoff’s or Jon Corzine’s talents in similar fashion, while interviews of their victims would be similarly revealing.

Now listen to Professor Robert Feldman, dean of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a leading psychologist on lying:

It’s not easy to lie. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that — initially, at least — deceit requires mental exertion for most of us. The effort to reconcile a lie with the truth — or with our notions of ourselves as good people — takes up so much brainpower that as we do it, we may actually forget to perform such effortless acts as blinking.

To sustain a lie over years, and against mounting evidence of its untruth, liars large and small must “develop an infrastructure around it,” Feldman said — a litany of justifications that makes it possible to cling to deception and convince ourselves that we are good people in spite of it.

“But as time goes on, it gets easier,” Feldman said.

“And it can be richly rewarding and therefore well worth the effort,” you can almost hear him say. Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Exodus after getting off the Hollywood blacklist, is one, like Armstrong, who seems to have put in the required mental exertion to lie convincingly and profitably.  He wrote in a letter to his son, “The important thing about a lie is not that it be interesting, fanciful, graceful, or even pleasant, but that it be believed … Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence.”

Conspiracy to Corrupt

What’s with these psychologists, the Feldmans, the Blatts, the Bermans, the Arielys, the nine psychologists and psychiatrists that Ruthann Aron was able to marshal in her defense?  Here’s where our opening quote from Willi Münzenberg comes in.  It is taken from an article by Timothy Matthews entitled “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt”  What he describes is a concerted movement to undermine what used to be called “Christendom,” which we now might call more broadly Western civilization.  It began after World War I in Frankfurt, Germany, as a form of Marxist revisionism that focused more directly upon the cultural rather than upon the economic foundation of society.  The concept of “political correctness” is part of the movement.  Within the larger category of political correctness is the method of teaching known as “values clarification.”

The underlying philosophy of Values Clarification holds that for teachers to promote virtues such as honesty, justice or chastity constitutes indoctrination of children and ‘violates’ their moral freedom.  It is urged that children should be free to choose their own values; the teacher must merely ‘facilitate’ and must avoid all moralizing or criticizing.

In such a world, clearly despicable behavior—cheating and lying—such as engaged in by Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton is not to be condemned.  To condemn it is to impose your old-fashioned, culturally determined notions of right and wrong on others.  Such is the utterly reprehensible New Moral Order that these psychologists seem to be trying to create for us.

_____________________________________________________________________________

*For more on the father of modern psychoanalysis see Henry Makow’s “Freud’s Part in Our Satanic Possession.”

David Martin

February 7, 2013

Article originally published by DCDave.

Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government

A review by David Martin

Oliver Stone on the Japanese Surrender

Oliver Stone on the Japanese Surrender

Not in this writer’s lifetime has a book challenging the central accepted tenets of U.S. history received so much publicity as Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, now being serialized in reduced form in ten weekly parts on the CBS cable subsidiary Showtime.  Search the authors’ names and book title with Google and on YouTube and you will find that almost everyone on the left has either given them a good review, a softball interview, or both.  In the uncritical interview category, they have enjoyed the attention of Democracy Now, MSNBC, CNN, RT, C-Span, PBS, and one that goes beyond favorable to fawning on The Young Turks.  You can doubtless find more.  This positive attention is really quite remarkable considering not only the neo-Stalinist tint of their history, but also the fact that the authors flatly deny a core American historical belief.   They assert that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not what caused the Japanese to surrender and to bring World War II to a close.

One can hear a full exposition of that thesis in Showtime’s “Episode 3: The Bomb.”  Their central conclusion is that the real reason for the Japanese surrender is that, virtually simultaneous with the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union broke its neutrality treaty with Japan that had been observed by both parties throughout the war and began a massive attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria.  At this point, the Japanese knew that the game was up.  A subordinate argument is that the atomic bombs then didn’t even serve a military purpose and that their use was opposed by various key military and political leaders in the U.S. government at the time and later.  The contemplated costly invasion of the Japanese mainland would not have been necessary.  The main reason the bombs were dropped, per Stone and Kuznick, was as a signal from the militarists in our government to the Soviet Union that we would not hesitate to use this new terror weapon to achieve our military and political objectives.  It was, in effect, our firing of the first shot in the Cold War.  Still more subordinate is the authors’ claim that if only Franklin Roosevelt’s hugely popular Vice President during his third term of office (1940-44), Henry Wallace, had not been replaced by Harry Truman, those unnecessary and reprehensible bombs would not have been dropped and, furthermore, there would have been no Cold War.

In support of their main conclusion, the authors point out that horrific bombing of Japanese cities, including Tokyo, had been going on for months causing massive civilian casualties.  The fact that the Japanese government did not react in any way after the Hiroshima attack shows that they regarded it as simply more of the same, only a bit worse.  Only the day after the second bomb was dropped—which also was the day after the Soviet entry into the war—did the Japanese send out a radio message suggesting that they were ready to surrender.

Readers might be surprised to learn that in many respects, Stone and Kuznick are not as far out on a limb as one might think.   They are absolutely right that many important military and political leaders within the government disagreed with the decision to drop the bomb.  A good collection of their views on the matter can be found on Doug Long’s web site.  Furthermore, one can even find reinforcement for their position from the influential libertarian, Lew Rockwell, the editor of the popular LewRockwell.com web site.  The following is from his December 7, 2012, interview of World War II scholar, John Denson, entitled “Learning the Historical Truth”:

ROCKWELL: Didn’t the U.S. government, Roosevelt, Truman and the rest of these people, want the war to continue as long as possible? I mean, isn’t this why they wanted unconditional surrender? They didn’t want to end the war. They didn’t want to accept the Japanese surrender. They wanted to keep killing and keep spending and terrorizing the world. And also, of course, they were planning to start the Cold War against the Russians. The Russians were not interested in the Cold War. They were, among other questions, were economically prostrate because of Socialism and because of all the deaths in World War II. So aren’t these people just blood-thirsty war criminals, FDR and Truman?

Actually, Stone and Kuznick are a good deal more nuanced in their argument.  They note correctly that the strongest advocate of the use of the bomb was Secretary of State James Byrnes.  The former Senator Byrnes had been hand-picked for the job by his former Senate colleague and admirer Truman, not inherited from Roosevelt like his other main advisers, and therefore had the most influence with him.  Byrnes was also the most rigid adherent among Truman’s key advisers to the unconditional surrender demand.  Harder liners toward the Soviets like Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew who, ironically, like the unconditional-surrender demand, Truman had inherited from Roosevelt, all counseled a softening of the surrender terms as a means of accelerating the end of the war.  Stone and Kuznick, understandably, manage to ease around this latter fact, however.

Mainstream Stone Reinforcement

More important in support of the Stone-Kuznick position on the Japanese surrender than Rockwell and assorted other historical revisionists is the Japanese-American professional historian, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.  His widely acclaimed 2005 book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan might very well be described as the latest word on the subject from the mainstream history community, if not the last.  Hasegawa, who reads Russian as well as his native Japanese and adopted English, delved into the archives of the three countries involved to see what was going on from the perspective of the leaders of each.  Favorable reviewer Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe, one of many on the Amazon.com page, sums up Hasegawa’s answer to the central question:

What ended World War II?…Tsuyoshi Hasegawa–a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara–has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.

That certainly does sound authoritative, but is it?  A very important reference missing from Hasegawa’s account is J. Robert Moskin’s 1996 book, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World.  As we pick up the Moskin narrative, it is the day after the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki.

At 7:33 A.M. the next day, August 10, in Washington, U.S. monitors picked up a shortwave message from Radio Tokyo addressed to the Swiss and Swedish governments for transmission to the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union.  The message said that at the command of His Majesty the Emperor and in the cause of peace, the Japanese government was ready to accept the terms of the joint declaration of July 26 “with the understanding that said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.”

This was not quite the unconditional surrender that Truman had been demanding.  And the Radio Tokyo broadcast was not an official communication of surrender.  Truman told [Joint Chiefs Chairman] Admiral [William] Leahy to summon a meeting at 9 A.M. of Secretaries Byrnes, Stimson, and Forrestal.  Should he regard this reply, he asked them, when officially received, as acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration?  Should the Emperor be allowed to stay in office, or did this “condition” contravene unconditional surrender?

The President faced pressures to accept the Japanese “understanding.”  The U.S. Army wanted to use the Emperor’s authority to control the occupation, and the Navy wanted to end the war before the Army could invade Japan.  Some highly placed Americans, including Stimson and Grew, wished to keep the Emperor in place in any case.  Political leaders were eager for an end before the Soviet army could stake out too large a claim in Manchuria.  And everyone wanted to minimize American casualties.

But strong voices also spoke against acceptance.  Not only many leaders but the vast majority of the American people wanted retribution and vengeance after the long, bloody, brutal war, and these voters had the power, if they wished, to make politicians who permitted the Emperor to stay pay a high political price at home.

Even before the official version of the Japanese petition was received, Stimson reminded Truman of the old adage that when you punish your dog, you do not stay sour on him all day after the punishment is over if you want “to keep his affection.”  It was, he said, the same with the Japanese if you want their cooperation in the long run.  Win the war, the elderly Secretary of War advised the President, and then be generous.

Just before noon, Byrnes brought Truman the official communication from the Japanese government; it followed the substance of the radio broadcast.  Byrnes also carried a draft reply to the Japanese message.

Truman discussed the Japanese offer with Byrnes while they grabbed a bite of lunch at his desk.  Again, he wanted to know: Did the Japanese proviso about the Emperor meet the American requirement for unconditional surrender?  He called a cabinet meeting at 2 P.M. to review the Japanese message and the State Department’s proposed reply.

To Stimson it made “good plain horse sense” to accept the Japanese offer.  It was to America’s advantage to retain the Emperor.  Only the Emperor could insist on the surrender of the Japanese forces in Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia; and the longer the war lasted, the larger part the Russians would play.  Leahy also wanted the offer to be accepted, and promptly.

Byrnes strongly opposed this course.  He held out for strict unconditional surrender.  Why, he asked, accept less than we had demanded at Potsdam before we had the atomic bomb and before the Soviet Union was in the war?  “I do not see why we should retreat from our demand from unconditional surrender,” he said.  “If any conditions are to be accepted, I want the United States and not Japan to state the conditions.”

Navy Secretary Forrestal came up with a shrewd and simple solution.  Accept the offer and declare that it accomplishes what the Potsdam Declaration demanded.  Say that the Emperor and the Japanese government will rule subject to the orders of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.  This would imply recognition of the Emperor while tending to neutralize American public passions against the Emperor.  Truman liked this.  It would be close enough to “unconditional.”

That, of course, was not the end of the matter.  The Japanese had to agree to these terms which, though leaving the Emperor in place, certainly did prejudice the prerogatives of the emperor as a sovereign ruler.  Hasegawa is very good in furnishing us with the deliberations within the Japanese government at that point.  Where he falls short is in his interpretation of those deliberations, a major shortcoming that is reflected in my December 29, 2012, email to him:

Dear Professor Hasegawa,

I am currently learning a lot from reading your very detailed Racing with the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan.  I must say, though, that I am extremely puzzled by the title you have chosen for Chapter 6 and some of your assertions you make in the chapter.  “Japan Accepts Unconditional Surrender” reads to me almost like a misprint.  Would the title not be more accurate if it read “Japan Accepts Conditional Surrender”?  You talk, after all, about the four conditions that many within the Japanese government wanted to attach to the Potsdam Declaration, which were narrowed down to the crucial one, retention of the emperor.  To be sure, the U.S. in its response watered the emperor’s powers down, or, shall we say, intentionally muddied the waters concerning the emperor’s powers and the kokutai, for the surrender to be sufficiently “conditional” for the emperor, himself.

“To the marshals’ question of the preservation of the kokutai, the emperor responded that the enemy had guaranteed that the imperial house would be maintained,” you write on page 242.  That passage makes it very apparent to me that the message that Navy Secretary James Forrestal meant to be conveyed as a way of overcoming U.S. qualms about retaining the emperor as described below was successful where it counted: with the emperor:

Forrestal came up with a shrewd and simple solution: Accept the offer ["with the understanding that said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler."] and declare that it accomplishes what the Potsdam Declaration demanded. Say that the Emperor and the Japanese government will rule subject to the orders of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. This would imply recognition of the emperor while tending to neutralize American public passions against the Emperor. Truman liked this. It would be close enough to ‘unconditional.’

J. Robert Moskin, Mr. Truman’s War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World, p. 313.

The Instrument of Surrender maintains the fiction of unconditional surrender in the second sentence, “We hereby proclaim the unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and of all Japanese Armed Forces and all Armed Forces under Japanese control wherever situated.”

But then in the concluding sentence it takes it back, “The authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the State shall be subject to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate these terms of surrender.”

There he is, still on the throne and still ruling, the crucial person who had been missing from the moment that FDR proclaimed “unconditional surrender” as America’s unwavering objective right through the Potsdam Declaration.

I can see why the various powers that be might want to keep up the fiction that the Japanese surrender was unconditional.  I don’t see why anyone committed to writing the truth about history would, though.

Professor Hasegawa has not responded, and I really can’t imagine what he could say.  For all his scholarship, he has done nothing to overturn the conclusion reached by Paul Kecskemeti in his 1964 book, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat:  “The American readiness to spare the Emperor’s position alone induced Japan to surrender.” p. 198

Who Came to His Senses?

The general belief in the United States is that the dropping of the A-bombs forced the Japanese, who were long past any hope of anything but abject defeat in the war, to come to their senses and to accept surrender.  Stone and Kuznick, and even Hasegawa, would have us believe that it was the Russian entry into the war that made them come to their senses.  As we look at how matters unfolded, though, we can only conclude that it was Harry Truman who finally came to his senses.

Hasegawa gives little support to the Stone-Kuznick notion that the A-bomb use was really aimed at the Russians.  Truman had little foreign policy experience; his experience was in domestic politics.  That was also the primary experience of his chosen top foreign policy adviser, Byrnes.  Their view of the situation was little different from that of the general public.  They never even gave a second thought to not using the bomb.  The military and bureaucratic momentum was all in favor of using it.  We had bludgeoned the Germans into unconditional surrender and with this new weapon it would be all that much easier to do it to the Japanese.  Byrnes continued with the same mind set—which no doubt reflected that of the average American—even after the Japanese offered their surrender terms.  But Truman blinked.  Immensely aided by Stimson, Leahy, Grew, and especially Forrestal (who strangely plays the role of the villain in the Stone-Kuznick morality play), he finally came to his senses and made the move that had been the primary stumbling block to bringing the war to a close.  He agreed to leave Emperor Hirohito in place.

But the actual truth of what caused the Japanese surrender is even harder for our ruling opinion molders to share with us than is the alternative presented by Oliver Stone.  Why should this be so?  It means that the real foreign policy experts within the administration, the anti-Communists, the Joseph Grews and the James Forrestals were the wise ones.  Had they been listened to, not only would the bombs not have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but very likely there would have been no Communist takeover of North Korea, China, and Vietnam and no Korea and Vietnam Wars.  (See “Forrestal Ignored: China Lost to Reds, Korean War Fought.”)  Hasegawa does make fleeting mention of the valiant effort of Forrestal, Grew, and Naval Intelligence Director Admiral Ellis Zacharias to end the war early, even referencing “How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender,” but he makes little of it, along the lines of no. 14 in the “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.” He puts the blame on the Japanese for failing to grasp the straw being offered them by people without the real power, rather than upon those counseling Truman to maintain the hard unconditional-surrender line.  In point of fact, it was these hard liners toward the Japanese—and friends of the Russians—who were dragging out the war in the Pacific, just as they dragged out the war in Europe.

Henry Wallace, the Savior?

Where does this leave Stone’s thesis that his hero Henry Wallace would have been the man to deliver us from the horrors of the atomic bomb.  Here’s what reformed Trotskyite Dwight MacDonald has to say about that:

May we conclude that, at least on the question of The Bomb, Henry Wallace has consistently stuck to humanitarian principles?  Alas, no.  He was, on the contrary, one of the godfathers of The Bomb.  Early in the war, Roosevelt created a secret policy group to study the possible use of atomic energy as a military weapon.  Its members included [Vannevar] Bush, [James B.] Conant, [George C.] Marshall, Stimson—and Wallace.  In June, 1942, this group recommended a vast expansion of the work and the transfer of the bulk of the program to the War Department.  This was the birth of the Manhattan Project…

It might be added that, far from feeling any guilt about his part in planning the atomic bomb, Henry seems to regard the whole business as a peculiar triumph of the New Deal.  Writing in The New Republic’s commemorative issue on Roosevelt (April 15, 1946), he observed, in the course of an article entitled “He Led the Common Man”:

“Roosevelt was not a scientist, but he had an intuition which made him respond to the suggestions of scientists.  The outstanding example, of course, was the way he acted at once on Einstein’s atomic-bomb suggestion in the fall of 1939.  It took the highest sort of executive courage to pour more than two billion dollars into an utterly untried project.  No President ever had such a remarkable combination of courage and imagination.  Without that imaginative courage, America would not today be the world’s greatest democratic nation.”  — Henry Wallace, The Man and the Myth (1947), pp. 84-85

But should we take Wallace, as Stone does, at his later word that as President he would not have actually used the bomb?  In the first place, from MacDonald’s splendid little book we also learn that even for an American politician, the gap between Wallace’s words and his actual deeds was enormous.  There is a very good chance that as President he would have continued the role he had played for FDR during the war, that of chief vilifier of the enemy.  Having for so long painted Hirohito and the Japanese as at least the equivalent in evil of Hitler and the Nazis, and having been an enthusiastic supporter of FDR’s war policies that targeted German and Japanese cities, he is very unlikely to have pulled back from those policies as President.

Furthermore, Hasegawa reminds us that the biggest opponents in the country to a policy that would have made the use of the bombs unnecessary for shortening the war, softer surrender terms for Japan, were the leftists and the liberals.  The leader among them in the State Department was the up-and-coming Dean Acheson.  In the leftist view, revenge had to be wreaked upon Japan for Pearl Harbor and for their unforgivable alliance with the hated Nazis.

If Wallace had not dropped the bombs, Soviet entry into the war along with U.S. invasion of the main islands of Japan would, indeed, have resulted in the Japanese surrender, but at what a price?  We also learn from Hasegawa that Stalin requested that he be allowed to occupy Hokkaido and to share in the occupation of Japan in the fashion of the occupation of Germany.  Truman had the good sense to deny those requests.  A President as cozy with Stalin as Wallace demonstrably was would no doubt have acceded to them, and both leaders would have been about as generous in victory toward the Japanese emperor as the Bolsheviks were to the czar.  Not only would all of Korea have fallen to the Communists, but Hokkaido and quite possibly the rest of Japan would have as well, not to mention what might have happened to Europe.

Now you know the real reason why Stone and his Strelnikov-lookalike (see video below) co-author Kuznick love Henry Wallace so much.

David Martin

January 22, 2013

See also “Oliver Stone on James Forrestal.”

B’Man: FDR was a scumbag who started wars, allowed forces to attack ours without warning (after he was adequately warned), perpetuated wars for Stalin, and followed the Jews’ Communist playbook of world domination. For anyone to consider this monster a “hero” shows ignorance that can now be changed with this education. Then, the next scumbag, Truman, took up the mantle for the Jews (even if he was just stupid, which I don’t think is the case). It may be because they tried to kill him. James Forrestal tried to stop their control of this  country and they killed him. JFK stood up to them and look what happened.

It is high time we stop being played by the Jews (Khazars).

The Federal Security Sham

The Federal Security Sham

Written and Narrated by our friend, DC Dave

Vince Foster, Richard Cory, and Abe Lincoln

Vince Foster, Richard Cory, and Abe Lincoln

We really didn’t need any better signs that something was seriously amiss in the case of the mysterious violent death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., on July 20, 1992 than was provided by the curious early behavior of the press.  From the very first day they called it an “apparent suicide,” when to anyone capable of thinking for himself it was not the least bit apparent.  Rather than exhibiting any of the natural curiosity that even the ordinary person possesses, they showed what can only be described as an aggressive lack of curiosity, which is particularly odd for people whose job it is to be curious.

Nobody reporting on the death seemed even to have gone out to the old Civil War relic, Fort Marcy Park, to look at the very unlikely place where the body was found.  The suicide conclusion had been reached, apparently, by the presence of a gun in Foster’s hand, but no evidence had yet been presented that the gun even belonged to Foster.  We had not been told if anyone in a position to know, particularly his two sons, had been asked about the gun.  Neither had there even been any speculation about how Foster, newly moved to Washington with the Clinton administration, might have found his way to such an obscure place.  I had been living in the Virginia suburbs of DC for ten years and I had never heard of Fort Marcy Park.

To me, the early clincher was the rare opinion piece by the Washington Post’s young national political reporter, David Von Drehle.  It contains no useful information.  Rather, it is an attempt to sell the public on the notion that Foster committed suicide in the complete absence of any supporting evidence.  It is a cry that we should take it on faith.  That is to say, it is an obvious piece of propaganda.

That article might have told me that foul play was involved—the press treatment in itself represented foul play of a sort—but at that point, like most of the country, I was not yet online.  Where could I share my suspicions?  My place of work in DC was only a few blocks from the office of The Post, so I took out my frustration by writing a letter to Von Drehle, saving a copy for the drawer like a Soviet dissident.  Later, in 1995, I would include it in a self-published book of essays and poems entitled The New Moral Order.  Finally, when I got online with a web site, I would publish it for a larger audience:

Excerpt from The Washington Post, Sunday August 1, 1993, p. C5, editorial section, twelve days after the discovery of the body of Vincent Foster, Jr. in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia. The author is national political reporter (now Style Section editor) David Von Drehle.

The Muse in the News
I Confess–T. S. Eliot Matters More to Me Than the Thomasons

And this was one of the Washington Post reporters who was supposed to be looking into what happened, one of the sets of eyes and ears of the public, as it were. Instead, he gave us this. So I was immediately moved to write him a letter, which I hand-delivered to The Post the next day.

Since I wrote that letter we have learned a lot more about the Foster case, and I have learned a lot more about what’s going on around us, prompting two more related poems:

I have not shared these last two poems with Mr. Von Drehle.  Should I?

David Martin, March 9, 1998

Since Von Drehle had quoted Alexander Pope, I wished I had known at that time the Pope quote that the renowned manuscript authenticator and Oxford English professor, the late Reginald Alton, gave me upon reading The New Moral Order, “Ask you what provocation I have had?  The strong antipathy of good to bad.”  I would have thrown it back at Von Drehle.  Instead, I had to settle for using it to lead off Part 2 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair.” (Alton was one of three handwriting experts who declared the torn-up “suicide note” a forgery.)

Readers might forgive me now if I express my skepticism that Von Drehle is really so credulous as to believe what he wrote.  If he volunteered the piece, he no doubt did it to curry favor with his employers by writing what he knew they wanted to hear.  More likely, though is that he was assigned to write a suicide-selling story, and this was the best he could come up with.  Later he would have a much bigger assignment along those lines, and I would later sum up his efforts in “The Press and the Death of Vincent Foster.”

Accompanying the [Michael] Isikoff article on that crucial first Sunday after the authorities had, they hoped, laid the Foster death controversy to rest, was a massive, front-page 159-column-inch article by David Von Drehle, syndicated to newspapers around the country, whose purpose is indicated by its title: “The Crumbling of a Pillar in Washington, Only Clinton Aide Foster Knew What Drove Him to Fort Marcy.” The article set the tone for virtually all that would follow in the American press. Dropping all pretense to objectivity, Von Drehle gives us nothing more than a serious sales effort for the tenuous thesis that Vince Foster killed himself because he was depressed. It is the prosecutor’s case for the murder of Vince Foster by Vince Foster. The case for the defense is completely absent. Nowhere in the lengthy article, for instance, are we told about the withheld official report or that the authorities are not even allowing release of photocopies of the torn-up note attributed to Foster that belatedly turned up mysteriously. Freely drawing conclusions about Foster’s state of mind as reflected in the uncharacteristically sophomoric and disjointed note, a note that had been supposedly found in a briefcase that had previously been thoroughly searched, Von Drehle also avoids any mention of authentication of the note’s handwriting.

Thanks to good organization men like Von Drehle, the cover-up of Foster’s murder has succeeded with the general public.  But thanks to two people more than any other, the witness Patrick Knowlton and Kenneth Starr’s erstwhile lead investigator, Miguel Rodriguez, it has failed utterly with anyone who actually wishes to be informed.  For Rodriguez’s very telling resignation letter, never published in any newspaper, either on paper or online, go here.

We have described Von Drehle as an organization man.  But what is his organization?  If you gave the obvious answer, The Washington Post, I believe your scope is too narrow.  The following quote from the British journalist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard more likely gets us closer to the right answer:

The Washington Post ceased to be a newspaper of liberal activism a long time ago, if it ever really was. “Its anti- establishment image is one of the most absurd myths in journalism today,” said Jeff Cohen, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in New York, a liberal group that monitors the Post closely and accuses it of an incestuous relationship with the governing elite. “It has been an instrument of state power for many years.”

From his Wikipedia page we find that Von Drehle left The Post some time ago to become editor-at-large at another longstanding “instrument of state power,” Time magazine.  Explaining his job history, Von Drehle says, “I like to change gears every four or five years.”  But has he really been changing gears…or organizations?  The following is from the 1987 book, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, by Yale history professor, Robin Winks:

In the fall of 1942 R&A (Research and Analysis of the CIA precursor OSS) began to contract out research projects to specialized institutes, first at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, and soon after to the University of Denver, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale. No one at the universities appears to have protested these ties, and university presidents and professors courted contractors and consultantships, at times going well beyond the supplying of analysis and information, as when Cal Tech manufactured rockets for the army. (p. 79)

Of the universities listed, there is one that stands out for its lack of prominence.  It is the one place where the OSS and later the CIA would be a very big fish in a small pond.  It also happens to be the alma mater of David Von Drehle.  We are talking about the University of Denver.  Condoleezza Rice also received her Ph.D. there, where she studied under Madeleine Albright’s father, Josef Korbel.

High Priest for the Lincoln God

What could be more fitting for a man with “a way with words” who has also shown himself to be more than willing to serve “instruments of state power” than Von Drehle’s latest gear-changing?  Now he’s playing the historian, having written a tribute to the president most beloved by the neocons for his willingness to make war on his own people in the name of consolidated state power.  It is called Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year.

From reading the reviews of the book, which I have not read, I gather that the “greatness” label, according to Von Drehle, deserves to be pinned upon Lincoln because organizing and motivating those on his side to pursue the war on their fellow Americans was a much bigger feat than is generally appreciated.   But here is how Thomas DiLorenzo describes what Lincoln accomplished:

How odd that anyone would equate the killing of some 850,000 Americans (the latest estimate of “Civil War” deaths), the bombing, burning, and destruction of entire cities, the mass killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the rape, pillage and plunder of thousands more, the suspension of Habeas Corpus and imprisonment of tens of thousands of Northern civilians, the shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North, military conscription, the daily execution of deserters (by the Lincoln regime), and the rigging of Northern elections as “civilization.” And how odd that anyone would think that the secession of a state (or states), under the correct belief that the union of the founding fathers was a voluntary union, would somehow “destroy” the government in Washington. In fact, the government in Washington grew exponentially after the Southern states seceded, fielding the largest and best-equipped army in world history up to that point.

As the latest Lincoln hagiographer, organization man Von Drehle might just be in his perfect gear.

David Martin

January 3, 2013

I want to thank DCDave for his Guest Post originally found here.

A Condensation of Military Incompetence

A Condensation of Military Incompetence

What with all the glorification of our “heroes” in uniform, a glorification that seems to grow in inverse proportion to the real need for them, a person could begin to feel afraid to utter aloud the sort of jokes that people used to make.  For instance, you might feel the need to look over your shoulder before you repeat the old George Carlin observation that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron.

The growing military hype and the sort of military intelligence with which I became all too familiar in my two years of service, 1966-1968, came together on this Veterans Day weekend.  The picture of the U.S. Navy’s finest engaged in the Sisyphean task of mopping dew off the basketball court that had been laid on the deck of the USS Yorktown said it all.  That was in coastal South Carolina on Friday night, November 9, in what was to have been a big military advertisement to kick off the weekend.  The same fiasco played itself out on the deck of the USS Bataan in Jacksonville, Florida, except that the college basketball players there put themselves in harm’s way for an entire half, attempting to play on the virtual skating rink that the very predictable condensation had made of the surface.

But it worked before in San Diego, I can imagine the Navy geniuses thinking, and they got a lot of great publicity out of it.  We can do it at a couple of sites on the East Coast, the games won’t have to start so late at night for the Eastern audience, and we can quadruple the viewers.  Apparently they have never paid much attention to the weatherman when he gives out the temperature number associated with the “dew point.”  In the southeastern United States, that number is almost always higher than the evening temperature that is reached quite soon after the sun goes down.  In San Diego, although the temperature tends to fall more rapidly at night, the dew point is seldom reached because there’s not much moisture in the air.  But, hey, these are Navy people, no reason for them to pay much attention to weather, at least to such a minor phenomenon as dew.  Folks play football and baseball outdoors at night, don’t they?

Now think about it a minute.  These are the people to whom we have given the authority to make life and death, godlike, decisions, over thousands of their subordinates and millions of people in less fortunate foreign lands.  As you will see toward the end of this article, their manifest failings have had some rather serious consequences—that could have been much worse—in an episode in Korea in the 1960s that is revealed here for the first time.

Flood Rescue, Eighth Army Style

My big brush with what we might call “the military versus the elements” came a little more than four months into my 13-month tour in Korea.  As a recently promoted first lieutenant, I was second in charge of the security, plans, operations, and training office of a headquarters outfit that oversaw a disparate collection of U.S. Army units in what was known to us as Ascom City.  The Ascom complex abutted the small town of Bupyeong, on the Seoul, or eastern, side of Inchon (now spelled Incheon).

It was late June and I had only been in the country for about three months.  Another lieutenant and I received the assignment to head up one of four flood rescue teams that might be required to rescue and take care of the residents of four islands that are in the Han River, the river that runs through Seoul.  Most of Korea’s annual rainfall occurs during the very muggy days of the late summer.  When that happens, the Han River can rise so much that the islands can become completely submerged and require evacuation.  Each of the teams, which came from Army units around the Seoul area, was to be responsible for the evacuation of one island.

The first question that arose in my mind was why this task was the responsibility of the U.S. Army.  The Han River has been flooding at that time of year throughout recorded history.  One would think that the Koreans, who are not exactly unresourceful people, would have figured out how to cope with it.  It was just fourteen years after the end of the Korean War, though, and the country was still desperately poor.  It might have been necessary for us to pitch in and help the Koreans with boats and helicopters should they need them in an emergency, but for us to assume the responsibility for evacuating Korean civilians struck me as rather misguided, along the lines of Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.

The one exception might have been Yoido (now spelled Yeouido. “Do” means “island” in Korean), where the U.S. military operated an air strip on the site of Seoul’s first airport, built by the Japanese occupiers in 1916.  It had been supplanted as the city’s airport by the one in Kimpo (now spelled Gimpo), some few miles to the west towards Inchon, in 1958.  Yoido is a little ways upstream from the now exclusive section on the south bank known as Gangnam (gang = river, nam = south), recently made world famous by the K-pop rapper, Psy.  Yoido would have been most convenient for us, because it was by far the nearest island to our location; we could see it off to our left from the bridge when we drove into Seoul, and there was a small bridge to it.

Unfortunately for us, every one of the other teams was closer to Yoido than we were, so we were assigned the most distant island much farther upstream.  We were also the most distant team from that site.  The most difficult part of our assignment, as we saw it, would be getting there, because we would have to find our way through the heart of Seoul.  There was no bypass, and there were lots of city twists and turns.  We certainly never could have accomplished it without our Korean KATUSA driver.

Before we were to do our one dry run we had a planning meeting, presided over by the lieutenant colonel from Eighth Army Headquarters in charge of the operation, at which the action plan was handed out.  Right off the bat we noticed a problem.  Each of the teams was identified with a number.  We were team four.  Each of the islands was also assigned a number, one through four, and they were called “sites.”  Our team four was to go to site one, team three was to go to site two, and so on.

We wanted badly to suggest that it might be a better idea to match up the sites and the team designations, so that team one went to site one, etc., but we were told that we would have an opportunity to make suggestions for the final action plan after we had done our dry run, so we held our fire.

There was another small problem with our team that might have presented some difficulties.  Our headquarters company had neither boats nor helicopters for rescuing anyone from an island.  Our contribution to the effort was to be only a couple of large tents for people to keep dry under, the manpower to set them up, and two junior officers to take responsibility if anything went wrong.  The rest of our team was to be made up of some enlisted men from an engineer battalion from Kimpo, which was to supply a couple of trailer-transported boats.  We were to meet them at the site, some twenty miles on the other side of Seoul.

We had our dry run, and, miraculously, things ran relatively smoothly.  Following the times and directions on the action plan, we and the Kimpo crew with the boats arrived at the site within minutes of one another, apparently having taken about the same time to negotiate Seoul’s traffic, which wasn’t very bad in those days before hardly anyone owned his own automobile.  We also made an important discovery in our reconnaissance mission.  Less than a mile down the country road from the site where we were to launch the boats was a large Korean Army compound.  It struck us that it might be a good idea to at least enlist their assistance in the rescue of their countrymen should it become necessary.

I suppose we might have gone down and introduced ourselves, but anyone who has ever been in the military would know that that is not the sort of initiative that is exactly encouraged.  If the higher-ups had meant for us to engage in any sort of liaison with our Korean counterparts it would have been included in our orders, or what is more likely, they would have done it for us.  I did step a little outside the prescribed script by taking the trouble to get the direct office telephone numbers of the guys with the boats from Kimpo.  No phone numbers had been included in the action plan.  The Army is a very top-down organization; lateral communication is not very strongly encouraged, and lateral communication outside the organization, particularly by underlings, such as any get-acquainted meeting with the local Korean Army detachment would have been out of the question.

We did, on our after-action report, make note of the presence of the Korean Army compound near our rescue site, hoping the colonel would get the hint, and we had the absolute temerity to suggest that it might be better to make the team and site numbers the same, so as to avoid confusion.  The final action plan ignored both the hint and the suggestion.  Even worse, our teams were assigned radio call signs.  Our team four’s call sign was to be “Ground Four,” Team Three was “Ground Three,” and so on.  Remember, though, that we were to go to Site One, and all the other teams had sites different from their numbers.  The potential for confusion was actually increased.

The Fateful Day Arrives

Predictably, it began to rain almost every afternoon starting around the middle of July and the Han River eased toward flood stage.  In the meantime, as it happens, the training sergeant in our office had decided that it would be a good idea for the men in our company to get in their annual shooting qualification on the one range that the Eighth Army had in the limited land available in the area.  That happened to be up north of Seoul some distance from us.  Reservations weeks in advance were required, as was an officer to supervise.  I was the officer, who got on the bus early on an August morning just as a slow rain began, unusual for the time of day.

By the time we reached Seoul, the rain was approaching a downpour, and I began to grow concerned about my greater obligation to the flood rescue team.  When the bus reached the Eighth Army headquarters at Yongsan in Seoul, I decided that I’d better get back to Ascom.  The shooters went on without me, and I found transportation back to my office, arriving there around noon with the rain coming down ever harder.  Then, sure enough, the call came down from a lieutenant in Eighth Army, one of the colonel’s assistants.

“We’re implementing the action plan,” said he, or words to that effect.  “Move out immediately.”

Patting myself on the back for the decision I had made, and in a state of rather high excitement, I pulled out the phone number of the contact in the Kimpo engineer battalion to make sure that there would be boats for us when we got to our destination.

It’s a good thing the phone worked—the military phones were something of a hit-or-miss thing at that time in Korea—considering his response.  “We haven’t had any move-out order,” he responded to me.

I immediately got back on the phone to the Eighth Army lieutenant to ask him what was up.

“Hold that first order,” he said.  “We’ve decided to give it a little more time.”

Now I was thinking that it was an especially good thing that I had not taken the “immediately” part of his move-out order too literally, and I was really glad I had gotten that boatman’s phone number.  Considering the weather conditions, “high and dry” doesn’t precisely describe the position we would have found ourselves in at the evacuation site without the boats and without even a need for them, but it comes close.

Having heard many reports of predicted river flooding on the news where the levels expected are based upon levels already recorded upstream, I inquired of the lieutenant as to the basis on which the final decision would be made.  I remember his response as though it were yesterday:

“Colonel ‘Geronimo’ is down looking at the river.”

As it turned out, no one drowned because some would-be rescue helicopter had landed at Site 3 instead of the correct Site 2 because he had received an emergency radio call from Ground 3, and we never suffered from the lack of manpower that the Korean Army might have provided at our site.  None of the islands flooded that day—or that year—and the “hold” on that first call from the Eighth Army lieutenant continued into perpetuity.

Bad Communications When It Counts

We’ll never know if the Army’s poor communications, particularly of the lateral variety, would have had really bad consequences in the flood business that year, but their luck would almost run out before I left Korea.  I didn’t take my mid-tour leave until January, and I took it in Japan.  A couple of days after my arrival in Tokyo I met an infantryman at the USO in the Ginza who was on leave from the 2^nd Division, up on the line in Korea.  We decided to do our touring around Japan together.  Not in any kind of a boastful manner he told me of some of the excitement he had experienced in his army tour, which was so much different from what those of us further south had to face.

“The most frightened I’ve ever been in my life,” he told me, “was when our gung-ho commanding officer took a squad of us over into North Korea one night to shoot up a propaganda loudspeaker.”

Fortunately, they had all returned unscathed.  It could have been a really embarrassing international incident.  He also told me of the almost constant probing of the line by North Korean infiltrators.  “Just a couple of nights ago,” he told me, “we heard a whole bunch of them come through.  We fired in their direction, but we didn’t hit anybody.”

I think it was the next day when we saw headlines in a Japanese English-language newspaper:  “North Korean assassination team stopped within blocks of the Blue House.”

“That’s them!” he immediately exclaimed upon seeing the newspaper.

“That’s who?” I responded.

“That’s the bunch we heard come through our lines.  I told you there were a lot of them.”

The newspaper reported that there were 31 in all.  All but one had been killed in a gun battle on the streets of Seoul.  But the newspapers also reported that the group had not been detected until they were seen by some Korean civilians gathering wood in the mountains.  That still seems to be the official position as of the date of this writing according to Wikipedia.  On the “Blue House Raid” Wikipedia site we find this passage:

On January 16, 1968, Unit 124 left their garrison at Yonsan. On January 17, at 2300 hours, they infiltrated the DMZ by cutting through the fencing of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division‘s sector and, by 0200 hours the next day, they had set up camp at Morae-dong and Seokpo-ri.

On the page for the Korean DMZ Conflict (1966-1969) we have this:

On the night of 17 January 1968, 31 men of Unit 124 penetrated the 2ID sector of the DMZ by cutting through the chain-link fence and passing undetected within 30m of a manned 2ID position. (Emphasis added)

In fact, they were detected, if my traveling companion—who was likely one of the guys at that position—is to be believed.  I have little doubt that they would have informed their higher ups.  From my own experience, though, I seriously doubt that their superiors bothered to say so much as “watch out” to their Korean counterparts.  As we have said, lateral communication was not their strong suit, especially across cultural lines.  Covering one’s rear end, on the other hand, is one of their strongest suits.  The truth of how we reacted to this known incursion would not have been well received in various important quarters and could have been quite damaging to a military career or two.

The aforementioned Wikipedia site also has this to say about intruder impediments:

The Barrier could not prevent infiltration (it was estimated that the North Koreans could cut through the fence in 30–40 seconds), rather it was intended to slow movement and provide easy observation. Behind the Barrier were the quick-reaction forces of mechanized infantry, tanks and armored cavalry who would hunt down infiltrators.

That all sounds very impressive, like a lot of U. S. Army boilerplate one reads, but, again, if my informant is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt him, they didn’t do much of a job of it in this instance.

Very little of what my companion had told me about the North Korean infiltration surprised me.  A short time before, the Korean major in charge of the KATUSAs in our command and I, in my capacity as chief of training, had sponsored a joint presentation by Korean Military Intelligence for both our Americans and our KATUSAs.  We had a presentation by a North Korean defector and they showed us a film that depicted exactly the sort of rigorous training that the infiltrators were receiving, giving them the ability to move with surprising speed on foot over mountainous terrain.

My recollection is that the initiative for that presentation came entirely from the Korean major, and he worked through me, not my superiors.  I have no recollection of any direction coming from Eighth Army to provide such information to the troops.

Post Script

Early that spring, in 1967, as I traveled into Seoul, I noticed some changes taking place on Yoido.  The Koreans, who apparently lacked the wherewithal to rescue their own people from the river, were bringing in a steady procession of dump trucks full of dirt and were building the island up.  By the time I left, an impressive transformation had begun to take shape.  Yoido, now virtually immune to floods, has become an important part of Seoul.  The National Assembly Building is there, and it is the city’s main business and investment banking district.

David Martin

November 15, 2012

Another excellent Guest Post by DCDave.