Countryburghers,
At last, we have begun to move along. This week I want to throw out a few thoughts dealing with our people in the military. Once, when things seemed a lot simpler than they do today, I was one of them. From 1957 to 1959 I soldiered as a Private First Class in the Fourth Armored Division, part of the Seventh Army, on station in what was then West Germany.
Service in the military came naturally in my family: my mother's older brother had been a battle surgeon in a sort of MASH unit in the trenches of the Marne during World War I, a hectic butcher-shop operation that taught him enough about the physiology of the heart to inaugurate a great career as a coronary pioneer. My father's kid brother was the bombadier and navigator who trained the crew of the Enola Gay. My mother ran the Home Service Division of the Red Cross in Minneapolis throughout World War II. We stepped up.
My turn came along when the Cold War was chilliest. The draft was universal. I got through college, and even a couple of years in Central Europe, initially as a Fulbright Student, but the inevitable Greetings caught up with me in Southern Spain. I underwent Basic Training at Fort Hood, Texas. Throughout the following winter I served in Germany as the team chief of an Angry 26, a rolling trip-wire communications unit mounted on the back of a standard deuce-and-a-half truck and camouflaged in the woodlands on the edge of the Grafenwohr Training Grounds along the Czech border. We could listen to the artillery of the Red Army, just across the frontier. As an Acting Sergeant I was in charge of a squad of smart but incorrigible reprobates, a headstrong Mexican-American telegrapher, a street-smart Puerto-Rican interested mostly in running a numbers game back at the post, and a teenaged black pickpocket from Detroit. The trick was getting them back to base with nobody landing in the stockade.
After two years I got my discharge in Europe and settled down in the Austrian Alps to try and write a book. In early 1961 I returned to the United States just as the Kennedy administration was settling in. By the time JFK got shot we were already knee-deep in Viet Nam. My wife and I found a cheap -- rent-controlled -- apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
Once Lyndon Johnson took over, the American commitment to the war deepened: at one point 600,000 of our troops were bogged down there, draftees mostly. I myself gradually became aware that the deferment pattern among the generation at risk, always skewed to favor the ownership classes -- whose children stayed in graduate school or had big families early to avoid service -- was turning into an unreported scandal. One of the first pieces I got published was an essay for the liberal New Leader entitled "Our Unlucky Minority Army." Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, a man of vision and conviction and an opponent of LBJ, gave me a lot of help.
A disproportionate number of blacks were among the casualties. My wife and I had resettled into a crossroads village in New Hampshire: it was painfully evident that the local draft was pulling in the offspring of the working poor, youngsters with no recourse and no connections to keep them out. They returned badly damaged in most cases. I remember long sessions with one youngster who had worked for me from time to time, put in his years as a platoon leader in the Vietnamese jungles, and returned with a roaring heroin habit. I spent many evenings weaning him back onto Bourbon. He got a sort of job, in the end, along with a life-long disability payment.
By then I was interested in -- writing about -- the early career of Edward Kennedy. I detail all this in Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography. Tossed out of Harvard for cheating, Kennedy had tried to make amends by serving in the Army in France. He too recognized that the system was increasingly unfair, that combat exposure was turning into a matter of who you were, who you knew. Typically, Kennedy didn't attempt to butt heads with the administration directly -- he was already sabotaging the poll tax laws and putting together immigration reform boilerplate for the president behind the scenes. But he was successful in getting a great many of the draft exemptions and eligibility requirements eliminated and/or redefined. Pretty soon the children of the Country Club Crowd were getting their draft notices. A few started getting shot up; some actually got killed. Society activists like Silver Star winner John Kerry started speaking at veterans' rallies against the war itself. Richard Nixon found himself forced to "Vietnamize" the struggle, cut way back on troop deployments, in the end simply cut and run. Combat was much too dangerous for the propertied classes, the major political contributors wouldn't put up with it.
At unacknowledged policy levels, one revelation that had been hanging there since the First World War was that modern full-scale mass warfare, with entire populations involved, was ultimately ruinous to established societies. Whole graduating classes from Oxford and Cambridge had been blown to pieces in the trenches of World War I; the effective collapse of the British Empire during subsequent decades was privately attributed to the destruction of that leadership generation. The loss of a generation of educated leaders in Germany no doubt led immediately to the barbarism of Nazism. With weaponry more sophisticated every decade, all these apprehensions converged in the behind-the-scenes decision to "professionalize" the military. The answer would be a volunteer army, small but superbly trained, available to jump in and fight any battles the politicians might decide to undertake.
That made it easer, of course, to invade and bomb and authorize a "police action" just short of technical war. Or go to war itself, if under another name. Easier to get in.
But harder, it would develop, to get out. The habitual projection of power is numbing, hallucinogenic. We cruise on fantasies.
All this led directly to the tragedy of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who shot up 16 Afghan civilians and may well have ended our longest war. Next time, what that really means.
Always,
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The Defenders of the Faith
Countrycrusaders,
So here we are, about to go to the mat for the last time -- this winter -- with the residual consequences of the JFK assassination. Each inquiry exacts a price. "Most 'respectable' academics, journalists, and news organizations don't want to get near the matter, lest they be labeled conspiracy nuts," Russ Baker points out early in his study of the connections among the oil boys, the Bushes and the CIA. Family of Secrets tracks decades of off-stage plotting intended to bring down successive administrations, what Peter Dale Scott has called the "deep politics" surrounding the murder of JFK.
As competent investigators have picked the Warren Commission Report apart, and writers in this field have been relegated to the badlands of publishing, several establishment publishers have stepped forward in the belated attempt to recusscitate the Warren Commission's moribund conclusions. Whatever credibility the Report once had got banged around throughout even the comparatively peripheral hearings conducted by Senators Schweiker and Church during the mid-1970s. The remnants got torn up pretty badly when the Select Committee on Assassinations went to work in the House of Representatives.
The counterattack was mounted in 1993, when Random House published Gerald Posner's Case Closed.
Rather than reinforcing the demonstrably skewed evidence the Warren Report depended on, Posner seemed to spend his energy attempting to discredit individual critics of the Report with whom he preferred to disagree -- after months lost poring over the notional material J. Edgar Hoover concocted in FBI archives -- along with key witnesses. Anthony Summers' important interviews with Guy Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, must be discounted entirely because Summers paid her to sit down with him. And besides, Delphine was Banister's mistress. One of the lead investigators on chief counsel Robert Blakey's staff on the House Committee was the astute Gaeton Fonzi, whom Posner dismisses as "an unusual choice for an inquiry" because he had written magazine pieces dubious about the Report before and after the House Committee announced its verdict: There had indeed been a conspiracy. Better a rubber stamp, a skeptic is unconscionable on a staff conducting an investigaztion. No amount of testimony holds up for Posner. A mere six witnesses saw Oswald and mob pilot David Ferrie together in Clinton, Louisiana the summer of 1963? Out of hundreds interviewed? Not good enough for Posner, no matter what the House Assassination Committee concluded.
In time Posner himself would run into trouble. Individuals he quoted denied that they had ever talked with the author, while both of the pathologists who had conducted autopsies on JFK's remains insisted they had not said anything like what Posner quoted them as saying. Kennedy had been shot from the front, a hollow-point bullet had blown out the back of his skull, and the medical staffs in Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at Bethesda agreed about that.
Posner's problems have compounded. Repeated charges of plagiarism have haunted him and led to his dismissal as chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast. The Warren Report obviously needed a sturdier champion. In 2007 Norton published Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, the author of Helter Skelter. At 1612 pages this eight-pound tome is unsuitable for bedtime reading. Any attempt to verify its contents becomes agonizing because the notes are purportedly to be found in the attached CD, a collating kerfuffle even the most dedicated savant would attempt to duck.
As I attempted to indicate in my notes for the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar, Bugliosi seems to think he has solved the primary inconsistencies through the sort of reasoning he takes to the medical evidence, noting with no small bemusement that "the most honest people in the world can think they saw the darnedest things." Parkland Hospital surgeon Robert McClelland appeared to remain "fixated on this large gaping hole in the back of the president's head," for all Bugliosi's earnest efforts to persuade McClelland that the wound must have been delusional. Bugliosi tracks virtually hour by hour Oswald's return to New Orleans the summer of 1963 but leaves out Oswald's well-verified dance with Guy Banister, David Ferrie and the rest of the gnomes around whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison would build his case. Like Posner, Bugliosi's method remains mostly to insult or dismiss his critics rather than come up with even a shred of meaningful counter-evidence.
The truth is, many have come forward. What happened on November 22, 1963 is reasonably clear. Why this happened -- whose geopolitical purposes were served, who benefited in the short run, who financed our national nightmare -- even all this is slowly coming into view.
But that must wait for another winter.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
So here we are, about to go to the mat for the last time -- this winter -- with the residual consequences of the JFK assassination. Each inquiry exacts a price. "Most 'respectable' academics, journalists, and news organizations don't want to get near the matter, lest they be labeled conspiracy nuts," Russ Baker points out early in his study of the connections among the oil boys, the Bushes and the CIA. Family of Secrets tracks decades of off-stage plotting intended to bring down successive administrations, what Peter Dale Scott has called the "deep politics" surrounding the murder of JFK.
As competent investigators have picked the Warren Commission Report apart, and writers in this field have been relegated to the badlands of publishing, several establishment publishers have stepped forward in the belated attempt to recusscitate the Warren Commission's moribund conclusions. Whatever credibility the Report once had got banged around throughout even the comparatively peripheral hearings conducted by Senators Schweiker and Church during the mid-1970s. The remnants got torn up pretty badly when the Select Committee on Assassinations went to work in the House of Representatives.
The counterattack was mounted in 1993, when Random House published Gerald Posner's Case Closed.
Rather than reinforcing the demonstrably skewed evidence the Warren Report depended on, Posner seemed to spend his energy attempting to discredit individual critics of the Report with whom he preferred to disagree -- after months lost poring over the notional material J. Edgar Hoover concocted in FBI archives -- along with key witnesses. Anthony Summers' important interviews with Guy Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, must be discounted entirely because Summers paid her to sit down with him. And besides, Delphine was Banister's mistress. One of the lead investigators on chief counsel Robert Blakey's staff on the House Committee was the astute Gaeton Fonzi, whom Posner dismisses as "an unusual choice for an inquiry" because he had written magazine pieces dubious about the Report before and after the House Committee announced its verdict: There had indeed been a conspiracy. Better a rubber stamp, a skeptic is unconscionable on a staff conducting an investigaztion. No amount of testimony holds up for Posner. A mere six witnesses saw Oswald and mob pilot David Ferrie together in Clinton, Louisiana the summer of 1963? Out of hundreds interviewed? Not good enough for Posner, no matter what the House Assassination Committee concluded.
In time Posner himself would run into trouble. Individuals he quoted denied that they had ever talked with the author, while both of the pathologists who had conducted autopsies on JFK's remains insisted they had not said anything like what Posner quoted them as saying. Kennedy had been shot from the front, a hollow-point bullet had blown out the back of his skull, and the medical staffs in Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at Bethesda agreed about that.
Posner's problems have compounded. Repeated charges of plagiarism have haunted him and led to his dismissal as chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast. The Warren Report obviously needed a sturdier champion. In 2007 Norton published Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, the author of Helter Skelter. At 1612 pages this eight-pound tome is unsuitable for bedtime reading. Any attempt to verify its contents becomes agonizing because the notes are purportedly to be found in the attached CD, a collating kerfuffle even the most dedicated savant would attempt to duck.
As I attempted to indicate in my notes for the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar, Bugliosi seems to think he has solved the primary inconsistencies through the sort of reasoning he takes to the medical evidence, noting with no small bemusement that "the most honest people in the world can think they saw the darnedest things." Parkland Hospital surgeon Robert McClelland appeared to remain "fixated on this large gaping hole in the back of the president's head," for all Bugliosi's earnest efforts to persuade McClelland that the wound must have been delusional. Bugliosi tracks virtually hour by hour Oswald's return to New Orleans the summer of 1963 but leaves out Oswald's well-verified dance with Guy Banister, David Ferrie and the rest of the gnomes around whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison would build his case. Like Posner, Bugliosi's method remains mostly to insult or dismiss his critics rather than come up with even a shred of meaningful counter-evidence.
The truth is, many have come forward. What happened on November 22, 1963 is reasonably clear. Why this happened -- whose geopolitical purposes were served, who benefited in the short run, who financed our national nightmare -- even all this is slowly coming into view.
But that must wait for another winter.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
Monday, February 27, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? The Critics
Countrysnoops,
Hello again. Back after it, turning over several of the more unfamiliar rocks of history in hopes of identifying the reptiles who deranged our history.
I think I began to understand why the killing of JFK has gone so long without conclusive investigation once my own treatment of the event, Chapter XIX of Bobby and J. Edgar, began to pull in flak. Characteristically -- as when it helped get the drums beating prior to the invasion of Iraq -- The New York Times has continued to defend the Warren Commission conclusions, emphasized at the time by its liberal drum-beater Anthony Lewis. A lot of history is agreed upon at Georgetown cocktail parties.
When Bobby and J. Edgar appeared in 2007 the review fell to David Corn, stammering out opinions at the time as a punster for The Nation. Having identified the stricken president as "a sex-crazed, drug-dependent, ailment-ridden party-boy politician," Corn attenpted to delegitimize my book on the basis of my having interviewed only fifty-four new subjects, "about a quarter of them..authors and journalists...." Since Jack Kennedy started out as a journalist after World War II, and a number of his closest friends were writers, I couldn't quite figure out how their profession disqualified these sources, especially since many of them worked in Kennedy's administration. Why bring up the hundreds of interviews supporting my two prior books about Edward Kennedy? But these are apparently finer distinctions than Corn can permit himself.
Had he looked at the seventy-two pages of source notes in the back -- thousands of entries, a great many from the FBI files and Kennedy family archives to which I had unlimited access -- he would have known why many informed reviewers and commentators tend to attach the adjective "meticulous" to my preparation of material.
After attacking the appropriateness of my bibliographical sources -- almost all of which were books written by players, people in the room, as the Kennedy years were unfolding, and many of whom -- Bobby Baker, Robert Maheu, Richard Goodwin, et. al. -- I took pains to pin them down with extensive interviews of my own. Corn asserts that "when the book reaches Nov. 22, 1963..it truly jumps the rails." I cite "one book of uncertain credibility" on a statement of Gerald Ford -- since backed up on the Watergate tapes by Richard Nixon -- , while books written by the Giancana family and based on first-hand testimony by the Giancana's daughter and nephew and brother, Corn dismisses as "unreliable."
Corn -- like my other critics -- apparently cannot trouble himself to produce one morsel of evidence to counter the hard and detailed specifics -- ballistic, surgical, autopsy, documentary, forensic -- that I was able to produce in support of my interpretation of events. Always the dismissive adjective -- "sleazy, eye-popping, discredited" -- in lieu of any investment of serious journalistic digging to counter my reading. Much easier to brush it off. The Attorney General of Texas testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald was on the FBI payroll? Well, J. Edgar Hoover says he wasn't, so that's that. What Corn -- and The Times -- appear to maintain their confidence in is the inherently contradictory and largely unsubstiantated case thrown together in the months following the Kennedy assassination against a dupe dispatched promptly by a Mafia hireling before Oswald could be interrogated anywhere near a court.
Davis Corn has been around a while. Earlier in his career he wrote a book about Ted Shackley, a hard-nosed operations specialist for the CIA who ran "low-intensity" wars during the sixties and seventies, a covert-warfare manager I knew fairly well. We had lunch regularly when I was in D.C. researching The Old Boys. Corn's book was spotty, poorly focused, and missed the substance of Shackley's career while subsisting on inaccurate rumors. Corn met Shackley once, at Shackley's insistence exclusively in the presence of Shackley's lawyers.
On July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Louis Stokes, called a press conference to announce the committee's final report after almost a decade spent investigating the murder of JFK. The report specified that "Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." There had been a conspiracy. Media across the spectrum scrambled to ignore or dismiss these results. A new wave of Warren Commission apologists was soon being lined up to hit the beaches of public opinion.
But that must wait until our next blog, Countrysnoops. Enjoy what's left of February.
Burton Hersh
Hello again. Back after it, turning over several of the more unfamiliar rocks of history in hopes of identifying the reptiles who deranged our history.
I think I began to understand why the killing of JFK has gone so long without conclusive investigation once my own treatment of the event, Chapter XIX of Bobby and J. Edgar, began to pull in flak. Characteristically -- as when it helped get the drums beating prior to the invasion of Iraq -- The New York Times has continued to defend the Warren Commission conclusions, emphasized at the time by its liberal drum-beater Anthony Lewis. A lot of history is agreed upon at Georgetown cocktail parties.
When Bobby and J. Edgar appeared in 2007 the review fell to David Corn, stammering out opinions at the time as a punster for The Nation. Having identified the stricken president as "a sex-crazed, drug-dependent, ailment-ridden party-boy politician," Corn attenpted to delegitimize my book on the basis of my having interviewed only fifty-four new subjects, "about a quarter of them..authors and journalists...." Since Jack Kennedy started out as a journalist after World War II, and a number of his closest friends were writers, I couldn't quite figure out how their profession disqualified these sources, especially since many of them worked in Kennedy's administration. Why bring up the hundreds of interviews supporting my two prior books about Edward Kennedy? But these are apparently finer distinctions than Corn can permit himself.
Had he looked at the seventy-two pages of source notes in the back -- thousands of entries, a great many from the FBI files and Kennedy family archives to which I had unlimited access -- he would have known why many informed reviewers and commentators tend to attach the adjective "meticulous" to my preparation of material.
After attacking the appropriateness of my bibliographical sources -- almost all of which were books written by players, people in the room, as the Kennedy years were unfolding, and many of whom -- Bobby Baker, Robert Maheu, Richard Goodwin, et. al. -- I took pains to pin them down with extensive interviews of my own. Corn asserts that "when the book reaches Nov. 22, 1963..it truly jumps the rails." I cite "one book of uncertain credibility" on a statement of Gerald Ford -- since backed up on the Watergate tapes by Richard Nixon -- , while books written by the Giancana family and based on first-hand testimony by the Giancana's daughter and nephew and brother, Corn dismisses as "unreliable."
Corn -- like my other critics -- apparently cannot trouble himself to produce one morsel of evidence to counter the hard and detailed specifics -- ballistic, surgical, autopsy, documentary, forensic -- that I was able to produce in support of my interpretation of events. Always the dismissive adjective -- "sleazy, eye-popping, discredited" -- in lieu of any investment of serious journalistic digging to counter my reading. Much easier to brush it off. The Attorney General of Texas testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald was on the FBI payroll? Well, J. Edgar Hoover says he wasn't, so that's that. What Corn -- and The Times -- appear to maintain their confidence in is the inherently contradictory and largely unsubstiantated case thrown together in the months following the Kennedy assassination against a dupe dispatched promptly by a Mafia hireling before Oswald could be interrogated anywhere near a court.
Davis Corn has been around a while. Earlier in his career he wrote a book about Ted Shackley, a hard-nosed operations specialist for the CIA who ran "low-intensity" wars during the sixties and seventies, a covert-warfare manager I knew fairly well. We had lunch regularly when I was in D.C. researching The Old Boys. Corn's book was spotty, poorly focused, and missed the substance of Shackley's career while subsisting on inaccurate rumors. Corn met Shackley once, at Shackley's insistence exclusively in the presence of Shackley's lawyers.
On July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Louis Stokes, called a press conference to announce the committee's final report after almost a decade spent investigating the murder of JFK. The report specified that "Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." There had been a conspiracy. Media across the spectrum scrambled to ignore or dismiss these results. A new wave of Warren Commission apologists was soon being lined up to hit the beaches of public opinion.
But that must wait until our next blog, Countrysnoops. Enjoy what's left of February.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? V
Countryconspirators,
So. Here we are again, circling reality a half century later and hoping enough dots will come up to connect. The following might help set the focal distance.
Last week I tried to tip in enough detail about Lee Harvey Oswald to suggest that he was neither a solitary nut case taking potshots at the presidential motorcade through heavy foliage nor an innocent passerby, essentially unconnected to the events of the afternoon. Oswald was a player -- a minor player, complicitous in the anti-Castro intelligence scrimmaging of the previous summer in New Orleans and apparently in touch with the cast of underworld technicians and mid-level Agency operatives that converged on Dallas that weekend in November to welcome the president.
CIA files remain largely embargoed, but FBI records tell quite a lot. I have to conclude that the Bureau came fairly late to the party, and got dragged in mostly for the cover-up. What could be more embarrassing for Hoover, after all, than to have to admit that Oswald was on the Bureau's payroll for a year before the shooting? Early Bureau warnings that Kennedy was at risk had headed off motorcades in Chicago and Miami -- the rabid segregationist Joseph Milteer had inadvertently alerted the Bureau. Combing out Bureau records while researching Bobby and J. Edgar, I myself ran into extremely telling documents. A regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, who had since 1956 been flying the top "strategizer" for the Chicago Outfit, Johnny Rosselli, on Company errands, asserted in an affidavit that Rosselli was on "a mission, we were told, to abort a pending attempt on the President's life...."
Another heavy clue turns up in the transcription of a telephone call between LBJ and Hoover the day after the assassination. The freshly sworn-in president wants more information about Oswald's purported visit to Mexico City in September. "No, that's one angle that's very confusing for this reason," J. Edgar responds. ""We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Empassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and tape do not correspond" to Oswald. It had started to dawn on individuals at the top of the government that the scenario they were depending on to hang this crime on Oswald was already falling apart.
What makes the most sense is the projection developed by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in Ultimate Sacrifice. Kennedy administration officials as high as ex-Secretary of State Dean Rusk have acknowledged U.S. military planning -- troops training -- throughout the Caribbean just then in anticipation of "C-Day." This meant another attempt to invade Cuba late in 1963, to expunge Communism "ninety miles from America's shore," as JFK so often put it, and guarantee the president's reelection in 1964. What was obviously needed was a pretext, a "bloody shirt" with which to enrage the citizenry and assure widespread public backing.
An attempted assassination of the president ought to light the fuse. The "legend" the disinformation specialists around the Agency had concocted for Oswald -- a fervent "Fair Play for Cuba" advocate, purported to conspire with a Soviet assassination expert in Mexico City -- left him the perfect fall guy. But Johnny Rosselli's boss, Sam Giancana, Al Capone's successor -- after single-handedly raising enough money and stuffing enough ballot boxes in Illinois to get JFK elected as a personal favor to well-connected old Joe -- found himself hammered day and night by tough guys from Bob Kennedy's Justice Department. Along with Johnny Rosselli, Giancana sent down James Files and Charlie Nicoretti, his two best button men, who took out the president. Giancana reasoned that the government was far too implicated by then to blow the whistle, and he was right. The planners still had Oswald, at least as long as he never got to trial.
All this is well documented in Bobby and J. Edgar. Perhaps the most tragic survivor was Robert Kennedy. I knew Bob fairly well the final couple of years of his life. He was profoundly troubled. Often -- and correctly -- referred to as the "co-president" during his brother's days in power -- "I couldn't have done it without him," Bobby liked to gibe, Bob was a frustrated and defensive senator. Catholic that he was, guilt played a very large part. In 1967, interviewed by Jack Anderson, Rosselli concluded that "Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." He added that the oil boys put up the money for this big-store operation.
Bobby wanted Castro's scalp, perhaps a little too badly, as he himself would remark sadly while running for president. During the Mongoose years Robert Kennedy had worked closely with Johnny Rosselli, who had been busting heads and arranging payoffs for Joseph P. Kennedy since the nineteen-twenties. But whatever
either Robert Kennedy or the Agency had scripted that afternoon in Dallas, it was Sam Giancana who seems to have decided the outcome.
Once it had happened, everybody involved started shoveling. Robert Kennedy recommended Allen Dulles -- whom his brother had canned for incompetence -- and John McCloy, the go-along voice of The Establishment. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate the New Orleans prelude to the assassination, Bob sent his investigative attack dog Walter Sheridan down in the role of producer of an NBC documentary to discredit Garrison's witnesses. Bob moved his brother's brain around -- an early examination might have determined the angle of the entry wound and the character of the bullet -- for years. One day he himself would get at the truth behind the loss of his brother, Bobby assured the curious. That was apparently enough.
One additional note. This President's Day would mark the eightieth birthday of Edward M. Kennedy, were he still with us. I wish he were. His compelling personality and unique knowledge of even the finest detail of pending legislation made the Congress workable for decades. He had his susceptibilities, but he had so much to offer the country that his loss proved crippling, immediately. I knew him from his undergraduate days in college, wrote about him for four decades, and ultimately put together Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography. Most critics have concluded that it is definitive, and I hope they are right. I expect to point up his amazing record on these pages before long. Let us commemorate here his life and career.
Burton Hersh
So. Here we are again, circling reality a half century later and hoping enough dots will come up to connect. The following might help set the focal distance.
Last week I tried to tip in enough detail about Lee Harvey Oswald to suggest that he was neither a solitary nut case taking potshots at the presidential motorcade through heavy foliage nor an innocent passerby, essentially unconnected to the events of the afternoon. Oswald was a player -- a minor player, complicitous in the anti-Castro intelligence scrimmaging of the previous summer in New Orleans and apparently in touch with the cast of underworld technicians and mid-level Agency operatives that converged on Dallas that weekend in November to welcome the president.
CIA files remain largely embargoed, but FBI records tell quite a lot. I have to conclude that the Bureau came fairly late to the party, and got dragged in mostly for the cover-up. What could be more embarrassing for Hoover, after all, than to have to admit that Oswald was on the Bureau's payroll for a year before the shooting? Early Bureau warnings that Kennedy was at risk had headed off motorcades in Chicago and Miami -- the rabid segregationist Joseph Milteer had inadvertently alerted the Bureau. Combing out Bureau records while researching Bobby and J. Edgar, I myself ran into extremely telling documents. A regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, who had since 1956 been flying the top "strategizer" for the Chicago Outfit, Johnny Rosselli, on Company errands, asserted in an affidavit that Rosselli was on "a mission, we were told, to abort a pending attempt on the President's life...."
Another heavy clue turns up in the transcription of a telephone call between LBJ and Hoover the day after the assassination. The freshly sworn-in president wants more information about Oswald's purported visit to Mexico City in September. "No, that's one angle that's very confusing for this reason," J. Edgar responds. ""We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Empassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and tape do not correspond" to Oswald. It had started to dawn on individuals at the top of the government that the scenario they were depending on to hang this crime on Oswald was already falling apart.
What makes the most sense is the projection developed by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in Ultimate Sacrifice. Kennedy administration officials as high as ex-Secretary of State Dean Rusk have acknowledged U.S. military planning -- troops training -- throughout the Caribbean just then in anticipation of "C-Day." This meant another attempt to invade Cuba late in 1963, to expunge Communism "ninety miles from America's shore," as JFK so often put it, and guarantee the president's reelection in 1964. What was obviously needed was a pretext, a "bloody shirt" with which to enrage the citizenry and assure widespread public backing.
An attempted assassination of the president ought to light the fuse. The "legend" the disinformation specialists around the Agency had concocted for Oswald -- a fervent "Fair Play for Cuba" advocate, purported to conspire with a Soviet assassination expert in Mexico City -- left him the perfect fall guy. But Johnny Rosselli's boss, Sam Giancana, Al Capone's successor -- after single-handedly raising enough money and stuffing enough ballot boxes in Illinois to get JFK elected as a personal favor to well-connected old Joe -- found himself hammered day and night by tough guys from Bob Kennedy's Justice Department. Along with Johnny Rosselli, Giancana sent down James Files and Charlie Nicoretti, his two best button men, who took out the president. Giancana reasoned that the government was far too implicated by then to blow the whistle, and he was right. The planners still had Oswald, at least as long as he never got to trial.
All this is well documented in Bobby and J. Edgar. Perhaps the most tragic survivor was Robert Kennedy. I knew Bob fairly well the final couple of years of his life. He was profoundly troubled. Often -- and correctly -- referred to as the "co-president" during his brother's days in power -- "I couldn't have done it without him," Bobby liked to gibe, Bob was a frustrated and defensive senator. Catholic that he was, guilt played a very large part. In 1967, interviewed by Jack Anderson, Rosselli concluded that "Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." He added that the oil boys put up the money for this big-store operation.
Bobby wanted Castro's scalp, perhaps a little too badly, as he himself would remark sadly while running for president. During the Mongoose years Robert Kennedy had worked closely with Johnny Rosselli, who had been busting heads and arranging payoffs for Joseph P. Kennedy since the nineteen-twenties. But whatever
either Robert Kennedy or the Agency had scripted that afternoon in Dallas, it was Sam Giancana who seems to have decided the outcome.
Once it had happened, everybody involved started shoveling. Robert Kennedy recommended Allen Dulles -- whom his brother had canned for incompetence -- and John McCloy, the go-along voice of The Establishment. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate the New Orleans prelude to the assassination, Bob sent his investigative attack dog Walter Sheridan down in the role of producer of an NBC documentary to discredit Garrison's witnesses. Bob moved his brother's brain around -- an early examination might have determined the angle of the entry wound and the character of the bullet -- for years. One day he himself would get at the truth behind the loss of his brother, Bobby assured the curious. That was apparently enough.
One additional note. This President's Day would mark the eightieth birthday of Edward M. Kennedy, were he still with us. I wish he were. His compelling personality and unique knowledge of even the finest detail of pending legislation made the Congress workable for decades. He had his susceptibilities, but he had so much to offer the country that his loss proved crippling, immediately. I knew him from his undergraduate days in college, wrote about him for four decades, and ultimately put together Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography. Most critics have concluded that it is definitive, and I hope they are right. I expect to point up his amazing record on these pages before long. Let us commemorate here his life and career.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? IV
Countryculprits,
So here we are, closing in on it, tiptoeing deeper and deeper into The Heart of Darkness. This week I want to take a closer look at Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either the primary perpetrator or peripheral to the JFK assassination, depending on which camp you've managed to join at this point. Either the solitary demonic shooter or a fall guy caught up in the assassination.
The flunkies who drafted the Warren Commission Report tended to treat Oswald as some kind of twitchy obsessive, extremely unstable, a low-rent cultural drifter who acted on impulse that day in Dallas to claim his place in history. All this bears very little resemblance to what becomes apparent upon a careful examination of Oswald's authentic biography. To anybody familiar with the processes through which the intelligence community develops its assets, Oswald's undercover history probably begins with his months as a Marine stationed at the U.S. Naval Facility outside Atsugi, Japan, from where the U-2s that overflew the Soviet Union originated. Half-educated, highly neurotic, Oswald abruptly developed such an interest in Russia that he buckled down and picked up this very difficult language in his off-hours, arranged for an early discharge -- not an easy thing to get during the Cold-War fifties -- and defected by way of Helsinki, proclaiming to the English-language press once he had made his way to Moscow that he had a lot of U-2 technology to share with the Soviets.
This was an era when the CIA was scratching around somewhat desperately for whatever it could find out about the "denied areas," the Soviet Union especially. CIA Counterintelligence, overseen by James J. Angleton, had a defector-redefector program designed to infiltrate people into Russia and then bring them back with whatever they could pick up. Jane Roman, who helped run this arrangement, indicated to me when I was researching The Old Boys that Oswald had participated. Interestingly, after flagrantly announcing that he was in Moscow to sell out vital American secrets, Oswald was permitted by U.S. authorities to come back immediately when largely on a whim he decided to, no fuss at all.
Back in the United States Oswald skipped from job to job in Texas while establishing a close working relationship with that mysterious Baltic Baron George de Mohrenschild, an important CIA asset in the Domestic Contact Program. By the spring and summer of 1963 his handlers had obviously decided that Oswald was ready to play a more meaningful part here. He turned up in New Orleans -- where Oswald had grown up and where his uncle, "Dutz" Murret, was an important functionary in the Carlos Marcello branch of the Cosa Nostra. According to the CIA case officer who ran him, Hunter Leake, Oswald helped out with CIA training operations on Lake Pontchartrain while doubling as an agent provocateur around The Big Easy, promoting his Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I have gone deeply into all of this in the text and the second-edition expanded notes for Bobby and J. Edgar.
Back in the Dallas area Oswald seems to have bounced around throughout that fateful summer and fall of 1963. I interviewed Ruth Paine, a no-nonsense Quaker lady who sublet an apartment to Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, and their daughter on the Paine property on the outskirts of Dallas; as the fall wore on Oswald rented an in-town place near the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where he had started a job. The previous summer Ruth Paine, concerned about Marina's well-being, had visited the Oswalds in their squalid little flat in New Orleans. Like so many others, Ruth found Oswald abrupt, hard to track, difficult to mother, and utterly self-interested. She remembered him toying with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he is so often pictured holding, and in the end she concluded that Oswald was indeed involved in the shooting of John Kennedy.
In all probability he was, one way or another. A scenario was quite clearly being worked up with Lee Harvey Oswald in a major role. Whichever interests were masterminding the event regarded Oswald as available, serviceable. The key here was creating a persona -- not always populated by the tangible Oswald -- who would seem to be taking a series of steps that would leave him convincingly in position to fire a weapon out the sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository while John Kennedy was passing below. Thus it became convenient to generate one or more stand-ins, quasi-Oswalds, to sign Oswald's nom-de-guerre, Alek Hidell, at the post office for delivery of the identifiable weapon, or storm around Mexico City to enlist a Soviet assassination specialist, or show up at a soiree for revenge-seeking Cubans. As with so many Agency operations, the important thing at that stage was to flesh out the back story.
A great deal of important detail comes through in the extensive private investigation of the JFK killing undertaken by a Dutch businessman, Willem Dankbaar, who hired three veteran FBI retirees to track down anybody implicated in the tragedy and sort the whole thing out. The great find was James Files, already implicated in books by the Giancana family, finishing out a full life of inspired bloodletting in the Illinois State penetentiary. Long a dependable button man for the Outfit, Files claimed to have fired the hollow-point bullet from the Grassy Knoll that blew Kennedy's brains out.
As interesting to assassination buffs was Files' rendition of events during the week preceding the shooting. Files maintained that he had been flown into Dallas from Chicago and squired around the city by Oswald, who Files knew in any case after collaborating with him earlier in the year running submachine guns to the Cuban resistance. Oswald supposedly took Files to a rifle range to sharpen up his eye and recommended the vantage point on the Grassy Knoll. Then Files drove Johnny Rosselli -- flown into Fort Worth by a regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee -- to a meeting in a Fort Worth Pancake House with Jack Ruby.
Another of those borderline-underworld types so useful to the Agency who showed up in Dallas was Chauncy Holt. Also a dependable pilot, Holt procured the Secret Service badges-of-the-day flashed by the ersatz Secret Service operatives who shooed away the curious from the Grassy Knoll before and after the muzzle flash there. A lot of technical talent had started to materialize in Dallas that week.
Everybody had his contribution. Part of Oswald's utility stemmed from his enhanced -- and deniable -- background as low-level functionary for several federal agencies. Apart from what by 1963 had turned into a wide-ranging assortment of covert chores for CIA, Oswald had been picking up a regular paycheck as an FBI informant. Stymied in his efforts to conduct a proper state investigation of the Kennedy assassination -- police paraffin tests had revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't fired a rifle the day of the shooting -- Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr -- see Wikipedia -- would testify before the Warren Commission that "Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November 1963." Hoover shrugged his shoulders, and denied everything.
By then, of course, what had probably been intended and what had happened that noontime in Dallas had diverged, catastrophically. The game of creating a pretext for invading Cuba had turned in moments into the game of bureaucratic survival. Lee Harvey Oswald would be the first to be sacrificed.
For chapter and verse, there will be another installment. Wait!
Burton Hersh
So here we are, closing in on it, tiptoeing deeper and deeper into The Heart of Darkness. This week I want to take a closer look at Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either the primary perpetrator or peripheral to the JFK assassination, depending on which camp you've managed to join at this point. Either the solitary demonic shooter or a fall guy caught up in the assassination.
The flunkies who drafted the Warren Commission Report tended to treat Oswald as some kind of twitchy obsessive, extremely unstable, a low-rent cultural drifter who acted on impulse that day in Dallas to claim his place in history. All this bears very little resemblance to what becomes apparent upon a careful examination of Oswald's authentic biography. To anybody familiar with the processes through which the intelligence community develops its assets, Oswald's undercover history probably begins with his months as a Marine stationed at the U.S. Naval Facility outside Atsugi, Japan, from where the U-2s that overflew the Soviet Union originated. Half-educated, highly neurotic, Oswald abruptly developed such an interest in Russia that he buckled down and picked up this very difficult language in his off-hours, arranged for an early discharge -- not an easy thing to get during the Cold-War fifties -- and defected by way of Helsinki, proclaiming to the English-language press once he had made his way to Moscow that he had a lot of U-2 technology to share with the Soviets.
This was an era when the CIA was scratching around somewhat desperately for whatever it could find out about the "denied areas," the Soviet Union especially. CIA Counterintelligence, overseen by James J. Angleton, had a defector-redefector program designed to infiltrate people into Russia and then bring them back with whatever they could pick up. Jane Roman, who helped run this arrangement, indicated to me when I was researching The Old Boys that Oswald had participated. Interestingly, after flagrantly announcing that he was in Moscow to sell out vital American secrets, Oswald was permitted by U.S. authorities to come back immediately when largely on a whim he decided to, no fuss at all.
Back in the United States Oswald skipped from job to job in Texas while establishing a close working relationship with that mysterious Baltic Baron George de Mohrenschild, an important CIA asset in the Domestic Contact Program. By the spring and summer of 1963 his handlers had obviously decided that Oswald was ready to play a more meaningful part here. He turned up in New Orleans -- where Oswald had grown up and where his uncle, "Dutz" Murret, was an important functionary in the Carlos Marcello branch of the Cosa Nostra. According to the CIA case officer who ran him, Hunter Leake, Oswald helped out with CIA training operations on Lake Pontchartrain while doubling as an agent provocateur around The Big Easy, promoting his Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I have gone deeply into all of this in the text and the second-edition expanded notes for Bobby and J. Edgar.
Back in the Dallas area Oswald seems to have bounced around throughout that fateful summer and fall of 1963. I interviewed Ruth Paine, a no-nonsense Quaker lady who sublet an apartment to Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, and their daughter on the Paine property on the outskirts of Dallas; as the fall wore on Oswald rented an in-town place near the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where he had started a job. The previous summer Ruth Paine, concerned about Marina's well-being, had visited the Oswalds in their squalid little flat in New Orleans. Like so many others, Ruth found Oswald abrupt, hard to track, difficult to mother, and utterly self-interested. She remembered him toying with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he is so often pictured holding, and in the end she concluded that Oswald was indeed involved in the shooting of John Kennedy.
In all probability he was, one way or another. A scenario was quite clearly being worked up with Lee Harvey Oswald in a major role. Whichever interests were masterminding the event regarded Oswald as available, serviceable. The key here was creating a persona -- not always populated by the tangible Oswald -- who would seem to be taking a series of steps that would leave him convincingly in position to fire a weapon out the sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository while John Kennedy was passing below. Thus it became convenient to generate one or more stand-ins, quasi-Oswalds, to sign Oswald's nom-de-guerre, Alek Hidell, at the post office for delivery of the identifiable weapon, or storm around Mexico City to enlist a Soviet assassination specialist, or show up at a soiree for revenge-seeking Cubans. As with so many Agency operations, the important thing at that stage was to flesh out the back story.
A great deal of important detail comes through in the extensive private investigation of the JFK killing undertaken by a Dutch businessman, Willem Dankbaar, who hired three veteran FBI retirees to track down anybody implicated in the tragedy and sort the whole thing out. The great find was James Files, already implicated in books by the Giancana family, finishing out a full life of inspired bloodletting in the Illinois State penetentiary. Long a dependable button man for the Outfit, Files claimed to have fired the hollow-point bullet from the Grassy Knoll that blew Kennedy's brains out.
As interesting to assassination buffs was Files' rendition of events during the week preceding the shooting. Files maintained that he had been flown into Dallas from Chicago and squired around the city by Oswald, who Files knew in any case after collaborating with him earlier in the year running submachine guns to the Cuban resistance. Oswald supposedly took Files to a rifle range to sharpen up his eye and recommended the vantage point on the Grassy Knoll. Then Files drove Johnny Rosselli -- flown into Fort Worth by a regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee -- to a meeting in a Fort Worth Pancake House with Jack Ruby.
Another of those borderline-underworld types so useful to the Agency who showed up in Dallas was Chauncy Holt. Also a dependable pilot, Holt procured the Secret Service badges-of-the-day flashed by the ersatz Secret Service operatives who shooed away the curious from the Grassy Knoll before and after the muzzle flash there. A lot of technical talent had started to materialize in Dallas that week.
Everybody had his contribution. Part of Oswald's utility stemmed from his enhanced -- and deniable -- background as low-level functionary for several federal agencies. Apart from what by 1963 had turned into a wide-ranging assortment of covert chores for CIA, Oswald had been picking up a regular paycheck as an FBI informant. Stymied in his efforts to conduct a proper state investigation of the Kennedy assassination -- police paraffin tests had revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't fired a rifle the day of the shooting -- Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr -- see Wikipedia -- would testify before the Warren Commission that "Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November 1963." Hoover shrugged his shoulders, and denied everything.
By then, of course, what had probably been intended and what had happened that noontime in Dallas had diverged, catastrophically. The game of creating a pretext for invading Cuba had turned in moments into the game of bureaucratic survival. Lee Harvey Oswald would be the first to be sacrificed.
For chapter and verse, there will be another installment. Wait!
Burton Hersh
Friday, February 3, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? III
Countrycynics,
We move on now to another phase of the investigation. What happened that noon in Dallas? A comment came in from one of you out there named "Richard," semi-nameless but right to the point. "It's very unlikely that the CIA or any government entity played a role in JFK's murder," he notes. "Those institutions are hardwired to wreck havoc in somebody else's sandbox." Then he cites Richard Posner, yet, on Oswald's guilt.
"Richard" is probably right, in a way, and wrong here. In Bobby and J. Edgar I laid out the extent to which, in 1963, the CIA had bases to support Operation Mongoose all around the Caribbean rim, from Opa Locka near Miami to Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. As I hope I established last week, at the operational level distinctions between CIA operatives and talent recruited from penitentiaries and exile groups and the executive level of well-integrated gangland organizations tended to fall away. The Church and Schweiker Committee investigations in the Senate during the mid-seventies staked all that out. Senator Richard Schweiker would later comment to Mark Lane that, under investigation, the Warren Committee Report " had collapsed like a house of cards...snuffed out before it began ..by senior officials who directed the cover-up." Insofar as CIA involvement is concerned, the real question is where, at what level, the traditional compartmentation and the sharing of information on a need-to-know basis breaks down and responsibility begins.
When the word of his brother's shooting reached him at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy's first impulse was to call in the director of the CIA, whom his brother had installed to replace Allen Dulles in September of 1961, the California industrialist John McCone, and demand of McCone: "Did you kill my brother?" McCone, a somber Catholic layman and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, never quite got the hang of intelligence work -- partly because his savvier underlings made sure they told him very little -- and assured the attorney general that he had not. Next down the chain of command was the head of the Directorate of Plans -- the Ivy-League gentlemen involved at that stage were still too delicate to call their shop Operations - , Richard Helms. The fact was, the senior intelligence staff around the Agency never really liked the administration's plotting against Cuba. As I noted earlier, Helms sat out the Bay of Pigs. His right-hand man, Sam Halpern, whom I always found amazingly outspoken when I interviewed him for The Old Boys, later commented that "Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy's obsession with Fidel....It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge."
By now we are getting down to the operational stalwarts. Perhaps the key figure here was E. Howard Hunt, "Eduardo," a snobby covert-warfare adept who moved over from his post as a staff assistant to Helms to help train the leadership of Brigade 2506, the fifteen hundred or so Cuban irregulars sacrificed in the feckless invasion. Hunt would remain very close to the Cuban survivors, as would David Atlee Phillips, who roamed the Western Hemisphere for decades, convulsing democracies objectionable to Washington.
I knew Phillips fairly well: early in the eighties I was a founding member of the David Atlee Phillips New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phillips showed up at our weekend meetings, regularly. A former actor, Phillips made sure to look the part -- hat brim pulled down, trenchcoat, dark aviator glasses, a terse, insider delivery, a dedicated chain-smoker. An English publication accused Phillips of having had a hand in the Kennedy assassination; Phillips sued in England, and won. Phillips always professed to be very indignant at the charge that he or the Agency might have taken out an American president. Failing finally, Phillips -- who had to have been instrumental in setting up the Mexico City "legend" prior to Oswald's purported visit -- confessed that "My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people."
My own guess at this point is that there was in fact a CIA involvement at a number of points in the big-store operation that resulted in the shooting of John Kennedy in Dallas, but that important individuals like Helms, who never were permitted to get anywhere near the details, realized afterwards that they had been complicit -- if always well insulated, at arms-length -- in the execution of a very sophisticated game plan calculated to achieve an entirely different outcome. Afterwards, the frenzy of cover-your-ass extended halfway across the bureaucracy.
How this could be must wait until my next blog.
Be patient,
Burton Hersh
We move on now to another phase of the investigation. What happened that noon in Dallas? A comment came in from one of you out there named "Richard," semi-nameless but right to the point. "It's very unlikely that the CIA or any government entity played a role in JFK's murder," he notes. "Those institutions are hardwired to wreck havoc in somebody else's sandbox." Then he cites Richard Posner, yet, on Oswald's guilt.
"Richard" is probably right, in a way, and wrong here. In Bobby and J. Edgar I laid out the extent to which, in 1963, the CIA had bases to support Operation Mongoose all around the Caribbean rim, from Opa Locka near Miami to Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. As I hope I established last week, at the operational level distinctions between CIA operatives and talent recruited from penitentiaries and exile groups and the executive level of well-integrated gangland organizations tended to fall away. The Church and Schweiker Committee investigations in the Senate during the mid-seventies staked all that out. Senator Richard Schweiker would later comment to Mark Lane that, under investigation, the Warren Committee Report " had collapsed like a house of cards...snuffed out before it began ..by senior officials who directed the cover-up." Insofar as CIA involvement is concerned, the real question is where, at what level, the traditional compartmentation and the sharing of information on a need-to-know basis breaks down and responsibility begins.
When the word of his brother's shooting reached him at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy's first impulse was to call in the director of the CIA, whom his brother had installed to replace Allen Dulles in September of 1961, the California industrialist John McCone, and demand of McCone: "Did you kill my brother?" McCone, a somber Catholic layman and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, never quite got the hang of intelligence work -- partly because his savvier underlings made sure they told him very little -- and assured the attorney general that he had not. Next down the chain of command was the head of the Directorate of Plans -- the Ivy-League gentlemen involved at that stage were still too delicate to call their shop Operations - , Richard Helms. The fact was, the senior intelligence staff around the Agency never really liked the administration's plotting against Cuba. As I noted earlier, Helms sat out the Bay of Pigs. His right-hand man, Sam Halpern, whom I always found amazingly outspoken when I interviewed him for The Old Boys, later commented that "Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy's obsession with Fidel....It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge."
By now we are getting down to the operational stalwarts. Perhaps the key figure here was E. Howard Hunt, "Eduardo," a snobby covert-warfare adept who moved over from his post as a staff assistant to Helms to help train the leadership of Brigade 2506, the fifteen hundred or so Cuban irregulars sacrificed in the feckless invasion. Hunt would remain very close to the Cuban survivors, as would David Atlee Phillips, who roamed the Western Hemisphere for decades, convulsing democracies objectionable to Washington.
I knew Phillips fairly well: early in the eighties I was a founding member of the David Atlee Phillips New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phillips showed up at our weekend meetings, regularly. A former actor, Phillips made sure to look the part -- hat brim pulled down, trenchcoat, dark aviator glasses, a terse, insider delivery, a dedicated chain-smoker. An English publication accused Phillips of having had a hand in the Kennedy assassination; Phillips sued in England, and won. Phillips always professed to be very indignant at the charge that he or the Agency might have taken out an American president. Failing finally, Phillips -- who had to have been instrumental in setting up the Mexico City "legend" prior to Oswald's purported visit -- confessed that "My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people."
My own guess at this point is that there was in fact a CIA involvement at a number of points in the big-store operation that resulted in the shooting of John Kennedy in Dallas, but that important individuals like Helms, who never were permitted to get anywhere near the details, realized afterwards that they had been complicit -- if always well insulated, at arms-length -- in the execution of a very sophisticated game plan calculated to achieve an entirely different outcome. Afterwards, the frenzy of cover-your-ass extended halfway across the bureaucracy.
How this could be must wait until my next blog.
Be patient,
Burton Hersh
Friday, January 27, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? II
Countrysleuths,
My blogette of January 9 on the death of JFK stirred up responses across the cybergalaxy. A correspondent in Germany was excited by my brief autopsy of the JFK assassination and divulged that this blog is developing a following in Central Europe. An acquaintance closer to home was affronted, and demanded to be taken off the access list. One professional skeptic in Minneapolis seemed to question whether Lee Harvey Oswald stopped by the Texas Book Depository that fateful noon primarily to grab a Coke.
A thoughtful follower of this blog and a fellow longtime student of assassination literature, Joyce Hall of Dallas, tended to second what I laid out in the piece but obviously felt that I hadn't gone far enough. She recommended JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas, a personal friend of hers. As it happens, I'd read Douglas' very solid book shortly after it came out and cited in in the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar. Douglas' excellent study bristles with the implication that the JFK assasination was the result of a government-wide conspiracy, the sort of plotting suggested by Oliver Stone in JFK.
The backup villain in this sort of projection is usually the CIA. Having myself spent the nineteen-eighties researching the Agency and inteviewing its top veterans for my 1992 book The Old Boys, over many, many hours of personal contact I had developed a fairly profound relationship with a number of of the CIA's key functionaries during the sixties, especially the operations chieftains Richard Helms and Dick Bissell and that dreaded counterintelligence sparkplug James Jesus Angleton. I had found all three to be as cagey as they needed to be yet in the end individuals of character, worried about our direction under Reagan, with CIA Director William Casey currently ramping up our shadow war with Nicaragua.
By 1963 Bissell was out, along with Allen Dulles, victims of the foul-ups that produced the Bay of Pigs. Helms was running operations. Richard Helms was the consummate bureaucrat -- fussy, protective of his subordinates, sensitive to the intentions of his bosses but willing to dissent when he felt an operation was ill-advised; Helms had risked his career by refusing to attend the planning sessions prior to the Bay of Pigs, which he had decided was doomed from the start. A well-bred Ivy-League moderate, Helms was a regular around the liberal Georgetown social circuit frequented by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- a fellow OSS veteran -- and Senator John Kennedy.
Conspiracy theorists since Mark Lane have tended to lumber the Agency with the primary responsibility for the Kennedy assassination. Mafia participation was secondary; Mob involvement would provide a fallback explanation in case investigators got too close. Court cases and near-deathbed confessions have established that middle-level CIA operations professionals like E. Howard Hunt and Gerry Patrick Hemming did indeed have advance knowledge of some sort of plot involving the president and were in fact moving weapons into Dallas before the shooting. In Mexico City the seasoned CIA disinformation specialist David Attlee Phillips was helping contrive a "legend" around a purported visit in September of 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald during which he ostensibly visited the Soviet Embassy and attempted to speak with KGB assassination honcho Valery V. Kostikov. There were sightings of a supposed second Oswald, often passing under his cover name, Alek Hidell, buying weapons or barging in on Silvia Odio, the daughter of an important anti-Castro activist. The CIA was clearly preparing the ground and setting Oswald up.
The logic here depends on a misperception of the covert warfare culture of the period. The distinction between CIA line operations and bump-and-run mobster-style wipeouts was arbitrary. As Watergate demonstrated, White House-mandated crews like The Plumbers never hesitated to break and enter and pillage and intimidate without benefit of any court order. By agreement with the U.S. government, the top figures in the Cosa Nostra took on a contract to ice Fidel Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was pulling in stipends from both the CIA and the FBI during the months before the president was shot, and Jack Ruby, a regular with the Chicago Outfit, ran guns to Castro as part of an Agency reinsurance scheme before Castro came to power and carried enough cash to Cuba later on to bail Santo Trafficante out of a Cuban lockup. The top Mob "facilitator," Johnny Rosselli, wore the bars of a U.S. Army colonel and worked directly under Bobby Kennedy through much of 1962 while he was attempting to mount raids and sabotage Cuban sugar refineries during Operation Mongoose.
To comprehend what twitched throughout the entire spider's web you will have to look at Chapter XIX of my book Bobby and J. Edgar. My point here is that cross-connections had developed. Senior gangsters had collaborated with government agencies since World War II, when Lucky Luciano arranged with the OSS for his Cosa Nostra pals to take out the Nazi defenses in Sicily ahead of the Allied landings. Once the orders had gone out, no by-the-book intelligence officer had a lot of control.
Individuals like James Files, who probably did shoot the president from the Grassy Knoll, worked directly for the Outfit while dropping out to moonlight for the Agency, in Files' case in Laos. In the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination a senior CIA official at Helms' level obviously felt he had no choice except to try and protect such feckless operatives as Howard Hunt and subsequently, when Lee Harvey Oswald's New Orleans CIA files surfaced, to destroy them immediately. But this does not mean Helms signed off on -- or knew in advance about -- any supposed Agency scheme to murder the president. There is a lot of evidence that the Agency's scenario and the Mob's scenario in Dallas diverged, sharply. On the ground, it was the Mob that pulled the triggers. It was in Helms' nature to protect his subordinates, as he would prove when he stonewalled the Warren Commission and refused to release relevant CIA cables. Years later Helms was caught lying about the Agency's involvement with Chile by a Congressional Committee and heavily fined. This he accepted too, with aplomb.
Invective tends to be simple, but history is complicated. Ransacking FBI files, I came across a good many clues as to what in fact did happen that history-convulsing noon in Dallas. Don't miss my next blog. Meanwhile, you can get my no-holds-barred treatment of the first decades of the CIA, The Old Boys, directly from us, electronically, at a very modest price. For a deeper vision of how the secret world works read my novel The Nature of the Beast. Also available as a document; go to http://www.treefarmbooks.com/
This blog is a little late -- Google crashed into our blogger universe earlier this week and reorganized everything. I hope we are OK now -- and that you all are too.
Burton Hersh
My blogette of January 9 on the death of JFK stirred up responses across the cybergalaxy. A correspondent in Germany was excited by my brief autopsy of the JFK assassination and divulged that this blog is developing a following in Central Europe. An acquaintance closer to home was affronted, and demanded to be taken off the access list. One professional skeptic in Minneapolis seemed to question whether Lee Harvey Oswald stopped by the Texas Book Depository that fateful noon primarily to grab a Coke.
A thoughtful follower of this blog and a fellow longtime student of assassination literature, Joyce Hall of Dallas, tended to second what I laid out in the piece but obviously felt that I hadn't gone far enough. She recommended JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas, a personal friend of hers. As it happens, I'd read Douglas' very solid book shortly after it came out and cited in in the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar. Douglas' excellent study bristles with the implication that the JFK assasination was the result of a government-wide conspiracy, the sort of plotting suggested by Oliver Stone in JFK.
The backup villain in this sort of projection is usually the CIA. Having myself spent the nineteen-eighties researching the Agency and inteviewing its top veterans for my 1992 book The Old Boys, over many, many hours of personal contact I had developed a fairly profound relationship with a number of of the CIA's key functionaries during the sixties, especially the operations chieftains Richard Helms and Dick Bissell and that dreaded counterintelligence sparkplug James Jesus Angleton. I had found all three to be as cagey as they needed to be yet in the end individuals of character, worried about our direction under Reagan, with CIA Director William Casey currently ramping up our shadow war with Nicaragua.
By 1963 Bissell was out, along with Allen Dulles, victims of the foul-ups that produced the Bay of Pigs. Helms was running operations. Richard Helms was the consummate bureaucrat -- fussy, protective of his subordinates, sensitive to the intentions of his bosses but willing to dissent when he felt an operation was ill-advised; Helms had risked his career by refusing to attend the planning sessions prior to the Bay of Pigs, which he had decided was doomed from the start. A well-bred Ivy-League moderate, Helms was a regular around the liberal Georgetown social circuit frequented by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- a fellow OSS veteran -- and Senator John Kennedy.
Conspiracy theorists since Mark Lane have tended to lumber the Agency with the primary responsibility for the Kennedy assassination. Mafia participation was secondary; Mob involvement would provide a fallback explanation in case investigators got too close. Court cases and near-deathbed confessions have established that middle-level CIA operations professionals like E. Howard Hunt and Gerry Patrick Hemming did indeed have advance knowledge of some sort of plot involving the president and were in fact moving weapons into Dallas before the shooting. In Mexico City the seasoned CIA disinformation specialist David Attlee Phillips was helping contrive a "legend" around a purported visit in September of 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald during which he ostensibly visited the Soviet Embassy and attempted to speak with KGB assassination honcho Valery V. Kostikov. There were sightings of a supposed second Oswald, often passing under his cover name, Alek Hidell, buying weapons or barging in on Silvia Odio, the daughter of an important anti-Castro activist. The CIA was clearly preparing the ground and setting Oswald up.
The logic here depends on a misperception of the covert warfare culture of the period. The distinction between CIA line operations and bump-and-run mobster-style wipeouts was arbitrary. As Watergate demonstrated, White House-mandated crews like The Plumbers never hesitated to break and enter and pillage and intimidate without benefit of any court order. By agreement with the U.S. government, the top figures in the Cosa Nostra took on a contract to ice Fidel Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was pulling in stipends from both the CIA and the FBI during the months before the president was shot, and Jack Ruby, a regular with the Chicago Outfit, ran guns to Castro as part of an Agency reinsurance scheme before Castro came to power and carried enough cash to Cuba later on to bail Santo Trafficante out of a Cuban lockup. The top Mob "facilitator," Johnny Rosselli, wore the bars of a U.S. Army colonel and worked directly under Bobby Kennedy through much of 1962 while he was attempting to mount raids and sabotage Cuban sugar refineries during Operation Mongoose.
To comprehend what twitched throughout the entire spider's web you will have to look at Chapter XIX of my book Bobby and J. Edgar. My point here is that cross-connections had developed. Senior gangsters had collaborated with government agencies since World War II, when Lucky Luciano arranged with the OSS for his Cosa Nostra pals to take out the Nazi defenses in Sicily ahead of the Allied landings. Once the orders had gone out, no by-the-book intelligence officer had a lot of control.
Individuals like James Files, who probably did shoot the president from the Grassy Knoll, worked directly for the Outfit while dropping out to moonlight for the Agency, in Files' case in Laos. In the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination a senior CIA official at Helms' level obviously felt he had no choice except to try and protect such feckless operatives as Howard Hunt and subsequently, when Lee Harvey Oswald's New Orleans CIA files surfaced, to destroy them immediately. But this does not mean Helms signed off on -- or knew in advance about -- any supposed Agency scheme to murder the president. There is a lot of evidence that the Agency's scenario and the Mob's scenario in Dallas diverged, sharply. On the ground, it was the Mob that pulled the triggers. It was in Helms' nature to protect his subordinates, as he would prove when he stonewalled the Warren Commission and refused to release relevant CIA cables. Years later Helms was caught lying about the Agency's involvement with Chile by a Congressional Committee and heavily fined. This he accepted too, with aplomb.
Invective tends to be simple, but history is complicated. Ransacking FBI files, I came across a good many clues as to what in fact did happen that history-convulsing noon in Dallas. Don't miss my next blog. Meanwhile, you can get my no-holds-barred treatment of the first decades of the CIA, The Old Boys, directly from us, electronically, at a very modest price. For a deeper vision of how the secret world works read my novel The Nature of the Beast. Also available as a document; go to http://www.treefarmbooks.com/
This blog is a little late -- Google crashed into our blogger universe earlier this week and reorganized everything. I hope we are OK now -- and that you all are too.
Burton Hersh
Monday, January 9, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK?
Countrypartisans,
I know, I know -- this subject has come up before. It will again. The fact is, the circumstances that led to the shooting of JFK work like a bleeding ulcer at the belly of our history, they sap us and confuse us, they prevent us from understanding properly how our society works and what the risks really are for anybody -- at any level -- who takes on entrenched American power.
I was reminded of the potency of our unacknowledged fears recently by an e-mail from a friend of more than forty years, a kindly and generous-spirited lawyer who has been a backroom presence in top Democratic circles going back to the Eleanor-Roosevelt-Adlai Stevenson era. My friend has important connections in the filmmaking business. I recently developed a film script based on my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and it occurred to me that my friend might be inclined to pass along the script to one of his Hollywood friends.
A week after he received the script my friend got back with his appraisal. He was still unshakably loyal to the Kennedy family, my friend wrote, and beyond that "...I must in good conscience disagree with many of the scenes in your screenplay... no one has been able to prove indisputably that the Mob killed JFK...that Hoffa tried to strangle Bobby, that the Kennedys arranged to have Marilyn killed, etc. etc..."
I replied at once. My script -- see my book Bobby and J. Edgar for details -- never suggested that the Kennedys arranged to kill Marilyn Monroe -- the point was that the Mob tracked Bob Kennedy to Marilyn's house in Brentwood, hours before she died, and sent their own specialists in to dispatch her in order to frame Bobby, who as attorney general had started to round up key members of the Mob. Hoffa's attempt to strangle Bobby comes directly from a book by Frank Ragano, Hoffa's lawyer, who was there. But most wounding and inaccurate of all was the familiar statement that "no one" has proved "indisputably" that the Mob killed JFK.
I hear this sort of thing from time to time and I am reminded of the arguments put forward by the defenders of creationism, who point out miniscule gaps in the fossil record in hopes of discrediting the theory of evolution. Such statements are profoundly uninformed. "If Oswald wasn't the only shooter, why haven't the conspirators stepped forward by now?" is the standard challenge.
The truth is, at all levels, dozens and dozens of people implicated in the Kennedy assassination have indeed stepped forward. For chapter and verse have a look at Bobby and J. Edgar and the extensive notes on Chapter Nineteen. Starting with his fellow workers in the second floor cafeteria of the Dallas Schoolbook Depository, who watched Oswald having a soft drink while he was purportedly four floors higher shooting Kennedy several hundred feet away through the foliage, to the eyewitnesses who testified overwhelmingly that the fatal shot came from the front, the "grassy knoll," the evidence against Oswald was contradicted from the start. Surgeons at Parkland hospital who attempted to save Kennedy would insist that the entry wound was found in the president's right temple. The police who grabbed Oswald found no indication of powder burns on his cheek or hands, unavoidable if he had discharged a weapon that day. James Files has testified from the Illinois State Penetentiary that he was stationed on the grassy knoll, and that he pulled the trigger.
The chief counsel who conducted a years-long investigation of the shooting for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, the distinguished Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, concluded that there were several shooters -- a conspiracy -- and that the Mob was likely to have been behind it. When the two key mobsters who probably saw to the orchestration of the assassination, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, were subpoenaed to appear before the Church Committee, both were found murdered days before they could testify, Giancana with a "Corsican necklace" of bullet wounds around his neck and Rosselli chopped up like chicken parts and floating in an oil drum in Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, key CIA records dealing with the assassination remain sequestered, until the middle of the twenty-first century. Not a conspiracy?
You decide. At least as fascinating is what led up to the assassination and what it would lead us into. Richard Nixon, no mean hand when it came to conspiracies himself, remarked on one of the Watergate tapes that the Warren Commission Report remained "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated" on the American people. Of course, that was decades before the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
Have a wonderful 2012.
Burton
I know, I know -- this subject has come up before. It will again. The fact is, the circumstances that led to the shooting of JFK work like a bleeding ulcer at the belly of our history, they sap us and confuse us, they prevent us from understanding properly how our society works and what the risks really are for anybody -- at any level -- who takes on entrenched American power.
I was reminded of the potency of our unacknowledged fears recently by an e-mail from a friend of more than forty years, a kindly and generous-spirited lawyer who has been a backroom presence in top Democratic circles going back to the Eleanor-Roosevelt-Adlai Stevenson era. My friend has important connections in the filmmaking business. I recently developed a film script based on my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and it occurred to me that my friend might be inclined to pass along the script to one of his Hollywood friends.
A week after he received the script my friend got back with his appraisal. He was still unshakably loyal to the Kennedy family, my friend wrote, and beyond that "...I must in good conscience disagree with many of the scenes in your screenplay... no one has been able to prove indisputably that the Mob killed JFK...that Hoffa tried to strangle Bobby, that the Kennedys arranged to have Marilyn killed, etc. etc..."
I replied at once. My script -- see my book Bobby and J. Edgar for details -- never suggested that the Kennedys arranged to kill Marilyn Monroe -- the point was that the Mob tracked Bob Kennedy to Marilyn's house in Brentwood, hours before she died, and sent their own specialists in to dispatch her in order to frame Bobby, who as attorney general had started to round up key members of the Mob. Hoffa's attempt to strangle Bobby comes directly from a book by Frank Ragano, Hoffa's lawyer, who was there. But most wounding and inaccurate of all was the familiar statement that "no one" has proved "indisputably" that the Mob killed JFK.
I hear this sort of thing from time to time and I am reminded of the arguments put forward by the defenders of creationism, who point out miniscule gaps in the fossil record in hopes of discrediting the theory of evolution. Such statements are profoundly uninformed. "If Oswald wasn't the only shooter, why haven't the conspirators stepped forward by now?" is the standard challenge.
The truth is, at all levels, dozens and dozens of people implicated in the Kennedy assassination have indeed stepped forward. For chapter and verse have a look at Bobby and J. Edgar and the extensive notes on Chapter Nineteen. Starting with his fellow workers in the second floor cafeteria of the Dallas Schoolbook Depository, who watched Oswald having a soft drink while he was purportedly four floors higher shooting Kennedy several hundred feet away through the foliage, to the eyewitnesses who testified overwhelmingly that the fatal shot came from the front, the "grassy knoll," the evidence against Oswald was contradicted from the start. Surgeons at Parkland hospital who attempted to save Kennedy would insist that the entry wound was found in the president's right temple. The police who grabbed Oswald found no indication of powder burns on his cheek or hands, unavoidable if he had discharged a weapon that day. James Files has testified from the Illinois State Penetentiary that he was stationed on the grassy knoll, and that he pulled the trigger.
The chief counsel who conducted a years-long investigation of the shooting for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, the distinguished Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, concluded that there were several shooters -- a conspiracy -- and that the Mob was likely to have been behind it. When the two key mobsters who probably saw to the orchestration of the assassination, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, were subpoenaed to appear before the Church Committee, both were found murdered days before they could testify, Giancana with a "Corsican necklace" of bullet wounds around his neck and Rosselli chopped up like chicken parts and floating in an oil drum in Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, key CIA records dealing with the assassination remain sequestered, until the middle of the twenty-first century. Not a conspiracy?
You decide. At least as fascinating is what led up to the assassination and what it would lead us into. Richard Nixon, no mean hand when it came to conspiracies himself, remarked on one of the Watergate tapes that the Warren Commission Report remained "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated" on the American people. Of course, that was decades before the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
Have a wonderful 2012.
Burton
Saturday, December 31, 2011
In the Time of the Assassins
Countryconspirators,
So here we are, hours from 2012. Will it bring fiscal redemption, a stock market surge, the decompression of sovereign debt? Is the rapture genuinely imminent? For those whose chips are properly positioned?
We shall certainly see. Meanwhile, the world we live in is becoming more and more Byzantine, literally, as in the stagnant and ominous final stages of the Ottoman Empire. There seems to be a bomb under construction in every basement, a blade behind every arras. Send whatever you can spare to The Department of Homeland Security.
In 2003 Tree Farm Books published a novel that anticipated a lot of this. The Nature of the Beast came out of perhaps twenty years of mixing it up with spooks, matching wits with the gentleman spymasters who put together the early decades of the CIA -- my preparation for writing The Old Boys. The Beast, as shocked members of my wife's family soon came to refer to the book, made its way on several levels. It was a chase -- a recently retired senior officer from the Agency, Owen Rheinsdorf, was tasked by his patrician ex-boss, Munson Dickler, to hunt down and deal with an operative under contract to the Agency who seemed to be running amok. The operative on whom this contract was being put out was a young -- late twenties -- socially primitive backwoods kid with a predilection for the young. Pruitt Rumsey was a child molester.
Still, the Agency hated to part company with Pruitt because of his uncanny inventiveness and efficiency when it came to his specialty, wet work. Rumsey was a natural, the sort of assassin his case officer at the Agency could send out confident that the target wouldn't be a problem much longer. An obituary was all but guaranteed inside of a month or so, usually specifying natural causes. But Rumsey had recently been arrested and thrown into a local jail for losing control of himself with a seductive little girl, and now he threatened to talk freely unless the Agency intervened.
All this seemed startling -- over-the-top -- when the novel appeared. It was generally ignored. The larger theme -- the ethical consequences of a life in the shadows of uncontrolled intelligence work, nicely elaborated during the exchanges between Rheinsdorf and Dickler over the course of the narrative -- never seemed to become apparent to the casual reviewers. But intelligence professionals understood. "You have truly captured the dark world of intrigue and crafted a splendid plot," John Waller, himself a much-published historian and for many years the Inspector General of the CIA, wrote me upon discovering the book.
As it happened, throughout the eighties and nineties I formed close friendships with several CIA contract operators who actually took on the sort of missions at which my villain Pruit Rumsey had been so adept. One, a mild-seeming retiree whose origins were undetectable in several languages, with whom we often overnighted in Connecticut enroute to Manhattan, encountered The Nature of the Beast as he attempted to fight off a cancer. I got a posthumous note from him thanking me for writing the book, which he maintained he read and reread throughout his terminal months. Somehow, it provided him a lot of comfort.
So literature can involve some unanticipated rewards. One now presents itself. One of the astonishing side-effects of computerization is to permit small publishers like Tree Farm Books to offer a digitized edition, either PDF or HTML format, of both The Nature of the Beast and The Old Boys directly, at a gratifying discount from the cost on Amazon. Just go to the following variation of the Tree Farm Books site and bring your credit card. Pruitt Rumsey will all but land in your lap. The address: http://www.treefarmbooks.com/ebooksaccess.html .
Good reading. We will be in touch before long.
Burton
So here we are, hours from 2012. Will it bring fiscal redemption, a stock market surge, the decompression of sovereign debt? Is the rapture genuinely imminent? For those whose chips are properly positioned?
We shall certainly see. Meanwhile, the world we live in is becoming more and more Byzantine, literally, as in the stagnant and ominous final stages of the Ottoman Empire. There seems to be a bomb under construction in every basement, a blade behind every arras. Send whatever you can spare to The Department of Homeland Security.
In 2003 Tree Farm Books published a novel that anticipated a lot of this. The Nature of the Beast came out of perhaps twenty years of mixing it up with spooks, matching wits with the gentleman spymasters who put together the early decades of the CIA -- my preparation for writing The Old Boys. The Beast, as shocked members of my wife's family soon came to refer to the book, made its way on several levels. It was a chase -- a recently retired senior officer from the Agency, Owen Rheinsdorf, was tasked by his patrician ex-boss, Munson Dickler, to hunt down and deal with an operative under contract to the Agency who seemed to be running amok. The operative on whom this contract was being put out was a young -- late twenties -- socially primitive backwoods kid with a predilection for the young. Pruitt Rumsey was a child molester.
Still, the Agency hated to part company with Pruitt because of his uncanny inventiveness and efficiency when it came to his specialty, wet work. Rumsey was a natural, the sort of assassin his case officer at the Agency could send out confident that the target wouldn't be a problem much longer. An obituary was all but guaranteed inside of a month or so, usually specifying natural causes. But Rumsey had recently been arrested and thrown into a local jail for losing control of himself with a seductive little girl, and now he threatened to talk freely unless the Agency intervened.
All this seemed startling -- over-the-top -- when the novel appeared. It was generally ignored. The larger theme -- the ethical consequences of a life in the shadows of uncontrolled intelligence work, nicely elaborated during the exchanges between Rheinsdorf and Dickler over the course of the narrative -- never seemed to become apparent to the casual reviewers. But intelligence professionals understood. "You have truly captured the dark world of intrigue and crafted a splendid plot," John Waller, himself a much-published historian and for many years the Inspector General of the CIA, wrote me upon discovering the book.
As it happened, throughout the eighties and nineties I formed close friendships with several CIA contract operators who actually took on the sort of missions at which my villain Pruit Rumsey had been so adept. One, a mild-seeming retiree whose origins were undetectable in several languages, with whom we often overnighted in Connecticut enroute to Manhattan, encountered The Nature of the Beast as he attempted to fight off a cancer. I got a posthumous note from him thanking me for writing the book, which he maintained he read and reread throughout his terminal months. Somehow, it provided him a lot of comfort.
So literature can involve some unanticipated rewards. One now presents itself. One of the astonishing side-effects of computerization is to permit small publishers like Tree Farm Books to offer a digitized edition, either PDF or HTML format, of both The Nature of the Beast and The Old Boys directly, at a gratifying discount from the cost on Amazon. Just go to the following variation of the Tree Farm Books site and bring your credit card. Pruitt Rumsey will all but land in your lap. The address: http://www.treefarmbooks.com/ebooksaccess.html .
Good reading. We will be in touch before long.
Burton
Saturday, December 24, 2011
On Productivity
Countrycelebrants,
Ho ho ho. Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house my children and grandchildren and all the lizards and cucarachas and fruit rats and assorted hangers-on are muttering carols as they eye the giftwrapped boxes and swig the wassail and dart out to nibble on the crumbs of fruit cake that have hit the tiles during the revels of the midday.
The holidays in Florida. I just returned after acquiring a new cell phone, a gift from our son. The store manager who sold it to us, a recent immigrant from Durban, South Africa, was extraordinary for his endless patience and total competence. Clerks these days so often seem a little at a loss as to how to make change, let alone the intricacies of the warranty.
Which leads me into the subject of the day. I recently watched Donald Trump bitching about the time he spends grinding his teeth on his phone while some purported technician from Mumbai or the Falkland Islands or wherever attempts to talk him through a series of confusing steps that just might get his computer back on line. Frequently in an English incomprehensible outside the Third World. Every subscriber his own electronic repairman. There really aren't a great many issues, political, sociological, what have you, on which Donald Trump makes a lot of sense to me. But this was one. I am considering writing Trump in when the Republican primaries reach Florida.
The real point here is the genuine cost, in time, money, and frustration, of the supposed efficiencies many of the Great Corporations have engineered and managed to hang on us. AT&T and AOL might save money offshoring their back-up services, but what is an hour of Donald Trump's time worth? I know I've brought this up before, but what kind of outcomes does, say, one of my publishers expect when he turns over publicity and promotion responsibilities on my latest book to some sweet, utterly inexperienced -- and unpaid -- intern with an empty rolodex and a lot of apprehension when it comes to dialing up even those individuals on whose radio and TV shows I had appeared a few years earlier, whose contact information I had long since provided. So the calls don't get made, the opportunities are thrown away, and the new book doesn't sell nearly as well as the earlier book, which got a push from accomplished professionals. If only, my disgruntled publisher mutters, my latest work was up to the previous book. But at least he cut his losses in advance by economizing on staff.
What I am obviously getting at is the extent to which our companies, by adopting policies that seem to save money at the time, are undermining a respect for professionalism throughout the economy, discouraging the development of oncoming generations well enough trained -- and well enough paid -- to inherit the work load during the decades coming up, and compromising our industrial future. These days there is virtually no push-back from the dispirited labor unions. Our discussion across most of the political spectrum seems to be about what the rest of us can do to help the rich get richer; every year we seem to be pouring more sand into the cement on which the structure of our future is going to depend. By permitting the lobbiests to shape our tax laws so as to give advantages to the corporations that manufacture and provide services largely overseas, we are expediting the coming economic implosion. The law school graduate subbing as an unpaid intern in some enormous law factory -- and sleeping on her parent's couch, and sweating her graduate-school loans -- faces quite a slog.
Every competent parent knows that he has to invest in his children. The time is long overdue for our leaders to understand that we have got to invest in all our children.
Let the Holidays roll!
Burton
Ho ho ho. Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house my children and grandchildren and all the lizards and cucarachas and fruit rats and assorted hangers-on are muttering carols as they eye the giftwrapped boxes and swig the wassail and dart out to nibble on the crumbs of fruit cake that have hit the tiles during the revels of the midday.
The holidays in Florida. I just returned after acquiring a new cell phone, a gift from our son. The store manager who sold it to us, a recent immigrant from Durban, South Africa, was extraordinary for his endless patience and total competence. Clerks these days so often seem a little at a loss as to how to make change, let alone the intricacies of the warranty.
Which leads me into the subject of the day. I recently watched Donald Trump bitching about the time he spends grinding his teeth on his phone while some purported technician from Mumbai or the Falkland Islands or wherever attempts to talk him through a series of confusing steps that just might get his computer back on line. Frequently in an English incomprehensible outside the Third World. Every subscriber his own electronic repairman. There really aren't a great many issues, political, sociological, what have you, on which Donald Trump makes a lot of sense to me. But this was one. I am considering writing Trump in when the Republican primaries reach Florida.
The real point here is the genuine cost, in time, money, and frustration, of the supposed efficiencies many of the Great Corporations have engineered and managed to hang on us. AT&T and AOL might save money offshoring their back-up services, but what is an hour of Donald Trump's time worth? I know I've brought this up before, but what kind of outcomes does, say, one of my publishers expect when he turns over publicity and promotion responsibilities on my latest book to some sweet, utterly inexperienced -- and unpaid -- intern with an empty rolodex and a lot of apprehension when it comes to dialing up even those individuals on whose radio and TV shows I had appeared a few years earlier, whose contact information I had long since provided. So the calls don't get made, the opportunities are thrown away, and the new book doesn't sell nearly as well as the earlier book, which got a push from accomplished professionals. If only, my disgruntled publisher mutters, my latest work was up to the previous book. But at least he cut his losses in advance by economizing on staff.
What I am obviously getting at is the extent to which our companies, by adopting policies that seem to save money at the time, are undermining a respect for professionalism throughout the economy, discouraging the development of oncoming generations well enough trained -- and well enough paid -- to inherit the work load during the decades coming up, and compromising our industrial future. These days there is virtually no push-back from the dispirited labor unions. Our discussion across most of the political spectrum seems to be about what the rest of us can do to help the rich get richer; every year we seem to be pouring more sand into the cement on which the structure of our future is going to depend. By permitting the lobbiests to shape our tax laws so as to give advantages to the corporations that manufacture and provide services largely overseas, we are expediting the coming economic implosion. The law school graduate subbing as an unpaid intern in some enormous law factory -- and sleeping on her parent's couch, and sweating her graduate-school loans -- faces quite a slog.
Every competent parent knows that he has to invest in his children. The time is long overdue for our leaders to understand that we have got to invest in all our children.
Let the Holidays roll!
Burton
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
About Marilyn
Countrycustomers,
Again, a film rumbling through the theaters triggers a blog. Like J. Edgar, My Week with Marilyn alights on an iconic personality, a name still smouldering with our secret emotions. The focus, of course, is Marilyn Monroe. From the moment she wriggled across the screen as Louis Calhern's vagrant mistress in The Asphault Jungle until she literally broke Clark Gable's heart in The Misfits, Marilyn inhabited our fantasies. Bobby Kennedy would recall his brother Jack, helpless in yet another hospital bed, jacking off to a poster of the naked Marilyn plastered across his ceiling.
The Weinstein brothers have turned reimagining the secret anguish of the English upper classes into an late-life avocation. What surprised me was how closely the Marilyn Monroe of this film touched on the celebrity herself -- succulent, as manipulative as an empress, apprehensive to the point of neurotic paralysis yet unable to keep from indulging every vagrant appetite. The plot here concerns the shooting of a film in England, The Prince and the Showgirl, over the course of which Marilyn's bridegroom, Arthur Miller, gives up on her and returns to Manhattan while the star toys with a good-looking young English go-for.
Marilyn off the screen first came to my attention during the nineteen-eighties. I was digging up the history of the CIA for The Old Boys. During the 1950s Eisenhower's crusty Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was alarmed when the new postcolonial nations of the South Pacific attempted to coordinate their policies as "neutralists" at the Bandung Conference, which Dulles dismissed as "The Dark-Town Strutters Ball." Their leader was Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno, a swart, wiry activist in a pitju well known to appreciate the ladies. According to several sources, the CIA arranged a romp for a Sukarno look-alike with a very energetic blond, which the Agency filmed in Los Angeles and subsequently released around the workl to discredit the disobedient Indonesian before the upcoming elections. What was an embarrassment to the Presbyterian Dulles was one more proof of their leader's boundless vitality to the Indonesian voters, which returned him to power with a much-expanded majority. A rumor went around the Agency that Marilyn had done the CIA a favor.
I suppose that nothing I have ever written has upset people as much as my treatment of the 1962 romance between Marilyn and Bob Kennedy in Bobby and J. Edgar. Like everything else in that controversial book, each episode was built on very hard evidence. Testimony by Ethel Kennedy's brother is backed up by interview and written material from Peter Lawford. I myself spent a day with the FBI agent who accompanied Bob around Los Angeles much of that fateful summer. The details of how Marilyn died is revealed in the important book, Double Cross, by Sam Giancana's brother and stepson. The Los Angeles Coroner's report -- declassified recently, after forty years -- corroborates the Giancanas' insistence that Marilyn succumbed to a lethel enema.
Like incontrovertible proof that JFK died in a crossfire in Dallas, the final infatuation and murder of Marilyn Monroe elicits disbelief in many. Americans these days operate according to the precept: "This can't be true because I don't want it to be true." At times readjusting reality gets to be a lot of work. Nevertheless, over the long run, the truth turns out to be a lot easier to live with. But this is something we are only now beginning to discover.
Again, a film rumbling through the theaters triggers a blog. Like J. Edgar, My Week with Marilyn alights on an iconic personality, a name still smouldering with our secret emotions. The focus, of course, is Marilyn Monroe. From the moment she wriggled across the screen as Louis Calhern's vagrant mistress in The Asphault Jungle until she literally broke Clark Gable's heart in The Misfits, Marilyn inhabited our fantasies. Bobby Kennedy would recall his brother Jack, helpless in yet another hospital bed, jacking off to a poster of the naked Marilyn plastered across his ceiling.
The Weinstein brothers have turned reimagining the secret anguish of the English upper classes into an late-life avocation. What surprised me was how closely the Marilyn Monroe of this film touched on the celebrity herself -- succulent, as manipulative as an empress, apprehensive to the point of neurotic paralysis yet unable to keep from indulging every vagrant appetite. The plot here concerns the shooting of a film in England, The Prince and the Showgirl, over the course of which Marilyn's bridegroom, Arthur Miller, gives up on her and returns to Manhattan while the star toys with a good-looking young English go-for.
Marilyn off the screen first came to my attention during the nineteen-eighties. I was digging up the history of the CIA for The Old Boys. During the 1950s Eisenhower's crusty Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was alarmed when the new postcolonial nations of the South Pacific attempted to coordinate their policies as "neutralists" at the Bandung Conference, which Dulles dismissed as "The Dark-Town Strutters Ball." Their leader was Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno, a swart, wiry activist in a pitju well known to appreciate the ladies. According to several sources, the CIA arranged a romp for a Sukarno look-alike with a very energetic blond, which the Agency filmed in Los Angeles and subsequently released around the workl to discredit the disobedient Indonesian before the upcoming elections. What was an embarrassment to the Presbyterian Dulles was one more proof of their leader's boundless vitality to the Indonesian voters, which returned him to power with a much-expanded majority. A rumor went around the Agency that Marilyn had done the CIA a favor.
I suppose that nothing I have ever written has upset people as much as my treatment of the 1962 romance between Marilyn and Bob Kennedy in Bobby and J. Edgar. Like everything else in that controversial book, each episode was built on very hard evidence. Testimony by Ethel Kennedy's brother is backed up by interview and written material from Peter Lawford. I myself spent a day with the FBI agent who accompanied Bob around Los Angeles much of that fateful summer. The details of how Marilyn died is revealed in the important book, Double Cross, by Sam Giancana's brother and stepson. The Los Angeles Coroner's report -- declassified recently, after forty years -- corroborates the Giancanas' insistence that Marilyn succumbed to a lethel enema.
Like incontrovertible proof that JFK died in a crossfire in Dallas, the final infatuation and murder of Marilyn Monroe elicits disbelief in many. Americans these days operate according to the precept: "This can't be true because I don't want it to be true." At times readjusting reality gets to be a lot of work. Nevertheless, over the long run, the truth turns out to be a lot easier to live with. But this is something we are only now beginning to discover.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Bill Colby -- Viet Nam Redux
Countrycherubs,
Again, events have overtaken me. My friend the astute Merle Allshouse has alerted me to the piece in the December 6 Huffington Post by Christina Wilkie. Filmmaker Carl Colby, the son of ex-CIA Director William Colby, has produced a documentary dealing with the controversial life and -- especially -- the final moments of his father's life. Colby disappeared in a canoe, leaving his dinner half eaten, into the Wimlico River in Maryland one evening in 1996. Rumors circulated as to whether he had died of a heart attack, whether he had been dispatched, or whether Colby had taken his own life, an explanation Carl seems to favor.
Everybody familiar with Colby recognized that he was self-controlled to the edge of utterly cold-blooded. As it happened, I knew Bill Colby fairly well. The night after he disappeared I appeared on the Lehrer Show to speculate on his whereabouts. Colby had a history freighted with contradictory performances. He ran the "Phoenix" program in Viet Nam, an initiative which resulted in the arbitrary singling out and assassination of somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 alleged Viet Cong agents, largely on hearsay evidence or to settle village feuds or eliminate prominent Buddhists.
After he came clean before the Church Committee and revealed the Agency's notorious "family jewels," Bill left the CIA and developed a law practice heavy with arms merchants and druglords. Such clients had played a very important if carefully classified role in the later years of the Viet Nam War itself. I would guess that they were the ones that did him in. Nelson Rockefeller had been openly alarmed by Colby's impulse to divulge Agency secrets before committees of Congress -- to "go to confession," as the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger remarked at the time.
The recurrent allegations that Bill Colby might have committed suicide strike me as unfounded -- Colby was a devout Catholic. The Agency had traditionally done a great deal of business with dope dealers, who supplied a lot of the financial resources stashed away in off-the-books accounts for operations the Congress would no doubt have refused to fund had they ever been disclosed. Once, when I brought that up with Richard Helms while researching The Old Boys, he literally threw up his hands. "Don't ask me about that," he laughed. "You could not overestimate the amount of money we sloshed in and out of bank accounts all over the world." The presumption was always that the gentlemen operatives at the top of the Agency were far better equipped to decide when to step in and rejigger Third-World governments than those bumblers in Congress. It could be that his post-CIA legal clients were starting to get alarmed at the possibility that Colby might go public one more time.
The paradox in Colby's case was the fact that he was a very serious Roman Catholic. Perhaps the extent to which Cardinal Spellman and his like pushed us into Viet Nam -- see my treatment of Vatican politics and the lead-up to the war in Bobby and J. Edgar -- justified Colby's ambiguous moral stance. Colby personally never gave up on defending our military presence in Southeast Asia, and later wrote a book with the inimitable James McCargar, Lost Victory, to justify his conviction that we were that close to winning over those elusive Vietnamese hearts and minds.
Personally, I always found Colby likeable and a bit shy, but straighforward. Find and read my piece in The Washingtonian on Colby and Jim Angleton (Sept., 1985, Dragons Have To Be Killed). Both of these intractable cold warriors are very much front and center in The Old Boys, my group portrait of the first few generations of the American intelligence community.
I suppose that it is interesting that the media are starting to heave up these remnants of our disastrous war in Southeast Asia just as we are starting to face reality and extract ourselves from Afghanistan. As Von Clausewitz said, "Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Again, events have overtaken me. My friend the astute Merle Allshouse has alerted me to the piece in the December 6 Huffington Post by Christina Wilkie. Filmmaker Carl Colby, the son of ex-CIA Director William Colby, has produced a documentary dealing with the controversial life and -- especially -- the final moments of his father's life. Colby disappeared in a canoe, leaving his dinner half eaten, into the Wimlico River in Maryland one evening in 1996. Rumors circulated as to whether he had died of a heart attack, whether he had been dispatched, or whether Colby had taken his own life, an explanation Carl seems to favor.
Everybody familiar with Colby recognized that he was self-controlled to the edge of utterly cold-blooded. As it happened, I knew Bill Colby fairly well. The night after he disappeared I appeared on the Lehrer Show to speculate on his whereabouts. Colby had a history freighted with contradictory performances. He ran the "Phoenix" program in Viet Nam, an initiative which resulted in the arbitrary singling out and assassination of somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 alleged Viet Cong agents, largely on hearsay evidence or to settle village feuds or eliminate prominent Buddhists.
After he came clean before the Church Committee and revealed the Agency's notorious "family jewels," Bill left the CIA and developed a law practice heavy with arms merchants and druglords. Such clients had played a very important if carefully classified role in the later years of the Viet Nam War itself. I would guess that they were the ones that did him in. Nelson Rockefeller had been openly alarmed by Colby's impulse to divulge Agency secrets before committees of Congress -- to "go to confession," as the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger remarked at the time.
The recurrent allegations that Bill Colby might have committed suicide strike me as unfounded -- Colby was a devout Catholic. The Agency had traditionally done a great deal of business with dope dealers, who supplied a lot of the financial resources stashed away in off-the-books accounts for operations the Congress would no doubt have refused to fund had they ever been disclosed. Once, when I brought that up with Richard Helms while researching The Old Boys, he literally threw up his hands. "Don't ask me about that," he laughed. "You could not overestimate the amount of money we sloshed in and out of bank accounts all over the world." The presumption was always that the gentlemen operatives at the top of the Agency were far better equipped to decide when to step in and rejigger Third-World governments than those bumblers in Congress. It could be that his post-CIA legal clients were starting to get alarmed at the possibility that Colby might go public one more time.
The paradox in Colby's case was the fact that he was a very serious Roman Catholic. Perhaps the extent to which Cardinal Spellman and his like pushed us into Viet Nam -- see my treatment of Vatican politics and the lead-up to the war in Bobby and J. Edgar -- justified Colby's ambiguous moral stance. Colby personally never gave up on defending our military presence in Southeast Asia, and later wrote a book with the inimitable James McCargar, Lost Victory, to justify his conviction that we were that close to winning over those elusive Vietnamese hearts and minds.
Personally, I always found Colby likeable and a bit shy, but straighforward. Find and read my piece in The Washingtonian on Colby and Jim Angleton (Sept., 1985, Dragons Have To Be Killed). Both of these intractable cold warriors are very much front and center in The Old Boys, my group portrait of the first few generations of the American intelligence community.
I suppose that it is interesting that the media are starting to heave up these remnants of our disastrous war in Southeast Asia just as we are starting to face reality and extract ourselves from Afghanistan. As Von Clausewitz said, "Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Goods on J. Edgar Hoover, #4
Countrycelebrants,
Salutations. The Thanksgiving engorgement is winding down, a second unseasonal blanketing of snow hit New Hampshire (along with a heavy influx of Republican aspirants), and football is getting serious. Tremors in the stock market suggest a very long winter.
As that embattled movie J. Edgar struggles at the box office to justify its thunderous publicity, I have a few retreating thoughts to offer about the Director and -- equally valid -- the organization he steamed together. As I have tried to indicate, while I was pulling together source material for The Old Boys about the origins of the CIA and, later, for Bobby and J. Edgar, I spent a lot of time with veterans from both organizations. Many ex and active CIA officers and special agents in the Bureau became friends over the course of the several decades I served on the board of the New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Inevitably, these years of contact conditioned -- and I hope deepened -- my feeling for who these people were, what motivated them and where they drew their ethical and operational lines. I hope a lot of what I determined made its way into my no-holds-barred CIA novel, The Nature of the Beast.
When hit-and-run reviewers like David Corn accuse me of having gone "soft on Hoover" in Bobby and J. Edgar, what they actually seem to mean is that I have not totally corroborated the caricature of the Bureau's opinionated founder that seized the Left during the McCarthy era. Hoover was in fact a complicated icon, like Robert Kennedy surprisingly emotional when it came to people he cared about, profoundly committed to preserving the status quo, and -- much more than Robert Kennedy -- respectful of the civil liberties of individuals. He could be as ruthless as advertised when it came to maligning the likes of Martin Luther King, an activist he perceived as totally immoral, opportunistic, and perilous to the social order. But when Richard Nixon called on his old friend Hoover to provide the storm troops for what could easily have turned into a coup, J. Edgar walked away, without a qualm.
There is a fascinating book waiting to be written about a number of the graduates of Hoover's academy, Bureau alumni who keep turning up to switch the tracks of history. For example, consider the unlikely career of Guy Banister, once Hoover's Special Agent in Charge in Capone-heir Sam Giancana's Chicago. Banister, who retired from the Bureau, breaks the surface of events the summer of 1963 in New Orleans running a private detective agency that supports Bob Kennedy's CIA-based spoiling operation against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Banister comes up with office space for Lee Harvey Oswald that summer so Oswald can mount his provocative Fair-Play-for-Cuba campaign. Giancana's primary fixer, Johnny Rosselli, stops by Banister's headquarters several times. Rosselli has been looking after odd jobs for Joe Kennedy for decades. Banister and Joe Kennedy's accountant, Carmine Bellino -- another FBI graduate, for whom Joe arranged a White House office once JFK became president -- had shared a business partnership. Connect the dots.
Another intriguing Bureau alumnus was Robert Maheu. I got to know Maheu originally in 1992 when I was on the road flogging The Old Boys. We shared a podium at the Library of Congress, and stayed in touch after that. Maheu remembered J. Edgar fondly for having arranged a compassionate assignment for him when his mother was dying in Maine. Once he moved on from the FBI, Maheu -- like Edward Morgan, another onetime special agent -- developed an extensive legal clientele on the fringes of the underworld. When the CIA wanted a team of experienced assassins to bump off Castro, Maheu hooked the Agency up with Giancana, Johnny Rosselli and Santo Trafficante. Later on Maheu became briefly famous as the public presence of the pathologically reclusive Howard Hughes. Maheu served as middleman when the mob sold its Las Vegas casinos to Hughes but kept its own operatives in charge, especially when it came to disposing of the skim. Maheu supervised the arrangement. Bob Maheu and Howard Hughes did not part happily.
Hoover himself was careful to maintain the Bureau as an equal opportunity employer. He himself dismissed the notion of a national crime syndicate until the end of the fifties. There was a measure of cooperation between the Bureau and a number of the senior hoods, especially when it came to sharing the product of accomplished wiremen like Bernie Spindel. Once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General the era of laissez-faire was over.
Rest in peace, J. Edgar. You are not forgotten.
Burton Hersh
Salutations. The Thanksgiving engorgement is winding down, a second unseasonal blanketing of snow hit New Hampshire (along with a heavy influx of Republican aspirants), and football is getting serious. Tremors in the stock market suggest a very long winter.
As that embattled movie J. Edgar struggles at the box office to justify its thunderous publicity, I have a few retreating thoughts to offer about the Director and -- equally valid -- the organization he steamed together. As I have tried to indicate, while I was pulling together source material for The Old Boys about the origins of the CIA and, later, for Bobby and J. Edgar, I spent a lot of time with veterans from both organizations. Many ex and active CIA officers and special agents in the Bureau became friends over the course of the several decades I served on the board of the New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Inevitably, these years of contact conditioned -- and I hope deepened -- my feeling for who these people were, what motivated them and where they drew their ethical and operational lines. I hope a lot of what I determined made its way into my no-holds-barred CIA novel, The Nature of the Beast.
When hit-and-run reviewers like David Corn accuse me of having gone "soft on Hoover" in Bobby and J. Edgar, what they actually seem to mean is that I have not totally corroborated the caricature of the Bureau's opinionated founder that seized the Left during the McCarthy era. Hoover was in fact a complicated icon, like Robert Kennedy surprisingly emotional when it came to people he cared about, profoundly committed to preserving the status quo, and -- much more than Robert Kennedy -- respectful of the civil liberties of individuals. He could be as ruthless as advertised when it came to maligning the likes of Martin Luther King, an activist he perceived as totally immoral, opportunistic, and perilous to the social order. But when Richard Nixon called on his old friend Hoover to provide the storm troops for what could easily have turned into a coup, J. Edgar walked away, without a qualm.
There is a fascinating book waiting to be written about a number of the graduates of Hoover's academy, Bureau alumni who keep turning up to switch the tracks of history. For example, consider the unlikely career of Guy Banister, once Hoover's Special Agent in Charge in Capone-heir Sam Giancana's Chicago. Banister, who retired from the Bureau, breaks the surface of events the summer of 1963 in New Orleans running a private detective agency that supports Bob Kennedy's CIA-based spoiling operation against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Banister comes up with office space for Lee Harvey Oswald that summer so Oswald can mount his provocative Fair-Play-for-Cuba campaign. Giancana's primary fixer, Johnny Rosselli, stops by Banister's headquarters several times. Rosselli has been looking after odd jobs for Joe Kennedy for decades. Banister and Joe Kennedy's accountant, Carmine Bellino -- another FBI graduate, for whom Joe arranged a White House office once JFK became president -- had shared a business partnership. Connect the dots.
Another intriguing Bureau alumnus was Robert Maheu. I got to know Maheu originally in 1992 when I was on the road flogging The Old Boys. We shared a podium at the Library of Congress, and stayed in touch after that. Maheu remembered J. Edgar fondly for having arranged a compassionate assignment for him when his mother was dying in Maine. Once he moved on from the FBI, Maheu -- like Edward Morgan, another onetime special agent -- developed an extensive legal clientele on the fringes of the underworld. When the CIA wanted a team of experienced assassins to bump off Castro, Maheu hooked the Agency up with Giancana, Johnny Rosselli and Santo Trafficante. Later on Maheu became briefly famous as the public presence of the pathologically reclusive Howard Hughes. Maheu served as middleman when the mob sold its Las Vegas casinos to Hughes but kept its own operatives in charge, especially when it came to disposing of the skim. Maheu supervised the arrangement. Bob Maheu and Howard Hughes did not part happily.
Hoover himself was careful to maintain the Bureau as an equal opportunity employer. He himself dismissed the notion of a national crime syndicate until the end of the fifties. There was a measure of cooperation between the Bureau and a number of the senior hoods, especially when it came to sharing the product of accomplished wiremen like Bernie Spindel. Once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General the era of laissez-faire was over.
Rest in peace, J. Edgar. You are not forgotten.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Goods on J. Edgar Hoover #3
Countrycruisers,
Yes, again, a round with the J. Edgar movie. I suppose I'm gnawing away on this bone because of a longstanding conviction that even a filmed interpretation of an event or an individual, even an out-and-out biopic, demands fidelity to the established body of history behind it. In the November 14 New Yorker, David Denby notes that this film came out of a collaboration between Clint Eastwood and "the activist gay screenwriter of 'Milk.'" That may elucidate a lot of the movie's focus on the slippery and ultimately undefined relationship between Hoover and his longtime associate director, Clyde Tolson. But it does not explain away the pattern of gross historical misreadings, the repeated and apparently wilful ignorance of facts on which much of the plot is hung.
Last week I cited -- one example among a number -- the scene in which Hoover purportedly appeared before Attorney General Robert Kennedy and threatened to expose his brother the president as an adulterer who did not scruple to conduct an affair with a seasoned prostitute -- Ellen Rometsch in real life -- most likely an East German spy. The affair was verifiable, I dealt with it in detail in Bobby and J. Edgar. But it was Bobby who kowtowed before Hoover to get him to intervene with a Senate committee on the point of conducting an investigation because articles hinting at the involvement by the respected Clark Mollenhoff were starting to appear in the Des Moines Register. Robert Kennedy in effect kidnapped Ellen Rometsch and shipped her back to Germany with an aide. When I was writing Bobby and J. Edgar I spent a day with Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's trusted sidekick, who pimped for dignitaries on both sides of the aisle, and he showed me letters from the heartbroken Ellen, back in Germany, that testified to John Kennedy's versatility as a lover.
Hoover got JFK off the hook that summer of 1963, but after that there was no more White House talk of replacing the Director. The previous summer Hoover had answered Robert Kennedy's pleas and stepped in to confiscate the telephone records that proved that Bob had been in touch with Marilyn Monroe -- in fact, had quarreled with her in her house in Brentwood -- hours before her mysterious death. FBI records document this. If Eastwood's screenwriter wanted genuine drama, how was he going to top that?
A late scene features J. Edgar dictating that famous letter -- "King, there is only one thing left for you to do--"
which urged King to end it all rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize and then find himself revealed as an habitual consorter with loose -- white -- whores. Hoover had the proof, and indeed his flunkies in the Bureau had repeatedly attempted to plant this evidence in the newspapers. The problem was, the Kennedy brothers disliked King and his rabble-rousing as much as Hoover did, and Bob Kennedy had granted Hoover explicit permission to bug and tap the offices and motel rooms of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All this would haunt Bobby once he ran for president.
As is suggested in Bobby and J. Edgar, Hoover himself was far too adroit to dictate a letter like the one he is shown composing in this movie, urging suicide on King. The chief of counterintelligence at the Bureau at the time, Ray Wannall, told me that Hoover's Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence, William Sullivan, had caught that duty. At that stage Sullivan could be depended on whenever the skies were darkening, most notably during the exposed hours after JFK's assassination, when Hoover was determined to cover the Bureau's tracks.
What I am attempting to suggest here is that the truth about Hoover is a lot more intriguing than anything that made it into this mottled movie version. Read and find out.
Burton Hersh
Yes, again, a round with the J. Edgar movie. I suppose I'm gnawing away on this bone because of a longstanding conviction that even a filmed interpretation of an event or an individual, even an out-and-out biopic, demands fidelity to the established body of history behind it. In the November 14 New Yorker, David Denby notes that this film came out of a collaboration between Clint Eastwood and "the activist gay screenwriter of 'Milk.'" That may elucidate a lot of the movie's focus on the slippery and ultimately undefined relationship between Hoover and his longtime associate director, Clyde Tolson. But it does not explain away the pattern of gross historical misreadings, the repeated and apparently wilful ignorance of facts on which much of the plot is hung.
Last week I cited -- one example among a number -- the scene in which Hoover purportedly appeared before Attorney General Robert Kennedy and threatened to expose his brother the president as an adulterer who did not scruple to conduct an affair with a seasoned prostitute -- Ellen Rometsch in real life -- most likely an East German spy. The affair was verifiable, I dealt with it in detail in Bobby and J. Edgar. But it was Bobby who kowtowed before Hoover to get him to intervene with a Senate committee on the point of conducting an investigation because articles hinting at the involvement by the respected Clark Mollenhoff were starting to appear in the Des Moines Register. Robert Kennedy in effect kidnapped Ellen Rometsch and shipped her back to Germany with an aide. When I was writing Bobby and J. Edgar I spent a day with Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's trusted sidekick, who pimped for dignitaries on both sides of the aisle, and he showed me letters from the heartbroken Ellen, back in Germany, that testified to John Kennedy's versatility as a lover.
Hoover got JFK off the hook that summer of 1963, but after that there was no more White House talk of replacing the Director. The previous summer Hoover had answered Robert Kennedy's pleas and stepped in to confiscate the telephone records that proved that Bob had been in touch with Marilyn Monroe -- in fact, had quarreled with her in her house in Brentwood -- hours before her mysterious death. FBI records document this. If Eastwood's screenwriter wanted genuine drama, how was he going to top that?
A late scene features J. Edgar dictating that famous letter -- "King, there is only one thing left for you to do--"
which urged King to end it all rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize and then find himself revealed as an habitual consorter with loose -- white -- whores. Hoover had the proof, and indeed his flunkies in the Bureau had repeatedly attempted to plant this evidence in the newspapers. The problem was, the Kennedy brothers disliked King and his rabble-rousing as much as Hoover did, and Bob Kennedy had granted Hoover explicit permission to bug and tap the offices and motel rooms of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All this would haunt Bobby once he ran for president.
As is suggested in Bobby and J. Edgar, Hoover himself was far too adroit to dictate a letter like the one he is shown composing in this movie, urging suicide on King. The chief of counterintelligence at the Bureau at the time, Ray Wannall, told me that Hoover's Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence, William Sullivan, had caught that duty. At that stage Sullivan could be depended on whenever the skies were darkening, most notably during the exposed hours after JFK's assassination, when Hoover was determined to cover the Bureau's tracks.
What I am attempting to suggest here is that the truth about Hoover is a lot more intriguing than anything that made it into this mottled movie version. Read and find out.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, November 12, 2011
The Goods on J. Edgar Hoover, #2
Countryvassals,
OK, you can exhale, here it is. My reading on the heavily ballyhooed J. Edgar film out of the Clint Eastwood monolith. Saw it last night, the first screening once it was released around here.
I guess you'd have to call my verdict mixed. What I liked best was the effort by the producers to deal with Hoover's life in a serious manner, not present a Hollywood caricature of him solely as a cross-dressing sex freak with a machine-gun delivery obsessed with hunting down nonexistent Communists and making Martin Luther King's life as ugly as possible. Throughout my career I have known well hundreds of FBI veterans, competent and dedicated people, lawyers usually, and I have never known any of them to bad-mouth their controversial founder. Researching Bobby and J. Edgar I spent days at a time with insiders from Hoover's inner directorate, from Deke DeLoach to Courtney Evans to Ray Wannell. The picture I got from them was of a frequently troubled boss utterly dedicated to his organization and its men, something of a pushover, who deployed associate director Clyde Tolson to crack the whip or fire agents when Hoover couldn't find it in himself to bear down too hard. At least a little of this comes over in this movie.
What I liked least was the structure of the movie itself. It really is hard not to suspect that the producers were overtaken by their release date, and picked whatever had any dramatic coherence off the cutting room floor and spliced it in willy-nilly. Much of the detail is sloppily researched. An extended takeout on the Lindberg kidnapping in the thirties is interrupted by a face-off between Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy the summer of 1963, during which Hoover pushes paperwork at the startled Kennedy confirming evidence of a liaison in California between JFK and an East German hooker under the control of the Stasi. (This actually happened, although not in California, and it was Bobby who went to Hoover over the matter to get the FBI director to use his enormous clout with Congress to head off a Senate investigation of the president -- conf. Bobby and J. Edgar.)
In the film, once the yelling subsides, the entire incident is left to hang there and the action returns to the thirties and the apprehension of Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged Lindberg kidnapper. The uneven adoption of a variety of cinema-verite and arbitrary docudrama techniques, stitched together by voice-over, helps confuse the proceedings. This sort of chronological jumping around happens repeatedly; for somebody unfamiliar with at least the outlines of Hoover's career the result has to be gathering disorientation.
What holds the film together is the progression of the inchoate love affair between Hoover and Clyde Tolson. This is nicely handled. How far the two of them went is still a matter of dispute; the scene in which Hoover blurts out that he has been going to bed with Dorothy Lamour in Los Angeles was born and died, I suspect, in the screenwriter's imagination. Forever a little panicked about Hoover's propensity for blackmail, Bob Kennedy assigned the head of his Organized Crime Section, William Hundley, to bug Hoover's home and office and catch him off base. "We tried to prove that Hoover was homosexual," Hundley told me. "That was all bullshit. You can never be sure, you know what I mean, but I think he was some sort of a eunuch."
Hoover's performance added up to a lot more that a chronic outbreak of right-wing phobias. When heavy-industry instigators behind the Liberty League and the German-American Bund approached Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover had his people infiltrate the plot and break it up. Thirty years later, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan threatened to terrorize the South and undermine the recently enacted Voting Rights Act, Hoover's FBI tore the Klan apart. I have often reflected that, had there been an FBI in place in Germany to keep the Brownshirts under control, Hitler would never have made it.
In a fundamentally vapid and poorly informed review of Bobby and J. Edgar in The New York Times in 2007, the staffer for Mother Jones, David Corn, concluded that "Hersh goes soft on Hoover toward the end." He may have had something there.
OK, you can exhale, here it is. My reading on the heavily ballyhooed J. Edgar film out of the Clint Eastwood monolith. Saw it last night, the first screening once it was released around here.
I guess you'd have to call my verdict mixed. What I liked best was the effort by the producers to deal with Hoover's life in a serious manner, not present a Hollywood caricature of him solely as a cross-dressing sex freak with a machine-gun delivery obsessed with hunting down nonexistent Communists and making Martin Luther King's life as ugly as possible. Throughout my career I have known well hundreds of FBI veterans, competent and dedicated people, lawyers usually, and I have never known any of them to bad-mouth their controversial founder. Researching Bobby and J. Edgar I spent days at a time with insiders from Hoover's inner directorate, from Deke DeLoach to Courtney Evans to Ray Wannell. The picture I got from them was of a frequently troubled boss utterly dedicated to his organization and its men, something of a pushover, who deployed associate director Clyde Tolson to crack the whip or fire agents when Hoover couldn't find it in himself to bear down too hard. At least a little of this comes over in this movie.
What I liked least was the structure of the movie itself. It really is hard not to suspect that the producers were overtaken by their release date, and picked whatever had any dramatic coherence off the cutting room floor and spliced it in willy-nilly. Much of the detail is sloppily researched. An extended takeout on the Lindberg kidnapping in the thirties is interrupted by a face-off between Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy the summer of 1963, during which Hoover pushes paperwork at the startled Kennedy confirming evidence of a liaison in California between JFK and an East German hooker under the control of the Stasi. (This actually happened, although not in California, and it was Bobby who went to Hoover over the matter to get the FBI director to use his enormous clout with Congress to head off a Senate investigation of the president -- conf. Bobby and J. Edgar.)
In the film, once the yelling subsides, the entire incident is left to hang there and the action returns to the thirties and the apprehension of Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged Lindberg kidnapper. The uneven adoption of a variety of cinema-verite and arbitrary docudrama techniques, stitched together by voice-over, helps confuse the proceedings. This sort of chronological jumping around happens repeatedly; for somebody unfamiliar with at least the outlines of Hoover's career the result has to be gathering disorientation.
What holds the film together is the progression of the inchoate love affair between Hoover and Clyde Tolson. This is nicely handled. How far the two of them went is still a matter of dispute; the scene in which Hoover blurts out that he has been going to bed with Dorothy Lamour in Los Angeles was born and died, I suspect, in the screenwriter's imagination. Forever a little panicked about Hoover's propensity for blackmail, Bob Kennedy assigned the head of his Organized Crime Section, William Hundley, to bug Hoover's home and office and catch him off base. "We tried to prove that Hoover was homosexual," Hundley told me. "That was all bullshit. You can never be sure, you know what I mean, but I think he was some sort of a eunuch."
Hoover's performance added up to a lot more that a chronic outbreak of right-wing phobias. When heavy-industry instigators behind the Liberty League and the German-American Bund approached Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover had his people infiltrate the plot and break it up. Thirty years later, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan threatened to terrorize the South and undermine the recently enacted Voting Rights Act, Hoover's FBI tore the Klan apart. I have often reflected that, had there been an FBI in place in Germany to keep the Brownshirts under control, Hitler would never have made it.
In a fundamentally vapid and poorly informed review of Bobby and J. Edgar in The New York Times in 2007, the staffer for Mother Jones, David Corn, concluded that "Hersh goes soft on Hoover toward the end." He may have had something there.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The Goods on J. Edgar Hoover, #1
Dear Countryclients,
The drums are beating, closer every day, and within a week or so the Clint Eastwood saga, J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover will burst across our movie screens. As it happens, along with Robert Kennedy, the high-powered, cold-blooded founder of the FBI carried a lot of the essential action in my controversial 2007 book Bobby and J. Edgar. Joe Kennedy was almost always within earshot, usually on the telephone.
My double biography is still in print. Details as to how exactly Marilyn Monroe died and who orchestrated the shooting of Jack Kennedy, and how, have sustained the buzz. The book recently moved up from #40 to #20 nationally in the Biography and Memoir category in the Amazon system.
With Bobby and J. Edgar coming back onto cycle I thought it might be a good time to contact the current publisher of the book, Basic Books, and volunteer to help out with whatever publicity the firm thought might be appropriate to spur sales. The president there got right back, promised to do whatever he could, and headlined the book in his company's current release to bookstores.
This response was noteworthy because it was so unusual. Publishing today is moribund, barely twitching at its most exalted moments. Most of the important houses have been gutted of competent staff. Replying to my publisher at Basic Books I unloaded -- with characteristic diplomacy -- my urgent concerns. I started out by pointing out what a shell game most publishers were playing with agents and writers. "The result of all this for writers," I pressed on,"since many agents have become quite cavalier when it comes to tracking down [royalty] specifics and sending along checks, has been to make a difficult profession impossible. The mid-list talent that ultimately supports the industry and produces the durable classics is in the process of giving up wholesale. It is obviously in the process of being replaced by underpaid reporters and marginal academics engaged to research 'hot' subjects and then turn over their notes to purported editors, often hired at starvation wages from outside the house, who produce the mediocre manuscripts now flooding the outlets. The increasingly alienated reading public finds the results unreadable and will not buy books, for good reason. Starving out genuinely talented professional writers can only eventuate in the extinction of publishing itself."
All this was venting, of course, but it was also an effort to alert a responsible executive in an increasingly troubled industry as to how it felt from the point of view of that shrinking cadre of committed literary professionals whose world is drying up around them. Perhaps the dinosaurs will go last. But they'll go too, and soon.
More on Bobby and J. Edgar shortly.
Cheers,
Burton
The drums are beating, closer every day, and within a week or so the Clint Eastwood saga, J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover will burst across our movie screens. As it happens, along with Robert Kennedy, the high-powered, cold-blooded founder of the FBI carried a lot of the essential action in my controversial 2007 book Bobby and J. Edgar. Joe Kennedy was almost always within earshot, usually on the telephone.
My double biography is still in print. Details as to how exactly Marilyn Monroe died and who orchestrated the shooting of Jack Kennedy, and how, have sustained the buzz. The book recently moved up from #40 to #20 nationally in the Biography and Memoir category in the Amazon system.
With Bobby and J. Edgar coming back onto cycle I thought it might be a good time to contact the current publisher of the book, Basic Books, and volunteer to help out with whatever publicity the firm thought might be appropriate to spur sales. The president there got right back, promised to do whatever he could, and headlined the book in his company's current release to bookstores.
This response was noteworthy because it was so unusual. Publishing today is moribund, barely twitching at its most exalted moments. Most of the important houses have been gutted of competent staff. Replying to my publisher at Basic Books I unloaded -- with characteristic diplomacy -- my urgent concerns. I started out by pointing out what a shell game most publishers were playing with agents and writers. "The result of all this for writers," I pressed on,"since many agents have become quite cavalier when it comes to tracking down [royalty] specifics and sending along checks, has been to make a difficult profession impossible. The mid-list talent that ultimately supports the industry and produces the durable classics is in the process of giving up wholesale. It is obviously in the process of being replaced by underpaid reporters and marginal academics engaged to research 'hot' subjects and then turn over their notes to purported editors, often hired at starvation wages from outside the house, who produce the mediocre manuscripts now flooding the outlets. The increasingly alienated reading public finds the results unreadable and will not buy books, for good reason. Starving out genuinely talented professional writers can only eventuate in the extinction of publishing itself."
All this was venting, of course, but it was also an effort to alert a responsible executive in an increasingly troubled industry as to how it felt from the point of view of that shrinking cadre of committed literary professionals whose world is drying up around them. Perhaps the dinosaurs will go last. But they'll go too, and soon.
More on Bobby and J. Edgar shortly.
Cheers,
Burton
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The Interest Rate Game
Countrycritters,
Back from our semiannual resettlement frenzy. My ruminations this week keep returning to the bad behavior of banks, everywhere and here, which are without a doubt gumming up the arteries of commerce world-wide. Beneficiaries of the greatest public bailout so far, bankers at every level seem determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by crippling the future.
The NY Times today -- October 25 -- points up the fact that banks all over the country, "flooded with cash," hate to lend it out, pay almost no interest, and indeed are talking about charging worried citizens for storing their savings. Easier for the bankers to park the cash in government securities, collect the difference, and spend the afternoon on the golf course.
That certainly reflects my experience recently. Seven years ago I signed on to buy a house our son lives in. My credit rating being top grade, I became the owner of record although he made the down payment and has been making the monthly payments without fail. With interest rates down, this seemed like a good time to remortgage the property. I went to our friendly neighborhood bank in rural New Hampshire and broached this possibility. I had maintained and paid off several mortgages with this bank without incident.
The portly local bank president heard me out and made a counterproposal. If I would lock up an amount somewhat in excess of the mortgage I was requesting in a non-interest-bearing account only the bank could invade for the life of the new mortgage, I might secure a marginally reduced mortgage balance for my son. These terms seemed preposterous -- there would be substantial closing fees and the rest rolled in -- and so I dropped the project, immediately. During the next few months I discovered that several contacts -- one a recently retired senior executive with a Fortune 500 corporation, another a Houston oil billionaire -- had substantially the same experience with local bank officers. Give me your watch and I'll tell you the time, as the Polish punch line goes.
We are a nation that has traditionally lubricated its economy with affordable credit. When credit dries up the economy implodes. During the 1920s, as I pointed out in my CIA history The Old Boys, the determination in Germany by Hjalmar Schacht and his fellow wizards to outsmart the British and the French by making reparations payments in wildly inflated Marks led quickly to the impoverishment of the middle class and the takeover by Hitler. Whether you hyperinflate an economy or starve it of ready capital, it is the productive, hard-working middle class that suffers first. Start-ups never get started; promising youngsters never make it to college. Our collective future darkens.
Every new president makes mistakes, but let's review Barack Obama's inclination to protect his flank by positioning spokesmen for Wall Street at the top of his economic management team. In the Oct. 31 issue of Time Joe Klein points out that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner blocked the overdue effort to break up Citibank (where his Clinton-era predecessor and patron Bob Rubin had gotten a special sinecure with an astronomical paycheck for eliminating the Glass-Steagall provisions which had protected commercial banks from the opium dreams of investment banking since the New Deal). Geithner stepped on the nomination of the reformist Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ex head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, had prevented the government from regulating the terrifyingly volatile multi-trillion-dollar derivatives market when he was Secretary of the Treasury late in the Clinton Administration. With reformers like these in charge, it's really no wonder that the economy continues to ride the rollercoaster.
With clown after clown emerging from the jalopy of Republican politics, sane voters are going to have very little choice in 2012. The best we can hope for is Obama Redux. Let's hope enough lessons have been learned by then.
Burton Hersh
Back from our semiannual resettlement frenzy. My ruminations this week keep returning to the bad behavior of banks, everywhere and here, which are without a doubt gumming up the arteries of commerce world-wide. Beneficiaries of the greatest public bailout so far, bankers at every level seem determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by crippling the future.
The NY Times today -- October 25 -- points up the fact that banks all over the country, "flooded with cash," hate to lend it out, pay almost no interest, and indeed are talking about charging worried citizens for storing their savings. Easier for the bankers to park the cash in government securities, collect the difference, and spend the afternoon on the golf course.
That certainly reflects my experience recently. Seven years ago I signed on to buy a house our son lives in. My credit rating being top grade, I became the owner of record although he made the down payment and has been making the monthly payments without fail. With interest rates down, this seemed like a good time to remortgage the property. I went to our friendly neighborhood bank in rural New Hampshire and broached this possibility. I had maintained and paid off several mortgages with this bank without incident.
The portly local bank president heard me out and made a counterproposal. If I would lock up an amount somewhat in excess of the mortgage I was requesting in a non-interest-bearing account only the bank could invade for the life of the new mortgage, I might secure a marginally reduced mortgage balance for my son. These terms seemed preposterous -- there would be substantial closing fees and the rest rolled in -- and so I dropped the project, immediately. During the next few months I discovered that several contacts -- one a recently retired senior executive with a Fortune 500 corporation, another a Houston oil billionaire -- had substantially the same experience with local bank officers. Give me your watch and I'll tell you the time, as the Polish punch line goes.
We are a nation that has traditionally lubricated its economy with affordable credit. When credit dries up the economy implodes. During the 1920s, as I pointed out in my CIA history The Old Boys, the determination in Germany by Hjalmar Schacht and his fellow wizards to outsmart the British and the French by making reparations payments in wildly inflated Marks led quickly to the impoverishment of the middle class and the takeover by Hitler. Whether you hyperinflate an economy or starve it of ready capital, it is the productive, hard-working middle class that suffers first. Start-ups never get started; promising youngsters never make it to college. Our collective future darkens.
Every new president makes mistakes, but let's review Barack Obama's inclination to protect his flank by positioning spokesmen for Wall Street at the top of his economic management team. In the Oct. 31 issue of Time Joe Klein points out that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner blocked the overdue effort to break up Citibank (where his Clinton-era predecessor and patron Bob Rubin had gotten a special sinecure with an astronomical paycheck for eliminating the Glass-Steagall provisions which had protected commercial banks from the opium dreams of investment banking since the New Deal). Geithner stepped on the nomination of the reformist Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ex head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, had prevented the government from regulating the terrifyingly volatile multi-trillion-dollar derivatives market when he was Secretary of the Treasury late in the Clinton Administration. With reformers like these in charge, it's really no wonder that the economy continues to ride the rollercoaster.
With clown after clown emerging from the jalopy of Republican politics, sane voters are going to have very little choice in 2012. The best we can hope for is Obama Redux. Let's hope enough lessons have been learned by then.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Jobs #3
Countryparsons,
The autumn deepens. The official unemployment levels refuse to budge, while effective unemployment -- people who have given up looking for work, recent college graduates who have simply moved in with the folks and are holed up until better times -- these totals are estimated to approach 25%. Our economy is stagnant, especially manufacturing.
The blame is commonly attributed to outsourcing, to automation, to the computerization of one white-collar profession after the next. And this explains a lot -- we are undergoing some kind of technological shift comparable with what went on during the mid nineteen-twenties, when nationwide electrification and the spread of mass-production techniques made millions of laborers, fresh off the farm, unnecessary. The Great Depression resulted, an agonizing slump it took World War II to remedy.
Now, under constant pressure to crank up "productivity," the great corporations which dominate our industry have moved very quickly to exploit the automation, global computerization and robotic methodologies currently available to create prosperity -- for the corporations -- without paychecks for the workers. In industries like autos foreign manufacturers have established plants here with the understanding that there will be two-tier wage levels, with a handful of unionized workers and the rest compensated at little better than minimum-wage levels. When a foreign firm took over a manufacturing facility in North Carolina to avail itself of the trained workers in the area, advanced automation made it possible to operate the company with 500 employees at a site that had previously employed thousands.
Moonstruck with numbers, we seem to be so preoccupied with how many workers are back on some kind of statistical roll that we are ignoring whether a middle-class wage will result as well as what kind of performance the rest of us can expect from our swelling but underpaid working population. One device that has become increasingly popular is the exploitation of "interns," recent students in the colleges and graduate schools who cannot get any kind of paying job and find themselves conned into sucking up their own living expenses while contributing their skills to a variety of enterprises, from law firms to newspapers, which are pleased enough to get the help for nothing. Time Magazine estimates that there are now millions of willing if naive youngsters in this expanding Intern Nation.
The problem with paying people little or nothing is that you are likely to get what you are paying for. As most of us can testify, attempting to get your computer back on line struggling with an incoherent menu or spelling out each word to some hapless clerk in Bangladesh whose English is shaky can gut an afternoon. Recently, when a book of mine came out and the publicity chores fell to an intern, I found that she was unable, over months, to make an effective connection with a single one of the several dozen radio or TV or book festival producers with whom I had recently worked successfully and whose names and contact information I had supplied. With time running out, within a few days I called them all and got onto every show.
What has been happening -- to the internet subscriber and to me -- is that the company or the publisher has in effect been saving money by taking on zombie employees, backloading the responsibility for normal commercial functions onto the customer or -- in my case -- the writer. Publishers are forever wailing that books don't sell. One central reason they don't sell is that the talented, well-connected editors and publicity people who knew and were trusted by media producers are mostly out, replaced by unpaid Valley Girls with better things to do. The reader has been abandoned.
You can replace somebody with somebody else or -- in some cases -- something else. But you cannot replace somebody with nobody. What we are headed into is an economy slipping beneath the waves from chronic unemployment and a lot of understaffed corporations that won't be able to compete in the long run.
Ten years from now, there may not be any Wall Street to Occupy.
Cheers,
Burton
The autumn deepens. The official unemployment levels refuse to budge, while effective unemployment -- people who have given up looking for work, recent college graduates who have simply moved in with the folks and are holed up until better times -- these totals are estimated to approach 25%. Our economy is stagnant, especially manufacturing.
The blame is commonly attributed to outsourcing, to automation, to the computerization of one white-collar profession after the next. And this explains a lot -- we are undergoing some kind of technological shift comparable with what went on during the mid nineteen-twenties, when nationwide electrification and the spread of mass-production techniques made millions of laborers, fresh off the farm, unnecessary. The Great Depression resulted, an agonizing slump it took World War II to remedy.
Now, under constant pressure to crank up "productivity," the great corporations which dominate our industry have moved very quickly to exploit the automation, global computerization and robotic methodologies currently available to create prosperity -- for the corporations -- without paychecks for the workers. In industries like autos foreign manufacturers have established plants here with the understanding that there will be two-tier wage levels, with a handful of unionized workers and the rest compensated at little better than minimum-wage levels. When a foreign firm took over a manufacturing facility in North Carolina to avail itself of the trained workers in the area, advanced automation made it possible to operate the company with 500 employees at a site that had previously employed thousands.
Moonstruck with numbers, we seem to be so preoccupied with how many workers are back on some kind of statistical roll that we are ignoring whether a middle-class wage will result as well as what kind of performance the rest of us can expect from our swelling but underpaid working population. One device that has become increasingly popular is the exploitation of "interns," recent students in the colleges and graduate schools who cannot get any kind of paying job and find themselves conned into sucking up their own living expenses while contributing their skills to a variety of enterprises, from law firms to newspapers, which are pleased enough to get the help for nothing. Time Magazine estimates that there are now millions of willing if naive youngsters in this expanding Intern Nation.
The problem with paying people little or nothing is that you are likely to get what you are paying for. As most of us can testify, attempting to get your computer back on line struggling with an incoherent menu or spelling out each word to some hapless clerk in Bangladesh whose English is shaky can gut an afternoon. Recently, when a book of mine came out and the publicity chores fell to an intern, I found that she was unable, over months, to make an effective connection with a single one of the several dozen radio or TV or book festival producers with whom I had recently worked successfully and whose names and contact information I had supplied. With time running out, within a few days I called them all and got onto every show.
What has been happening -- to the internet subscriber and to me -- is that the company or the publisher has in effect been saving money by taking on zombie employees, backloading the responsibility for normal commercial functions onto the customer or -- in my case -- the writer. Publishers are forever wailing that books don't sell. One central reason they don't sell is that the talented, well-connected editors and publicity people who knew and were trusted by media producers are mostly out, replaced by unpaid Valley Girls with better things to do. The reader has been abandoned.
You can replace somebody with somebody else or -- in some cases -- something else. But you cannot replace somebody with nobody. What we are headed into is an economy slipping beneath the waves from chronic unemployment and a lot of understaffed corporations that won't be able to compete in the long run.
Ten years from now, there may not be any Wall Street to Occupy.
Cheers,
Burton
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Another Date With Hitler
Countryfolk,
First, sorry to have missed a week. A quick trip to commiserate with the survivors of my high school class followed -- immediately, too immediately -- by our semiannual trek down or up the Eastern Seaboard ate up the days. But we are resettled and brimming over. Bring your mops!
It has become a commonplace on the right to accuse the leadership on the left, especially when pocketbook issues come up, of approximating the tactics -- if not presenting the apparition, the Antichrist himself -- of the risen Hitler. Posters of Barack Obama have been circulating for some time representing our angular, tawny president with a toothbrush mustache, a manifestation of the Evil that will consume your children and drain your bank accounts.
Somehow the temperate Obama seems to provoke this sort of hallucinated attack, no doubt an outbreak of the vestigial racism that haunts our politics. But in a way it might be time to pay a little attention to the historical forces that actually did thrust a hysteric like Hitler into control of a desperate society like Weimar Germany and opened the way to the worldwide catastrophe that followed.
Hitler's assumption of power was a fluke, the consequence of a fateful, hair-brained decision by his predecessor as Chancellor, von Schleicher, to drum into power this joke leader of a fading political movement -- the Nazis never exceeded 37% of the popular vote -- and give the shrill little demagogue the opportunity to destroy himself. Von Schleicher and his Junker colleagues miscalculated badly; Hitler installed Hermann Goering as the Minister of the Interior, let loose his Brownshirt army, and grabbed total control in a Germany too culturally and economically depleted to resist.
I myself arrived in Central Europe, after years of contemplating German history from a university setting, as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955 and spent the next six years in the region living, soldiering, and writing. Much of post-war Germany was rubble still -- not only East Berlin and Dresden but entire neighborhoods of Frankfurt and Munich. I lived for some months with a typical German family -- to keep his job, the father had become a Nazi Party member, and fought in both World Wars. Later, in the military myself, I rented a flat from another family of onetime Nazi functionaries. These people, and many others, turned into lifelong friends.
What kept coming through as I came to know these survivors was what they had been through. In the aftermath of World War I their world had collapsed. Unemployment was universal; the Allied reparations policy and the depredations of bankers in New York and London had forced economic technocrats like Hjalmar Schacht to water the Reichsmark until virtually everybody's savings were worthless. In pre-1914 Germany, the cultural and scientific center of Western thought, a mood of tolerance and respect for the contributions of citizens of every background was expected. Walther Rathenau, a Jewish economist, had run the finances of the country for the Kaiser. Hitler's own father, a mid-level bureaucrat in the Austro-Hungarian tax collection bureaucracy, had nothing but contempt for anti-Semites, whom he considered declasse.
All this is leading to my historical point. Bad luck, bad judgement, a lost war and atrocious economic management had led within comparatively few years to the utter erosion of the middle class and fed the rise of the Nazis. A rich, modernist society characterized by tolerance, invention, and prudent economic management had collapsed internally and produced the sustained nightmare from which my generation has been attempting to recover ever since. Obama is no Hitler. But unless we begin to deal with the crisis we face, and replace the short-sighted, greed-driven expectations which activate so many of our citizens with a genuine willingness everywhere to sacrifice and rebuild, our prospects are dimming every day. We are much closer to imploding than most of us realize.
The new Hitler waits in the wings.
Burton Hersh
First, sorry to have missed a week. A quick trip to commiserate with the survivors of my high school class followed -- immediately, too immediately -- by our semiannual trek down or up the Eastern Seaboard ate up the days. But we are resettled and brimming over. Bring your mops!
It has become a commonplace on the right to accuse the leadership on the left, especially when pocketbook issues come up, of approximating the tactics -- if not presenting the apparition, the Antichrist himself -- of the risen Hitler. Posters of Barack Obama have been circulating for some time representing our angular, tawny president with a toothbrush mustache, a manifestation of the Evil that will consume your children and drain your bank accounts.
Somehow the temperate Obama seems to provoke this sort of hallucinated attack, no doubt an outbreak of the vestigial racism that haunts our politics. But in a way it might be time to pay a little attention to the historical forces that actually did thrust a hysteric like Hitler into control of a desperate society like Weimar Germany and opened the way to the worldwide catastrophe that followed.
Hitler's assumption of power was a fluke, the consequence of a fateful, hair-brained decision by his predecessor as Chancellor, von Schleicher, to drum into power this joke leader of a fading political movement -- the Nazis never exceeded 37% of the popular vote -- and give the shrill little demagogue the opportunity to destroy himself. Von Schleicher and his Junker colleagues miscalculated badly; Hitler installed Hermann Goering as the Minister of the Interior, let loose his Brownshirt army, and grabbed total control in a Germany too culturally and economically depleted to resist.
I myself arrived in Central Europe, after years of contemplating German history from a university setting, as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955 and spent the next six years in the region living, soldiering, and writing. Much of post-war Germany was rubble still -- not only East Berlin and Dresden but entire neighborhoods of Frankfurt and Munich. I lived for some months with a typical German family -- to keep his job, the father had become a Nazi Party member, and fought in both World Wars. Later, in the military myself, I rented a flat from another family of onetime Nazi functionaries. These people, and many others, turned into lifelong friends.
What kept coming through as I came to know these survivors was what they had been through. In the aftermath of World War I their world had collapsed. Unemployment was universal; the Allied reparations policy and the depredations of bankers in New York and London had forced economic technocrats like Hjalmar Schacht to water the Reichsmark until virtually everybody's savings were worthless. In pre-1914 Germany, the cultural and scientific center of Western thought, a mood of tolerance and respect for the contributions of citizens of every background was expected. Walther Rathenau, a Jewish economist, had run the finances of the country for the Kaiser. Hitler's own father, a mid-level bureaucrat in the Austro-Hungarian tax collection bureaucracy, had nothing but contempt for anti-Semites, whom he considered declasse.
All this is leading to my historical point. Bad luck, bad judgement, a lost war and atrocious economic management had led within comparatively few years to the utter erosion of the middle class and fed the rise of the Nazis. A rich, modernist society characterized by tolerance, invention, and prudent economic management had collapsed internally and produced the sustained nightmare from which my generation has been attempting to recover ever since. Obama is no Hitler. But unless we begin to deal with the crisis we face, and replace the short-sighted, greed-driven expectations which activate so many of our citizens with a genuine willingness everywhere to sacrifice and rebuild, our prospects are dimming every day. We are much closer to imploding than most of us realize.
The new Hitler waits in the wings.
Burton Hersh
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Vapors of Camelot
Countrymice,
Today's subject is delicate. We will be dealing here with friends, intimate history, how reality is lighted, or obscured. You'll get the picture.
Last week excerpts from the tapes of a fairly extended interview Jacqueline Onassis gave Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1964 made it onto network television. The drumbeat of publicity leading up to this feature on ABC indicated that this premature release of many of the tapes was the price Caroline Kennedy was willing to pay if the network would refrain from airing the miniseries on the Kennedys it had already scheduled. The miniseries ultimately made it onto a secondary cable channel. While tiptoeing around most of the more contested issues -- Vietnam, Cuba, the unconstitutional tactics of Bob Kennedy's Get-Hoffa Squad -- the miniseries did touch on a surprising amount of heretofore protected information -- how sick Jack Kennedy really was, his tendency to clutch in a crisis, his heedless and politically suicidal womanizing. Like Joe Kennedy and Jackie Onassis before her, Caroline Kennedy seems to understand instinctively how important it remains to calcify the abiding mythology, to blow the right publicity trumpets.
Well before the Schlesinger/Onassis interview aired there were leaks in the media suggesting potential bombshells. The Texas oil wildcatters were behind the assassination of JFK. Lyndon Johnson had a hand. Having investigated and projected in my controversial book Bobby and J. Edgar my own very detailed treatment of who actually gunned down President Kennedy, and why, I hoped for something new. But when the hour came these rumors appeared to be unfounded. Such potentially loaded observations by Mrs. Onassis had obviously been censored out.
I felt for Arthur Schlesinger. I knew Arthur well; he had been a teacher of mine while I was an undergraduate at Harvard. For perhaps thirty years, once I began to research the CIA for The Old Boys, I never visited Manhattan -- and I was there often -- without having lunch with Schlesinger, who had served in the OSS and knew the intelligence pioneers well. Arthur had been recruited as an adviser in the Kennedy White House-- his advice was almost always good but very rarely listened to -- and afterwards he became an important source and a close friend of Robert Kennedy, whose biography he wrote. Robert Kennedy and His Times was an inspired performance. But in it Good Bobby was everywhere, and Bad Bobby -- on whom I later lavished a lot of attention -- was nowhere in sight. Arthur's devotion to the Kennedy crowd ultimately cost him a lot of reputation among historians. At our last lunch he asked me, rather timorously, what I thought of Evan Thomas' biography of Bob. Thomas' book was capable if quite restrained in its attention to Robert Kennedy's faults -- certainly compared with Bobby and J. Edgar later on. From what he had heard, Arthur said, he could not bring himself to read the Thomas biography.
For all his legendary prickliness, Arthur Schlesinger had fallen in love with a myth. His passion cost him. As long as we continue to evade and classify the elements of our own unfolding history, it will cost us.
Burton Hersh
Today's subject is delicate. We will be dealing here with friends, intimate history, how reality is lighted, or obscured. You'll get the picture.
Last week excerpts from the tapes of a fairly extended interview Jacqueline Onassis gave Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1964 made it onto network television. The drumbeat of publicity leading up to this feature on ABC indicated that this premature release of many of the tapes was the price Caroline Kennedy was willing to pay if the network would refrain from airing the miniseries on the Kennedys it had already scheduled. The miniseries ultimately made it onto a secondary cable channel. While tiptoeing around most of the more contested issues -- Vietnam, Cuba, the unconstitutional tactics of Bob Kennedy's Get-Hoffa Squad -- the miniseries did touch on a surprising amount of heretofore protected information -- how sick Jack Kennedy really was, his tendency to clutch in a crisis, his heedless and politically suicidal womanizing. Like Joe Kennedy and Jackie Onassis before her, Caroline Kennedy seems to understand instinctively how important it remains to calcify the abiding mythology, to blow the right publicity trumpets.
Well before the Schlesinger/Onassis interview aired there were leaks in the media suggesting potential bombshells. The Texas oil wildcatters were behind the assassination of JFK. Lyndon Johnson had a hand. Having investigated and projected in my controversial book Bobby and J. Edgar my own very detailed treatment of who actually gunned down President Kennedy, and why, I hoped for something new. But when the hour came these rumors appeared to be unfounded. Such potentially loaded observations by Mrs. Onassis had obviously been censored out.
I felt for Arthur Schlesinger. I knew Arthur well; he had been a teacher of mine while I was an undergraduate at Harvard. For perhaps thirty years, once I began to research the CIA for The Old Boys, I never visited Manhattan -- and I was there often -- without having lunch with Schlesinger, who had served in the OSS and knew the intelligence pioneers well. Arthur had been recruited as an adviser in the Kennedy White House-- his advice was almost always good but very rarely listened to -- and afterwards he became an important source and a close friend of Robert Kennedy, whose biography he wrote. Robert Kennedy and His Times was an inspired performance. But in it Good Bobby was everywhere, and Bad Bobby -- on whom I later lavished a lot of attention -- was nowhere in sight. Arthur's devotion to the Kennedy crowd ultimately cost him a lot of reputation among historians. At our last lunch he asked me, rather timorously, what I thought of Evan Thomas' biography of Bob. Thomas' book was capable if quite restrained in its attention to Robert Kennedy's faults -- certainly compared with Bobby and J. Edgar later on. From what he had heard, Arthur said, he could not bring himself to read the Thomas biography.
For all his legendary prickliness, Arthur Schlesinger had fallen in love with a myth. His passion cost him. As long as we continue to evade and classify the elements of our own unfolding history, it will cost us.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, September 10, 2011
About 9/11
Countrymice,
A national calamity is never an easy subject, supercharged as it invariably is with loss, frustration,
and the haunting awareness that somehow the whole thing might have been headed off. I am old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, an event which gutshot our national self-confidence and rerouted our destiny.
The catastrophes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ten years ago have developed into another such turning point. The effect was so tremendous that almost the entire society lost sight of the fact that we had been subject to what was essentially a fluke. A handful of educated Saudis and Egyptians had slipped into the United States, taken flying lessons, and highjacked several airliners by threatening their crews with box-cutters -- box-cutters! -- unless they agreed to fly these commandeered passenger planes into designated targets. Like the limpet bomb stuck onto the side of a U.S. Navy destroyer from a fishing boat or the Third-World embassy bombings, all this was very low-tech, dependent on a lot of luck and an absent-minded adversary.
Worse, we had the intelligence capability to anticipate 9/11. An Al Qaeda planning session in Malaysia had been penetrated by the CIA. The FBI had picked up on several of the highjackers and one of its senior agents was convinced that he knew the target. But interagency cooperation was sloppy or nonexistent, and the attackers brought it off.
Attempts by Al Qaeda since -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- would suggest how bush league Bin Laden and his operatives have remained all along. Certainly our National Security apparatus has tightened up -- and bulked out to an amazing and perhaps self-defeating extent. No doubt the worst consequence of 9/11 has been the justification it has seemed to offer our opportunity-seeking industrialists and politicians to pursue our involvement in the Middle East, the projections of power which attracted the attention of the Al Qaeda fanatics in the first place. Ever contemptuous of reality, Richard Cheney and his following of right-wing fanaticists kept insisting, incorrectly, that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack, and before long would be turning over weapons of mass destruction to his charges. An aroused if poorly informed Congress went along, and we plunged into the orgy of pointless conquest and senseless nation-building that has been sapping us ever since.
Today we mourn the losses of a decade ago. This is the moment to consider the lessons we might have learned.
Always,
Burton Hersh
A national calamity is never an easy subject, supercharged as it invariably is with loss, frustration,
and the haunting awareness that somehow the whole thing might have been headed off. I am old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, an event which gutshot our national self-confidence and rerouted our destiny.
The catastrophes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ten years ago have developed into another such turning point. The effect was so tremendous that almost the entire society lost sight of the fact that we had been subject to what was essentially a fluke. A handful of educated Saudis and Egyptians had slipped into the United States, taken flying lessons, and highjacked several airliners by threatening their crews with box-cutters -- box-cutters! -- unless they agreed to fly these commandeered passenger planes into designated targets. Like the limpet bomb stuck onto the side of a U.S. Navy destroyer from a fishing boat or the Third-World embassy bombings, all this was very low-tech, dependent on a lot of luck and an absent-minded adversary.
Worse, we had the intelligence capability to anticipate 9/11. An Al Qaeda planning session in Malaysia had been penetrated by the CIA. The FBI had picked up on several of the highjackers and one of its senior agents was convinced that he knew the target. But interagency cooperation was sloppy or nonexistent, and the attackers brought it off.
Attempts by Al Qaeda since -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- would suggest how bush league Bin Laden and his operatives have remained all along. Certainly our National Security apparatus has tightened up -- and bulked out to an amazing and perhaps self-defeating extent. No doubt the worst consequence of 9/11 has been the justification it has seemed to offer our opportunity-seeking industrialists and politicians to pursue our involvement in the Middle East, the projections of power which attracted the attention of the Al Qaeda fanatics in the first place. Ever contemptuous of reality, Richard Cheney and his following of right-wing fanaticists kept insisting, incorrectly, that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack, and before long would be turning over weapons of mass destruction to his charges. An aroused if poorly informed Congress went along, and we plunged into the orgy of pointless conquest and senseless nation-building that has been sapping us ever since.
Today we mourn the losses of a decade ago. This is the moment to consider the lessons we might have learned.
Always,
Burton Hersh
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
How We Stumble into Wars #2
Countryvarmints,
E-mails have poured in after last week's blog, when I attempted to lift the doormat before all the facts that induced the Kennedy administration to risk its reputation over Cuba could scurry out of sight. This week I intend to point up factors that tempted Jack Kennedy to light the fuse on what had been a minor CIA advisory presence in Saigon. My friend Nick Natsios served as the Agency station chief there during the Eisenhower years, so I had access to many of the details.
The sequence of events that actually led us into the quagmire of Viet Nam is laid out in Chapter 21 of my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and follows the narrative developed by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Kennedy's head of special operations -- active spookery -- for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty saw it, Kennedy was under heavy pressure to support the million or so Viet Namese Catholics who with U.S. help fled Ho Chi Minh and had been forced into leadership positions in the villages of South Vietnam by the Diem regime. Diem himself was a family friend of the Kennedys during the years he awaited his moment in a monastery in Maryland and a protege of Cardinal Spellman. Once the indigenous Buddhists began to revolt, President Kennedy ordered the 16,000 helicopter troops into South Viet Nam and our national nightmare was upon us. Vatican politics, never really acknowledged.
What we had done was to attempt to force our will on one element of what began as a civil war. We have been attempting a similar form of intervention periodically ever since, playing favorites among the clans and tribes of the Middle East, and we have lost every time. By that I mean -- we as a nation. We as interested corporations -- Brown and Root, which built Cam Ranh Bay, to become Halliburton, to morph into KBR, which built billions and billions of dollar's-worth of airfields and dependent-housing-quarters that we are abandoning now in Iraq -- we as corporations made out beautifully. Our surviving children and grandchildren can deal with the costs.
My pal and patron of many decades, John Fry, the godfather of the modern ski movement in America, responded to last week's blog with a hard-headed appraisal of what we have taken on in an e-mail that begins: "..the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6000 bases in the United States...." according to the 2003 Base Status Report. This itemization omits installations such as Camp Bondsteel on Kosovo, built and maintained by Kellogg, Brown and Root, as well as "bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan."
All this while Medicaid benefits are about to be cut back and class sizes in the ghettos are ballooning.
All the best, as always,
Burton Hersh
E-mails have poured in after last week's blog, when I attempted to lift the doormat before all the facts that induced the Kennedy administration to risk its reputation over Cuba could scurry out of sight. This week I intend to point up factors that tempted Jack Kennedy to light the fuse on what had been a minor CIA advisory presence in Saigon. My friend Nick Natsios served as the Agency station chief there during the Eisenhower years, so I had access to many of the details.
The sequence of events that actually led us into the quagmire of Viet Nam is laid out in Chapter 21 of my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and follows the narrative developed by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Kennedy's head of special operations -- active spookery -- for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty saw it, Kennedy was under heavy pressure to support the million or so Viet Namese Catholics who with U.S. help fled Ho Chi Minh and had been forced into leadership positions in the villages of South Vietnam by the Diem regime. Diem himself was a family friend of the Kennedys during the years he awaited his moment in a monastery in Maryland and a protege of Cardinal Spellman. Once the indigenous Buddhists began to revolt, President Kennedy ordered the 16,000 helicopter troops into South Viet Nam and our national nightmare was upon us. Vatican politics, never really acknowledged.
What we had done was to attempt to force our will on one element of what began as a civil war. We have been attempting a similar form of intervention periodically ever since, playing favorites among the clans and tribes of the Middle East, and we have lost every time. By that I mean -- we as a nation. We as interested corporations -- Brown and Root, which built Cam Ranh Bay, to become Halliburton, to morph into KBR, which built billions and billions of dollar's-worth of airfields and dependent-housing-quarters that we are abandoning now in Iraq -- we as corporations made out beautifully. Our surviving children and grandchildren can deal with the costs.
My pal and patron of many decades, John Fry, the godfather of the modern ski movement in America, responded to last week's blog with a hard-headed appraisal of what we have taken on in an e-mail that begins: "..the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6000 bases in the United States...." according to the 2003 Base Status Report. This itemization omits installations such as Camp Bondsteel on Kosovo, built and maintained by Kellogg, Brown and Root, as well as "bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan."
All this while Medicaid benefits are about to be cut back and class sizes in the ghettos are ballooning.
All the best, as always,
Burton Hersh
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