Countrycompadres,
So now we proceed, our familiar collection of monsters except holding forth from another galaxy. Back now in Photoscenic New Hampshire, after driving for days through a hurricane that thankfully degenerated into a nasty tropical storm. Like two days of plowing through a car-wash, with 18-wheelers jack-knifed and crumpled into the cement retaining walls along I-95 and an incessant downpour that never really let up, so that a few seconds forging through an underpass was cognitive bliss.
After two days we landed in D.C. for a short visit. Research for my next novel, in and around the Supreme Court. Finally arriving at the Mother Ship in Bradford, NH, where the storm that had been stalking us up the East Coast overtook us again and blew the guts out of our computer. But we are finally on line, as you might surmise.
Most followers of this blog seemed captivated by my barracks story last time around. One, the courageous investigative reporter and biographer -- and professor -- Joan Mellen admonished me about getting into race and/or sex as subject matter. She is undoubtedly right, but when did I ever listen?
The next incident I remember from my army days involving color came about once Basic Training was over and I was stationed for several months in what was then Camp Gordon -- now Fort Gordon -- in Augusta Georgia. I was training to become an 053, a radio operator. Our classes were held in a big grid of one-story buildings; we were expected to double-time in the fearful August heat between classes, our "Tessie-rolls" -- rolled-up raincoats -- under our right arms and paired off according to height, the tallest pair in front and the rest of the trainees in descending order. Very military.
It happened that the classmate who was exactly my height was a black draftee who had just gotten his PH.D. in physics at the University of Chicago. I had studied the subject a little in both high school and college, and during the breaks he brought me up to speed as regarded developments in quantum mechanics and uncertainty theory. I definitely wanted to hear more, and so I invited him over for dinner one Saturday to the one-room apartment in which my new wife -- we had gotten married perhaps a month earlier -- and I were starting out. Essentially, the place was an abandoned gas station, with a huge plate-glass window facing -- yes, really! -- the original Tobacco Road and a bed and a couch and a primitive little stove. The place was literally crawling with field mice, and after lights-out we lay in bed together and listened to the traps my wife had set all over the block-linoleum floor snap shut. Once we had counted down, and were sure each contained a dead mouse, we turned to our newlywed obligations. This was no honeymoon for the squeamish.
My fellow draftee got off the bus from Camp Gordon at the appointed time, and I ushered him into our flat and mixed us a couple of drinks. My wife had come up with hors d'oeuvres. The conversation was just getting interesting when my red-neck landlord happened to pass the big plate glass window, and peered in, and immediately all but kicked the door open and joined our party. "Git that nigguh outta mah house!" he roared; all of us stood up.
What happened during the next few minutes promised a race riot. Hillbillies literally brandishing pitchforks stormed through the surrounding weeds; GIs who were renting in the upper reaches of the building -- both Northerners and Southern youngsters who were obviously rethinking Jim Crow after months in the desegregated military -- clambered down the fire escape steps to help us out. The local sheriff rolled up in a battered prowl car, a heavy-set fellow who attempted to explain to my wife and myself that "Understand, boy, the red birds do not congregate with the black birds in this world. The nigruhs, they don't want that neither...."
I had by God invited this fellow over for a meal, and I was determined to show him hospitality. Our guest had another idea. Lynchings were still common in the Eisenhower-era South, and he obviously had another notion as to how he wanted his life to play out. I had a car, a dented green Buick sedan with lots of portholes, over a decade old. Perhaps I might give our guest a ride into Augusta? There was a blacks-only nightclub where nobody would give him trouble.
I suspect I learned a lot more about Race in America that evening than my guest did. But there was more to come, once we were deployed to Germany.
As you will discover.
Ever,
Burton
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Saturday, May 26, 2012
White Like Me
Countryconverts,
Here in Florida the sticky waterless spring is deepening into summer. Our bags are packed. When next I rant, it will be from the hills of Photoscenic New Hampshire.
The Trayvon Martin shooting and the embroilments of its legal aftermath have started me musing about race in America. Race relations during my lifetime. It's been a choppy graph.
In 1960 a novelist named John Howard Griffin published a book called Black Like Me. Griffin, a susceptible white man, had dyed his body black and floated around the Jim Crow South of the later fifties. He had been insulted, condescended to, and brutalized hour by hour as he hitchhiked through the Old Confederacy, and hearing it from an educated Caucasian had quite an impact on genteel white America. Martin Luther King was rising.
During the same decade, the fifties, I put in my two-year hitch in the U.S. Army. The spring of 1957 I went through basic training in the reconstituted Fourth Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas. Roughly half of my fellow trainees were black. The Negros of the period, as they were then called, probably spanned a cultural range wider than their white counterparts. The few I had known in college were a select culling -- one of my classmates, Cliff Alexander, went on to become Secretary of the Army, and another, my friend Nat Lamar, was no doubt the most promising novelist of his generation.
The draftees in my platoon during basic were unquestionably more representative. But across an enormous social range. One mild soul with whom I boarded the Army bus in Minneapolis that carried us to Texas was an accountant in civlian life. We hit a rest stop in Arkansas, where he was not only refused counter service but denied access to the washroom. He'd have to hold his water. The South was rising again.
My sharpest memory of interrace conflict during our training months involved a face-off I managed to get into in the barracks after hours. I was already in my middle twenties. The days of double-timing for miles and tossing fragmentation grenades over barriers produced a definite craving for sleep by nine PM, when the lights went out, and as I lay on my upper bunk the blaring rock and roll coming out of the transistor radio of a black teenaged kid across the aisle was keeping me awake, night after night. In time, I blew. After asking -- semi-politely -- that this harebrained jitterbug turn the frigging thing off, I swung down clad solely in my boxer shorts and went for the radio.
The kid reached into his locker and grabbed an entrenching tool, a heavy stubbed foldable shovel that would have served nicely as a mace, perfect for laying my head open. A few steps before I got squarely into range, through the last of the twilight, another black recruit, a huge but amiable fellow I later learned was a Christian minister in the deep South, slipped in between us and gripped each of us by the wrist and hoisted us both off the floor. We dangled like chickens in a poultry shop. "Now, mens," he recommended in his deep, soothing voice, "does you really have to fight like this? They catch you, you wind up in the stockade fo' years. Ain't hardly worth it, seem lahk to me."
We both stopped wriggling. The minister dropped us. The jitterbug slumped over and turned the radio off. I slouched across the aisle and swung back up onto my upper bunk. The Lord had been served.
I'm still a hothead, but that was a lesson I never forgot. It tuned me up for the incidents later on.
Stay tuned.
As always,
Burton Hersh
Here in Florida the sticky waterless spring is deepening into summer. Our bags are packed. When next I rant, it will be from the hills of Photoscenic New Hampshire.
The Trayvon Martin shooting and the embroilments of its legal aftermath have started me musing about race in America. Race relations during my lifetime. It's been a choppy graph.
In 1960 a novelist named John Howard Griffin published a book called Black Like Me. Griffin, a susceptible white man, had dyed his body black and floated around the Jim Crow South of the later fifties. He had been insulted, condescended to, and brutalized hour by hour as he hitchhiked through the Old Confederacy, and hearing it from an educated Caucasian had quite an impact on genteel white America. Martin Luther King was rising.
During the same decade, the fifties, I put in my two-year hitch in the U.S. Army. The spring of 1957 I went through basic training in the reconstituted Fourth Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas. Roughly half of my fellow trainees were black. The Negros of the period, as they were then called, probably spanned a cultural range wider than their white counterparts. The few I had known in college were a select culling -- one of my classmates, Cliff Alexander, went on to become Secretary of the Army, and another, my friend Nat Lamar, was no doubt the most promising novelist of his generation.
The draftees in my platoon during basic were unquestionably more representative. But across an enormous social range. One mild soul with whom I boarded the Army bus in Minneapolis that carried us to Texas was an accountant in civlian life. We hit a rest stop in Arkansas, where he was not only refused counter service but denied access to the washroom. He'd have to hold his water. The South was rising again.
My sharpest memory of interrace conflict during our training months involved a face-off I managed to get into in the barracks after hours. I was already in my middle twenties. The days of double-timing for miles and tossing fragmentation grenades over barriers produced a definite craving for sleep by nine PM, when the lights went out, and as I lay on my upper bunk the blaring rock and roll coming out of the transistor radio of a black teenaged kid across the aisle was keeping me awake, night after night. In time, I blew. After asking -- semi-politely -- that this harebrained jitterbug turn the frigging thing off, I swung down clad solely in my boxer shorts and went for the radio.
The kid reached into his locker and grabbed an entrenching tool, a heavy stubbed foldable shovel that would have served nicely as a mace, perfect for laying my head open. A few steps before I got squarely into range, through the last of the twilight, another black recruit, a huge but amiable fellow I later learned was a Christian minister in the deep South, slipped in between us and gripped each of us by the wrist and hoisted us both off the floor. We dangled like chickens in a poultry shop. "Now, mens," he recommended in his deep, soothing voice, "does you really have to fight like this? They catch you, you wind up in the stockade fo' years. Ain't hardly worth it, seem lahk to me."
We both stopped wriggling. The minister dropped us. The jitterbug slumped over and turned the radio off. I slouched across the aisle and swung back up onto my upper bunk. The Lord had been served.
I'm still a hothead, but that was a lesson I never forgot. It tuned me up for the incidents later on.
Stay tuned.
As always,
Burton Hersh
Saturday, May 12, 2012
The Great Hair Ticket II
Countrycomrades,
I thought last week that once around about the John Edwards/Bunny Mellon tragicomedy was enough, but so many of you came back with astute and often enough amusing comments that it forces me to take another look, if only to quote what you have to say. Money, politics, and the ancient human urges ignite a combustible mixture.
One pal, Vern Farnsworth, sums up his days in politics with a reminiscence of having come home puffed up after lunch in the prestigious Tavern Club in Boston with Elliot Richardson and Senators Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge. His wife "listened patiently to my account of the luncheon and then told me to take out the trash. So much for arrogance."
Another acquaintance of several decades, a fixture in our intelligence structure who understood right away in 1992 that my book The Old Boys represented a revolutionary interpretation of the history of U.S. intelligence despite the anguish of her colleagues at having so many of their deepest secrets and most profound embarrasments out there in print, felt profoundly the predicament of Bunny Mellon. The heir herself to the traditions of one of America's oldest and most respected families, my friend confessed that her "heart goes out to a withdrawn, private Bunny Mellon who is at that age and condition where a conniving little xxxx like the dapper Edwards can make her feel that mortgaging her house to fund his next misadventure...serves some greater purpose."
I responded privately that, whatever the fallout publicly, it was my impression that as the heir to the Lambert fortune as well as Paul Mellon's estate Bunny was no doubt well provided for. But then I read in the NY Times of May 9 that "Mrs. Mellon, an heiress, had given more than $6 million to his [Edwards'] campaigns and causes and an additional $725,000 secretly through Mr. Young to care for Ms. Hunter."
Perhaps we were talking real money. Meanwhile, my friend the intelligence bureaucrat came back with an e-mail that revealed how much more she knew than I did about Bunny Mellon's predicament. "Yes, Bunny has plenty of assets," she wrote, "but not a lot of money. A common problem for the elderly rich who live grandly. She had to sell the NYC place, and some houses in France, for liquidity. And her financial retinue has begun asserting controls on spending." The tens of millions that Edwards and Young attempted to extract to underwrite some sort of "foundation" that Young would run probably set off alarm bells all over the accounting houses of Manhattan.
"Families grow concerned that you will be taken advantage of, snookered, start funding some n'er-do-wells," my friend writes. "Or worry that their inheritance will be frittered away in your final years. Every contact is fraught with expectations, distrust, psychological/medical snooping, and gossip. ...you become a prisoner of the trappings of wealth rather than one living out final days in splendor with few worries."
What can I add?
Blogs to come will probably become a little more intermittent over the next month or so while I take a quick research trip to Costa Rica and we then embark on our late-May resettlement for the summer in New Hampshire. Stay tuned in. There is more to come.
Buck up. See -- poverty hath its privileges!
Burton Hersh
I thought last week that once around about the John Edwards/Bunny Mellon tragicomedy was enough, but so many of you came back with astute and often enough amusing comments that it forces me to take another look, if only to quote what you have to say. Money, politics, and the ancient human urges ignite a combustible mixture.
One pal, Vern Farnsworth, sums up his days in politics with a reminiscence of having come home puffed up after lunch in the prestigious Tavern Club in Boston with Elliot Richardson and Senators Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge. His wife "listened patiently to my account of the luncheon and then told me to take out the trash. So much for arrogance."
Another acquaintance of several decades, a fixture in our intelligence structure who understood right away in 1992 that my book The Old Boys represented a revolutionary interpretation of the history of U.S. intelligence despite the anguish of her colleagues at having so many of their deepest secrets and most profound embarrasments out there in print, felt profoundly the predicament of Bunny Mellon. The heir herself to the traditions of one of America's oldest and most respected families, my friend confessed that her "heart goes out to a withdrawn, private Bunny Mellon who is at that age and condition where a conniving little xxxx like the dapper Edwards can make her feel that mortgaging her house to fund his next misadventure...serves some greater purpose."
I responded privately that, whatever the fallout publicly, it was my impression that as the heir to the Lambert fortune as well as Paul Mellon's estate Bunny was no doubt well provided for. But then I read in the NY Times of May 9 that "Mrs. Mellon, an heiress, had given more than $6 million to his [Edwards'] campaigns and causes and an additional $725,000 secretly through Mr. Young to care for Ms. Hunter."
Perhaps we were talking real money. Meanwhile, my friend the intelligence bureaucrat came back with an e-mail that revealed how much more she knew than I did about Bunny Mellon's predicament. "Yes, Bunny has plenty of assets," she wrote, "but not a lot of money. A common problem for the elderly rich who live grandly. She had to sell the NYC place, and some houses in France, for liquidity. And her financial retinue has begun asserting controls on spending." The tens of millions that Edwards and Young attempted to extract to underwrite some sort of "foundation" that Young would run probably set off alarm bells all over the accounting houses of Manhattan.
"Families grow concerned that you will be taken advantage of, snookered, start funding some n'er-do-wells," my friend writes. "Or worry that their inheritance will be frittered away in your final years. Every contact is fraught with expectations, distrust, psychological/medical snooping, and gossip. ...you become a prisoner of the trappings of wealth rather than one living out final days in splendor with few worries."
What can I add?
Blogs to come will probably become a little more intermittent over the next month or so while I take a quick research trip to Costa Rica and we then embark on our late-May resettlement for the summer in New Hampshire. Stay tuned in. There is more to come.
Buck up. See -- poverty hath its privileges!
Burton Hersh
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
The Great Hair Ticket
Countryconsumers,
As the tabloidization of the American psyche proceeds, each new sensation
heaves into view the ghosts of sensations past. I have been reminded of how
this operates by the attention even the more august papers have been giving the
last few weeks to the court testimony of Cheri and Andrew Young. Young was
the aide whose adoration for Senator John Edwards was such that he agreed to
'fess up that he himself was the father of the baby that Edwards sired with his
adventurous mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards was the vice-presidential
candidate John Kerry picked in 2004.
As things happened, I had a sort of remote advisorial role in the Kerry cam-
paign, and found myself more and more taken aback by the extent to which
the leaders of the ticket seemed to be cruising along, disinterested in political
reality. While he was still angling for the Democratic nomination I suggested
to Kerry that he consider disavowing his vote for the resolution to go into Iraq,
which was already turning into a fratricidal disaster. He dug a long forefinger
into my chest and lectured me on consistency. A year later, when photos of
the Senator were being released to the newspapers featuring him hang-gliding
in a wet suit off some soigne overseas beach while the Bush brothers in shirt-
sleeves were handing out bottles of water after the Punta Gorda hurricane, I
questioned the p.r. implications of that. Nothing registered.
I go into this to suggest the obliviousness that tends to overtake political
candidates once they are into their campaign burn. I suppose something like
that happened with John Edwards. His girl friend's pregnancy must have
seemed like just another awkward detail, something the staff could fix. And-
rew Young apparently stepped forward. The participant who surprised me
here was Rachel -- Bunny -- Mellon. I spent five years during the seventies
hanging around Paul Mellon in preparation for writing The Mellon Family.
Bunny, Paul's wife, was certainly no pushover. A natural manager, she latched
onto Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once Jack was headed toward the White
House and designed the Rose Gardens. Bunny could take on anybody.
Perhaps in her nineties she softened up. Still, her nephew, a long-time friend,
tells me that even now, at one-hundred plus, Bunny is still adroit, still tending
her gardens at Upperville. Perhaps in the cavalier John Edwards she spied
another JFK. What did a little womanizing amount to at those social alt-
itudes? The lawyers could deal with the rest of it.
Google has rejiggered the format of this blog again. Please forgive any irre-
gularities. And Godspeed.
Burton Hersh
As the tabloidization of the American psyche proceeds, each new sensation
heaves into view the ghosts of sensations past. I have been reminded of how
this operates by the attention even the more august papers have been giving the
last few weeks to the court testimony of Cheri and Andrew Young. Young was
the aide whose adoration for Senator John Edwards was such that he agreed to
'fess up that he himself was the father of the baby that Edwards sired with his
adventurous mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards was the vice-presidential
candidate John Kerry picked in 2004.
As things happened, I had a sort of remote advisorial role in the Kerry cam-
paign, and found myself more and more taken aback by the extent to which
the leaders of the ticket seemed to be cruising along, disinterested in political
reality. While he was still angling for the Democratic nomination I suggested
to Kerry that he consider disavowing his vote for the resolution to go into Iraq,
which was already turning into a fratricidal disaster. He dug a long forefinger
into my chest and lectured me on consistency. A year later, when photos of
the Senator were being released to the newspapers featuring him hang-gliding
in a wet suit off some soigne overseas beach while the Bush brothers in shirt-
sleeves were handing out bottles of water after the Punta Gorda hurricane, I
questioned the p.r. implications of that. Nothing registered.
I go into this to suggest the obliviousness that tends to overtake political
candidates once they are into their campaign burn. I suppose something like
that happened with John Edwards. His girl friend's pregnancy must have
seemed like just another awkward detail, something the staff could fix. And-
rew Young apparently stepped forward. The participant who surprised me
here was Rachel -- Bunny -- Mellon. I spent five years during the seventies
hanging around Paul Mellon in preparation for writing The Mellon Family.
Bunny, Paul's wife, was certainly no pushover. A natural manager, she latched
onto Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once Jack was headed toward the White
House and designed the Rose Gardens. Bunny could take on anybody.
Perhaps in her nineties she softened up. Still, her nephew, a long-time friend,
tells me that even now, at one-hundred plus, Bunny is still adroit, still tending
her gardens at Upperville. Perhaps in the cavalier John Edwards she spied
another JFK. What did a little womanizing amount to at those social alt-
itudes? The lawyers could deal with the rest of it.
Google has rejiggered the format of this blog again. Please forgive any irre-
gularities. And Godspeed.
Burton Hersh
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Who Serves V
Countryconquistadors,
Again, unexpectedly, a few more comments dealing with the structure of our military. This was not anticipated, but several of your comments in response to my earlier observations seemed so on point, so thought-provoking, that I felt they deserved another look along with my take on their take.
One came from my pal Vern Farnsworth, who quotes a retired Special Ops Colonel with whom he serves on a local board as having concluded that "If a nation does not want to change, it will not happen." In any case, "Don't send a boy to do a man's job." My own exchanges with senior brass over the years suggest that this apprehension about the vulnerability of the raw volunteers who fight our wars is widespread among professional soldiers.
Another friend, MA Fairbank -- Mark, I assume -- from the New Hampshire pole of our family enterprise wonders: "Is Imperialism so different from Nation Building?" He cites "Roman legionnaires in Gaul and Albion, Crusaders in Constantanople, British regulars in Bombay, U.S. Marines in the Phillipines" as engaged in "nation building to serve our national interest" and equates this with "putting a state's force into a foreign land to secure vital resources."
Mark is an astute fellow, but it seems to me that you don't have to be much of a historian to bridle at the assumptions behind this. Tooth-and-claw imperialism has almost always had disastrous long-term consequences for the imperial power, from the appearance of the Goths at the ramparts of Rome in 552 to the rather lame attempts by spokesmen for the Obama administration to explain away our frantic behind-the-scenes rescheduling to slink out of Afghanistan ASAP. Native populations invariably prefer their identity, however brutal and unsanitary it may appear to us.
All this is particularly self-evident in the Muslim world. In 1187 the Crusaders took a fatal hammering from the armies of Saladin, and Arab propagandists still hobgoblinize every gesture by the West as the resurgence of the Crusader spirit. We do keep trying, though. In The Old Boys I track the maneuvering of the early CIA as its ace in the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, installed Nasser, and then a more compliant government in Syria, and finally subverted a working democracy in Iran to reinstate the Shah in a series of maneuvers intended primarily to benefit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of British Petroleum. We turned Iran into our primary base in the Middle East and subsequently lost everything when the Ayatollahs swept into power in 1979. I interviewed Roosevelt repeatedly; he himself had been a professional historian -- he taught at Harvard as a young man. I found Roosevelt stricken with a degree of historical remorse that made his last years acutely depressing. He had turned down the chance to subvert Guatemala in the interests of the United Fruit Company; that, at least, ultimately provided him a measure of solace.
One last comment definitely needs to be recognized. One of my several Anonymous correspondents points out that warfare today has changed radically, and is characterized now by "vanished battle lines and a 'nobility deficit.'" Today death can come very quickly and unexpectedly from an IED or a child with a bomb beneath her rags. Best to machine-gun everybody, assume the natives you are there to rescue hate you and take preventative action. With reflexes like that it is very hard to build a nation or live with yourself afterwards. Read this response in its entirety among the comments on this blog.
Columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has taken an interest in the predicament of soldiers returning from our hapless wars in the Middle East. He points out that, along with a heightened suicide rate among soldiers in the battle zones, the number of veterans coming home who ultimately kill themselves is stunning, @6500 a year. Kristof suspects that this is the result of traumatic brain injuries -- too close to too many roadside bombs, which produces long-term trauma to the tissues of the brain. This is a terrible add-on for the luckless handful of Americans who fight our wars to absorb. Meanwhile, pressure builds on the political right to cut back the facilities available at veterans' hospitals and save more money -- cut taxes -- for its wealthy constituents.
If imperialism has its price, these brain-damaged veterans are dealing with the first round of bills coming due. The rest of us are certain to confront the worst of them before long.
Cheers, right?
Burton Hersh
Again, unexpectedly, a few more comments dealing with the structure of our military. This was not anticipated, but several of your comments in response to my earlier observations seemed so on point, so thought-provoking, that I felt they deserved another look along with my take on their take.
One came from my pal Vern Farnsworth, who quotes a retired Special Ops Colonel with whom he serves on a local board as having concluded that "If a nation does not want to change, it will not happen." In any case, "Don't send a boy to do a man's job." My own exchanges with senior brass over the years suggest that this apprehension about the vulnerability of the raw volunteers who fight our wars is widespread among professional soldiers.
Another friend, MA Fairbank -- Mark, I assume -- from the New Hampshire pole of our family enterprise wonders: "Is Imperialism so different from Nation Building?" He cites "Roman legionnaires in Gaul and Albion, Crusaders in Constantanople, British regulars in Bombay, U.S. Marines in the Phillipines" as engaged in "nation building to serve our national interest" and equates this with "putting a state's force into a foreign land to secure vital resources."
Mark is an astute fellow, but it seems to me that you don't have to be much of a historian to bridle at the assumptions behind this. Tooth-and-claw imperialism has almost always had disastrous long-term consequences for the imperial power, from the appearance of the Goths at the ramparts of Rome in 552 to the rather lame attempts by spokesmen for the Obama administration to explain away our frantic behind-the-scenes rescheduling to slink out of Afghanistan ASAP. Native populations invariably prefer their identity, however brutal and unsanitary it may appear to us.
All this is particularly self-evident in the Muslim world. In 1187 the Crusaders took a fatal hammering from the armies of Saladin, and Arab propagandists still hobgoblinize every gesture by the West as the resurgence of the Crusader spirit. We do keep trying, though. In The Old Boys I track the maneuvering of the early CIA as its ace in the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, installed Nasser, and then a more compliant government in Syria, and finally subverted a working democracy in Iran to reinstate the Shah in a series of maneuvers intended primarily to benefit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of British Petroleum. We turned Iran into our primary base in the Middle East and subsequently lost everything when the Ayatollahs swept into power in 1979. I interviewed Roosevelt repeatedly; he himself had been a professional historian -- he taught at Harvard as a young man. I found Roosevelt stricken with a degree of historical remorse that made his last years acutely depressing. He had turned down the chance to subvert Guatemala in the interests of the United Fruit Company; that, at least, ultimately provided him a measure of solace.
One last comment definitely needs to be recognized. One of my several Anonymous correspondents points out that warfare today has changed radically, and is characterized now by "vanished battle lines and a 'nobility deficit.'" Today death can come very quickly and unexpectedly from an IED or a child with a bomb beneath her rags. Best to machine-gun everybody, assume the natives you are there to rescue hate you and take preventative action. With reflexes like that it is very hard to build a nation or live with yourself afterwards. Read this response in its entirety among the comments on this blog.
Columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has taken an interest in the predicament of soldiers returning from our hapless wars in the Middle East. He points out that, along with a heightened suicide rate among soldiers in the battle zones, the number of veterans coming home who ultimately kill themselves is stunning, @6500 a year. Kristof suspects that this is the result of traumatic brain injuries -- too close to too many roadside bombs, which produces long-term trauma to the tissues of the brain. This is a terrible add-on for the luckless handful of Americans who fight our wars to absorb. Meanwhile, pressure builds on the political right to cut back the facilities available at veterans' hospitals and save more money -- cut taxes -- for its wealthy constituents.
If imperialism has its price, these brain-damaged veterans are dealing with the first round of bills coming due. The rest of us are certain to confront the worst of them before long.
Cheers, right?
Burton Hersh
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Who Serves IV
Countryconspiritors,
Again -- you may have noticed -- the conscription issue. I do not profess to be a military historian, but I know a number of them. Military history is so often the rough, scaly public surface of intelligence history, which slides privately along the slime of the unacknowledged. I spent the eighties interacting with hundreds of spooks while writing The Old Boys. Many had put in their time soldiering, and a number are friends to this day.
It might be worthwhile to look at the questions about who winds up in the military through the other end of the telescope, asking ourselves what as a nation we have had to confront over my lifetime and what were the tools that made any sense. When I was a child isolationism was the creed of the respectable right, and it took the attack on Pearl Harbor to jolt the America Firsters into going to war, which the Axis Powers declared first on us. By the early fifties, with the British Empire decomposing, demagogues on the right like Joe McCarthy joined the One World visionaries behind the likes of Henry Wallace to support such organizations as NATO, the tactics and strategy of which came straight out of Washington. Like Hitler, Stalin was a threat. We fought a war in Korea similar to the engagements nation-states had been fighting for millenia, warm bodies and fixed bayonets. The machine gun made a difference, but it was still land armies against land armies, with each hemorrhaging blood to overrun the other side's territory. We managed a stand-off -- at best -- in Korea because Eisenhower threatened to take out the industrial cities of Eastern China with the Strategic Air Command unless Mao got reasonable. Wars like that were now unwinnable.
With the advent of atomic weapons, strategic and tactical, we found ourselves attempting to contend -- unwisely, almost always -- with insurgencies. You picked a side, and bombed hell out of the upstarts in the jungle. During most of the Viet Nam War the draft produced the millions of grunts we needed, but it is very hard to subdue a swamp, and even a proxy war in Asia is essentially hopeless. We got clobbered.
After that the draft army was quietly discontinued, for the first time since 1940, and the military was forced to fall back on the harum-scarum recruitment policies that have led to so many tragedies. Such back-up entities as the Reserves and the National Guard, where George W. Bush and other genteel scions of his generation were permitted to hide out when the fighting was fierce in Asia, modulated into pools of ready combatants, now that the well placed didn't need such protection when their deferments ran out. The problem here was that a couple of hours marching on rural parade grounds on Saturday did not prepare several generations of small-town enthusiasts for months at a time, deployment after deployment, for the baking heat and roadside detonations of a hellhole like Iraq, let alone the anxieties of "nation-building." Enter post-traumatic stress disorder
The problem was partly the enemy. After 911, when -- immediately, suspiciously to anybody who understands how slow the intelligence mills normally grind, virtually in the next-day's news cycle -- the culprits were identified as twenty plus or minus mostly young Saudis, names and backgrounds supplied -- the cry went up immediately on the jingoist right for blood, for revenge. Somebody new to detest, to fear, to crank up the armaments industry and go after. Al Qaeda!
It was quite evident all along that Saddam Hussein, never one to make alliances or share power, was unlikely to be backing as uncontrollable a collection of hotheads and fanatics as Bin Laden's organization. But the right-wing press -- and for a while the Bush administration -- insisted on the connection. We invaded Iraq. Everybody I knew at CIA insisted that the weapons of mass destruction charges were bogus, certainly any atomic installations were impossible to hide from satellites. Joe Wilson wrote bravely in The New York Times that Iraq had not been importing yellow-cake uranium ore from Africa. Nevertheless -- in we went, producing massive civilian casualties, expensive -- for us -- but perfunctory "nation-building," gigantic contractor profits, a crack for our multinationals at Iraq's enormous oil fields, a trillion-dollars-worth of debt to load on our children.
I thought -- and said at the time -- that, if we really wanted to scotch Al Qaeda, instead of rolling the tanks into Baghdad, amputating a huge, important part of the Middle East and then trying withour success to sew it back together, we should practice oncology. Expend our intelligence assets, perfect our Special Operations Forces, use up some chits, identify the specific organizers and propagandists and promotors and bankers who made this terrorist network possible. Then take them out. Drones, defunding, SEALS, assassinations -- whatever it takes. Pretty much what the Obama administration has been trying to manage, and with signal success. The truly professional army we will need from now on is coming into view. I hope we have the judgement to select, nurture, and reimburse the troops.
We ought to stop making war on abstractions, like "Terror." Attempting to police the world will destroy us ultimately and won't help anybody else much in the long run. We are a single nation -- limited resources, deep-seated needs and problems of our own. We are long past due when it comes to subordinating our larger purposes to those of the special interests that drive our politics. We have sacrificed an unconscionable number of our young people to wars they were never intended to fight.
It is time to reconsider.
Burton Hersh
Again -- you may have noticed -- the conscription issue. I do not profess to be a military historian, but I know a number of them. Military history is so often the rough, scaly public surface of intelligence history, which slides privately along the slime of the unacknowledged. I spent the eighties interacting with hundreds of spooks while writing The Old Boys. Many had put in their time soldiering, and a number are friends to this day.
It might be worthwhile to look at the questions about who winds up in the military through the other end of the telescope, asking ourselves what as a nation we have had to confront over my lifetime and what were the tools that made any sense. When I was a child isolationism was the creed of the respectable right, and it took the attack on Pearl Harbor to jolt the America Firsters into going to war, which the Axis Powers declared first on us. By the early fifties, with the British Empire decomposing, demagogues on the right like Joe McCarthy joined the One World visionaries behind the likes of Henry Wallace to support such organizations as NATO, the tactics and strategy of which came straight out of Washington. Like Hitler, Stalin was a threat. We fought a war in Korea similar to the engagements nation-states had been fighting for millenia, warm bodies and fixed bayonets. The machine gun made a difference, but it was still land armies against land armies, with each hemorrhaging blood to overrun the other side's territory. We managed a stand-off -- at best -- in Korea because Eisenhower threatened to take out the industrial cities of Eastern China with the Strategic Air Command unless Mao got reasonable. Wars like that were now unwinnable.
With the advent of atomic weapons, strategic and tactical, we found ourselves attempting to contend -- unwisely, almost always -- with insurgencies. You picked a side, and bombed hell out of the upstarts in the jungle. During most of the Viet Nam War the draft produced the millions of grunts we needed, but it is very hard to subdue a swamp, and even a proxy war in Asia is essentially hopeless. We got clobbered.
After that the draft army was quietly discontinued, for the first time since 1940, and the military was forced to fall back on the harum-scarum recruitment policies that have led to so many tragedies. Such back-up entities as the Reserves and the National Guard, where George W. Bush and other genteel scions of his generation were permitted to hide out when the fighting was fierce in Asia, modulated into pools of ready combatants, now that the well placed didn't need such protection when their deferments ran out. The problem here was that a couple of hours marching on rural parade grounds on Saturday did not prepare several generations of small-town enthusiasts for months at a time, deployment after deployment, for the baking heat and roadside detonations of a hellhole like Iraq, let alone the anxieties of "nation-building." Enter post-traumatic stress disorder
The problem was partly the enemy. After 911, when -- immediately, suspiciously to anybody who understands how slow the intelligence mills normally grind, virtually in the next-day's news cycle -- the culprits were identified as twenty plus or minus mostly young Saudis, names and backgrounds supplied -- the cry went up immediately on the jingoist right for blood, for revenge. Somebody new to detest, to fear, to crank up the armaments industry and go after. Al Qaeda!
It was quite evident all along that Saddam Hussein, never one to make alliances or share power, was unlikely to be backing as uncontrollable a collection of hotheads and fanatics as Bin Laden's organization. But the right-wing press -- and for a while the Bush administration -- insisted on the connection. We invaded Iraq. Everybody I knew at CIA insisted that the weapons of mass destruction charges were bogus, certainly any atomic installations were impossible to hide from satellites. Joe Wilson wrote bravely in The New York Times that Iraq had not been importing yellow-cake uranium ore from Africa. Nevertheless -- in we went, producing massive civilian casualties, expensive -- for us -- but perfunctory "nation-building," gigantic contractor profits, a crack for our multinationals at Iraq's enormous oil fields, a trillion-dollars-worth of debt to load on our children.
I thought -- and said at the time -- that, if we really wanted to scotch Al Qaeda, instead of rolling the tanks into Baghdad, amputating a huge, important part of the Middle East and then trying withour success to sew it back together, we should practice oncology. Expend our intelligence assets, perfect our Special Operations Forces, use up some chits, identify the specific organizers and propagandists and promotors and bankers who made this terrorist network possible. Then take them out. Drones, defunding, SEALS, assassinations -- whatever it takes. Pretty much what the Obama administration has been trying to manage, and with signal success. The truly professional army we will need from now on is coming into view. I hope we have the judgement to select, nurture, and reimburse the troops.
We ought to stop making war on abstractions, like "Terror." Attempting to police the world will destroy us ultimately and won't help anybody else much in the long run. We are a single nation -- limited resources, deep-seated needs and problems of our own. We are long past due when it comes to subordinating our larger purposes to those of the special interests that drive our politics. We have sacrificed an unconscionable number of our young people to wars they were never intended to fight.
It is time to reconsider.
Burton Hersh
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Who Serves III
Countryskeptics,
To the ramparts, again. I really hadn't intended to go another round with the issue of how we pick our regular military, who gets picked, and what constitutes the fallout from our hit-and-run approach to meeting our requirements. But this is important. The way we use our volunteer military reflects a great deal that has gone unattended vis-a-vis the seismic sociological shifts that are collapsing our middle class.
Most of the people who got back to me tended to agree with my overall conclusions. Several did not. One friend of many, many years roared back in gigantic block letters, irate that I seemed to have said that "all the blue-collar men and women who enlist in the services are low-life misfits...." Any reasonable reading of my last blog couldn't really have suggested that I thought anything like that. What I did say was that a dangerous percentage of today's enlistees come into the services unprepared for the strains of military life -- let alone the acute stresses of combat exposure, often throughout repeated deployments. Many come from problem families, others are offered the choice between jail and a hitch in the service, few have the life experience or the sophistication to deal with the recurrent traumas that build up after months spent contending with angry tribesmen and revenge-seeking native trainees. Profound animosities build up on both sides, passing incidents trigger explosions, and before long the Iraqis are telling us to clear out whatever the risks and the Afghans are refusing to let our trainers "embed" themselves in the native units we are supposed to be preparing to take the country over.
Many of my apprehensions are shared by the senior American military I've known over the years. If we are going to continue to back ourselves into "nation-building" we had better develop a cadre of seasoned advisors conditioned for the role, not green GIs. For what it's worth, perhaps I should elaborate here on a few details from my own experience. After that first winter in Germany as the team chief of a radio unit on the Czech border, I was pulled back into the Civil Affairs Section of the Fourth Armored Division and designated a clerk and translator -- my German was very fluent then after my years as a Fulbright student. My responsibilities ran from explaining to an outraged Buergermeister why some beered-up GI had tossed a fragmentation grenade into the lounge of the neighboring Gasthaus or driven his tank up the courthouse steps to interpreting at murder trials throughout the Republik to translating top-secret NATO documents.
My point here is that we too had incidents to contend with, but because we were a conscript army there were individuals like me available within the military qualified to work with the local people, smooth things over, keep atrocities in perspective. My wife and I lived "on the economy," upstairs of a German family with whom we became close friends. A lot of Germany still lay in rubble, but such informal relationships helped assuage the animosities from the -- then -- quite recent and devastating bombing.
No doubt the sort of work I did then is done today by "contractors," who have been hired at tremendous expense to the American taxpayer to perform touchy services like guarding diplomats and pulling perimeter guard, normally standard military obligations. These people -- sometimes imports, sometimes retired military -- now serve in numbers that nearly approximate the active-duty personnel in the combat areas and remain utterly sequestered from the native populations, for their own protection. Where city-size airfields are being built, KBR and other huge contractors bring in their own "blue-collar men and women" and make sure they are adequately secured. Whether we intend to project ourselves as such or not, we continue to be perceived as occupiers.
As the technology of war advances, and a team in a bunker in Kansas operates a drone in Yemen that takes out a car full of Arabs we are pretty sure support Al Qaeda, it may be time to contemplate deep-seated changes. If we want a space-age, electronic army we should no doubt stand prepared to support one. The two-tier model, with a sergeant pulling in $40,000 a year and his contractor counterpart signing on for $200,000, probably ought to be replaced by an integrated organization in which everybody who joins is held to high standards of background and competence, paid accordingly, and sent to war only after both the Congress and the Executive Branch conclude war is the only option. Everybody would recognize that the stakes are high, the blue-collar/white collar distinction would be meaningless, and everybody would be prepared to pay the price.
Perhaps with his own children. Perhaps we need a draft again. My Selective Service Board has my number. I'm ready.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
To the ramparts, again. I really hadn't intended to go another round with the issue of how we pick our regular military, who gets picked, and what constitutes the fallout from our hit-and-run approach to meeting our requirements. But this is important. The way we use our volunteer military reflects a great deal that has gone unattended vis-a-vis the seismic sociological shifts that are collapsing our middle class.
Most of the people who got back to me tended to agree with my overall conclusions. Several did not. One friend of many, many years roared back in gigantic block letters, irate that I seemed to have said that "all the blue-collar men and women who enlist in the services are low-life misfits...." Any reasonable reading of my last blog couldn't really have suggested that I thought anything like that. What I did say was that a dangerous percentage of today's enlistees come into the services unprepared for the strains of military life -- let alone the acute stresses of combat exposure, often throughout repeated deployments. Many come from problem families, others are offered the choice between jail and a hitch in the service, few have the life experience or the sophistication to deal with the recurrent traumas that build up after months spent contending with angry tribesmen and revenge-seeking native trainees. Profound animosities build up on both sides, passing incidents trigger explosions, and before long the Iraqis are telling us to clear out whatever the risks and the Afghans are refusing to let our trainers "embed" themselves in the native units we are supposed to be preparing to take the country over.
Many of my apprehensions are shared by the senior American military I've known over the years. If we are going to continue to back ourselves into "nation-building" we had better develop a cadre of seasoned advisors conditioned for the role, not green GIs. For what it's worth, perhaps I should elaborate here on a few details from my own experience. After that first winter in Germany as the team chief of a radio unit on the Czech border, I was pulled back into the Civil Affairs Section of the Fourth Armored Division and designated a clerk and translator -- my German was very fluent then after my years as a Fulbright student. My responsibilities ran from explaining to an outraged Buergermeister why some beered-up GI had tossed a fragmentation grenade into the lounge of the neighboring Gasthaus or driven his tank up the courthouse steps to interpreting at murder trials throughout the Republik to translating top-secret NATO documents.
My point here is that we too had incidents to contend with, but because we were a conscript army there were individuals like me available within the military qualified to work with the local people, smooth things over, keep atrocities in perspective. My wife and I lived "on the economy," upstairs of a German family with whom we became close friends. A lot of Germany still lay in rubble, but such informal relationships helped assuage the animosities from the -- then -- quite recent and devastating bombing.
No doubt the sort of work I did then is done today by "contractors," who have been hired at tremendous expense to the American taxpayer to perform touchy services like guarding diplomats and pulling perimeter guard, normally standard military obligations. These people -- sometimes imports, sometimes retired military -- now serve in numbers that nearly approximate the active-duty personnel in the combat areas and remain utterly sequestered from the native populations, for their own protection. Where city-size airfields are being built, KBR and other huge contractors bring in their own "blue-collar men and women" and make sure they are adequately secured. Whether we intend to project ourselves as such or not, we continue to be perceived as occupiers.
As the technology of war advances, and a team in a bunker in Kansas operates a drone in Yemen that takes out a car full of Arabs we are pretty sure support Al Qaeda, it may be time to contemplate deep-seated changes. If we want a space-age, electronic army we should no doubt stand prepared to support one. The two-tier model, with a sergeant pulling in $40,000 a year and his contractor counterpart signing on for $200,000, probably ought to be replaced by an integrated organization in which everybody who joins is held to high standards of background and competence, paid accordingly, and sent to war only after both the Congress and the Executive Branch conclude war is the only option. Everybody would recognize that the stakes are high, the blue-collar/white collar distinction would be meaningless, and everybody would be prepared to pay the price.
Perhaps with his own children. Perhaps we need a draft again. My Selective Service Board has my number. I'm ready.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
Monday, March 26, 2012
Who Serves II
Countryconstituents,
Back after it, telling truth to the preoccupied. Another look this time at who we pick for our military, how we pick them, and how that all comes out.
My first outbreak on this subject brought down a surprising amount of commentary. Except for one furtive and congenitally truculent New Hampshire connection -- "Anonymous" -- , who seemed to be surprised that I had a life before I began instructing him in the niceties of modern tennis, the remarks were appreciative. The veteran radio jock Barry Farber e-mailed me at once and we covered a lot of historical ground on his national show for an hour. Barry felt that I had retained a lot of brain function, for a liberal.
At the heart of my inquiry here was what the so-called "military obligation" has turned into. The fact is, I no doubt served in the military because I had to. From 1940 on, young men in the United States automatically became draft-eligible, and, with the Cold War following on immediately after 1945, a sizable percentage of my generation served. Once Viet Nam closed over us in 1963-1964 the process intensified, although the deferment game gradually became an issue, as I indicated in my last blog.
The draft was so bitterly resented once we had given it up in Southeast Asia that the regular military was professionalized. There was no ongoing draft. Instead, the services attempted to recruit individuals their leaderships hoped they could turn into competent personnel. Watching all this evolve from our homes in New Hampshire and D.C. and, more recently, Florida, on the neighborhood level, it couldn't have been more apparent that a great many of the kids getting enticed into service were volunteering as a last resort. There were a lot of high-school drop-outs, youngsters otherwise headed to prison and offered a last-minute choice by some municipal judge, knockabouts with drug problems. Their peers from solider backgrounds were moving on to colleges and graduate schools, law practices, brokerage offices.
For going on two decades this seemed to be working out because whatever military engagements we got caught up in tended to be quick and dirty -- the intervention in Panama, Desert Storm, the aerial war against Serbia. In and out, flatten out the heathen, declare victory and return the national focus fast to getting and spending. The genuine crisis arrived with the invasion of Iraq, which -- like Viet Nam -- started out as a glorified support action and turned quickly into a bona-fide big league donnybrook, a misguided attempt to muscle our preferences out of a full-scale civil war. Along with our benighted involvement in Afghanistan -- where we pushed in and left and returned and now are desperate to find some excuse to leave again -- the wars of the last ten years unexpectantly turned expensive, touchy, politically unmanageable, both on the battlefield and around our country. The effort to cook the numbers by bringing in hundreds of thousands of highly paid "contractors" would show up fast enough in our deficit figures.
The perhaps 2 and a half million soldiers who were feeding in and out of these high-stress battlefields, most of them on "multiple deployments," were too often in no way psychologically equipped to undergo this repeated strain. Many of them cracked, too much "dwell time," as the jargon phrases it, and the catch-all term "post-traumatic stress disorder," the successor to "shell shock," was concocted to cover a wide range of fundamentally undiagnosable explosions of violence. Nobody was willing to face this, but a lot of the misery stemmed from shortcomings of background and class. You fill an army with the misfits of a generation, and pretty soon a lot of them are pissing on Taliban corpses and staging the festivities at Abu Graib and slipping out on a quiet evening to blow away some extended Afghan family. Statistics surfaced recently indicating that more GIs have killed themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last year than have died in combat. An even greater percentage offed themselves stateside. With these propensities, it's not that hard for the wrong body of enlisted personnel to undo whatever the commanders thought they were accomplishing.
Recently retired Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarked on the way out that any future leader in his position who attempted to send an American land army to the Middle East "ought to have his head examined." Not that his opinion has slowed down the likes of Senator McCain, who has been pumping all winter to get those boots onto the ground in Syria. Hilary Clinton pushed for American troops to lead the charge into Libya. We are historically slow learners.
Send in the boys! The problem is always: Whose boys? Which boys and girls are we supposed to send next time, and in whose interests? If we would think this through the next time we find ourselves tempted to jump, we might survive a few more years as an empire.
Cheerful, no?
Burton Hersh
Back after it, telling truth to the preoccupied. Another look this time at who we pick for our military, how we pick them, and how that all comes out.
My first outbreak on this subject brought down a surprising amount of commentary. Except for one furtive and congenitally truculent New Hampshire connection -- "Anonymous" -- , who seemed to be surprised that I had a life before I began instructing him in the niceties of modern tennis, the remarks were appreciative. The veteran radio jock Barry Farber e-mailed me at once and we covered a lot of historical ground on his national show for an hour. Barry felt that I had retained a lot of brain function, for a liberal.
At the heart of my inquiry here was what the so-called "military obligation" has turned into. The fact is, I no doubt served in the military because I had to. From 1940 on, young men in the United States automatically became draft-eligible, and, with the Cold War following on immediately after 1945, a sizable percentage of my generation served. Once Viet Nam closed over us in 1963-1964 the process intensified, although the deferment game gradually became an issue, as I indicated in my last blog.
The draft was so bitterly resented once we had given it up in Southeast Asia that the regular military was professionalized. There was no ongoing draft. Instead, the services attempted to recruit individuals their leaderships hoped they could turn into competent personnel. Watching all this evolve from our homes in New Hampshire and D.C. and, more recently, Florida, on the neighborhood level, it couldn't have been more apparent that a great many of the kids getting enticed into service were volunteering as a last resort. There were a lot of high-school drop-outs, youngsters otherwise headed to prison and offered a last-minute choice by some municipal judge, knockabouts with drug problems. Their peers from solider backgrounds were moving on to colleges and graduate schools, law practices, brokerage offices.
For going on two decades this seemed to be working out because whatever military engagements we got caught up in tended to be quick and dirty -- the intervention in Panama, Desert Storm, the aerial war against Serbia. In and out, flatten out the heathen, declare victory and return the national focus fast to getting and spending. The genuine crisis arrived with the invasion of Iraq, which -- like Viet Nam -- started out as a glorified support action and turned quickly into a bona-fide big league donnybrook, a misguided attempt to muscle our preferences out of a full-scale civil war. Along with our benighted involvement in Afghanistan -- where we pushed in and left and returned and now are desperate to find some excuse to leave again -- the wars of the last ten years unexpectantly turned expensive, touchy, politically unmanageable, both on the battlefield and around our country. The effort to cook the numbers by bringing in hundreds of thousands of highly paid "contractors" would show up fast enough in our deficit figures.
The perhaps 2 and a half million soldiers who were feeding in and out of these high-stress battlefields, most of them on "multiple deployments," were too often in no way psychologically equipped to undergo this repeated strain. Many of them cracked, too much "dwell time," as the jargon phrases it, and the catch-all term "post-traumatic stress disorder," the successor to "shell shock," was concocted to cover a wide range of fundamentally undiagnosable explosions of violence. Nobody was willing to face this, but a lot of the misery stemmed from shortcomings of background and class. You fill an army with the misfits of a generation, and pretty soon a lot of them are pissing on Taliban corpses and staging the festivities at Abu Graib and slipping out on a quiet evening to blow away some extended Afghan family. Statistics surfaced recently indicating that more GIs have killed themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last year than have died in combat. An even greater percentage offed themselves stateside. With these propensities, it's not that hard for the wrong body of enlisted personnel to undo whatever the commanders thought they were accomplishing.
Recently retired Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarked on the way out that any future leader in his position who attempted to send an American land army to the Middle East "ought to have his head examined." Not that his opinion has slowed down the likes of Senator McCain, who has been pumping all winter to get those boots onto the ground in Syria. Hilary Clinton pushed for American troops to lead the charge into Libya. We are historically slow learners.
Send in the boys! The problem is always: Whose boys? Which boys and girls are we supposed to send next time, and in whose interests? If we would think this through the next time we find ourselves tempted to jump, we might survive a few more years as an empire.
Cheerful, no?
Burton Hersh
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Who Serves
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
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
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."
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