Secret State: 1960s and 1970s

[Carl Oglesby]

How could the clandestine state have stricken us so profoundly? How could we - as we might have fancied, "of all people" - have given way with so little resistance, in fact with so little evident understanding of what was happening? What accounts for the way the various organs of state force-defense and security alike-became so divided - against each other? CIA-Intelligence against CIA-Operations, the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the presidency at one time or another against each other-what is this internal conflict all about? Why should the country's premier political coalition, formed after Reconstruction and reformed by Franklin Roosevelt, have begun to destabilize so badly in the 1960s and 1970s?

The intensification of clandestine, illicit methods against racial and antiwar dissent as a "threat" to the (secret) state precisely coincided with the intensified use of such methods in conflicts for power and hegemony taking place within the secret state, against a background of declining consensus....

The lines of division became clear early in 1968 with the rapid crystallizing of a whole new front of opposition to the war, that of the "corporate liberals." Formerly, the established liberalism of the sort we associate with Xerox and Harvard had been inclined to defend the U.S. position in Vietnam as a part of its long-standing general commitment to anticommunism. The Yankee lights had made the usual arrangements to provide world banking services to a Free South Vietnam and take the oil from its waters, and it was always clear that there would be no serious objection from the Yankees as a whole if the Vietnam War turned out to be winnable.' But now in 1967-68 a new line of criticism of Johnson and his war policy opened up.

The war's costs had exploded out of all proportion to the original objective, one now heard. No vital American interests were being attacked or defended in Vietnam, after all. Europe was appalled at us. Our European alliances were suffering. Our young people were strenuously alienated. Our economy was hurting. Other problems were lying neglected. We needed to wrap up the bleeding stump and move to a better position. General James Gavin, for example, one of President Kennedy's chief military advisers, developed these and related ideas about the war in various public forums during that period.

But the strategy that was continued by Nixon in 1969 in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and Nixon's resultant reelection, was, of course, escalation - the secret air war, the invasion of the "sanctuaries" in Cambodia and Laos, the Christmas bombings, etc. But for a moment in 1968, Johnson had suddenly and strangely abdicated, stopped the bombing, and opened the Paris peace talks, and Robert Kennedy had assembled an electoral coalition reaching from Mayor Daley to the liberal peaceniks, if not Tom Hayden, a New-Politics style coalition that appeared easily capable of beating , the opposition of Yankee and Cowboy.

The lines of division became clear early in 1968 with the rapid crystallizing of a whole new front of opposition to the war, that of the "corporate liberals." Formerly, the established liberalism of the sort we associate with Xerox and Harvard had been inclined to defend the U.S. position in Vietnam as a part of its long-standing general commitment to anticommunism. The Yankee lights had made the usual arrangements to provide world banking services to a Free South Vietnam and take the oil from its waters, and it was always clear that there would be no serious objection from the Yankees as a whole if the Vietnam War turned out to be winnable.' But now in 1967-68 a new line of criticism of Johnson and his war policy opened up.

[John Simkin]

Although I agree that the Vietnam War created the need to remove JFK from power, I do not see the Yankee-Cowboy conflict as the main dynamic of the development of the Secret State. In fact, under LBJ there was an attempt to unify these two groups. This has been continued by other presidents.

In my view the emergence of the secret state dates back to the Second World War. After the war the General Accounting Office told a House Merchant Marine Committee investigation that John McCone (director of the CIA when JFK was assassinated) had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000 in a shipbuilding company in California during the war. McCone was not alone in this war profiteering. Others included Herman & George Brown, Howard Hughes, Henry J. Kaiser and Steve Bechtel. Some of these were definitely Cowboys (the Brown brothers, based in Texas, had been backing LBJ since the early 1930s) whereas others were Yankees.

For the next 30 years this group of businessmen involved in the armed trade searched for ways to return to the profits of the Second World War. This why it was necessary for these entrepreneurs to encourage the creation of a Cold War after 1945. To help them with this they had to bring in politicians, military leaders and members of the intelligence services into their network (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence Complex). The Cold War was a good earner but they realized that the main stimulus for their section of the economy was a “hot” war. This is why the Vietnam became so important to them. To make this a success it was necessary to unite the interests of the Yankees and the Cowboys. In fact, the people who benefited from this conflict were evenly spread between these two groups. It had to be, otherwise the losers would have drawn attention to what was happening.

[John Dolva]

" otherwise the losers would have drawn attention to what was happening. "

Isn't that what the losers did try to do? Call attention to it? It took assassinations, and that part of the battle was lost, It's not over, and it's the sort of war likely to go on for a long while more. Lessons to be learnt and so on. Kennedy with his superior intellect and ideas, combined with careful planning, years of preperation, energy, and a genuine warmth, stormed to the top of the hill in spite of elements in both parties trying to stop him. This avenue of appealing to the voter personally to carry through to the Presidency, forming a mass organisation of enthusastic supporters and going into the fight with unbending basic principles and actually personally doing the hard work, this avenue is surely not closed?

[Robert Howard]

" otherwise the losers would have drawn attention to what was happening. "

Isn't that what the losers did try to do? Call attention to it? It took assassinations, and that part of the battle was lost, It's not over, and it's the sort of war likely to go on for a long while more. Lessons to be learnt and so on. Kennedy with his superior intellect and ideas, combined with careful planning, years of preperation, energy, and a genuine warmth, stormed to the top of the hill in spite of elements in both parties trying to stop him. This avenue of appealing to the voter personally to carry through to the Presidency, forming a mass organisation of enthusastic supporters and going into the fight with unbending basic principles and actually personally doing the hard work, this avenue is surely not closed?

The world is most certainly run by multinational military-industrial groups feeding off an oil economy. When seen in proper context, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the current Iraq war - these are all little more than asset adjustments. Assassinations are personnel shifts, implemented by Global Human Resources.

I would like to add a few thoughts, on these two pivotal decades in American history. As much as has been unearthed concerning the JFK assassination, I will state the obvious that, that event still needs to be dissected, explored and basically, solved in order to fit the event into the overall chronology of those same two decades.

[Mary Ferrell's chronologies, which Rex Bradford recently uploaded to her site give a sweeping opportunity to do that combined the chronologies come to 1,650 pages, of ostensibly unmasking the history of some of the pertinent individuals, to the point that, what was unthinkable [solving the case] that process has been jumpstarted].

What bears mentioning is, the history we don't know; the interweaving of individuals between and in, Skull and Bones, the Sovereign Knight's of Malta, resolution of the 'other Oswald's,' insofar as who was pulling those string's, the Suite-8F Group et al. I think about the death of Roosevelt, Tommy Corcoran, Charles Willoughby, and G-2 in Japan...Yakuza and Madrid, Allen Dulles, LBJ, Hoover, the CIA, the Cuban's, Interpen...one could go on forever.

The most compelling aspect of these two decades I could mention is the comparison between 1964 and 2003

A Texas President takes office, with very strong ties to the oil industry, makes the case for war using smoke and mirror's...an illusionary causus belli, after the dust has settled both are faced with a nightmare from which the first didn't escape..."I will not seek, nor will I accept...." The jury is still out on the second...."Same as it ever was," is an insult to the American people and all our hopes and dreams, and everything that America once stood for.