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Ben Bradlee


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I supported Connally for President (fool that I was) because IMO, at the time, he was a strong and forceful leader. He was smart enough to engage Williams to ensure his acquittal in his bribery trial. He also had advised Nixon to burn his tapes, before they had been subpoenaed. Had Nixon followed Connally's advise, he might have survived.

As you all probably know, when Nixon asked Helms to see the 1967 CIA Inspector General's report that detailed the assassination plots against Castro, Helms just stonewalled him. Had Connally been President, I am convinced he would have had the report by the end of the day or Helms would have been cleaning out his desk.

I don't know enough about Connally's case to judge his guilt or innocence but one must admire Williams' legal skills in winning acquitals for most of his clients. Just as one must admire the legal skills of the late Johnny Cochran even though it is clear his skills allowed a murderer to escape justice. An article on Cochran noted that after the Simpson trial when Cochran was asked about Simpson's guilt, Cochran always answered carefully, "Mr. Simpson has always maintained his innocence."

Of course, Simpson was acquitted not only because of Cochran's skills but also because of the stumbles of the prosecution, as devestatingly discussed in a book by Vincent Bugliosi.

In a discussion of the Schiavo case, John suggested that I should have more faith in the American legal system. But the Simpson case is a good example that the system produces injustices. We are taught in America that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than that one innocent man be falsely convicted. Unfortunately, it may be true that there are more innocent men wrongfully convicted than guilty men who go free. In that sense, the Simpson case may be an anomaly.

Sorry about the digression. My point is that we can admire the skills of an attorney without agreeing with the clients he or she represents.

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Tim, in response to your Connally comment...It's a good thing Helms didn't give Nixon the IG report or it would have disappeared. Evidently, the internal reports Helms did give Nixon were never returned. (Now where did I just read this?) Probably in Ehrlichman. Maybe Haldeman's diary.

Anyhow, when discussing Williams, it's important to remember the SOB impressed EVERYONE. He even got Bobby Kennedy's secretary after Bobby was assassinated--and this despite the fact he was Hoffa's attorney. He was the DNC's lawyer in Watergate, and an enemy of corruption and yet repped Baker, Helms and Connally when their corruption was exposed. Ford tried to get him for DCI but settled on George Bush--and this despite Williams' total lack of experience and the fact he was a Democrat. Politics creates strange bedfellows indeed.

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  • 3 years later...
In chapter 4, The Media, the CIA, and the Cover-Up”, you quote Carl Bernstein’s article in The Rolling Stone (20th October 1977) that: “For many years, Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C. D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life Magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a Time executive, Jackson co-authored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s”. You go on to say that according to Richard Stolley, Jackson was “so upset by the head-wound sequence that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.” (pages 34-35)

Jackson indeed played an important role in the cover-up. Soon after the assassination Jackson also successfully negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story. Peter Dale Scott argues in his book “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK” (1996) that Jackson, on the urging of Allen Dulles, employed Isaac Don Levine, a veteran CIA publicist, to ghost-write Marina's story. This story never appeared in print.

Jackson, like many CIA operatives, was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War. Another member of the SOS was Frank Wisner. In 1948 Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. Later that year Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited former SOS officers, Jackson (Time) and Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

Carl Bernstein was the first journalist to expose Operation Mockingbird (although he never used this term) in his article in the Rolling Stone. The Bernstein article is also interesting for what it left out. For example, there is no mention of Philip Graham and other staff members of the Washington Post. Nor does he mention Ben Bradlee's involvement with the CIA that dated back to the Rosenberg case. Bradlee, of course, joined forces with James Jesus Angleton, the dispose of Mary Pinchot Meyer's diary and letters after her murder in October 1964. It was James Truitt (OSS, Washington Post, Operation Mockingbird) who revealed this story in 1976. However, Mockingbird did its job well and the case received very little publicity.

Interestingly, Phil Graham, Frank Wisner and James Truitt all committed suicide. So also did Len Damore, a journalist working on the case in 1995.

My question is about where Carl Bernstein got his information from for this article. Was it from Truitt or was it a result of his work on the Watergate case. Did Bernstein suspect that Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward were working on behalf of the CIA during the investigation. According to Deborah Davis' book, Katharine the Great, Deep Throat was Richard Ober, a CIA officer. It is significant that Bradlee attempted to stop Katharine the Great from being published. In fact, Bradlee and Graham persuaded the publishers William Jovanovich, to pulp 20,000 copies of the book. Davis filed a breach-of-contract and damage-to-reputation suit against Jovanovich, who settled out of court with her in 1983.

Wish I could shed further light on Carl Bernstein's sources for his article on CIA and Media. It is, of course, noteworthy that he did not delve into anyone (e.g., Bradlee) from his own newspaper. All I know is what Bernstein set down at the time in Rolling Stone. What I try to do in my new book is make a few links between that, and the ways some of the same "players" covered up in the Kennedy assassination - a leap Bernstein didn't make, if he was even aware of it.

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Daniel Brandt wrote a very important article about Ben Bradlee for the National Reporter in 1987.

http://www.namebase.org/davis.html

Alfred Friendly was a Post reporter while also serving in Air Force intelligence during World War II and as director of overseas information for the Economic Cooperation Administration from 1948-49. Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold Warrior) reports that the ECA routinely provided cover for the CIA. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were set up by the CIA and John S. Hayes was their chairman by 1974. Years earlier when Hayes was vice-president for radio and television at the Post, he was appointed by Kennedy to a secret CIA propaganda task force. Friendly left the Post soon after Bradlee came on board, and Hayes left when Johnson appointed him ambassador to Switzerland in 1966.

But poor Bradlee claims he didn't know that Cord Meyer was a globetrotting CIA destabilizer in the fifties, just as he knew nothing about CIA links when he took time off from the Post to work as a propagandist for the U.S. embassy in Paris from 1951-53. Deborah Davis includes in her book a memo released under the FOIA that shows Bradlee responding to a request from the CIA station chief in Paris, Robert Thayer. His assignment was to place stories in the European press to discredit the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, and Bradlee followed orders.

Benjamin Bradlee: from Post reporter to embassy propagandist, then on to Newsweek and back to the Post as executive editor, without breaking stride. The point of Davis' book is that this pattern is repeated again and again in Post history; she calls it "mediapolitics" -- the use of information media for political purposes. Robert Thayer's status as CIA station chief in Paris is confirmed in Richard Harris Smith's book OSS. While in Paris, Bradlee already knew Thayer, having attended the preparatory school Thayer ran while Robert Jr. was his classmate. Bradlee categorically denies any CIA connection, but it's a toss-up as to which is more disturbing: Bradlee in bed with the CIA and lying about it, or Bradlee led around by the CIA and not knowing it.

Unlike Bradlee, Katharine does not seem as sophisticated or conniving; she was apparently completely sucked in by such charmers as Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and even Henry Kissinger, who took her to the movies. She supported Nixon in 1968 and 1972, changed her mind about him later, but has yet to waver from the anti-Communism that kept the Post from criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam. Her idea of an awkward situation is asking Nixon for National Guard protection during anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Washington; Lyndon never made her ask. The demonstrators had to be duped -- after all, she had taken the time to get her facts straight with a trip to Vietnam in 1965, where she shopped for blue and white china, and had access to all the assorted power brokers and opinion makers who showed up at the 1966 masked ball that Truman Capote gave for her. Between Bradlee and Katharine, with journalism such as this it's a wonder that the Vietnamese people survived.

The elitist conservatism and intelligence connections of the Post are as important today as they ever were; Katharine and Bradlee are still in control. Davis could have remarked on the current New Right editorial line in the Post, or added the fact that former editorial page editor (1968-79) Philip Geyelin joined the CIA for a year in 1950, while on leave from the Wall Street Journal, but found the work boring and went back to the Journal. And she also doesn't mention that Walter Pincus, a Post reporter who still covers intelligence issues, took two CIA-financed trips overseas to international student conferences in 1960, and waited to write about them until 1967 when reporters everywhere were exposing CIA conduits. Informed readers of Geyelin (who stills does a column) and Pincus can learn much from they way these writers filter history. This may qualify them as good journalists among their colleagues, but for the unwitting masses it simply amounts to more disinformation.

The CIA connections that Davis does mention are dynamite. The issue is relevant today because frequently the D.C. reader has to pick up the Washington Times to get information on the CIA the Post refuses to print. For example, while almost every major newspaper in the country, as well as CBS News and ABC News, use the real name of former CIA Costa Rican station chief "Tomas Castillo," the Post, as of late June, continues to gloat over their use of the pseudonym only. This is probably Bradlee's decision, not Katharine's, because Newsweek let former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry use Castillo's real name (Joseph F. Fernandez, age 50) when Parry joined the magazine earlier this year. According to Davis, Katharine doesn't make editorial decisions these days unless they threaten the health of the company.

The question, then, becomes one of myth-management, and attempting to discern why the Post enjoys such a liberal reputation in spite of its record. Once you redefine liberalism as something slightly closer to the center than the New Right, it means that "genuine" liberalism (if such a thing was ever important) is stranded and soon becomes extinct. Add to this the fact that U.S. liberalism since World War II, whether "genuine" or contemporary, has a record on foreign policy that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. That leaves two media events to explain the Post puzzle: the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Forget the first event, because the Post was merely trying to keep up with the New York Times so as not to lose face. Besides, they didn't make a movie about it.

Watergate and the Post, the stuff of great drama. Much has been written already about the probability that Nixon was set up. McCord as a double agent has been covered neatly in Carl Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy War, Bob Woodward's previous employment with a Pentagon intelligence unit was mentioned in Jim Hougan's Secret Agenda, and the motive -- that Nixon was losing perspective and becoming a threat to those who were still able to see their long-range interests clearly -- is evident after reading Seymour Hersh's The Politics of Power.

If you put it all together and summarize it in the context of Deep Throat and the Post, along with Bradlee's CIA sympathies, you must agree with Davis that Nixon wasn't the only one set up; Deep Throat led the Post by the nose. Whether they knew it or not, whether they cared or not assuming that they knew, and whether or not a noble end can justify shabby means -- all this pales next to Davis' main point. That point is this: the Post, whose history of journalism by manipulation helped create the conditions that led to Vietnam, the demonstrations, and the psychosis of Nixon, ended up using or responding to these same manipulative methods to avoid political obsolescence, and somehow it worked.

Davis identifies Deep Throat as Richard Ober, the chief of the CIA's domestic spying program called Operation CHAOS. The evidence is circumstantial and her sources remain anonymous. According to Davis, Kissinger moved Angleton into the White House and set him up with his own Israeli intelligence desk in 1969. This sounds like vintage Kissinger as he acts swiftly to capture the foreign policy apparatus, but it's the first I've heard that Angleton, who thought the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse designed to catch the West napping, was on any sort of terms with the China-hopping, detente-talking Kissinger.

Davis writes that Angleton's deputy Ober was also given a White House office, and after the Pentagon Papers were published Ober had privileged access to Nixon and was able to observe his deterioration. Again, this is news to me. If Davis is correct, it means Angleton and Ober were running Operation CHAOS out of the White House, Nixon knew about it while Kissinger didn't, but both Kissinger and Nixon were deeply suspicious of the CIA and felt it necessary to start up the Huston Plan to cover the CIA's shortcomings in domestic intelligence. At least the book includes a photograph of Ober -- the first one I've seen. Davis makes more sense than some of the Watergate theories that have kicked around in past years, but this is still the most speculative portion of her book.

Part of the Post success story has to do with sheer wealth. As one of the world's richest women, Graham has the empire backed up with many millions, which guarantees continued access to privilege and power. Another part is an ability to play dirty. Katharine Graham, who became one of Washington's most notorious union-busters in the name of a free press, used her "soft cop" with Bradlee's "hard cop" to insure that William Jovanovich, who published the first edition of this book in 1979, was bullied into recalling 20,000 copies because of minor inaccuracies alleged by Bradlee. Jovanovich made no effort to check Bradlee's allegations. Deborah Davis filed a breach-of- contract and damage-to-reputation suit against Jovanovich, who settled out of court with her in 1983.

The entire saga of Katharine the Great is a sobering antidote to the intoxication I felt when All the President's Men first played. A myth has been more than punctured; Davis bludgeons it mercilessly -- yet in a manner that shows far more journalistic integrity than one can expect from the Post or from Jovanovich. This bludgeoning was overdue for eight years, delayed by exactly the sort of Washington hardball that Davis exposes. Indeed, there can be no more eloquent testimony to the substantive nature of Davis' material than the sound that those 20,000 copies must have made as they, at the behest of Post power, went through a shredding machine.

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  • 2 years later...
Guest Tom Scully

On the day before the JFK assassination, the obituary of Charles Clucas was published. Clucas's sudden death made Celia de Gersdorff, daughter of Ben Bradlee's mother's uncle George Bruno de Gersdorff, a widow.

Charles Clucas was divorced in 1959 from Baroness Phyllis De Mohrenschildt.

Just a few key words and names here, but they are associated and intriguingly intertwined and repetitive.: Clucas - DeMohrenschildt - de Gersdorff - Thomas Hoving, Bush - Devine - Macomber - Lindsay, Cogswell - New Yorker - Truax - McCloy, Paris in the 1950's - CIA - John Train - Plimpton - McCloy, Thomas Hoving - Walter Hoving - John V. Lindsay - Met. Museum of Art - William B. Macomber, Jr. - C. Douglas Dillon - Roswell Gilpatric, Albert B. Carter, Jr. - Lowell Clucas, Jr. - Munich - Thomas J. Devine - Charles Hubbard (step-son of Henry C. Brunie, best man of John McCloy)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&q=Mader%2C%20Julius.%20Frederic%20Fleisher%2C&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=pw&psj=1#q=cholly+knickerbocker+clucas&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&tbm=nws&source=lnt&tbs=ar:1&sa=X&psj=1&ei=drqeTebWHZC_gQfIhLHmDw&ved=0CA8QpwUoBQ&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=b709a90cde17f16d

Cholly Knickerbocker .

Palm Beach Daily News - Feb 1, 1959

NOTEBOOK A divorce on grounds ofintolerable cruelty habitual intemperance and misconduct obtained by chemical exec Charles Clucas from Mrs Phyllis Washington Clucas in Connecticut may sound pretty final.

However, Mrs. Clucas, the former Baroness de Mohrenschildt says it is only the beginning....

(she says she has letters and other evidence) concerning Mr. Clucas's interest in a very-much married New York lady socialite...

http://nyvagenealogy.homestead.com/1969NYOBITS.html

Nov 21 1963 found in the NY Herald Tribune

Charles Clucas of Stockbridge, Mass. His wife Celia de Gersdorff Clucas & son of the late Lowel M & Frances T. Clucas of Stockbridge, Mass. Brother of Mrs Franklin Paddock - Lenox Mass, Lowell Clucas Jr of Menlo Park Ca, Thomas T.Sherwood of Lantana Fla. beloved father of Alice Graham Clucas of Greenwich Conn & Catherine Clucas of Stockbridge Mass....

http://www.americanancestors.com/boston-cousins-of-queen-victoria-and-yankee-ancestors/

Surprising Connections # 6 and 7: Boston Cousins of Queen Victoria and Yankee Ancestors of Mrs. Thomas Philip “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.

Gary Boyd Roberts

Published Date : October - November 1993

...In addition Joanna Dorothea of Reuss-Ebersdorf, a daughter of Henry XXIX and Sophie Theodora, married Christoph F.L von Trotta genannt Treyden and left an only child, Frederica Theodora Elizabeth von Trotta genannt [163] Treyden, who married Friedrich Ludwig von Tschirschky und Bögendorff. Of their progeny a granddaughter was Amalie Joanna Lydia von Tschirschky und Bögendorff, first wife of her fourth and fifth cousin, the above-named Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz (1825-1887), American Moravian bishop and historian; and a daughter, Augusta Theodora von Tschirschky und Bögendorff, married Heinrich August von Gersdorff. Their eldest son, Dr. Ernst Bruno von (in America always Bruno de) Gersdorff (1820-1883), a third cousin of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, of King Leopold II of the Belgians and the Empress Carlota of Mexico, and of Fernando II, King Consort of Portugal, immigrated to America in 1846. Born at Eisenach, the son of a judge at the court of Saxe-Weimar -these Reuss- Ebersdorf kinsmen were largely Saxons -Ernst Bruno graduated from the University of Leipzig. According to his obituary in the Boston Transcript (2 July 1882, p. 4, col. 5) “partly because of the political troubles of the time in his native country,” leading, in part, to the failed revolutions of 1848 “and partly because of the deep love he felt for republican institutions, he came to this country immediately after his graduation.” He first settled, for only a few months, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, undoubtedly near his de Schweinitz cousins. He next came to Boston, then Andover, and in 1849 to Salem, where he was a homeopathic physician until 1865 and in 1860 married Caroline Choate, sister of famed lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate, American ambassador to Great Britain, 1899-1905. Caroline’s own immigrant ancestors included the royally descended Mrs. Alice Freeman Thompson Parke, also a forebear of H.R.H. The Princess of Wales and her sons.

In 1865 Ernst Bruno and Caroline moved to Boston. Dr. de Gersdorff was professor of pathology and therapeutics at the Boston University School of Medicine from its founding (1873) until his death ten years later. His two sons graduated from Harvard in 1887 and 1888 respectively. The younger, an architect, adopted two children, the son a Harvard graduate of 1947 and the daughter the wife of graduates of Princeton and Yale. The eldest son of Ernst Bruno and Caroline, Wall Street lawyer Carl August de Gersdorff, married a sister of Vanity Fair editor Francis Welch (Frank) Crowninshield and left a son and two daughters. The son, both sons-in-law, two Bradlee grandsons and two grandsons-in-law (R.C. Alsop and RG. Wilmers) were also Harvard graduates. Another grandson, CA. de Gersdorff II, was a graduate of Princeton.

Josephine de Gersdorff, eldest child of Carl August, in 1917 married Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr., sometime Boston banker, whose own royally descended ancestors included Rev. Peter and Jane (Allen) Bulkeley, the former of Massachusetts, and William Wentworth of New Hampshire, and one of whose great-great-great-grandmothers was the poet Sarah Wentworth (Apthorp) Morton (1759-1846). Of the two Bradlee sons, both Harvard graduates, the younger is Benjamin Crowninshield “Ben” Bradlee (b. 1921), well-known Watergate-era editor of The Washington Post (and sponsor of Woodward and Bernstein), whose first wife, stepdaughter of literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, was a Saltonstall cousin of Senator Leverett Saltonstall (III); whose second wife was a niece of Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot; and whose third wife is former television anchor Sally Quinn. Thus a third cousin of Queen Victoria, allied by marriage with Choates, and his son with Crowninshields, is both a great-grandfather of a nationally known figure and the ancestor or ancestor-in-law of at least ten Harvard graduates to date (including, from the next generation, Robert Denny Alsop, class of 1971). These American de Gersdorffs are still covered, I might note, in the modern (post-1953) Genealogisches Handbuch des Adds, successor to the Almanach de Gotha....

....5. Dr. Ernst Bruno von (in America de) Gersdorff of Salem and Boston, Mass. (1820-1883), professor of pathology and therapeutics at Boston University, 1873-83 = 1860 Caroline Choate (1834-1889), sister of lawyer and diplomat Joseph Hodges Choate (1832-1917). The royal descent of J.H. Choate and Mrs. de Gersdorff, and their kinship to H.R.H. The Princess of Wales and her sons, all via Mrs. Alice Freeman Thompson Parke, are covered in G.B. Roberts and W.A. Reitwiesner, American Ancestors and Cousins of The Princess of Wales (1984), pp. 21-32, 37, 39, 143-44, and RD500, pp. 435-37. Ernst Bruno and Caroline left only two sons; the younger, George Bruno de Gerssdorff (1866-1964), Harvard College graduate of 1888, architect (with McKim, Mead and White in New York City, 1895-1912), married Isabel Cleaveland Lawrence in 1907 and adopted two children, Robert Lawrence de Gersdoff, Harvard College graduate of 1947 and Celia C. de Gersdorff, wife of Elliot M. Ogden, Princeton College graduate of 1955, Charles Clucas, and Charles James Kittredge (b. 1921), Yale College graduate of 1943, Boston and Pittsfield banker (see Who’s Who in America)

6. Carl August de Gersdorff (1865-1944), New York City lawyer (see Who Was Who in America, vol. 2 [19501, p. 150), Harvard College graduate of 1887, = 1895 Helen SuzetteCrowninshield (1868-1941), daughter of Frederic Crowninshield (1845-1918), noted painter, author, and director of the American Academy in Rome, and Helen Suzette Fairbanks, and sister of Francis Welch (Frank) Crowninshield (1872-1947), editor of Vanity Fair. Their eldest child is treated below; of their two younger children, Alma de Gersdorff (b. 1897) married in 1919 David Percy Morgan, Jr. (1894-1974), chemist and consultant (see Who Was Who in America, vol. 6, 1974-1976, p. 292), Harvard College graduate of 1916, and left an only child, Helen Suzette Morgan (b. 1922), Radcliffe College graduate of 1945, who married in 1943 Robert Chapin Alsop (b. 1923), lawyer, Harvard College graduate of 1945. Caspar Crowninshield de Gersdorff (1901-1982), Wall Street broker, Harvard College graduate of 1923, youngest child of Carl August and Helen Suzette, married L. Helena Ogden in 1929 and left two children – Carl August de Gersdorff II(b. 1931) Princeton College graduate of 1954, who married Susan Van Wyck Kleinhansand Marianne Weber, and Ida Gertrude de Gersdorff(b. 1938), who married in 1963 RobertGeorge Wilmers(b. 1934), Buffalo, N.Y. banker and Harvard College graduate of 1956. The Alsops have four children, C.A. de Gersdorff II has five, and the Wilmerses have two.

7. Josephine de Gersdorff (1896-1975) = 1917 Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr. (1892-1970), Boston banker, company officer, and chairman of the Mass. Parole Board, Harvard College graduate of 1915 (Frederick Josiah Bradlee & Elizabeth Whitwell Thomas; Arthur Malcolm Thomas & Mary Sarah Sargent; Alexander Thomas & Elizabeth Malcolm Rand, Howard Sargent & Charlotte Cunningham; Isaac Rand & Lucy Whitwell, [John] Richard Cunningham & Sarah Apthorp Morton; John Rand & Elizabeth Malcolm, Perez Morton & Sarah Wentworth Apthorp, noted poet; Isaac Rand & Margaret Damon, James Apthorp & Sarah Wentworth; John Damon, Jr. & Margaret Clarke, Samuel Wentworth & Elizabeth Deering; Thomas Clarke & Mary Bulkeley, John Wentworth, Lt. Coy, of N.H., & Sarah Hunking Edward Bulkeley & Lucian ,Samuel Wentworth & Mary Benning; Rev. Peter Bulkeley of Mass. [RD]& Jane Allen [RD], William Wentworth of N.H. (RD) & ___). The second child of F.J., Jr. and Josephine is noted below; the eldest, Frederick Josiah Bradlee III [166] b. 1919), Harvard College graduate of 1941, unmarried, is an actor and writer; the youngest, Constance Bradlee (b. 1923), married Francis C. Thayer.

8.Benjamin Crowninshield (“Ben”) Bradlee (b. 1921), managing or executive editor of The Washington Post 1965-92, formerly Washington bureau chief and a reporter for Newsweek, author of That Special Grace [about John F. Kennedy, 1964] and Conversations with Kennedy (1974), Harvard College graduate of 1943, = (1) 1942 (divorced 1955) JeanSaltonstall (b. 1921) (later Mrs. Oscar William Haussermann, Jr.), daughter of John Lee Saltonstall (a first cousin once removed and double second cousin once removed of U.S. Senator Leverett Saltonstall [iII]) and Gladys Durant Rice (later Mrs. Van Wyck Brooks, wife of the man of letters) and sister of Elizabeth Lee Saltonstall, Mrs. August Belmont IV; (2) 1956 (divorced 1976) Mrs. Antoinette Eno Pinchot Pittman (b. 1924), Vassar College graduate of 1945, daughter of Amos [Richards Eno] Pinchat, noted lawyer and publicist, and Ruth Pickering, and niece of Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot; (3) 1978 Sally Quinn (b. 1941), journalist (co-anchor, CBS Morning News 1973-74), Smith College graduate of 1963. “Ben” Bradlee is thus a sixth cousin of Kings Baudouin land Albert II of the Belgians, and a sixth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain; Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; King Harald V of Norway; King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden; Queen Margarethe II of Denmark; King Juan Carlos land Queen Sophia of Spain; and Hereditary Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg. In his 1993 50th Harvard reunion report Bradlee listed four children, none with Harvard affiliations (his two elder sons, Benjamin C., Jr. [b. 1948], and Dominic [b. 1958], graduated respectively from Colby in 1969 and Yale in 1979); there are eight grandchildren.

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  • 1 year later...
Guest Tom Scully
John,

You have uncovered the Truth Squad, no wonder they sink these references during the Search Engine process.

You have uncovered evidence of systematic and chronic manipulation of the media by the CIA and joint agencies, an interlocking of CIA and US MEDIA personalities within the extended family and social scene. Antoinette Pinchot (pronounced Pan-shot, I believe) married Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer married Cord Meyer, Dick Helms brokered the sale of NEWSWEEK with a million dollar check changing hands, Bradlee and Angleton working in Europe together for VOA and USIA projects, all this is horribly enlightening about the suspicions so many have had concerning the corporate newspaper and magazine industry.

Mary Meyer's murder on the Towpath as the Warren COmmission Report was released looks like a clean up operation, and the BRADLEE/WOODWARD control of the Watergate burglary issue looks like sustained damage control

visavis HUNT, GONZALES, MARTINEZ, STURGIS, BARKER and MCCORD.

Thank you for shedding light on the tight linkages between Dallas, Watergate, the US Agencies and the press.

As I have pointed out at:

http://educationforu...?showtopic=3520

Ben Bradlee is still alive (and hopefully getting very upset by my postings about him).

There are still several people left alive who know a great deal about this case. This Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, Anne Truitt and Cicely d'Autremont Angleton. Mary's son, Quentin Meyer, is also still interested in finding out who murdered his mother. Peter Janney is another one worth interviewing. His father, Wistar Janney was a top CIA official who was part of the Georgetown Crowd. Peter believes the CIA murdered Mary.

In his autobiography, A Good Life, Bradlee admits that it was Wistar Janney who told him that Mary Meyer had been murdered. He does not mention that Janney was a senior CIA operative.

For the latest information I have on Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer, Cord Meyer and Operation Mockingbird, see:

http://www.spartacus...JFKbradleeB.htm

http://www.spartacus...k/JFKmeyerM.htm

http://www.spartacus...k/JFKmeyerC.htm

http://www.spartacus...mockingbird.htm

Bradlee was a journalist, and editor of the reports of other journalists, yet he writes a difficult to believe or

an incoherent account of his reaction to a telephone call from a friend working at the CIA involving a news

radio report of an unidentified female shooting victim in Georgetown.

Bradlee relates that based solely on a speculative observation received in a telephone call from Wistar Janney, he immediately dropped what he was doing at his job and dispatched Anne Chamberlin to New York City after rushing home, and later made an alarming call to his mother-in-law, Ruth, a woman of either 71 or 88 years of age, motivated entirely on speculation. Neither Ben Bradlee nor anyone else in a position to confirm the victim's identity had yet received a request to come to the morgue to identify Mary Meyer's body.

A Good Life - Page 266

books.google.com Ben Bradlee - 1996 - 512 pages - Google eBook

AnneChamberlinRuthPinchot.jpg

Peter Janney writes that he interviewed Bradlee about this in 2007, and Janney then writes only that Bradlee raced home, leaving out entirely Bradlee's own account of his premature dispatching of Anne Chamberlin to travel immediately to Ruth Pinchot in New York, or of Bradlee's later call to alert Ruth Pinchot that Chamberlin was coming for her, yet he writes the question anyway, "What did Bradlee know, and when did he know it?"

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary ...

books.google.com Peter Janney - 2012

BradleeJanney.jpg

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary ...

books.google.com Peter Janney - 2012

.....

Finally, for some reason it has appeared that Mary's close friend Anne Chamberlin couldn't stand the heat. She wouldn't actively .

participate in the conspiracy to conceal. It was as if something had scared her. She didn't want any part of it, and she didn't want her name mentioned in any subsequent account. Anne Chamberlin left Washington abruptly after Mary's murder and fled to Maine....

Edited by Tom Scully
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  • 1 month later...
Guest Tom Scully
http://letsrollforums.com/showpost.php?p=238631&postcount=535

Re: The "JFK-MURDER" was a STAGED EVENT / JFK wasn't "KILLED" on 11/22/63!

3 Nov 2012 , 12:54 PM

Culto

.

....This very interesting old Ben Bradlee thread at Education Forum by John Simkin confirms just that: Ben Bradlee's involvement in both professional and personal ways:

As a result of a family friend who knew Eugene Meyer, Bradlee found work on the Washington Post as a crime reporter. Bradlee also got to know Philip Graham, Eugene Meyer's son-in-law, and associate publisher of the newspaper. In 1951 Graham helped Bradlee to become assistant press attache in the American embassy in Paris.

In 1952 Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the the Central Intelligence Agency throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural information" worldwide. While at the USIE Bradlee worked with E. Howard Hunt and Alfred Friendly.

Bradlee officially worked for the USIE until 1953, when he began working for Newsweek. While based in France, Bradlee divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot. At the time of the marriage, Antoinette's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to Cord Meyer, a key figure in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the American media.

Antionette Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d'Autremont, who was married to James Angleton. Bradlee worked closely with Angleton in Paris. At the time Angleton was liaison for all Allied intelligence in Europe. His deputy was Richard Ober, a fellow student of Bradlee's at Harvard University.

[...]

Bradlee now began working at Newsweek in Washington. While working for the journal

Bradlee became a close friend of JFK.

This included publishing stories beneficial to the career of the ambitious politician. Bradlee later wrote two books about Kennedy: That Special Grace (1964) and Conversations with Kennedy (1975).

Etc. etc. Well-connected, that's for sure. As mentioned before, Ben Bradlee didn't dare to publish anything (at all!) about the "brutal murder on the towpath" of his sister-in-law Mary in his 1975 autobiography Conversations with Kennedy:

And something else about that Ben Bradlee thread: the last post so far is post #21 of September 16, 2012 by Tom Scully.

It's about Anne Chamberlin's role in Bradlee's account of the afternoon of October 12, 1964. Tom Scully questions both Chamberlin's and Bradlee's role in that story.

Interestingly, this post was the very first time that Anne Chamberlin was actually mentioned at Education Forum!

So far, no one of those experienced "JFK/MPM researchers" at EduForum has had the guts to react to Tom Scully's post...

Quote: Originally Posted by do2read

Apparently it is simply no fun if you don't leave clues in plain sight that the sleeping can never see!

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In March, 1976, James Truitt, a former senior member of staff at the Washington Post, gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot Meyer was having an affair with John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".

Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time that Meyer was murdered on 12th October, 1964. She phoned Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."

James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary.

Article on the Truitts' son Sam: http://www.woodstock...idden-meanings/

Excerpt:

“It’s ‘about’ the JFK assassination — or, as it is written, ‘Made of maps, mirrors and labyrinths — though grounded in proprietary knowledge — DICK is a book that explodes the Kennedy assassination and the machinations around that event. References to the JFK murder are in fact quite oblique: in fact, the whole work is, including most obdurately the integral deployment of Morse Code as text.’”

Truitt works in layers. Taken as transmitted what comes across is a robotic British female voice reading bits of text interspersed with long renderings of “dash dot dot dash dash” Morse Code, simultaneous to a fast-paced flickering of partial images and appearing/disappearing notes. One gets a sense of things happening, of a narrative being unveiled somewhat reluctantly, and huge amounts of work at play. The very cross-pollination of media is impressive…and about the only welcoming element of the whole enterprise, at least until one starts returning to it daily and getting a sense of something unfolding.

Having been cheat-slipped a copy of the text as a whole, before Truitt came up with the transmission idea for its initial “publication,” DICK — as a whole document — is similarly mysterious in its constant use of Morse Code and Shakespearean stage directions amid an apparent stream of consciousness babble of statements, descriptions, and epiphanies. Yet it also imparts a building sense of outrage and dangerousness. Something evil is being imparted, it appears, that creates a sense of outrage in the writer.

Partly that comes from the sense of background Truitt allows to precede his transmissions.

“The story behind DICK lies in my family’s association with Kennedy’s assassination,” he writes. “My mother, the visual artist Anne Truitt, was a close friend of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, who helped found the World Federalist Movement and was subsequently a CIA official. Mary Meyer had an on-going affair with President Kennedy up to his death, about which she wrote in a diary. On our family leaving Washington for Tokyo in 1963 (my father, a journalist, had been appointed bureau chief of Newsweek in Japan), Mary Meyer told my mother that if anything happened to her she should find and safeguard the diary. Mary Meyer was assassinated in Washington in October 1964, and on this news my mother contacted James Angleton, the CIA’s head of Counter Intelligence and a family friend, to secure the diary. He did so and having read the diary kept it in his safe at CIA. Subsequently the diary was given to my mother and to Mary Meyer’s sister, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, the wife of Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. They read and then burned it.”

Unstated in the annotations Truitt provides are such elements as his father’s eventual release from Newsweek and eventual suicide, the fact that his sister’s godparents were Angleton and Meyer (and his godfather, Cord Meyer), or his toddler memories of having had his first school experience alongside the Kennedy kids in the White House nursery.

After running some of the Morse Code through translators, uncovering what appears to be a gobbledygook of capital letters, I asked Truitt if I was missing something. He said he’d added that another cryptographic layer that needed cracking by those searching out the deeper messages he was trying to impart.

“You can continue the penetration and find out what was transmitted by Mary Meyer’s diary,” he said. “Why do I bury it all? Unless there’s an outright release of all the documents involved in her assassination, the Kennedy murder, and the other records kept top secret — unless everybody were to become clear and come clean at the CIA, the FBI and so forth — the whole of this narrative will never be clear. I chose this as a way of sharing the impenetrability of what really happened.”

Sam Truitt's Facebook page: http://www.facebook....494093407275592

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