John Bevilaqua Posted October 30, 2007 Share Posted October 30, 2007 John B.,You continue to engage in the kind of McCarthyism you claim to despise. "Prouty knew X, who was once affiliated with Y, etc., etc." You're trying to smear some good people here. Fletcher Prouty sat on the Board of Directors of Libery Lobby in the late 80s-early 90s period- not sure about the exact time period, but around then. Another member of Liberty Lobby's Board of Directors was black activist and one time well-known comedian Dick Gregory. Can you connect Gregory to Nazis, too? Mark Lane is a civil libertarian who defended Liberty Lobby against the likes of Jack Anderson, E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, none of whom I imagine are in your pantheon of heroes. Stop and think for a minute about how you sound when you make these wild connections. Don't they remind you just a bit of the kind of tactics used to label "commies," "pinkos" and "fellow travelers" during the fabulous fifities? If you continue to do this, and to maintain your consistently acerbic tone, you're going to lose the support of a lot of people who would otherwise agree with you. Interesting. John Bevilaqua now presents some evidence in support of his contentions, as befits a researcher and "civil" member of the Education Forum, and all his proffered evidence is suggested to be no more than a continuation of engaging in the kind of McCarthyism he claims to despise. It's of no small significance that Colonel Prouty and Mark Lane (and even Dick Gregory) have associated their names with Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby et al in the past. If these are instances of naivete, ignorance, or whatever, then they may be understandable if it can be shown that those persons separated themselves from such. If not, the questions raised are entirely legitimate as to where those persons stand (or stood) on certain issues. http://www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-52.html Why have some on the left fallen for the pseudo-radical siren song of the fascist right? Sara Diamond thinks "after 12 years of living as an anti-administration anti-establishment subculture, many in the progressive movement know what they are against, but have lost sight of what they stand for." According to Diamond, this leaves persons susceptible to allying with anyone else that attacks the government." In part it's desperation," says Diamond. "We have, in fact, lost influence and become marginal." And, Diamond adds, this happened "against a backdrop of political illiteracy." This political myopia has been shaped in part by a reliance on the electronic media for news routinely presented in ahistorical, sound-bite packages that fail to make connections or references to even recent history, much less events earlier in [the twentieth] century. Sadly, many Americans developed their understanding of fascism by watching the show "Hogan's Heroes" on television. The age of television has promoted style over substance. Demagoguery of all political stripes flourishes in this environment. Interviewer David Barsamian who produces the syndicated Alternative Radio series from Boulder, Colorado warns that radio personalities who harp on conspiracies are providing entertaining confusion rather than helping listeners focus clearly on complex issues. He says progressives should not fall for "left guruism" where sensational anti-government theories are accepted without any independent critical analysis. Daniel, Great response and a nice choice for an extract. Just look at what Lane did for Carto in the Mel Mermelstein case which was later made into a movie staring Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy. Now when Spock jumps onto a cause I am the first one to ask: "Beam me up, Scotty." I mean, Lane, who is Jewish taking a case which had to argue that The Holocaust NEVER HAPPENED. Have you no shame, after all this time, have you no shame? All of you should check out the Institute for Historical Review which was part of the Carto Empire, too. They put out a constant stream of Holocaust Denial pablum to be consumed by those predisposed to accepting such theories. I am going to try to find other extracts from PublicEye.org relevant to this Right Woos Left theory for the delight, education and edification of others. I am also trying to contact Lou Wolf who used to live near Washington, DC who hopefully would recall the comments made by both Prouty and Lane at that conference. I will never forget the comments made by the Barry Goldwater's son lookalike right down to the black Goldwater glasses... "Colonel Prouty is like us on all the N**ger issues." Now what is little game being played by Liberty Lobby vis-a-vis their justifiable finger pointing at certain elements of the CIA? This is their way of holding the CIA at bay regarding the right wing involvment and is part and parcel of the entire scapegoating and cover-up game IMHO. The subrose message being sent out is: "Hey, Wickliffe Draper of The Pioneer Fund and Dr. Hans J. Eysenck know all about MKULTRA and the people YOU murdered using those techniques, so don't even think about going after us for whatever crimes or murders we pulled off or plan to pull off. And don't try to blame us and Wickliffe Draper and our friends in WACL for raising the money to kill JFK because we know where all the bodies are buried and we know all about the Baltimore CIA proprietaries used in Iran Contra and in the JFK hit. We raised the funds but the friends of Ulius Amoss and that Murder, Inc. he created in Baltimore actually hired the killers. And through Robert J. Morris, James Angleton, Charles Willoughby and RAY S. CLINE we know all about Archbishop Oscar Romero and about Benito Aquino and Martin L. King, too and we had little or NOTHING to with those hits. Go after Ray S. Cline if you dare, he started his OWN Murder, Inc. and snuffed Archbishops and the enemies of Marcos like Benito Aquine. How are you going to splain that one away, Lucy? Sure, James O. Eastland's nephew Byron DeLa Beckwith is in jail for killing Medgar Evers, Jr. and yes Draper funded that one and The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and The Freedom Riders hit. But don't start up with this "Look at the Pot Calling the Kettle Black" stuff with us. You snuff who you want to snuff and we snuff whoever we want to snuff and that is that. We hate Freedom Riders, those who would integrate our schools like Medgar Evers, Jr., MLK and many, many others. Hey take a look at that list from The Congress of Freedom meeting attented by Willie Somersett and Joseph S. Milteer who even knew Don Burros who was in Oswald's phone book. Our cover was almost blown to bits by that blabber Milteer but he is dead now. Anyone on that Congress of Freedom list you hate enough to snuff? There were 200 names there. Pick one. You hate Commies, and Commie-Symps. We hate integrationists and blacks and Jews. It is all about Market Share. We both hated JFK and you should never have gotten into bed with us and Draper and Eysenck and let your Baltimore-Washington Beltway boys sub contract the hit out to their little Murder, Inc. crowds. So you go your way and we go ours. OK? Hey you guys kill Archbishops saying Mass and unarmed polticians like Benito Aquino and we KNOW Cline was in the Phillipines at the time Aquino was killed. Who are you kidding? There is plenty of money to be had for both of us. And plenty of targets and plenty of killers too. So bug off." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest David Guyatt Posted November 1, 2007 Share Posted November 1, 2007 Here are some links on L. Fletcher Prouty that will cause you to totallyrevisit the background and associates of this man...and hopefully to thoroughly reconsider both his motivations and his actions. When you read the list of far rightist players and projects he participated in, then you will realize where this man was really coming from... He and Mark Lane were very close to Willis A. Carto who started The Liberty Lobby which filed a lawsuit against someone who called them an anti Semitic neo Nazi organization. Liberty Lobby lost. Leonard Nimoy starred in a movie playing Mel Mermelstein or something close to that who sued Liberty Lobby for saying that the Holocaust NEVER even occurred. Liberty Lobby lost $50,000 and they were represented in court by none other than Mark Lane. Do a search at publiceye.org for Prouty or for Lane or for any of the other right wing extremists linked to Prouty or Carto. Bo Gritz? Skolnick? How about the fact that Tim McVeigh actually called a Liberty Lobby associate in Europe a few days before he blew up the Murrah(sp?) building in OK? Or that he was a subscriber to Spotlight, the right wing rag of the Liberty Lobby? Or that an advertisment from the Sons of Liberty from Spotlight was found in his apartment? Many believe to this day that he bought The Turner Diaries from the Spotlight which distributed it. One of the books which inspired him to act in fact which was based on Ulius Amoss concept of leaderless resistance. Remember that name Colonel Ulius Amoss and his International Services of Information Foundation from Baltimore, MD. Amoss hired and trained one of Interpen's best known assassins at ISOIF and used him for multiple hits. This guy is dead and gone but he was later associated by some very serious researchers on this Forum with the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero AND MLK and he admitted helping to oust Papa Doc Duvalier with George de Mohrenschildt himself in an article he wrote. This guy was also fingered by another now deceased member of Interpen as being one of the JFK trigger men. Amoss died in 1961 but some of his best talent was stolen by Ray S. Cline later and used within WACL for multiple hits either as murder for hire operations or for CIA covert actions or both. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. I simply can not believe that people who consider themselves to be intelligent can not be aware of the backgrounds of Lane and Prouty and their roles with Liberty Lobby and the Institute of Historical Review which is just like Regnery Press a Holocaust Denier the worst kind of scum. I simply can not believe how easy it is to brainwash a whole group of posters on a Forum into swallowing lies, distortions and mistruths. It can not even taste that good, does it? To unbrainwash your old thought patterns is even harder than it was to brainwash you in the first place. A mind is a terrible thing to baste. Do a Google on Ulius Amoss and you will find the same 400 words on this guy at about 50 different sites. He was OSS then CIA then he created this front proprietary called ISOI Foundation. If anyone knows someone in Washington, DC I found a folder on Amoss and ISOI Foundation which requires a visit to the Library of Congress. Thank you for your continued open mindedness. If you have been brainwashed then an open mind is required in order to allow fresh thoughts and ideas to enter and be placed into permanent storage thus expunging the original concepts embedded their previously by your brainwashers. See Manchurian Candidate. PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left14 One highly- condensed version of this paper, circulated briefly only on the Peacenet computer network, misidentified Fletcher Prouty as a CIA agent. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-53.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The JFK ConspiracySome right-wing paranoid theories are woven into the film, not surprising since Fletcher Prouty was an advisor to Stone, and the film's character "Mr. X" ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-30.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Populist Party/Liberty Lobby ...Spotlight used the opportunity of the release of Oliver Stone's film JFK to promote Fletcher Prouty, Mark Lane, and Victor Marchetti. Prouty was an advisor ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-09.html PublicEye.org - The Populist Action CommitteeL. Fletcher Prouty (US Air Force, ret.) John Rakus (President, National Justice Foundation) John Rarick (Former Congressman, D-Louisiana) Vince Ryan (Editor ... www.publiceye.org/racism/popactcom.html PublicEye.org - Investigative Report On Craig Hulet, aka KC dePassIn San Francisco, Hulet distorted facts about Fletcher Prouty: ... Hulet clearly is implying that Fletcher Prouty is not a right-winger and that the fact ... www.publiceye.org/conspire/hulet.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Other Right-Wing Groups and the ...Fletcher Prouty, expert on this government within a government, argues that it has all the earmarks." Prouty also moderated a panel where Bo Gritz wove a ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-23.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Right-Wing Roots of Sheehan's ...... Prouty book sat in Sheehan's personal bookshelf in his Christic office). ... that forms the basis of criticism in Fletcher Prouty's book Secret Team. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-14.html PublicEye.org - Big Stories, Spooky Sources... 1973 books by retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty: "The Secret Team: The ... Prouty's "Secret Team" was recently republished by Noontide Press, ... www.publiceye.org/media/spooky.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Liberty Lobby Populist Action ...Both Bo Gritz and Fletcher Prouty were named to the advisory panel. According to the Spotlight, the other persons named to the advisory board were: ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-10.html PublicEye.org - Reading List on Intelligence Agencies & Political ...The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the World Fletcher Prouty, 1974. Early critical research on the CIA, but is marred by a somewhat ... www.publiceye.org/research/biblio/repression_bib.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The LaRouchite CritiqueWhile Carto's Liberty Lobby network was recruiting Fletcher Prouty, Bo Gritz, longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti, and assassination conspiracy researchers ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-11.html According to Wikipedia and other internet sources, Political Research Associates/PRA (of which Publiceye.Org is the mouthpiece) is funded partly by the Ford Foundation, partly by Public Welfare Foundation and partly by individual sponsors and sales. Of the $700k annual funding required by PRA in 2002, $175,663. was apparently provided by the Ford Foundation alone. Adopting PRA's chief analyst and writer, Chip Berlet's, method of tainting by association - not to mention Mr. Belivaqua's likewise skills (see my post #17 at: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...15&start=15 - Political Conspiracies forum), one might very well point to the Ford Foundation's family tree noting that Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and that, in particular, Henry Ford is well known for his rabid anti-semitism and actively pro-Hitler. One might note that Edsel Ford (the son) was also pro Nazi and a serving board member of American I G - i.e., I G Farben, the front company of the Auslands Organization (Nazi foreign intelligence) and the manufacturers of Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi gas chambers. Ford made a point of remembering Hitler's birthday by sending him 50,000 Reichmarks annually. Charles Higham's book TRADING WITH THE ENEMY provides considerably more detail about the Ford family and Ford Motor Company's pro-Hitler policy. Public Welfare Foundation was founded by millionaire Charles Edward Marsh, a life-long friend of LBJ. If one is going to be politically correct to such a manifest degree, and come over all zealot-like in attacking fascism, then at least an effort could be made to avoid such obvious pitfalls as financially benefiting(arguably surviving) from a foundation established by well-known Nazi believers and supporters. The irony of the foregoing is that the words "contradiction in terms" seem particularly fitting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted November 1, 2007 Share Posted November 1, 2007 John B.,You continue to engage in the kind of McCarthyism you claim to despise. "Prouty knew X, who was once affiliated with Y, etc., etc." You're trying to smear some good people here. Fletcher Prouty sat on the Board of Directors of Libery Lobby in the late 80s-early 90s period- not sure about the exact time period, but around then. Another member of Liberty Lobby's Board of Directors was black activist and one time well-known comedian Dick Gregory. Can you connect Gregory to Nazis, too? Mark Lane is a civil libertarian who defended Liberty Lobby against the likes of Jack Anderson, E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, none of whom I imagine are in your pantheon of heroes. Stop and think for a minute about how you sound when you make these wild connections. Don't they remind you just a bit of the kind of tactics used to label "commies," "pinkos" and "fellow travelers" during the fabulous fifities? If you continue to do this, and to maintain your consistently acerbic tone, you're going to lose the support of a lot of people who would otherwise agree with you. Sometimes using McCarthyism against former McCarthyites is the best way to make a point. Dick Gregory was not particularly aware of the history of IHR, Carto or The Liberty Lobby and perhaps just wanted another podium another stage and another audience who was willing to entertain his theories, his thesis, his theme, whatever. I am only acerbic when acid is thrown in my face or into my threads. The Grafitti Tagger has not stopped his activity despite being warned many times. I maintain that I am right about Otto F. Otepka and Mellen and Pease were taken in by the siren song of The Ordeal of Otto Otepka and that they were brainwashed. I hold that the same thing occurred with L. Fletcher Prouty. "Oh, I am not a MEMBER of Liberty Lobby, I never JOINED the Liberty Lobby." What the hell does that matter? He WAS The Liberty Lobby for years and so was Lane and even Warren Richardson, too. Did you see Prouty at the JFK road show at the Harvard School of Government with Oliver Stone. Only two people stood up to question Prouty on his background, his motivations and his hypocrisy and I was one of them. More hissing and booing than applause but it was scattered. Imagine hissing and booing at Harvard? And support of Prouty? Stone used Roy Hargraves as perhaps the only other advisor on JFK, I think but Roy was not a road show type of person. Now Hargraves really knew whereof he spoke. "But who shot JFK Roy? Who shot him?" said Mary Ferrell and he told her. It was a now deceased former Interpen member who worked for Ray S. Cline. That's all she wrote. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted November 3, 2007 Share Posted November 3, 2007 (edited) Here are some links on L. Fletcher Prouty that will cause you to totally revisit the background and associates of this man...and hopefully to thoroughly reconsider both his motivations and his actions. When you read the list of far rightist players and projects he participated in, then you will realize where this man was really coming from...PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left14 One highly- condensed version of this paper, circulated briefly only on the Peacenet computer network, misidentified Fletcher Prouty as a CIA agent. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-53.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The JFK ConspiracySome right-wing paranoid theories are woven into the film, not surprising since Fletcher Prouty was an advisor to Stone, and the film's character "Mr. X" ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-30.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Populist Party/Liberty Lobby ...Spotlight used the opportunity of the release of Oliver Stone's film JFK to promote Fletcher Prouty, Mark Lane, and Victor Marchetti. Prouty was an advisor ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-09.html PublicEye.org - The Populist Action CommitteeL. Fletcher Prouty (US Air Force, ret.) John Rakus (President, National Justice Foundation) John Rarick (Former Congressman, D-Louisiana) Vince Ryan (Editor ... www.publiceye.org/racism/popactcom.html PublicEye.org - Investigative Report On Craig Hulet, aka KC dePassIn San Francisco, Hulet distorted facts about Fletcher Prouty: ... Hulet clearly is implying that Fletcher Prouty is not a right-winger and that the fact ... www.publiceye.org/conspire/hulet.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Other Right-Wing Groups and the ...Fletcher Prouty, expert on this government within a government, argues that it has all the earmarks." Prouty also moderated a panel where Bo Gritz wove a ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-23.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Right-Wing Roots of Sheehan's ...... Prouty book sat in Sheehan's personal bookshelf in his Christic office). ... that forms the basis of criticism in Fletcher Prouty's book Secret Team. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-14.html PublicEye.org - Big Stories, Spooky Sources... 1973 books by retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty: "The Secret Team: The ... Prouty's "Secret Team" was recently republished by Noontide Press, ... www.publiceye.org/media/spooky.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Liberty Lobby Populist Action ...Both Bo Gritz and Fletcher Prouty were named to the advisory panel. According to the Spotlight, the other persons named to the advisory board were: ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-10.html PublicEye.org - Reading List on Intelligence Agencies & Political ...The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the World Fletcher Prouty, 1974. Early critical research on the CIA, but is marred by a somewhat ... www.publiceye.org/research/biblio/repression_bib.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The LaRouchite CritiqueWhile Carto's Liberty Lobby network was recruiting Fletcher Prouty, Bo Gritz, longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti, and assassination conspiracy researchers ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-11.html According to Wikipedia and other internet sources, Political Research Associates/PRA (of which Publiceye.Org is the mouthpiece) is funded partly by the Ford Foundation, partly by Public Welfare Foundation and partly by individual sponsors and sales. Of the $700k annual funding required by PRA in 2002, $175,663. was apparently provided by the Ford Foundation alone. Adopting PRA's chief analyst and writer, Chip Berlet's, method of tainting by association - not to mention Mr. Belivaqua's likewise skills (see my post #17 at: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...15&start=15 - Political Conspiracies forum), one might very well point to the Ford Foundation's family tree noting that Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and that, in particular, Henry Ford is well known for his rabid anti-semitism and actively pro-Hitler. One might note that Edsel Ford (the son) was also pro Nazi and a serving board member of American I G - i.e., I G Farben, the front company of the Auslands Organization (Nazi foreign intelligence) and the manufacturers of Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi gas chambers. Ford made a point of remembering Hitler's birthday by sending him 50,000 Reichmarks annually. Charles Higham's book TRADING WITH THE ENEMY provides considerably more detail about the Ford family and Ford Motor Company's pro-Hitler policy. Public Welfare Foundation was founded by millionaire Charles Edward Marsh, a life-long friend of LBJ. If one is going to be politically correct to such a manifest degree, and come over all zealot-like in attacking fascism, then at least an effort could be made to avoid such obvious pitfalls as financially benefiting(arguably surviving) from a foundation established by well-known Nazi believers and supporters. The irony of the foregoing is that the words "contradiction in terms" seem particularly fitting. A shrewd deflection, David. If a cash transfer is evidence of some sort of purchase being made, we have Otto Otepka having been "bought" by the John Birch Society, Colonel Prouty having been "bought" by the Institute for Historical Review, and Chip Berlet/PRA having been "bought" by the Ford Foundation. In an initial or superficial reading, we're encouraged to conclude "they're all the same" (for instance, there's no difference between the Ford Foundation, IHR, and the John Birch Society). Likewise, it's suggested that the Ford Foundation is irrevocably tainted by the beliefs and actions of its original founders. And so, since Berlet/PRA are supported by the Ford Foundation and proceed to "come over all zealot-like in attacking fascism," we're encouraged to conclude "it's all a sham" because the targets of Berlet/PRA's attacks are the very types of people and organizations the original founders would have found to their liking. This helps deflect attention away from whether or not the linked articles have merit in themselves (that is, whether the facts are correct and the conclusions drawn are valid). What the Fords did 50 years ago and what The Ford Foundation is doing today are 2 totally different things as our shrewd deflector Mr. Guyatt knows full well. They would not support PRA and Berlet if they did not agree with what PRA is producing as output. A cynic would say that The Foundation in an attempt at public reparations and mea culpas is actually going full tilt in the opposite direction in an attempt to reverse the harm done by the founding Fords. Has that ever occurred to Mr. Guyatt? And the efforts of the boycotts and tirades against Ford or IBM or even GM or even Pope Paul XII by Jewish special interest groups have been, ironically enough, very successful in getting The Foundation to channel money into the very coffers of PRA which Mr. Guyatt is now so vociferously objecting to. Go figure. And yet he still pulls that old BMW strategy. Bi*** and Moan and Whine until they cough up more dough to ease their guilty consciences and quiet these special interest groups and to satisfy their requests or demands. Some people are never satisfied. Maybe The Foundation should cough up more dough to PRA? Now back to the topic at hand. Are the Fletcher Prouty criticisms valid or not? I think they are. He is another opportunist who will say what you want in front of whatever group just to get an honorarium or make a buck. How is that different than what Mr. Guyatt is doing? Yellow journalism and acting as a professional BMW, just to make a living. Pretty lame. Very lame. Would Guyatt ever drive a BMW or a Ford? Not. Would he ever revisit the altered case against Pope Pius XII and admit he was brainwashed into becoming anti Pope or anti Pius? Not. What does that accomplish except to keep the lies going and the subscriptions flowing? Nothing. Read The Myth of Hitler's Pope by a Rabbi, and maybe, just maybe it will change your mind. Read Right Woos Left by a leftist and maybe you will wakeup to the threats from Noontide Press, Right Magazine and that entire Secret Team at Liberty Lobby. Or track down Lou Wolf near Washington, DC. He is both Jewish AND a leftist and a confirmed opponent of L. Fletcher Prouty and Mark Lane and Willis Carto. He knew all about the Mel Mermelstein case, and IHR and Liberty Lobby and Willis Carto. I stand by all my quotes from Prouty and Lane at the COPA conference. All of them. When the unadulterated tapes are found if they exist, they will show what was said. I just hope the Q and A sessions are on there verbatim as well. Mark Lane: Files, what files? There are no files? Me: THERE ARE NO FILES? WHERE HAVE WE HEARD THAT BEFORE THIS? Later. Edited November 3, 2007 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 In 1968, Richard Nixon appointed Otto Otepka to a Subversive Activities Control Board, not a very active body, and obviously an attempt to give the impoverished State Department officer some employment. Confirmation did not come easily. Falsely, Otepka was labeled a Birchite and an anti-Semite, although he was neither of these. (Joan Mellen)Joan, James M. Stewart from the American Defense Fund (a fund with the John Birch Society association) said that $22,000 had been given to Otepka which at the time was about 80% of his legal costs. It should be pointed out though that accepting the legal fees was not illegal. Otepka allegedly spoke to gatherings at the homes of Birch Society activists. He also spoke at a large meeting in the auditorium of the Flick-Reedy Education Enterprises, an ultra-conservation organization. Gordon Hall, an authority on extremist groups and Medford Evans, book review editor for the Birch Society Magazine both place Otepka at a Birch Society organized rally in Boston. FWIW. James Gordon Hall, along with his friend, Grace Hoag, were long time..er...monitors of the right and left wing extremists. Gordon was very close to some of them. Hell, when George Lincoln Rockwell was arrested, who was the first person he called? Gordon Hall. Gordon was also very much aware of Oswald, most likely through Banister. Otepka was close to Julien Sourwine, Robert Morris, and Ray Rocca. The curator of the Hall-Hoag Collection at Brown University, even told me that Gordon Hall almost got elected as President of an American Nazi Party affiliate. He was that convincing. Or maybe he was THAT convinced. Gordon Hall also said he had debated Robert J. Morris several times in the past. While Hall debunked the possibility that Edwin A. Walker could have organized the JFK hit, he did not dismiss the possibility that Robert Morris could have been the one along with Charles Willoughby which I thought was an amazing admission. Hall was basically an FBI employee who spent about $250,000 of someone's money to purchase subscriptions to the collection he donated to Brown University which weighed well over a ton and dated back to the early 1950's. It was taxpayer money, given to him by the FBI. Billy James Hargis and others feared and hated Gordon Hall who was profiled in The Age of Surveillance in the 1950's as a snoop, a spy and a likely FBI agent provocateur. John Judge knew the name, Gordon Hall of Arlington, MA as a long-time subscriber to the COPA journals. And some idiot from MIT who ran a leftist publication admitted that Gordon Hall offered to "organize his files" for free. And the guy let him have free reign for days. Gordon Hall read each and every document, to determine where to file it. He was just a grandfatherly, believable and ostensibly harmless looking guy, who reveled in exposing either the Far Right or the Far Left for a buck. A snoop, a snitch and a sneak. What a way to earn a living. I guess someone had to do it. I helped him profile, the Unabomber in the latter part of the 20th Century when he asked me why I did not spend my efforts on a case like that. I did and told him that publishing the manifesto was the only way to catch the Unabomber. I had a feeling he was an FBI contact even at that time. They did and my theory that someone would eventually say "That sounds just like my crazy Uncle Harry or whomever" actually came to fruition. Boy I am good at this stuff. Stay tuned for more. McCarthyite in Camelot: The “Loss” of Cuba, Homophobia, and the Otto Otepka Scandal Monday, May 21 2007, 12:00pm - 1:30pm McCarthyite in Camelot: The "Loss" of Cuba, Homophobia, and the Otto Otepka Scandal in the Kennedy State Department By Eric Paul Roorda Eric Paul Roorda is a Professor of History and Political Science, Bellarmine University, and Co-Director, Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies, Mystic Seaport. He is the author of The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, Duke University Press, 1998, winner of the Herbert Hoover Book Award and the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Association of Social Historians and American Foreign Policy; and Cuba, America and the Sea, 2006. Otepka was the chief of the State Department Office of Internal Security, which was the creation of the anti-communist Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). In 1961, Kennedy tried to gain control over the State Department security program, and ended up firing Otepka, which caused a scandal and Senate hearings. The dispute demonstrates the bureaucratic struggles fought between the legislative and executive branches to control United States foreign policy. This study examines the homophobic assumptions of the senators on the SISS, their staff, and various newspapers and magazines around the country. These critics equated the culture of the Foreign Service with homosexuality, and homosexuality with Communism. The analysis also emphasizes the social setting of Havana between the 1930s and the 1950s as a determining factor in shaping the attitudes and personal actions of the most prominent figures in the SISS "loss" of Cuba hearings, which triggered the Otepka scandal. This presentation is cosponsored by the Working Group on Ethnicity and Difference, Latin American Institute, the American History Colloquium, and the LGBT Studies Program. A light lunch will be served. Click here for flyer Location: Rolfe Hall 4302 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 Joan,I take it that you believe that Oswald was working in some intelligence capacity for the Kennedy's? Can you give me a condensed outline of who hired him, when he was hired and what he had been hired to do? I have an open mind and would like to consider all evidence available in this matter. With George DeM knowing Jackie's family, Jackie being married to the President, George DeM becoming friends with Oswald, and then Oswald being accused of killing JFK...I guess there could have been some kind of connection. Was George DeM working for the CIA, as most people believe, or was he working for the Kennedy's, or was he working for both? George DeM was working for The White Russian Solidarists, Jean deMenil and their world vojhd, Anastase Vonsisatsky. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 I Agree With Ann Coulter Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com Wednesday, July 9, 2003 As might have been expected, Ann Coulter has created a firestorm with her sensational new best-selling book, "Treason – Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism." Naturally, liberals and Democrats – pretty much the same thing – are infuriated at being indicted as a class of dedicated anti-Americans who, beginning with the Cold War, found much to be admired in the international communist conspiracy and much to be hated in their own United States of America. Unexpected has been the reaction of such conservatives as Andrew Sullivan who are offended by Ann’s no-holds-barred polemical style and appear to have been infected by the anti-Joe McCarthy virus. This virus has spread thanks to the leftist media and socialist dons in academia. Now several generations of Americans who weren’t there when Joe McCarthy was battling to expose hordes of subversives nestled in the bosom of the United States government think he was a bad guy. For them, it’s simply not stylish to join forces with the very much déclassé Wisconsin senator. McCarthy was not a certified gentleman with all the right Ivy League credentials and club memberships – like Alger Hiss, for example. He was a tough Mick, an ex-Marine street fighter who loved his country and hated its enemies. To their dismay, instead of wielding a thin dueling rapier in skewing disloyal liberals, Ann uses a heavy Claymore to bash the skulls of a class of people who, at the very least, hung around the fringes of treachery or were knee deep in the muck and mire of treason. As they always do when challenged by facts, her liberal critics settled on a handful of responses, daring Miss Coulter to explain how certain prominent liberals now considered in the common wisdom to have been fiercely anti-Communist come off in Ann’s book as less than fervent enemies of Communist subversion. How can you say Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson, all of whom fought shooting wars against Communist aggression, were witting abettors of treason? she’s asked every time she faces a liberal critic. Or how can she defend Joe McCarthy when he conducted a war of terrorism and repression against hordes of innocent loyal American liberals. And again, using that old tactic of admissions against interest, allow that sure, a lot of liberals acted against America’s best interests, but it isn’t fair to lump these unfortunately mistaken liberals in with all the good liberals. Let’s take these criticisms one at a time. How can Coulter make a case that liberals were busy betraying America when such well-known Americans as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy were such dedicated anti-Communists? Easy. As Coulter repeatedly states in her book, Joe McCarthy was not running around with a red catching net, seeking to find Communists under the White House beds, in Hollywood, in the media or in academia, where they abounded. McCarthy was seeking solely to uncover people who fit the profile of security risk as identified under President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which stated plainly that should extensive investigations reveal that if any questions existed concerning the fitness of a government employee from the standpoint of national security, that person should be discharged. Even prior to that order, evidence that an official of the U.S. government was a security risk would have demanded that person be barred from any government post in the interests of national security. As Coulter reveals in her book, Harry Truman not only ignored strong evidence that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were agents of the Soviet Union and thus dedicated to the overthrow of the United States and Soviet victory in the Cold War, but also actually advanced their careers. Moreover, his administration was honeycombed with secret Communist agents. And when Truman was advised of the existence of the Venona documents, which showed the extent of Soviet penetration of the government, he allegedly dismissed the decoded Soviet cables as a "fairy story," just as he called the charges against Hiss a "red herring." Dedicated anti-Communists don’t defend Communist subversion of the United States government. Truman did. He may have been a foe of armed Soviet aggression and dragged America into a war he would not allow his generals to win, but the record shows he was soft on Communist subversion within his administration. President Kennedy is also paraded out by Coulter’s critics as another fierce anti-Communist – after all, he took us into Vietnam, another war all those loyal Democrats would not allow us to win. Moreover, Kennedy continued to allow people, about whom serious doubts concerning their loyalty would have kept them out of government service, to infest his administration at the highest levels. And when one genuine anti-Communist government official sought to enforce EO 10450 and keep unsuitable appointees from working at the State Department, he was parboiled and hung out to dry. Kennedy’s election gave the liberals an opening to bring a lot of old discredited security risks back into government service. Not long after the election, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Bobby Kennedy met with State Department security chief Otto Otepka to discuss the possibility of obtaining security clearance for one Walt Whitman Rostow, a one-worlder who had once written a book calling for "an end to nationhood," and had been chosen to be JFK’s chief foreign-policy planner. Otepka was stunned. Rostow, he knew, had been denied security clearance three times during the Eisenhower administration. He told Rusk and Kennedy about Rostow’s background: that he was the son of a socialist revolutionary and had long consorted with Communist Party members, including known Soviet spies, and that two of his aunts had been identified as members of the Communist Party. Otepka also explained that U.S. Air Force intelligence had branded Rostow a security risk, and the CIA had dropped him from a sensitive contract. Under the strictures of Executive Order 10450, Otepka explained, security clearance could not be given to Rostow – not, at least, without a new, full-fledged FBI investigation. In his book, "The United States in the World Arena," Rostow wrote: "It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations – including the United States – the right to use substantial military force to peruse their own interests. Since this residual right is the right of national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined." He wrote about a "convergence" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and ridding the vocabulary of such formulations as capitalism vs. communism. He was one of the principle advocates of escalating the troop buildup in Vietnam while at the same time contributing to the "Rules of Engagement" declassified in 1985, which insured that we could not win the war. Instead of sending Rostow back into exile, Rusk and the Kennedys began a long-running brutal campaign designed send Otepka into exile. Kennedy would simply ignore this derogatory information and appoint Rostow special adviser in 1961, where he influenced the Bay of Pigs operation, Vietnam policy and military disarmament. Rostow would remain with Johnson until 1967. But the Rostow case was just the beginning of the Kennedys' war on national security. One hundred fifty-two waivers of security approvals were signed, in contrast to the mere five waivers issued under the eight years of the Eisenhower administration. Many security clearances simply bypassed Otepka's Division of Evaluations. Rusk's new security chief, John Reilly, rubber-stamped them. Walt Rostow was slipped into the State Department, heading its policy-planning council. There he authored the infamous "Rostow Papers," which laid out these goals for American foreign policy: unilateral disarmament, world government and accommodation with the Communist world. With Rusk, he would help engineer the Bay of Pigs disaster as well as the Vietnam War – a war calculated to dispirit America and embroil it in turmoil. When in October 1963 JFK was questioned about the treatment accorded Otepka (he was being charged with violating department policy by cooperating with a Senate Committee investigating security breaches at the State Department) he had this reaction: QUESTION: Mr. President, sir, there seems to be some connection between the attempt of the State Department to discharge Mr. Otto Otepka, the Security Officer, and there seems to be some connection between the fact that he gave much information to the Senate Internal Security Committee about various employees of the State Department – William Arthur Wieland and Walter W. Rostow and many others. Also Secretary Rusk has now put forth an order that employees of the State Department cannot talk or give information to this congressional committee. Isn't that a direct violation of law? THE PRESIDENT: No, it isn't. QUESTION: That government employees are allowed to give information to Members of Congress and to committees? PRESIDENT: By what means? You mean secret dispatches? QUESTION: Well any information. The law doesn't say what it will be. It says that any government employee can give information to Members of Congress or to the committees. THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me just say that the Secretary of State has been prepared to testify since August before the Internal Security Committee and discuss the case very completely – QUESTION: Well, but – THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. There was a hearing scheduled for early September, but because of the Labor Day weekend that hearing did not take place. The Secretary of State stands ready, and he is the responsible officer. Now the best thing to do is to give the Secretary of State a chance to explain the entire case; because in all frankness, your analysis of it is not complete. QUESTION: Would you like to complete it, sir? THE PRESIDENT: I will be glad to have the Secretary of State talk to the Internal Security Committee about what it is that has caused action to be taken, administrative action to be taken, within the Department of State, to be taken against the gentlemen you named, the kind of actions he carried out, what the law said, how he met the law, how he didn't meet the law: This is all a matter that is going to be heard by the State Department Board. Then it will be heard by the Civil Service Commission for review. Then it can be discussed in the courts. [End of transcript] That little exchange showed how complicit JFK was in this attempt to silence a real anti-Communist government officer. Sorry, critics, JFK was not anti-Communist – he allowed security risks to serve in his administration at the highest level. Much the same can be said about Lyndon Johnson. He followed the lead of fellow liberal Democrat presidents, refusing to rid the government of men like Rostow and other security risks. And he continued the persecution of Otto Otepka. In another press conference on March 13, 1965, there was this exchange between LBJ and a reporter. Mr. President, sir, I would like to change the subject to another matter. Mr. Otto Otepka, a top security officer in the State Department, faces dismissal for answering the questions of some Members of Congress who were investigating the security of the United States. I would like to know if you can't stop this dismissal. THE PRESIDENT: I have had some conversations with Secretary Rusk concerning that case, and I have complete confidence in the manner in which he will handle it. Johnson knew it was Rusk who launched the get-Otepka campaign almost as soon as he took office at State, and he knew how Rusk would " handle it." He would get rid of Otepka but not the security risks. During the mid-1950s, Otepka reviewed the files of all State Department personnel and found some kind of derogatory information on 1,943 persons, almost 20 percent of those on the Department payroll. He testified at Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings years later that of the 1,943 employees, 722 left the department for various reasons, but mostly by transfer to other agencies, before a final security determination could be made. Otepka trimmed the remaining number on the list to 858 and in December 1955 sent their names to his then boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be watched because of Communists associations, homosexuality, habitual drunkenness or mental illness. Wrote Coulter: "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." That, liberals say, is slander. They say it confuses good liberals with bad liberals. But Coulter maintains that all liberals are the same, and the record shows she’s right. One only needs to look at what defines liberals: They universally attack America’s foreign policies. When the U.S. is at war, no matter who or what we are fighting, liberals attack the U.S. and side with our enemies. It was that way in Vietnam and it’s that way today in Iraq. Hear what liberal Gary Kamiya of the left-wing Salon.com has to say. "I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong." He wished, he said, that the Iraqis would resist the U.S. attack more vigorously, that "the Arab world would rise up in rage" – he wished for "all the things we feared would happen." And, he added, he was not alone – "a number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people [read "liberals"] have told me they have had identical feelings." He dismissed the idea that once the shooting started liberals should get on board and support the troops. "But there is one argument against this: what if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative – four more years of Bush, for example. ..." Better that American soldiers should die than that Bush should be re-elected. What defines liberals? They are universally in favor of abortion (killing unborn babies is OK, killing Ho Chi Minh’s or Saddam’s thugs is wrong), gay rights and homosexual marriage and socialism, and universally against the kind of society handed down to us by the founding fathers (dead white Europeans) or the strict interpretation of the Constitution. There are no good liberals, because liberalism as it has come to be in the United States is inherently bad. In "Treason" Coulter tells us that everything we know about Joe McCarthy is a lie. She lays out the evidence for this assertion but her critics ignore it. It is, to them, an article of faith that Joe was the devil incarnate, and no one can be allowed to shatter that illusion. "The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times," she wrote. "Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name." It is claimed that McCarthy was wrong in claiming that there was a plague of Communist subversion afflicting the government. Release of the Venona intercepts and other documents concerning the extent of communist subversion disproved that lie. It is claimed that Joe McCarthy persecuted innocent people and that Americans trembled in fear that they would be caught up in Joe’s net, but the record shows that no such reign of terror ever existed. The only people who trembled were those with secrets concerning their flirtations with Communism or who had something else to hide. And the liberals can’t point to a single one of those people Joe ever attacked. As Coulter insists, McCarthy’s only targets concerned subversives in the government. McCarthy was castigated for attacking Gen. Ralph Zwicker, who was portrayed by the media and the liberals as a staunch and honest Army officer. But in testimony before the McClellan Committee on March 23, 1955, Zwicker denied giving McCarthy aide George Anastos derogatory information about Irving Peress, – who McCarthy charged had been promoted despite the fact he was a communist – in their telephone conversation of Jan. 22, 1954. When Anastos and the secretary who had monitored the conversation both testified under oath and contradicted Zwicker, the McClellan Committee forwarded the transcript of the hearing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution of Zwicker for perjury. McCarthy had been investigating lax security at Ft. Monmouth, N.J. He was attacked on the grounds that there was no security problem there, where Zwicker held a command. In his 1979 book, "With No Apologies," Barry Goldwater wrote that "Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me privately Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the majority Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been penetrated. They didn’t want to admit that McCarthy was right in his accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from New Jersey to a new location in Arizona." McCarthy’s Senate colleagues allegedly censured him for his reckless activities and smearing of innocent people, to hear the libs tell it. That’s not quite the story. The campaign to destroy McCarthy began on July 30, 1954, when Sen. Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate. Flanders, who had told the Senate two months earlier that McCarthy's anti-Communism so completely paralleled that of Adolf Hitler that he struck fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority, had been given a laundry list of charges from the far-left National Committee for an Effective Congress. McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and a special committee was set up – the fifth one to investigate McCarthy – under the chairmanship of Sen. Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges. After two months of hearings and deliberations, the committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on just two of the 46 original counts. At a Special Session of the Senate convened on Nov. 8, 1954, these were the two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Sen. McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, which was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a Resolution for his expulsion from the Senate. 2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Sen. McCarthy had "intemperately abused" Gen. Ralph Zwicker. But too many senators were unhappy about the Zwicker count, because the Army had shown contempt for then committee chairman McCarthy by ignoring his letter of Feb. 1, 1954. and then going ahead and giving Maj. Irving Peress an honorable discharge the very next day. Believing that McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on Feb. 18 was at least partially justified, they dropped the Zwicker count at the last minute and replaced it with the charge that he had called the Watkins Committee an "unwitting handmaiden of the Communist Party" and described the special hearings as a "Lynch Party" and thus he had acted in a manner contrary to Senate ethics and "tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the Constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity." On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Sen. Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously voting in favor and the Republicans split down the middle. In choosing to explode the McCarthy myth, Ann Coulter took on one of the liberals’ most cherished articles of faith. Had she simply accepted that myth, the furor over "Treason" would be more or less muted compared to what it is now. Instead she took the hard choice and in so doing infuriated the left, which will now treat her as they treated Joe. She’s given them a new hobgoblin – Coulterism – that they can now rant and rave about for years to come. Editor's note: See NewsMax's Special Offer for Ann Coulter's "Treason" – Click Here Now. * * * * * * Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee, which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 The Voice of Elmer Davis Gerald Weales In the winter and spring of 1953," Elmer Davis says in the Author's Note that introduces But We Were Born Free (1954), "I was going around the country, preaching sermons on the need of defending the freedom of the mind." The substance of those speeches, reworked and pieced out with new material, became the long opening essay, "Through the Perilous Night," that is the heart of But We Were Born Free. Packaged with several essays from the same period, which began as articles or as lectures that in turn became articles, the contents formed Davis's first book since Not to Mention the War (1940). Except for his history of The New York Times (1921), where he worked from 1914 to 1924, and his novels, about which the less said the better, his books were collections of his magazine work. He begins the introductory essay in Show Window (1927)—"To You, Whoever You Are"—with a joke about the book's lack of unity and then goes on to discuss the contents in a way that indicates, as if by accident, that Davis himself is the unifying force in a gathering that ranges from an appreciation of Catullus (he took Greats at Oxford) to a caustic consideration of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, where he was born in 1890. There is no pretense of disunity in But We Were Born Free. Of "Grandeurs and Miseries of Old Age," he says, "This may seem to have no connection with the theme of the book; but you will find that it has." Even when Davis seems to go roundabout, his collection is clearly designed to insist that we are not yet through the perilous night and that we had better, as Americans with freedoms to defend, face up to the fake patriots— self-serving congressmen and professional anti-Communists, "who play the circuit of Congressional committees, as horse players go from one track to another." But We Were Born Free may seem to have been a little late getting into the field. Congressional investigations of presumed subversion had been underway since the late 1940's, when the House Un-American Activities Committee uncovered—if that is the word—the Hollywood Ten; and Senator Joseph McCarthy—"a master of the obscene innuendo," as Davis calls him—had made his debut as a self-advertised rat-catcher in his infamous Wheeling speech in 1950. Washington Witch Hunt by New York Herald Tribune reporter Bert Andrews had appeared way back in 1948. Not that Davis offers himself as a lonely fighter for freedom. The book is sprinkled with appreciative quotations from those who obeyed what Davis calls "the first and great commandment": "Don't let them scare you." This group includes not only fellow journalists but men like Judge Learned Hand, James B. Conant, and Harry S. Truman. Davis himself had been speaking out for years, as Roger Burlingame indicates in his biography of Davis (1961), which he calls—not surprisingly— Don't Let Them Scare You. As Davis says in a throwaway line in the essay on aging, "My fan mail includes a good many gleeful predictions that I am going to be lynched." Why then this new impetus in 1953, this urgency to preach from lecture platforms and through bookstores? It was the year in which Senator McCarthy was riding highest and was riding roughshod over opposition in and out of government. Davis gives their due to the HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee, but it is McCarthy who fuels But We Were Born Free. Who was Elmer Davis that he might be presumed capable of reaching and persuading an audience? That is a question I never expected to have to answer when I first considered a new look at But We Were Born Free, but younger colleagues and librarians to whom I mentioned the project simply did not know who Elmer Davis was. Celebrity passes quickly. Legendary figures aside, best-selling authors, politicians, movie stars, and certainly radio commentators fade quickly from public memory. My head is full of voices that once had a tremendous impact on the American public. I can still do a passable imitation of H. V. Kaltenborn, but where is the audience for it? The Elmer Davis who took to the podium in 1953 was not The New York Times writer, for he would have been largely forgotten by then; nor was he the author of light fiction even though Heywood Broun (I know: who's Heywood Broun?) once plugged Davis's amiable yawn, Times Have Changed (1923), as "The most amusing book we have read recently." He was not even the Davis who headed the Office of War Information during World War II. He was the radio voice, the one that, as E. B. White said in his enthusiastic review of But We Were Born Free (The New Yorker, Feb. 20, 1954), "in 1940 used to steady us at five minutes to nine, quieting our goose pimples." Davis got into radio almost by accident, substituting for Kaltenborn at the end of 1939 and then filling his own five-minute spot on CRS until he went to Washington in 1942; after the war he moved to ARC, where, according to Burlingame, he was given greater freedom to speak his own mind in his fifteen-minute "Elmer Davis Presents the News." That was the man who went after McCarthy in 1953, a crusade that is generally believed to have led to the first of the strokes that finally killed him in 1958. How effective was Davis's book as a weapon against McCarthy and his followers? Its critical reception was largely favorable, and the public response was strong. It sold almost a hundred thousand copies. Yet Davis had his doubts about the efficacy of his mission. At the end of the Author's Note, he writes, "I am afraid, however, that I was preaching mostly to just men and women who need no repentance." Ironically, it was another radio man, turned television personality (Davis's own brief foray into television came later), who greased the skids for Senator McCarthy's noisy slide from power. Shortly after the publication of But We Were Born Free in February, 1954, Edward R. Murrow in "See It Now" (March 9) presented the famous McCarthy segment in which carefully selected film clips were used to let the Senator damn himself. On April 22 the Army-McCarthy hearings began, and in December of that year the U.S. Senate censured McCarthy. Congressional investigations did not stop, and the set of mind that they represent has certainly not disappeared. Yet 1954 did represent a turnaround of sorts, and But We Were Born Free played an important part in that changing ideational climate. The book may have preached to the converted, but Davis did much to strengthen the convictions of those who had already found their way to the mourners' bench. Now, more than 40 years after its publication, what kind of life does But We Were Born Free have? That other anti-witch hunt document from 1953, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, has grown in popularity, now rivaling Death of a Salesman as the playwright's most frequently performed play, but it has done so by becoming divorced from the context that elicited it. Its historical setting allows it to speak of false accusation at any time and place. That is less easy for a book like But We Were Born Free. Partly as a result of his work in radio, where the day's news dictated the shape of his commentary, and partly out of his perception of the immediate danger to democracy, Davis works with specific cases—horror stories—of Congressional overreaching. To many readers the text may be allusive, full of names and events that once evoked predictable responses, but which are now lost in the shadows of the past, best recoverable in detailed histories for which books like Davis's are representative artifacts. To someone my age, for whom this period is not ancient history, the villains and victims are familiar; and I found myself frighteningly at home as I reread the book. Old angers, old exasperations were reawakened, but McCarthy has been dead for 38 years. That train has long since passed, and it is far too late to untie the innocent heroine from the railroad track. Yet there is nothing retrograde about the basic impulse of Davis's book. There may be something quaint about the idea of a domestic Communist conspiracy, and the impropriety hunters may now be after different quarry, but, behind whatever mask, the rectitude boys remain convinced that they speak for God, the country, and universal values. "This is a hard-hitting and exhilarating book . . ." wrote Charles J. Rolo in The Atlantic (April 1954), "full of quietly murderous thrusts at the heresy-sniffers, the doublethinkers, the would-be thought-controllers, the cowardly conformists, and at absolutists of various stripes." That is a cast of characters that no one should have difficulty recognizing today. Davis brought to his attack the strength of his refusal to be part of group-think from the left or the right. He saw the Communists in Russia and China as dangerous insofar as they stuck to their declared doctrine and pointed out that domestic anti-Communists were benignly uninterested in any threat from abroad. Even within the administration, he says, there were those who "if asked to name the two most important and dangerous Communists of recent years, would give you not Stalin and Malenkov, but Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White." He recognized that some of those investigated were indeed Communists without accepting that it needed indiscriminate accusations from congressmen and old Comrades (born-again patriots) to finger a few men and women who were in any case no danger to the country. In a parenthetic aside, he says, "Congressional committees seem to be the only people in the country who believe what they read in the Daily Worker." Two prevailing ideas, evident all through Davis's work, are central to But We Were Born Free—his distrust of true believers who insist that everyone else must be made to stand in their particular light and his conviction, perhaps an inheritance of 19th-century optimism, that people have the power to rectify wrongs, correct errors, rout intruders. These can be seen as early as his first novel, The Princess Cecilia (1915), at once an imitation and a parody of the kind of romantic fiction that Richard Harding Davis wrote—a book that the author later tried to forget. There is a peripheral character in the novel who has come to the fictional Ambok to study the conservative Moslem party for his History of Militant Puritanism from Chrysostom to Comstock (see Davis's "The Comstock Load: Reflections on Censorship," reprinted in Show Window), and there is a more important one, the president of the "Society in Favor of the Prevention of Things." The hero, an amiable Indiana boy fresh from Harvard, prefers to stand outside events, to look on with amusement, but the love of the titular princess brings him into the action on the presumed right side. Attitudes that are jokes or plot necessities in this happily forgotten novel become increasingly real for Davis. "Fear of intelligence, fear of thinking, fear to trust your own opinions" are the chief targets in But We Were Born Free. "But we can all do something to resist this general drive against the freedom of the mind," to stand up to "the kind of people who want to make other people think their way, or else to stop thinking at all." In the final piece in the book, "Are We Worth Saving? And If So, Why?," the mindless supporters of McCarthyism are generalized into a perennial presence, "a sediment, a sludge, at the bottom of American society" ("some of them white-collar and even top-hat primitives") who are "actuated only by hatred and fear and envy" of "their own neighbors who try to think." The point of the essay—of the book as a whole—is that although this sediment may be always with us, courage and a willingness to act, to speak out can prevent it from dominating our society. Today's newspapers are full of sedimental proclamations. Despite the minutiae of its period, But We Were Born Free speaks strongly to the present. "He was always more interested in content than in form and manner," wrote Robert Lloyd Davis, the author's son, in his introduction to By Elmer Davis (1964). That is probably true, but there is more than content to lure readers to But We Were Born Free. There is the voice of Elmer Davis, the one that E. B. White described and that August Heckscher celebrated in his New York Herald Tribune review (Feb. 14, 1954). In the Museum of Television and Radio in New York there are a few samples of Davis's radio voice. In three of his five-minute broadcasts from 1940 (May 30, May 31, June 1) he reports the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk. He speaks without the hysterical note that too many television reporters bring even to minor events. There is something calming about his voice, quieting the "goose pimples," as White said; but the disastrous events are never covered over with soothing syrup. So it is with But We Were Born Free. Davis is not a stump speaker; despite his conversion metaphor, his sermons would be out of place in an evangelist's tent. There is never any doubt about the urgency of his message, but he gives it in a deliberate, intelligent, unhurried, and unharried voice, one marked—as his work always is—with wit and irony. At one point Davis cites a Ford Foundation grant "whose function was frankly stated as the restoring of respectability to the individual freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution" and the response of Congressmen R. Carroll Reece—a call for still another investigation of tax-free foundations. On the day that Reece introduced his resolution, a Congressional committee approved a bill to erect a monument to those freedoms. "The monument was to be erected right outside Arlington Cemetery," Davis says in a quiet finish to the passage. "If Mr. Reece and those like him have their way, it had better be put up inside the cemetery, along with the monuments to all the other distinguished dead." Sometimes Davis leans too heavily on a good line. At the end of a paragraph on the presumed advantages of getting old, including tax breaks, he says, "and if I have the additional felicity to become blind, I can deduct some more." He does not really need to begin the next paragraph with "I have no ambition to go blind at any age, despite the allurement." Most of the time, however, the acid asides and the summary final lines that complete ugly examples stand on their own. This is a familiar comic device, one that Davis used often in his magazine writing. For instance, in "Remarks on the Perfect State," a deceptive appreciation of Sparta, reprinted in Show Window, he ends a paragraph with a joke ("a helot had no more rights in Sparta than a conservative in Russia or a pedestrian in the United States") which should—but somehow does not—soften the point he is making. Certainly the wit that sprinkles the pages of But We Were Born Free never masks Davis's anger at injustice and his contempt for willful ignorance. "And convictions are absolutely incompatible with a sense of humor," says the hero of The Princess Cecilia, but that is before he finds those of his own. Convictions go hand-in-hand with a sense of humor, as But We Were Born Free shows, particularly when one is ranged against the humorless overconvinced thought-police. Elmer Davis's was a comforting voice in 1954, even as it argued that the perilous night would not end until we insisted on the return of the dawn's early light. It offers the same comfort and the same warning today. If you liked this, see. . . “A Prayer for New York” by Tony Kushner Subscription Required “Revolution in the Past” by D. Nurkse “Water” by W. D. Ehrhart “Vermont: August Fever” by Sydney Lea “"Joe McCarthy's First Victim"” by Patrick Maney Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Tom Scully Posted August 11, 2010 Share Posted August 11, 2010 (edited) BUMP: for those interested in why Joan Mellen believes that RFK sent Walter Sheridan into New Orleans. A difficult story to follow not least because of the amount of "connections" that are thrown about on the thread, but an interesting read nevertheless. Whether you agree with it or not is a different matter. Lee I try to follow the trail wherever it leads. IMO, RFK was probably reduced to protecting his wife and kids, his father's reputation, or all of the above. Part of it seems to be that at least for a time, the assassination of JFK killed a lot of the fight in RFK. He acted like a man with amnesia after the Warren Commission was appointed and went to work. While I can only see and support the idea that the WC was a mob infiltrated sham cover up, Bobby knew it and did not interfere or publicly protest the amazing conflicts of interests of Earl Warren, Albert Jenner, and J, Edgar Hoover, or even the abomination of David Bazelon as chief judge of the DC court of appeals and Tom Clark as a Supreme Court justice. Bobby acted more like a loyal democratic party apparatchik than he did a U.S. Attorney General whose brother, the president of the United States had just been assassinated. I hope it was not because he decided to play along to get along, anticipating that the party was the only practical road to achieve his own presidential ambitions. After the assassination of RFK's brother, RFK seems to have sat idly by while the people who had been targets of his investigation of organized crime, were placed in charge of the Warren Commission and the investigation into JFK's death. Did they threaten RFK with harm to his family if he did not cooperate with them in the cover up? http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16336&view=findpost&p=201195 http://books.google.com/books?id=BfJ7pLZ7RksC&pg=PA175&dq=robert+kennedy+general+dynamics&hl=en&ei=hGliTObzNIaKlwf5may3Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=robert%20kennedy%20general%20dynamics&f=falseThe American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril - Page 175 Eugene Jarecki - 2010 ..Behiind McClellan's maneuver though, was a combination of motives which dated back to his days as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. With Robert F. Kennedy as his chief counsel, McClellan had overseen a sweeping investigation of organized crime in which General Dynamics had been implicated... http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=late%20partner%20of%20Humphreys%20and%20Glimco&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbo=u&tbs=bks:1&source=og&sa=N&tab=wp&fp=709e8b6913abdf3 # Captive city Ovid Demaris - 1969 - 366 pages - Snippet view In one hotel, police discovered that listed with Ziffren on the hotel's liquor license was the wife of Fred Evans, the late partner of Humphreys and Glimco. Another principal was Samuel Genis, a financial wizard who fronted for Alex ... books.google.com - Book overview - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼ # Billboard - Mar 10, 1958 - Page 84 100 pages - Magazine - Full view Smith | reportedly comes under the thumb ] of Joseph (Joey) Glimco, local syn- 1 dicate lieutenant, ... facing deportation proceedings and income tax prosecution; Murray (The Camel) Humphreys, long linked with labor rackets; ... books.google.com - Magazine overview - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼ # Searching look at big crime from shadows, hoodlums - Feb 23, 1959 - Page 19 LIFE - Vol. 46, No. 8 - 120 pages - Magazine - Full view Most of Luciano's partners in the big purge (right) went their way violently. True to his nickname, Luciano stayed lucky. .... 7 Delivery drivers handling everything from liquor to linens are dominated by Joe Glimco. ... Edited August 11, 2010 by Tom Scully Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted August 11, 2010 Share Posted August 11, 2010 In 1968, Richard Nixon appointed Otto Otepka to a Subversive Activities Control Board, not a very active body, and obviously an attempt to give the impoverished State Department officer some employment. Confirmation did not come easily. Falsely, Otepka was labeled a Birchite and an anti-Semite, although he was neither of these. (Joan Mellen) Joan, James M. Stewart from the American Defense Fund (a fund with the John Birch Society association) said that $22,000 had been given to Otepka which at the time was about 80% of his legal costs. It should be pointed out though that accepting the legal fees was not illegal. Otepka allegedly spoke to gatherings at the homes of Birch Society activists. He also spoke at a large meeting in the auditorium of the Flick-Reedy Education Enterprises, an ultra-conservation organization. Gordon Hall, an authority on extremist groups and Medford Evans, book review editor for the Birch Society Magazine both place Otepka at a Birch Society organized rally in Boston. FWIW. James When I suggested to Bill Turner that it was highly likely that Otepka, head of State Dept. Security at the passport office, was "Oswald's personal travel agent" he wholeheartedly agreed with me at an ASK Conference in about 1993-1994. Who was the attorney who jumped to the defense of Otepka when he was summarily fired for leaking confidential info about Walt Rostow during his confirmation hearings? Why none other than Robert J. Morris who was given credit for being "the real brains behind McCarthyism" by Whittaker Chambers in Morris' obituary in the NY Times. Morris also jumped to the defense of Edwin A. Walker after the Ole Miss Insurrection Riots. Morris and Willoughby met at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas right after JFK's death and drank toasts celebrating JFK's demise which they orchestrated. Anyone who jumps to the defense of either Otto F. Otepka or Robert J. Morris for their actions is either hopelessly ill-informed about their roles in the entire JFK conundrum and in McCarthyism or deliberately blinded to their true intentions. Even Mark Zaid tried to defend Otto Otepka, Robert Morris and Charles Willoughby during that same conference and he was heartily booed and jeered for making those statements and never again appeared at a JFK Conference. Read: "The Strange Ordeal of Otto F. Otepka" for the right wing's views of the "Otepka termination". There was also a short movie made with the same title starring Rep. James B. Utt, Senator J. Strom Thurmond and even Robert J. Morris, Birchers all. The book was by a Richard Gill I think it was yet another John Bircher. Otepka had to approve each and every controversial passport application, and certainly he had the Oswald defector folder on his desk. It was probably Otepka who picked Oswald as the "perfect patsy" in fact. Otepka was a pathological xxxx, and a conniving McCarthyite who had the morals of a tarantula or a T-Rex. It is just a shame to see anyone who spends time casting Otepka in some other more favorable light. Just a real shame. By the way I just browsed the fascinating Harry Dean memo on the JFK hit and he quite correctly pins the blame for the JFK hit on Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, Maj Gen Edwin Walker, Ezra Taft Benson and the John Birchers. Who would know better than Harry Dean, who was once an avid Bircher himself? Even Medford B. Evans was a John Bircher who worked with Boris Pash at the Atomic Energy Commission. Otepka was actually one of the primary implicators involved with the "creation of the Oswald legend" by dint of his actions with his defector file. Who were the others playing that same role? Edwin A. Walker after the "faked pot-shot shooting incident" allegedly involving Oswald, Robert J. Morris, Dr. Revilo P. Oliver in his Warren Commission testimony, Rev. Gerald L K Smith in "The Cross and the Flag" and yes, even Senator James O. Eastland from Mississippi who told Oswald to order the Manlicher-Carcano from Klein's Sporting Goods and sent him to Clinton, LA on that voter registration drive. Eastland even ran Wick Draper's Eugenics Committee for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and worked with Medford Evans and his son, both Birchers. If you want to know who was behind the whole JFK conundrum you have to look no further than this list of people who beat the drum loudly while railing against Oswald and building his "false legend" for years before and then after the JFK murder. It is so painfully obvious that I can not understand why others can not see this cause and effect relationship. Case closed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted August 11, 2010 Share Posted August 11, 2010 Here are some links on L. Fletcher Prouty that will cause you to totallyrevisit the background and associates of this man...and hopefully to thoroughly reconsider both his motivations and his actions. When you read the list of far rightist players and projects he participated in, then you will realize where this man was really coming from... He and Mark Lane were very close to Willis A. Carto who started The Liberty Lobby which filed a lawsuit against someone who called them an anti Semitic neo Nazi organization. Liberty Lobby lost. Leonard Nimoy starred in a movie playing Mel Mermelstein or something close to that who sued Liberty Lobby for saying that the Holocaust NEVER even occurred. Liberty Lobby lost $50,000 and they were represented in court by none other than Mark Lane. Do a search at publiceye.org for Prouty or for Lane or for any of the other right wing extremists linked to Prouty or Carto. Bo Gritz? Skolnick? How about the fact that Tim McVeigh actually called a Liberty Lobby associate in Europe a few days before he blew up the Murrah(sp?) building in OK? Or that he was a subscriber to Spotlight, the right wing rag of the Liberty Lobby? Or that an advertisment from the Sons of Liberty from Spotlight was found in his apartment? Many believe to this day that he bought The Turner Diaries from the Spotlight which distributed it. One of the books which inspired him to act in fact which was based on Ulius Amoss concept of leaderless resistance. Remember that name Colonel Ulius Amoss and his International Services of Information Foundation from Baltimore, MD. Amoss hired and trained one of Interpen's best known assassins at ISOIF and used him for multiple hits. This guy is dead and gone but he was later associated by some very serious researchers on this Forum with the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero AND MLK and he admitted helping to oust Papa Doc Duvalier with George de Mohrenschildt himself in an article he wrote. This guy was also fingered by another now deceased member of Interpen as being one of the JFK trigger men. Amoss died in 1961 but some of his best talent was stolen by Ray S. Cline later and used within WACL for multiple hits either as murder for hire operations or for CIA covert actions or both. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. I simply can not believe that people who consider themselves to be intelligent can not be aware of the backgrounds of Lane and Prouty and their roles with Liberty Lobby and the Institute of Historical Review which is just like Regnery Press a Holocaust Denier the worst kind of scum. I simply can not believe how easy it is to brainwash a whole group of posters on a Forum into swallowing lies, distortions and mistruths. It can not even taste that good, does it? To unbrainwash your old thought patterns is even harder than it was to brainwash you in the first place. A mind is a terrible thing to baste. Do a Google on Ulius Amoss and you will find the same 400 words on this guy at about 50 different sites. He was OSS then CIA then he created this front proprietary called ISOI Foundation. If anyone knows someone in Washington, DC I found a folder on Amoss and ISOI Foundation which requires a visit to the Library of Congress. Thank you for your continued open mindedness. If you have been brainwashed then an open mind is required in order to allow fresh thoughts and ideas to enter and be placed into permanent storage thus expunging the original concepts embedded their previously by your brainwashers. See Manchurian Candidate. PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left14 One highly- condensed version of this paper, circulated briefly only on the Peacenet computer network, misidentified Fletcher Prouty as a CIA agent. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-53.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The JFK ConspiracySome right-wing paranoid theories are woven into the film, not surprising since Fletcher Prouty was an advisor to Stone, and the film's character "Mr. X" ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-30.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Populist Party/Liberty Lobby ...Spotlight used the opportunity of the release of Oliver Stone's film JFK to promote Fletcher Prouty, Mark Lane, and Victor Marchetti. Prouty was an advisor ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-09.html PublicEye.org - The Populist Action CommitteeL. Fletcher Prouty (US Air Force, ret.) John Rakus (President, National Justice Foundation) John Rarick (Former Congressman, D-Louisiana) Vince Ryan (Editor ... www.publiceye.org/racism/popactcom.html PublicEye.org - Investigative Report On Craig Hulet, aka KC dePassIn San Francisco, Hulet distorted facts about Fletcher Prouty: ... Hulet clearly is implying that Fletcher Prouty is not a right-winger and that the fact ... www.publiceye.org/conspire/hulet.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: Other Right-Wing Groups and the ...Fletcher Prouty, expert on this government within a government, argues that it has all the earmarks." Prouty also moderated a panel where Bo Gritz wove a ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-23.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Right-Wing Roots of Sheehan's ...... Prouty book sat in Sheehan's personal bookshelf in his Christic office). ... that forms the basis of criticism in Fletcher Prouty's book Secret Team. ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-14.html PublicEye.org - Big Stories, Spooky Sources... 1973 books by retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty: "The Secret Team: The ... Prouty's "Secret Team" was recently republished by Noontide Press, ... www.publiceye.org/media/spooky.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The Liberty Lobby Populist Action ...Both Bo Gritz and Fletcher Prouty were named to the advisory panel. According to the Spotlight, the other persons named to the advisory board were: ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-10.html PublicEye.org - Reading List on Intelligence Agencies & Political ...The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the World Fletcher Prouty, 1974. Early critical research on the CIA, but is marred by a somewhat ... www.publiceye.org/research/biblio/repression_bib.html PublicEye.org - Right Woos Left: The LaRouchite CritiqueWhile Carto's Liberty Lobby network was recruiting Fletcher Prouty, Bo Gritz, longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti, and assassination conspiracy researchers ... www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-11.html According to Wikipedia and other internet sources, Political Research Associates/PRA (of which Publiceye.Org is the mouthpiece) is funded partly by the Ford Foundation, partly by Public Welfare Foundation and partly by individual sponsors and sales. Of the $700k annual funding required by PRA in 2002, $175,663. was apparently provided by the Ford Foundation alone. Adopting PRA's chief analyst and writer, Chip Berlet's, method of tainting by association - not to mention Mr. Belivaqua's likewise skills (see my post #17 at: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...15&start=15 - Political Conspiracies forum), one might very well point to the Ford Foundation's family tree noting that Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and that, in particular, Henry Ford is well known for his rabid anti-semitism and actively pro-Hitler. One might note that Edsel Ford (the son) was also pro Nazi and a serving board member of American I G - i.e., I G Farben, the front company of the Auslands Organization (Nazi foreign intelligence) and the manufacturers of Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi gas chambers. Ford made a point of remembering Hitler's birthday by sending him 50,000 Reichmarks annually. Charles Higham's book TRADING WITH THE ENEMY provides considerably more detail about the Ford family and Ford Motor Company's pro-Hitler policy. Public Welfare Foundation was founded by millionaire Charles Edward Marsh, a life-long friend of LBJ. If one is going to be politically correct to such a manifest degree, and come over all zealot-like in attacking fascism, then at least an effort could be made to avoid such obvious pitfalls as financially benefiting(arguably surviving) from a foundation established by well-known Nazi believers and supporters. The irony of the foregoing is that the words "contradiction in terms" seem particularly fitting. How do you explain the fact that it was the anti-Semites and the pro-Fascists who were behind the murder of JFK and yet almost the entire Jewish representation in the JFK research community (Mark Zaid, David Guyatt, Mark Lane and that Case Closed dude - forgot his name) are totally clueless as to the identity or motivations of the real perps? How is THAT for a historical irony? This fact alone just blows me away. Talk about clueless. 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Paul Brancato Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 This subject has been bugging me a lot lately, and now that John Bevilacqua is not around here we might actually be able to discuss the info herein. A few tidbits have been posted about Otepka on other threads recently, and I have tried to engage with the posters with little success. Examples - recent posts questioning Mark Lane because of his ties to Jonestown and to Liberty Lobby. Bevilacqua and Joan Mellen went at it early in this thread. I agreed with him, but his style was impossible. I thought that other more reasonable posters did a better job of questioning Mellen's conclusions. Unfortunately it became impossible to examine the claims that Robert Morris, Senator James Eastland, Guy Banister, Otepka, JBS etc were up to something with Oswald. Otepka would have everyone believe that RFK was running Oswald, or at least that RFK ruined Otepka because of Otepka's monitoring of Oswald. To me this seems like an incredible clue as to who may have been running Oswald. I think the appropriate quote would be, in referring to Otto's 'Ordeal' - Me thinks thou dost protest too much'. One thing that puzzles me, and probably lies behind my bumping this thread, is why the Otepka protestation is being largely ignored by the one poster here whose theory about Walker and the JBS would seem to intersect very closely with Otepka's close ties to Senator Eastland and Robert Morris. Is Beliacqua correct when he claims that an article in the Picayune in 1957 places those two characters in the same meeting with Guy Banister? I don't want this thread to devolve like it has in the past, to either a discussion between Garrison's promoters and his detractors, or to Bevilacqua's bonafides or sanity. I really want to know how much evidence there is for a connection between Oswald and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and Otepka. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 If you go to page one, after Mellen's long article, J Raymond Carroll responds a few times showing I think the flaws in Mellen's piece. Later, Bevilacqua completely hijacks the thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Knight Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 I think the Otepka story will be a "Rosetta Stone" of its own, once we finally understand the correct interpretation of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted January 31, 2015 Share Posted January 31, 2015 I kind of agree Mark. I have been buried in researching it and trying to figure out a timeline. I suppose somewhere there are records of the SISS hearings. One thing for sure - Otepka felt the heat even before the Kennedy administration took over the WH, in December 1960. One could say just as surely the Otepka was on his guard and ready for a fight as soon as JFK won the election. That has to be true simply because all of his ilk were extremely upset. So when he tells stories about meeting RFK in Dec. 1960 at a meeting where he did not expect RFK to show up, his distaste is obvious. Frankly I can understand why he was hounded and eventually prosecuted. Mellen, in my opinion, did this community and history a great disservice, and it seems like ever since she muddied the waters the subject has been avoided. No one wants to see RFK and Walter Sheridan through Otepka's eyes, but because of Mellen, trying to defend Garrison's honor I suppose, we are forced to. But I have no doubt that it is Otepka's story, and not the whole truth, that Mellen has bequeathed to us. So I say turn the tables, and read it as the opposite of what it seems. It is Otepka who thought he could pass judgement on who was worthy and who was not from his far right perspective, and he couldn't stomach the idea of having to answer to RFK. And it is far more likely that Otepka's knowledge of Oswald led to Oswald being used by the right wing anti Castro crowd, rather than that RFK tried to stop Otepka from digging in to LHO because he was an RFK asset. The presence of Robert Morris is highly suspicious, and suggestive of the former interpretation vs the latter. I am not even aware if we have any proof of what Otepka claims was in his stolen files. I am also not aware yet at least of what Otepka shared with the SISS Senators. If anyone has more info I'd love to see it, such as more complete bios of the Senators Dodd and Eastland and others, of the general counsel J. Sourwine. Next stop Pawley. It is the overreaching involvement of the SISS in Pawley's Operation Tilt that got me thinking about what else the senators might have been up to - that and PD Scott's insights. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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