Alex Constantine talks about Mae Brussell

[Douglas Caddy]

Fascism in America" - Alex Constantine talks about the research of Mae Brussell

 

From the article: Q.: You say that she found that the far-right was responsible for the murder of Kennedy, including local intelligence officials and recruits from Nazi Germany. Her research on the assassination in Dealey Plaza evolved to bring about Watergate, Iran-contra and a litany of other political scandals

…

A.C.: She had a deep understanding of the Kennedy assassination – her hand-written notes cross-referencing the Warren Report alone numbered over 30,000 pages. She spent years on it, and couldn’t help but notice, as she explained in a radio interview in 1971, a system set up after the assassination “to bring in more repression.” The criminality itself evolved, “and then in 1968, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, national security and wire-tapping and surveillance increased even more.”

 

http://www.reddirtreport.com/rustys-reads/fascism-america-alex-constantine-talks-about-research-mae-brussell

[Paul Brancato]

Douglas - this interview could be posted in the JFK assassination topic. I have wondered ever since I started reading and posting here why Mae Brussell gets so little attention. It's almost a 'been there done that' point of view. She was instrumental in crystallizing my own viewpoints on JFK and on world history, and I think more relevant today than ever. My liberal friends see it differently of course. They view our democratic institutions as fundamentally sound and fully able to fend off the minority far right. That point of view is now called into question, and we see the battle lines being drawn more clearly. It's true that fascism has a much tougher time establishing itself here where Democratic institutions have long histories. But it should be clear to everyone that we are closer to an open fascist state now than ever before. 

I found Mae Brussell quite by accident while driving home from work one evening about 35 years ago. The station from which she, and later her followers, broadcast had a weak signal, so it was only late at night and through considerable static that I was able to listen. I was already a 'student' of the '60's assassinations, but I knew nothing about the Nazis and the far right connections to mainstream politics. I remembered that the Minutemen were named as possibly behind the JFK assassination, but that group had all but disappeared from national consciousness by the time I began listening to her. Others that followed in her footsteps include John Judge, and also Daniel Sheehan.

i think the time has come to take a more careful look at her web of connections. 

[Joe Bauer]

Paul, I am from the same locale in California as Mae Brussell.

She broadcast on a small privately owned FM station "KLRB" in Carmel.

I was quite a bit younger than her, but I listened to her as often as I could.

My West Coast young adult generation of the mid-1960's through mid-1970's was very inclined toward political mistrust views ( who wouldn't be after JFK, RFK and MLK? ) and Ms. Brussell was looked upon as almost a guru in this regards.

Some people labeled her a totally obsessed conspiracy nut, but those critics would never spend 10 minutes actually listening to and especially reviewing or contemplating what she had researched and broadcast.

Brussell was uncovering incredibly sinister and deep cover doings and associations at the highest governmental levels beyond anything average American citizens could have imagined and any of our mainstream media and most well known journalists would have ever pursued and reported.

One thing the JFK research community , including Mae Brussell, has succeeded doing in spades since the 1960's, is uncovering and exposing mountains of factual information like this that would have probably never seen the light of day were it not for their years of dogged digging and courageous reporting.

I didn't know it at the time of her broadcasts but Mae Brussell's personal background was incredibly interesting. She ( maiden name Mae Magnin ) came from the very wealthy I.Magnin family. She was born in Beverly Hills. She was decently educated attending Stanford and Berkeley ( although no high degrees from there.) 

But what an outright "machine" in her research efforts.

I still find it a little tough listening to some of her past broadcasts though, only because she would tire me out. She talked non-stop for hours and shared so much info...you had to take mental exhaustion breaks because of this.

Funny, Mr. Ultra Right Wing himself ( Clint Eastwood ) is from this same area and was here during Mae Brussell's time. I am sure he knew of her and was of the "Brussell's a kook " camp.  He even owns a radio station here that may be that old one Mae Brussell broadcast on, but with different call letters? Now known as KRML? Not totally sure about this coincidence, but Eastwood does or did own this Carmel, Ca based radio station at one time.

 

 

Edited February 6, 2017 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

Mae Brussell was a phenomenal researcher of many things, including the assassinations of the sixties.

I know this for a fact since i was one of the very few people allowed to search through her archives when it was located up in Santa Barbara and the late Tom Davis was housing it.  

It was easily the largest collection of papers and books owned by one person I ever saw.  It consisted of about forty four drawer file cabinets in letter size drawers.  Each one of those drawers was so filled with papers that you had a hard time pulling documents from it.  In addition to that, she had about 4,000 books, some of which were very hard to find elsewhere.

How did she do this?  As Joe mentions above, she came from a wealthy family in Beverly Hills of the I. Magnin fortune.  She was the black sheep of the family.  The day JFK was killed greatly disturbed her personal equilibrium.  From day one she never bought the Oswald story.  So she began to research the case.  Since she had money, she bought about four copiers and had them spread out on every floor of her house.  She subscribed to a total of about 15 papers and magazines. And then she did her personal FOIA's and exchanged documents with other researchers.

The problem with Mae is she was not a very good writer.  He roost famous essay, the Nazi Connection to the JFK assassination, was ghost written by the late Bill Turner.  If that woman had been good writer, I mean, wow. 

Edited February 6, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Joe Bauer]

Jim Di,

Like Mae Brussell your own JFK & related truth seeking research efforts are an amazing achievement in themselves.

Unlike Brussell however, you are an excellent writer imo.

I just cannot fathom the years of time and work commitment people like you and Mark Lane and Jim Garrison and Brussell and so many others including some members of this very forum were and are still willing to take on ... all for the sake of the enlightened democracy truth versus the secret society darkness JFK described and warned us about in his Newspaper Publishers speech on April 27th, 1961, as well as Eisenhower in his MIC farewell speech.

And how much harder is this sacrifice effort for those who have given it without much outside funding and not being monetarily endowed such as Mae Brussell? 

 

 

 

Edited February 6, 2017 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Thanks Joe.  Very much.

 

Edited February 6, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

On February 6, 2017 at 0:09 PM, James DiEugenio said:

Oh yes, believe me with some money like Mae Brussell, I mean what we could do.

 

On February 6, 2017 at 0:09 PM, James DiEugenio said:

Its a real shame what happened to her archives.  Its sitting up in the San Luis Obispo area in some lady's basement.

 

Edited February 8, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Paul Brancato]

That seems like a real shame. Has anyone tried to solve this problem?

[James DiEugenio]

To my knowledge, no.

After Tom Davis died, his idea about opening up a reading room of her archives fell apart.

 

[Chuck Schwartz]

Bob Fass of WBAI used to have Mae on his radio show all the time (in the late 1960's and early 1970's). I used to listen to her all the time - she was the first to connect the Nazi's and Dulles to the JFK murder.  Now Bill Kelly has something on that on his blog, "JFKCounterCoup" and Talbot wrote about this connection in "The Devils Chessboard".  Anyway, here is a status of where Bob is..

Ten-thousand hours of radio airchecks that chronicle the counterculture of the 1960s have been acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The vast majority of the recordings are reel-to-reel tapes of Radio Unnameable, the late-night freeform program created by Bob Fass at WBAI-FM, Pacifica’s New York station, in the early 1960s.

Bob Fass with his wife, Lynn. (Photo: Jon Kalish)

As Fass, 83, recovers from a recent hospitalization, the show has been airing irregularly on WBAI as well as WFTE-FM, a community station serving Scranton and Mt. Cobb, Pa.; WIOF-LP in Woodstock, N.Y.; and WAZU-FM, a Pacifica affiliate in Peoria, Ill.

Library Director Sean Quimby expects digitization of the collection to take about three years. Plans call for researchers to be able to access the audio archive via laptops in the library’s reading room, he said.

Fass was a co-founder of the Yippies and a key mover and shaker in New York’s counterculture scene in the 1960s and ’70s. He is credited with pioneering the art of freeform radio by mixing music and conversation in live broadcasts; he also captured historic events.

Radio Unnameable provided live coverage of street protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as well as the student takeover of Columbia University that same year.

In WBAI’s studios, Fass put multiple listeners on the air simultaneously without screening them, and he helped listeners connect the protest movement to the music of the time. The Radio Unnameable archive includes recordings of live studio performances by such folk luminaries as Jerry Jeff Walker, David Bromberg, Phil Ochs and Arlo Guthrie. Bob Dylan did comic improvisations on the show but didn’t perform his music.

The archive “is valuable because it’s a moment in broadcasting that might not come again — when an individual producer got to make the selections without having to get the suits to OK it,” Fass said.

Quimby first considered acquiring Fass’s archive in a previous job at Syracuse University, but negotiations did not result in a sale. When he was hired to direct Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Quimby continued to pursue what he called “a vast and untapped resource that will support term papers, dissertations and books for years to come.”

Columbia announced the deal in October and started a crowdfunding campaign on its website titled “Preserve Voices of the Counterculture.” The campaign raised $25,000 by mid-November.

The sale of the archive was brokered by Allan Stypeck, a book dealer based in Rockville, Md. In an appraisal he described the archive as an “exceptional” resource for academic research on the political, social and cultural impact of the 1960s on American society.

Under the terms of the agreement, Stypeck is to remain the exclusive agent overseeing commercialization of the material. The hope is that recordings of musical performances and other forms of content could be mined from the collection.

Asked which performers from the era might end up on a Radio Unnameable CD, Stypeck replied, “Everybody.”

Fass has done little to preserve the archive over the years. Mitch Blank, a Bob Dylan collector who has assisted Fass for decades with organizing and digitizing his recordings, described the boxes of seven- and 10-inch audio tapes in Fass’ home as “a bunch of post-nuclear spaghetti hanging from the wall.”

Filmmakers Jessica Wolfson and Paul Lovelace were instrumental in getting the archive out of Fass’ house while they were producing a documentary about Radio Unnameable. And Caryl Ratner, a former WBAI producer who went on to become a real estate executive, fronted tens of thousands of dollars to pay for lawyers, accountants and insurance while negotiations for the archive proceeded.  

Efforts are also under way to preserve the archive of Fass’s WBAI colleague Steve Post, who passed away in 2014. Airchecks of Post’s live radio shows on WBAI, The Outside and Room 101, have been digitized and will be accessible online, according to friends of the late radio personality. The collection includes the entire run of Post’s program for WNYC in New York, The No Show.

Post credited Fass with being a huge influence on him when they worked at WBAI together in the 1960s.

Fass had been doing Radio Unnameable from his home on Staten Island, N.Y., thanks to a studio built by engineers from WFTE-FM. But since he got home from the hospital, he’s been unable to walk upstairs to the second-floor studio. Fass told Current that WFTE may help him set up his equipment on the ground

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Great post Chuck. I'm a NY native but I've been in California since 1969, so I've done much more listening to KPFA. They have an incredible archive as well. Funny, the one thing that has bothered me over the years is Pacifica, and KPFA also - can't speak to what the other affiliates do - have what seems to me to be a Chomsky-like approach to the JFK assassination, which is that somehow it didn't really matter because JFK was no leftie, but rather just another Cold warrior. The only recent exception to this blackout recently was on a local KPFA show called Guns and Butter, when the producer of that show did at least two lengthy interviews with, of all people, Judyth Vary Baker. I don't really understand this blind spot. Even my Communist dad figured out that JFK's death mattered, mattered a lot. Same with RFK. They do get the MLK assassination, and broadcast speeches of his from their considerable archives at least once a year on MLK day.

its really hard to imagine that KPFA would have given Mae Brussell air time. I doubt they did. You are right that she was the one who figured out the connection between Dulles, Nazis, and JFK. 

 

Edited February 9, 2017 by Paul Brancato