Douglas Caddy

Steering Murdoch in Scandal, Klein Put School Goals Aside The New York Times May 7, 2012 By AMY CHOZICK Last week, after a British parliamentary report declared that Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person” to lead a major corporation, several senior News Corporation executives huddled in tense discussion on the eighth floor of the company’s New York headquarters. Some initially wanted to take off the gloves and issue an equally damning condemnation of the report’s criticism of their chairman and chief executive. Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor who has become Mr. Murdoch’s trusted adviser, was more restrained, arguing that the company’s statement needed a balanced tone, according to a person close to the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The executives eventually agreed. The response, drafted by Mr. Klein and the company’s general counsel, Gerson A. Zweifach, dismissed the personal jabs at Mr. Murdoch as “unjustified and highly partisan,” but also acknowledged that the company’s response to wrongdoing in Britain had been “too slow and too defensive.” The statement reflected the measure and care of a man who has spent decades in politics. “Joel likes to fight, but he’s also incredibly politically astute,” said a person close to Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein’s political instincts may have helped News Corporation, but his involvement has delayed his own ambitions within the company. He was hired by Mr. Murdoch to lead his company’s aggressive push into the education market. But just over six months into his tenure, the news broke that the company’s News of the World tabloid in Britain had hacked into the phone of a murdered 13-year-old, Milly Dowler, and suddenly, Mr. Klein became Mr. Murdoch’s legal compass in the ensuing British firestorm. Mr. Klein, who declined to comment for this article, has slowly returned his attention to parts of his education portfolio, but prospects for success may have been damaged by the investigation. In 2010, News Corporation paid $360 million for a 90 percent stake in Wireless Generation, a company based in Brooklyn that specializes in education software, data systems and assessment tools to help teachers analyze student performance and customize lessons. Last year, New York State rejected a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation, citing “the significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corporation.” More recently, there has been criticism of Mr. Klein’s seemingly contradictory roles within News Corporation, both investigating wrongdoing inside the company and advising Mr. Murdoch on handling public relations and his appearances before the British Parliament. While Mr. Klein still worked for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Klein became close friends. They talked frequently about the state of public schools and Mr. Klein was lured to News Corporation with the promise that he could use the company’s deep coffers to put in place his vision of revolutionizing K-12 education. Mr. Murdoch has said he would be “thrilled” if education were to account for 10 percent of News Corporation’s $34 billion in annual revenue in the next five years. “Joel has a huge amount of respect and admiration for Mr. Murdoch and what he’s accomplished in his life,” said Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, which oversees New York State’s Education Department. Mr. Klein’s résumé — he previously served as head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, helped the Clinton White House respond to the Whitewater inquiries and prepared Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her Supreme Court nomination hearings — made him an obvious candidate to help Mr. Murdoch through the phone-hacking scandal. He agreed, with the hope that News Corporation would provide him with the resources to realize his longtime goal of getting technology into schools, according to people close to both men. “It wasn’t just ‘Oh, by the way, let’s get into schools.’ This is something that’s very important to Murdoch, or Joel wouldn’t have done it,” said a longtime friend of Mr. Klein’s, Barbara Walters. She said the scandal in Britain had “sidetracked” Mr. Klein. He emerged as one of Mr. Murdoch’s most trusted advisers, along with Chase Carey, president and chief operating officer of News Corporation; and David F. DeVoe, the chief financial officer. Mr. Murdoch put Mr. Klein in charge of the internal investigation into the hacking case, reporting to Viet D. Dinh, an independent director on News Corporation’s board. But Mr. Klein also advised on handling the scandal, sitting behind Mr. Murdoch during his first testimony before a parliamentary panel in summer 2011 and spending hours in London helping Mr. Murdoch prepare for a second round of questions last month. Shareholder groups have expressed concerns about Mr. Klein’s independence in leading the investigation. His compensation package at News Corporation was more than $4.5 million last year, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “His salary was a huge bump, so he’s clearly beholden to Murdoch and should not be running an internal investigation,” said Michael Pryce-Jones, a spokesman for the CtW Investment Group, a shareholder advocacy group based in Washington that works with pension funds for large labor unions. (British investigators have said they believe the internal review led by Mr. Klein was independent.) In December, Mr. Klein championed the hiring of Mr. Zweifach, a Washington lawyer from Williams & Connolly, as News Corporation’s new general counsel. The hiring of Mr. Zweifach, who has represented The Star tabloid in a libel lawsuit filed by the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, and The National Enquirer in an invasion of privacy lawsuit filed by Clint Eastwood, has helped Mr. Klein return his focus almost entirely to education, something friends said he had been impatient to do. He now spends about two-thirds of his time on education and the rest on issues related to the fallout in Britain, according to people with knowledge of Mr. Klein’s schedule. Mr. Klein’s education unit is now one of the few areas within the company that is currently growing, both through investment in Wireless Generation and potential acquisitions. The company is looking at several small education-related companies, though no deals are imminent, according to a person knowledgeable about News Corporation’s preliminary strategy. Wireless Generation had come under fire before the dropped New York bid. The company had been a key Education Department partner on two efforts that Mr. Klein had championed as chancellor. The timing of News Corporation’s acquisition, two weeks after Mr. Klein said he would join the company, prompted accusations that he had violated the city’s conflict-of-interest rules. At the time, a News Corporation spokeswoman said the deal had been developing for several months and Mr. Klein had no involvement in it. A spokeswoman for the Education Department said Mr. Klein recused himself from all business between the city and Wireless Generation as soon as he knew News Corporation had acquired it. Unions representing teachers remain steadfastly opposed to News Corporation’s move into education. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has clashed with Mr. Klein in the past, called the company’s education push in the midst of the hacking scandal “the definition of chutzpah.” Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents New York City teachers, asked, “What parent would want personal information about themselves and their children in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, given the current circumstances?” Wireless Generation said more than 2,500 United States school districts, 200,000 teachers and three million schoolchildren currently use its products, and many of those contracts were won after the rejected New York bid. “Joel is a big thinker,” said John White, superintendent of Louisiana’s Education Department, who was deputy chancellor in New York under Mr. Klein. “Among those of us in the field, we’re anxiously awaiting what News Corporation will offer.” Mr. Klein has hired some of the biggest names in education. Kristen Kane, a former chief operating officer for New York City’s Department of Education; Peter Gorman, former superintendent at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina; and Diana Rhoten, co-founder of the nonprofit Startl, which helps develop digital learning tools, have all joined News Corporation. They’ll most likely carry out Mr. Klein’s vision without his full attention as long as News Corporation remains caught up in the hacking scandal. Mr. Klein’s office is just down the hall from Mr. Murdoch’s on News Corporation’s executive floor, and the two men occasionally have lunch together on weekends at an Italian restaurant near their homes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “We’ve had our history of battles,” Ms. Weingarten said of Mr. Klein. “But he’s always had a reputation for integrity, and I can’t imagine the last several months of being mired in this scandal have been fun for him.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner, has told the story several times on national radio about how Housing Secretary Jack Kemp would say to her, “Catherine, they have something one everyone in this town. What do they have on you?” and she would always reply, “nothing,” which Kemp found hard to believe given what they had on him. They have something on Obama, which is why Joseph Stiglitz says Obama has merely continued the Bush financial policies using the same people who caused the crisis to begin with. Is this “Change you can believe in?” I have no idea what they have on Obama. It could be sex, it could be a CIA background, it could be something else. See the Frontline interview with Joseph Stiglitz below. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oral-history/financial-crisis/joseph-stiglitz/ Also worth viewing is Max Keiser’s interview on April 19 with Matt Tiabbi. It starts at minute 12:45 in the video below. Max and Matt agree that covering financial news today is like covering a crime story – organized crime. Under Obama, there has been no accountability. One wonders why.

The Cozy Compliance of the News Corp. Board The New York Times May 6, 2012 By DAVID CARR If you sat on the board of a company that was raked over the coals by a British parliamentary committee in a 121-page document, accused of a pattern of corporate misconduct that included widespread phone hacking and an ensuing cover-up by senior officials, you might want to pause for a moment and consider all the implications. But there was little reflection last week by the board of News Corporation, which met quickly the day after the committee’s report and announced “its full confidence in Rupert Murdoch’s fitness and support for his continuing to lead News Corporation into the future as its chairman and C.E.O.” before the ink was even dry on the report. (While the board expressed unanimous support for Mr. Murdoch, it’s worth noting there were no such words for his son James.) There are many reasons Rupert Murdoch has avoided any serious consequences from the scandal despite hundreds of British citizens having had their phones hacked, dozens or more being bribed in law enforcement and several dozen more of his employees having been arrested. The market, of course, has no conscience. News Corporation’s share price has risen about 30 percent in the last nine scandal-ridden months and investors might have decided that the bad news from the print division in Britain was really good news for those who believe the company should abandon newspapers altogether. Further, Mr. Murdoch runs a large, multinational company with some 50,000 employees, so he has a certain plausible deniability, even though several of his most trusted lieutenants were accused by the committee of playing a central role in the growing scandal and cover-up. Mr. Murdoch also remains mostly unscathed because much of News Corporation’s business and most of its profits lie here in the United States, where the scandal is viewed as something happening on a distant island. There have been reports of corporate misdeeds in America, including computer hacking at its News America Marketing division, but other than some faint rumbles in Washington about further investigations, it’s been mostly smoke, no fire. “Ask anyone’s mother here who Rupert Murdoch is and you will get blank stares,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, adding that other News Corporation assets seem unaffected by the scandal. At parties for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last weekend, many reporters remarked on how the hacking scandal had very little traction or traffic among readers. But the primary reason Mr. Murdoch has not been held to account is that the board of News Corporation has no independence, little influence and no stomach for confronting its chairman. Like many media companies (including the one I work for), News Corporation has a two-tiered stock setup that gives the family control of the voting shares. The current board includes family members and several senior executives; the independent slots are filled by a host of familiars. Viet Dinh, a former Bush administration official, is godfather to Lachlan K. Murdoch’s son. Roderick Eddington was deputy chairman of a division of the company in the late 1990s. Andrew S. B. Knight and Arthur M. Siskind are both former senior executives, and John L. Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs president, served as an adviser to News Corporation on several major deals. The board also includes Natalie Bancroft, a trained opera singer who made a great deal of money when her family sold Dow Jones, which included The Wall Street Journal, to Mr. Murdoch in 2007, and José Maria Aznar, a former prime minister of Spain, who is a friend of Mr. Murdoch’s. Being a board member of News Corporation is not a bad gig; it pays over $200,000 a year and requires lifting nothing heavier than a rubber stamp. The directors apparently haven’t asked why the company maintained its “rogue reporter” defense after it became clear that “rogue enterprise” was a more apt description. They appeared to sit silently by while Mr. Murdoch and his son James waited for law enforcement officials to finally ferret out employees of the company’s British newspaper division who were accused of engaging in criminal conduct. Still, the board may regret being quite so quick to throw its full support behind Mr. Murdoch and the current management. The parliamentary report, as scathing as it was, is only the first of many dominoes expected to fall in the next few weeks and months. Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, is assessing whether News Corporation should be allowed to continue to hold its stake in British Sky Broadcasting. For its part, BSkyB was quick to get out the 10-foot pole, reminding everyone that the two companies are separate even though News Corporation owns a 39 percent stake. Next week, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson will appear before the Leveson Inquiry in Parliament, offering another peek under unseemly blankets. The British Supreme Court will soon hear a case that could decide whether Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who pleaded guilty to charges that he had hacked phones for The News of the World, is to be freed from a confidentiality agreement he made in return for payment of legal fees. He reportedly has 11,000 pages documenting his work for News Corporation. Three separate police investigation are under way — into phone hacking, computer hacking and bribes — and the results of Operation Weeting, the phone hacking inquiry, will be disclosed in the next few months. Soon enough, there could be a parade of criminal trials that could produce new evidence that those accused of misdeeds were hardly rogues but rather following a corporate culture formed to win at all costs. It was never going to be one single thing that would loosen Mr. Murdoch’s grip, but rather the steady accretion of damage from a ticktock of criminal, civil and governmental inquiries that will go on for months and years. At some point, the artfully crafted statements from the company and expressions of support from a board in lock step will begin to sound silly. “We wonder how many more of these issues have to surface before the board takes a more assertive oversight role over the activities of News Corporation management,” Anne Sheehan, director of corporate governance at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which owns 5.9 million shares of nonvoting stock in News Corporation, said in a statement the day the parliamentary report came out. Nothing will stop News Corporation’s remarkable run as a successful enterprise, because a great deal comes from lucrative cable and broadcast properties that are not at risk in the current scandal. But the Rupert Murdoch that we have known — untouchable and evasive — has become a man falling down stairs, slowly but surely. Continued profits and a compliant board can check the fall, but they can’t stop it. E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Robert Caro writes — and writes and writes — about LBJ in ‘The Passage of Power’ By Steve Inskeep, Published: May 3, 2012 The Washington Post President Lyndon Baines Johnson lived 64 years. Robert Caro has been examining that life for about 35. “I don’t like to be rushed,” he told me early in April. We met in the room where Caro wrote the fourth volume of his Johnson biography. It is not the last. “The Passage of Power” brings Caro’s work on Johnson to more than 3,000 pages. Only near the end of his most recent book has Caro arrived at the beginning of Johnson’s presidency, which lasted from 1963 to 1969. Each time he releases another volume — usually after an interval of eight to 12 years — Caro provokes astonishment that he would devote so much time to one subject. He’s been compared more than once to Ahab, Melville’s one-legged captain obsessed with Moby Dick. The comparison is a bit morbid. Ahab’s life did not end well. The Columbia Journalism Review asked a decade ago if Caro’s excessive interest in Johnson had “led him astray,” and his 80-year-old editor has told the New York Times that he doesn’t expect to live to edit Caro’s final book. But Caro’s meticulous process delivers powerful results. A onetime newspaper reporter, he abandoned that deadline-oriented mind-set long ago. In a world of snap judgments and ephemeral facts, he makes exceptional use of the commodity that modern journalists have the least of: time. Now 76, Caro exhibits a youthful enthusiasm when discussing his work among the bookshelves and filing cabinets of his Manhattan office. Saying that he would be too “lazy” if he worked at home, he has commuted to this room for decades. Almost nothing in the office betrays the arrival of the 21st century. His inbox is an inbox. He does use a computer for research, as he says the LBJ Library complained about his clacking typewriter. For his LBJ biographies, Caro supplemented exhaustive digging by interviewing those who knew Johnson, who died in 1973. He temporarily moved with his wife, Ina, to Johnson’s home state of Texas, driving into the countryside outside Austin to sit with the president’s relatives and boyhood classmates. He met other aging sources in their offices, continued calling after they entered nursing homes and preserved his notes for years after they died. The roster of available interviewees is thinning — “The human life span is my biggest obstacle,” Caro said — but he occasionally finds one more. In 2008, when he learned that Cecil Stoughton, who photographed Johnson’s swearing-in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, was still alive, Caro picked up a phone. Stoughton’s wife answered. “Mrs. Stoughton, my name is Robert Caro,” the author recalled saying. “And she says, ‘Cecil has been waiting on you to call.’ ” Caro weaves the photographer’s memories into a pivotal section of “The Passage of Power.” In the new volume, Johnson, desperate to lead, was trapped in a powerless vice presidency, irrelevant and despondent. “In the crack of a gunshot it [was] reversed,” Caro said. The new president had to reassure a traumatized nation and begin driving Kennedy’s legislative agenda through Congress. Having accumulated information for decades, Caro deploys it as ruthlessly as Johnson wielded power. Early volumes of the biography describe a driven young congressman who broke his aides’ spirit and rewarded campaign contributors with federal contracts. Johnson kissed up to anyone who could help him — often literally kissing the bald head of his mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.). Caro’s prodigious research has not shielded him from criticism. In the 1990s, he was drawn into a debate with the writer Sidney Blumenthal, who accused him of overdramatizing Johnson’s disputed 1948 election to the Senate, idealizing LBJ’s opponent to make Johnson look worse. “What he has overlooked completely is politics,” Blumenthal declared in an epic review in the New Republic, “not to mention a number of facts.” That’s the other knock on Caro: He’s mean. Years ago, a college professor introduced me to Caro’s work by saying, “He’s a hater.” She said this while discussing Caro’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Power Broker,” a 1,246-page investigation of Robert Moses, New York’s indomitable builder of bridges and highways. Still, her opinion did not prevent her from assigning the book. I found it breathtaking. For all the devastating detail — the great builder wrecked vibrant neighborhoods to make room for new roads soon clogged with traffic — Moses was not destroyed in my eyes. When I discovered Caro’s LBJ series, neither was Johnson. They grew larger, their stories told by a biographer with ambitions as vast as theirs. Caro writes about flawed, vindictive men who degraded democracy but wielded power brilliantly. Johnson rose from poverty, put young men to work in the Great Depression and got loans to string electric wires in rural Texas, transforming the lives of people as poor as he had been. In “The Passage of Power,” Johnson extorts favorable coverage from the media and feuds pointlessly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but when he becomes chief executive, he shines. Manipulating Senate rules as well as the men who made them, the new president outmaneuvers his fellow Southern Democrats to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Has Caro grown to like Johnson? “Like” is not the word, he said: “He’s the same guy. In my earlier books, you see a man looking for power and utterly ruthless in his attempts to get it. In my latter books, you see what he does with the power once he gets it, and it is kind of wonderful.” There’s time for the portrait to darken again, as the fifth book follows Johnson’s administration into Vietnam and social chaos in the wake of the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. Caro has outlined the book on a series of typewritten sheets, tacked across two corkboards in his office. At the end of the outline, he has written the final book’s final sentence, which he asked interviewers not to read. Unlike Ahab, who never caught his whale, Caro can see the spot where he plans to fling the last harpoon. sinskeep@npr.org

Senator likely to be rebuffed in News Corp inquiry Fri, May 4 2012 By Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The British judicial inquiry investigating questionable reporting practices by Rupert Murdoch's media properties is unlikely to cooperate with a prominent senator's request for evidence of misconduct in the United States, three people familiar with the inquiry said. The sources said that the judicial inquiry, created by British Prime Minister David Cameron and chaired by Sir Brian Leveson, a senior English judge, is not authorized to provide legal assistance or evidence to other bodies or organizations, including foreign government agencies or components. Nor is the inquiry investigating matters outside Britain. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, on Wednesday sent a letter to Leveson asking if his inquiry has uncovered any misconduct on the part of Murdoch's News Corp that occurred in the United States or violated American laws. Murdoch and his global media empire have been embroiled in a "phone hacking" and bribery scandal since last summer when evidence emerged that Murdoch's now-shuttered News of the World tabloid hacked into voicemails of a missing British schoolgirl. U.S. critics of Murdoch have been trying to instigate official investigations into whether similar questionable practices were pursued by Murdoch journalists in the United States, but so far U.S. probes have been limited. Murdoch's properties in the United States include Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post. Rockefeller's request came after a British parliamentary committee issued a report on Monday that found Murdoch "not a fit person" to run a major international company, asserting that he was ultimately responsible for illegal phone hacking. [iD:nL5E8G1B3E] News Corp denounced the report's analysis as "unjustified and highly partisan." Rockefeller directed his request to the independent Leveson inquiry, which is conducting an in-depth investigation into journalism practices used by British media owned by Murdoch and other proprietors. However, there is no mechanism by which it would be within Leveson's purview to provide official assistance to Rockefeller or his committee, said the people familiar with the inquiry. "Not in a month of blue Sundays" would Leveson agree to pass on evidence to Rockefeller's committee or any similar U.S. body, one source said. A spokesman for Rockefeller said he did not have a comment beyond the five-page letter sent to Leveson. A spokesman for Leveson confirmed that the inquiry had received Rockfeller's letter requesting assistance, but declined any further comment. U.S. CONNECTIONS News Corp and its 81-year-old chief are the subject of multiple British inquiries. The company initially tried to contain the scandal by claiming phone hacking was limited to a single "rogue" reporter. But the controversy mushroomed, and more than 40 people, most of them journalists, have since been arrested on suspicion of bribery, phone hacking or other illegal activity. No charges have yet been filed. The FBI last summer opened an investigation into possible phone hacking or other illegal reporting activities in the United States. To date, however, the FBI inquiry has found no evidence such practices were employed by journalists in the United States, a law enforcement source said. Lawyers for British celebrities and other individuals have said there is evidence that Murdoch journalists may have engaged in questionable surveillance when the targets were physically on U.S. soil. The lawyers have suggested that this could lead to the filing of civil lawsuits in U.S. courts alleging illegal practices by Murdoch operatives, although no such lawsuits have been filed and there may be jurisdictional limitations. For example, actor Jude Law chose to go through the British courts, and not U.S. courts, in his phone-hacking case against Murdoch's News International, despite claims that News of the World hacked phones or voice mails when Law and his assistant were at New York's JFK Airport in 2003. News International admitted "unconditionally" in British court documents earlier this year that it was liable for all Law's claims. News Corp had no further comment. A person familiar with legal issues surrounding such cases said that jurisdictional issues could be murky even when a target such as Law may have been physically present in the United States when the hacking occurred. The person said U.S. legal exposure may be limited because Law is British, and the journalists or operatives who were targeting him were also likely British or based in Britain. Also, while his phone may have physically been in the United States at the time of hacking, the server that held his voice mail messages may well have been located in Britain, too. A U.S. law enforcement source confirmed that the FBI was still conducting a criminal investigation into possible violations by Murdoch journalists or operatives of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars bribes to officials of foreign governments. But the source also said that this investigation was a long way from generating criminal charges against anyone. U.S. officials and legal experts have said that the most likely outcome of any Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation directed at Murdoch properties would be a large civil settlement rather than criminal charges under U.S. law. (Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Gary Hill)

Excerpts from an interview of Robert Caro by Brian Bolduc in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, May 5-6, 2012, titled, “Political Power: How to Get It and Use It”: “The book also shows the momentous occasion when Johnson’s compassion and ambition ‘coincide.’ Mr. Caro says, ‘This genius of his for using political power to help people is unleashed.’ After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson uses all his political guile to push the slain president’s legislative program – the famous income tax-cut package and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – through Congress. At the same time, Johnson avails himself of any opportunity to amass greater popularity, and thus greater power. To wrap himself in the Kennedy mantle, he makes certain that Jackie Kennedy, her dress stained with her husband’s blood, is photographed next to him when he takes the oath of office on Nov. 22, 1963.” “The Kennedy’s are ‘not going to like some of the stuff in the book, but it’s not my job to do that,’ Mr. Caro says. Nevertheless, ‘they were certainly great in helping me understand the dynamics between the Kennedys and the Johnsons.’ And they were more helpful than the Johnson clan, which has long been antagonistic towards Mr. Caro’s efforts. Lady Bird Johnson stopped talking to him after a few interviews, and ‘the daughters, I am told, really hate the books,’ he laments. ‘I haven’t really tried to talk to them.’”

A month after Obama took office and began to renege on what he had promised the American people that he would do once elected, I concluded that someone or some group had something on him and that in essence he was being blackmailed. Just as J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailed by the mafia that possessed an incriminating photograph of him and Clyde Tolson together, so, too, has a blackmailed Obama ignored whole areas of the financial world that deserved to be prosecuted for massive fraud and other crimes involving trillions of dollars. As a result what passes today as free enterprise in America under Obama is actually organized crime.

Weekend Edition May 4-6, 2012 www.counterpunch.org http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/04/the-bearding-of-barack-obama/ The Bearding of Barack Obama? by MICHAEL DICKINSON ‘Beard’ - a man or woman used as a cover for a gay partner. This month’s edition of ‘Vanity Fair’ features an article entitled “Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend’s Secret Diary” which features entries from a diary kept by Genevieve Cook, daughter of an Australian diplomat, who was one of the previously unknown ‘girlfriends’ of the 22 year old future President in New York in the early eighties. Taken from a new book: ‘Barack Obama – The Story’ by David Maraniss, the diary extracts show Genevieve’s perception of the young man’s character as their relationship progresses. On Sundays Obama would lounge around bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle. “His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil. Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.” (As if he’s withholding something. In a closet, perhaps?) To another so-called Columbia graduate girlfriend, Alex McNear, intellectualising Obama wrote: “You seem surprised at TS Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?” It seems that Obama himself did. For in another book written 5 years ago called ‘Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies, Murder’ the author Larry Sinclair claims to have twice given the budding President a blowjob in Chicago in 1999, once in the back of a hired limousine, the other in his hotel room. On each occasion Obama was reputedly smoking crack cocaine. Further, Sinclair claims that Obama was involved in an intimate and sexual relationship with Donald Young – the openly gay choirmaster at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago which Obama attended for 20 years. The 47 year old deacon was found murdered in his flat execution style with bullets to the back of his head shortly before the Iowa Causcus in 2007 which helped sweep Obama into power. Two other young black male parishioners – Larry Bland and Nate Spencer, both gay, were found dead in similar circumstances within 40 days of each other. Sinclair believes that the murder of Donald Young was an attempt to protect Barack Obama’s secrets, and the Obama White House is trying to have his book withdrawn from circulation to avoid any further embarrassments about Obama’s homosexual past and the possible involvement of his top lieutenants in Young’s murder, which has yet to be solved by the Chicago police. Of the two books the national media has shown a lot of attention to David Maraniss’ latest Obama biography but scant if any to Larry Sinclair’s scandalous account. Opining more on the writer T.S. Eliot to ‘girlfriend’ Alex McNear in one of his literary epistles the young Obama wrote: “Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.” Did Obama make the same choice? Michael Dickinson lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted via his website http://yabanji.tripod.com

Mary's Mosaic: Prologue by Peter Janney www.lewrockwell.com May 4, 2012 This is the prologue to Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy To Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace. Copyright 2012 by Peter Janney. Reprint permission courtesy of the author. Published by Skyhorse Publishing. “He was perfect for the CIA. He never felt guilt about anything.” ~ St. John Hunt, reflecting on the life of his father, E. Howard Hunt[1] Thanksgiving vacation in the fall of 1964 offered a welcome respite from the rigors of boarding school life in New Hampshire.[2] At seventeen, I was full of both testosterone and a lust for freedom that didn’t find much outlet at a New England prep school. I was a “lifer,” as we used to say. I had arrived in the ninth grade, or what was commonly known in the English boarding- school system as “the third form.” I would stay until the end and graduate, but that fall, in my fifth- form junior year, I felt engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to break free: five days off – this year with a driver’s license! – followed by another long slog up the hill. It was 1964. Just a year and half more of this, I kept telling myself, and I’d be out of what seemed like jail. Adolescence, with all of its possibilities, sometimes felt like prison. Dreams and a rich fantasy life were often the only escape. As the plane began its final approach into Washington’s National Airport, I picked out a number of familiar places stretched out below, including my old alma mater, Georgetown Day School (GDS), the sight of which stirred a flood of memories from my childhood. Something had been lost while I was a student there; and, nearly a decade later, emotional scar tissue still lingered. My best friend and classmate, Michael Pinchot Meyer, had been killed when we were both just nine years old. It had been my first experience with death – losing someone I had been deeply fond of. I didn’t want to think about it. I consoled myself instead with the promise of freedom that lay before me. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. My father would still be at work when I got home, but my mother and my younger brother would likely be around. I would have most of the afternoon to cruise about town with old friends – certainly enough time to sneak a beer or two and a few cigarettes. My family’s home was a modern architectural marvel for its time. A long, split-level structure, spacious and light-filled, with large picture windows in most rooms, the house was nestled in one of the last enclaves of Washington’s woods, sheltered from the cacophony of distant traffic. At dinner that evening, I looked out from the split-level dining room through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the verdant lawn was the concrete swimming pool, half-drained and dotted with logs to prevent winter ice from cracking its walls. I took my usual place at the table facing my brother, Christopher, with my mother to my left and my father to my right. On the wall behind my mother, an original black-and-white Morris Rosenfeld photograph, Spinnakers Flying, announced the family passion – sailing. My parents had met during summers spent on Cape Cod, and they had imparted their love of navigating the open sea to my brother and me. By the age of seventeen, I had already spent long stretches offshore in the Atlantic racing to Bermuda, and from Annapolis to Newport, Rhode Island. During dinner that evening, my father mentioned that it was not too early to think about racing our sailboat from Annapolis to Newport again in the coming year. Sailing was a rite of passage for me, and I looked forward to continuing to master its intricacies under my father’s guidance. The previous summer had already extended my knowledge and experience with a small group trip down the Dalmatian coast from Venice to Athens on a seventy-seven-foot Rhodes ketch. Its colorful skipper, a gallant, distinguished former World War II Marine combat captain named Horace (“Hod”) Fuller, had been a delightful legend to sail with. An accomplished sailor, he sometimes kindly took me aside for tutorials on some of the idiosyncrasies of sailing in the Adriatic Sea. There were, however, a couple of instances during the trip that disturbed me. Late one night, I had awakened to the sound of Hod Fuller having what sounded like combat nightmares from his World War II experiences. No one else in our group wanted to acknowledge it. Years later, my father, a career CIA senior official, having had his usual “generous” intake of alcohol one evening, remarked that “Hod Fuller was one of the best damn assassins we ever had. . . .” A bit stunned, I curiously inquired as to how he went about his assignments. In at least one instance, my father said, Hod had taken his victim out in a rowboat and shot him in the back of the head and then dumped him overboard. But on the evening before Thanksgiving, diving into a sumptuous meal of veal scaloppini, I was happily anticipating the short recess that lay before me, and dreaming about being on the ocean again, a place where my freedom flourished. It was comforting to be home, to have a reprieve from academic pressures and boarding-school life, and to be with my family. Amid the challenges and turbulence of adolescence, hearth and home was still a place I could count on. It wouldn’t last much longer, I soon discovered. I wasn’t at all prepared when the conversation took a sudden turn. “Mary Meyer died earlier this fall,” my mother said, looking at me. I reached for my water. “What do you mean?” I asked. Her words bludgeoned me. “She was murdered while walking on the canal towpath,” my mother explained. “They caught the guy who did it. She was taking one of her usual walks during the day. It was a sexual assault.” Reeling, I tried to make sense of what she was saying. “How was she killed?” I asked, trying to orient myself over the eruption of pounding in my chest. “She was shot. It’s very sad for all of us.” I pressed her for more details but absorbed little. Numbness and shock were setting in. I remember my mother mentioning Mary’s funeral, and then something about how my father and another man had gone to the airport to meet Cord Meyer, who had been away on the day of his ex-wife’s murder. My mother was doing all the talking; my father didn’t say anything. He just sat there, staring vacantly off into space. There was something almost eerie about his silence. My stomach was in knots. Was it only confusion, or was it fear? After a while, I excused myself from the table, saying that I had plans to go out for the evening. In fact, my only impulse was to go to my room and curl up in my bed. That night, I was in and out of sleep. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Memories crashed through my mind like a hurricane’s pounding surf. Seeing Georgetown Day School from the plane earlier in the day had already stirred something in me, and now there was no escape. I had known the Meyer family since 1952, when I was five years old. My mother, Mary Draper, and Mary Pinchot had been classmates in Vassar College’s class of 1942. My father, Wistar Janney, had met Cord Meyer after World War II, and they now worked together at the CIA. Our families were socially entwined – we went camping together, played touch football, visited each other’s homes frequently. The Meyers had three children: Quentin, Michael, and Mark. Michael and I had been born less than one month apart, and Quentin – or “Quenty,” as we called him – was a year and a half older. Mark and my brother, Christopher, were the same age, about two years younger than Michael and I. By the time Michael and I were seven, we were best friends, and often inseparable. We shared a number of bonds, especially baseball and fishing. We had been in the same class at Georgetown Day School for three years, our desks side by side for two of them. As I lay crawled up in a fetal position that night, the shock of Mary Meyer’s murder brought back a flood of memories of being at Michael’s house in McLean, Virginia, just a few miles from my own house. One sunny spring day, we had been hunting for copperheads in the backyard forest behind the Meyer house. Brandishing knives like the “young bucks” we thought we were, Michael pulled a long stick out of a hole we’d been investigating. Suddenly, a snapping snake came out right behind it, narrowly missing his face. We pulled back, both screaming, and ran as fast as we could. We finally stopped, both of us shaking with an adrenalin rush and laughing uncontrollably. Regaining a bit of composure, we realized that both of us, out of fear and excitement, had urinated in our pants. Humiliated, a bit defeated, but still giddy from the adventure, we returned to the house. Michael’s mother, Mary, was painting in a small studio just off the patio. “Mom, a copperhead almost bit me!” Michael announced. Mary Pinchot Meyer looked up from her canvas. Even then, I distinctly remember feeling that there was something unique about Michael’s mother, beyond her glistening, radiant beauty. She was so unlike any other adult in my world at that time. Calm and still, at peace with herself, she had a presence and demeanor that struck me. Less than a year before, Michael and I had been playing baseball in front of their house when Michael sent one of my pitches zooming off his bat and over the house. I ran around to the back in search of the ball and came upon Mary reading on a blanket. She lay completely naked, her backside to the sun. I was breathless. She hadn’t heard me coming, and I stood there for what seemed to me a very long time, gawking. At the time, I had no words for the vision that I beheld, but I knew that beauty such as hers was something I longed to know better. When Mary finally looked up and saw me, she wasn’t embarrassed or upset, or even startled. She just smiled, letting me know that it was okay; no sin had been committed. I found the ball, ran back to play with Mikey, and felt somehow irrevocably altered, even blessed. But it wasn’t anything I could describe at the time. I had a similar feeling about Mary the day of the copperhead hunt. Mary’s outer beauty seemed to be a manifestation of her inner freedom and peace. Whatever it was, it made me feel safe, and free. I remember her smiling at us in a prideful way. Here we were – dirty, sweaty, and soaked in piss, to boot – and Mary responded by being tender. She had guessed what must have happened and, laughing, directed us to the laundry room. We slipped out of our soiled clothes, put them in the washing machine, and put on the clean underwear that Mary had given us, along with a pile of clean clothes to wear. “You two look like little Indians,” she said teasingly. “Where’s your war paint?” I remembered how Michael’s eyes had lit up with excitement. “Mom, paint an arrowhead on my face!” he blurted out. “Go get the watercolors I gave you and I will!” she said. We stood in our underwear on the patio under a warm spring sun. Mary made intricate designs that we took to be tribal symbols on our faces and arms while we began emitting loud Indian war cries. While Mary was painting my face, Michael went in search of two Indian headdresses. Almost immediately, our exuberance erupted. Michael and I made guttural noises, each trying to outdo the other. War paint in place, we danced as we had seen Indians do on television. Flapping our hands over our mouths like trumpeters with plunger mutes, we shrieked louder and louder, jerking our bodies in wild leaps across the room. We strapped our knife sheaths onto makeshift belts, donned the headdresses, and descended into a kind of primal expression of childhood glee and human joy, running barefoot in circles. It was as if Mary’s brushstrokes of “war paint” had transported us into a primal place of wildness that demanded a surrender to the life force itself. In a sudden, simultaneous move that was pure, unbridled innocence, we stepped out of our underwear. Naked now, our playing became even more frenzied. We ran through the woods toward a small barn, chased each other around a riding circle, and back to the patio, waving our knives in flagrant violation of every childhood safety rule known to man. As our excitement subsided, we dropped to the floor, laughing and exhausted from the thrill of what we had just experienced. Peace and serenity returned, but eventually I became self-conscious. Where were my pants? Shouldn’t I have something on? Once again, Mary’s tender gaze delivered me from any embarrassment. “Mom, do we have anything to eat? I’m hungry!” asked Michael. We were putting on the clothes that Mary had given us, while Mary directed us to cookies and lemonade in the fridge. It seemed like an eternity had passed. A bit disoriented, I was calm – yet also exhilarated by the sense of an unknown powerful life force that had just moved through me. Mary’s quietly spirited presence had made it all possible. It was as if she had extended her freedom to me, giving me permission that day to explore and experience my own boyhood wildness like no other adult ever had. Mary’s persona contrasted sharply with that of Michael’s father, Cord Meyer. Insensitive and dismissive, Cord was arrogantly patronizing and never fun to be around. One day Michael and I went fishing on the Potomac River with Cord and his CIA friend and colleague Jim Angleton, who was also godfather to the three Meyer boys. I always found myself completely inhibited around Cord. Michael and I took turns climbing out onto a set of rocks that jutted out from the shoreline. There, we snagged herring by casting into a huge school of passing fish with a three-pronged snag hook. Cord’s demeanor that day had been as intimidating as it was uncomfortable. He and Angleton spent most of the time criticizing our techniques. Already self-conscious, I had to watch my every move lest I provoke one of Cord’s or Angleton’s withering stares. Truth be told, I never liked Cord. Michael feared his father, inasmuch as telling me so. His dread of his father was such a contrast to the connection he had with his mother. Sleep, if it came at all that dreadful night before Thanksgiving, was fitful as I wrestled with Mary Meyer’s death. Ominously, one horrid thought was the realization that Quenty and Mark would now have only Cord, their aloof father. In my agitation, I continually tossed and repositioned myself, hugging a second pillow for comfort. At one point I woke up; it was still dark outside. I was soaked in moisture, then realizing that in my sleep, I had been crying for my lost childhood friend Michael, and the memory of what had occurred on December 18, 1956. Just before Christmas vacation began, our school’s holiday festivities took place – a Nativity play, Christmas caroling in the Georgetown Day School assembly, and painting ornaments in the school’s art studio where Mary Meyer and Ken Noland sometimes taught together. The Meyer family didn’t have television in the mid-1950s – only because Mary was against it. Her prescience regarding the docile passivity that television engendered was remarkable. But it didn’t keep the two older Meyer boys – Quenty and Michael – from stealing away to a friend’s house to engage the technological marvel. The way home to the Meyer farmhouse required crossing a busy thoroughfare known as Route 123. Two years earlier, the family’s beloved golden retriever had been hit by a car and killed crossing that roadway. The two boys were on their way home, rushing to be on time for dinner. In the waning winter solstice light of Tuesday’s evening rush hour, some cars had not yet turned on their headlights. The agile Quenty made his way across first, dodging cars as he ran from one side to the other. His younger brother wasn’t so lucky. Michael was struck by an oncoming car and killed. The next day, after returning home early from work, my father and mother summoned me from my bedroom, where I had been playing. I joined them in the living room, taking a chair opposite the fireplace. My mother sat on the sofa and my father reclined into his favorite orange Eero Saarinen Womb chair, his legs stretched out on the ottoman before him. He was sipping his usual first martini of the evening. Our house was resplendent with FAO Schwarz Christmas pageantry – holly, mistletoe, a towering spruce pine that twinkled with lights and ornaments, with colorfully wrapped gifts everywhere. It was an idyllic scene, but I sat with the unease of one who hears his name called and wonders what he’s done wrong. I was braced for some kind of reprimand, but not for what came next. “We have something to tell you,” my mother said, looking in my direction without making eye contact. “Mikey Meyer was hit by a car yesterday. He was killed.” Her words rocked me to the core. The disturbance was cellular. The hollow silence of loss opened into my world. I couldn’t contain it. “That’s not true! Tell me it’s not true!” I shouted, before collapsing into tears. “It’s true,” she said, trying to remain calm. I turned toward my father as though he might have a different version of the story to offer. “Daddy, tell me it’s not true, please tell me it’s not true!” Hysterical, I threatened to throw a heavy ashtray through the living-room picture window. “Tell me it’s not true, or I’ll break the window!” I screamed. I don’t remember what came next, but I eventually found myself in my father’s arms with my head against his chest. Feeling the thumping of his heart against my head helped calm my sobs. I remembered looking up at his face. For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry. Later that evening, I overheard my parents talking about going to visit Cord and Mary after I went to bed. I insisted – demanded – that they take me with them. I didn’t know why it was so imperative that I accompany them. After some resistance, they relented. During the fifteen-minute drive to Michael’s house, darkness enshrouded everything, overtaking me. There was no moon or stars in the sky that night. Everything and everywhere was dark. We entered the front door and walked down an unlit hallway into the Meyers’ living room, where their own postcard-perfect holiday scene – the tree, the wrapped presents – seemed out of place. As my mother embraced Mary, I felt this house, so familiar just days before, was now alien to me. In spite of – or, perhaps, because of – the joy I had once felt in that house, it was almost unbearable to be there now. No longer would it be Michael’s house; nothing would ever be the same again. Mikey had left, and a part of me had gone with him. Emptiness now became my new companion. I was facing Michael’s mother, whose gaze was fixed on me. She looked into my eyes, as she had done so many times before, but this time it was her sadness, not her serenity, that moved me. I was overwhelmed by it and wanted to look away, but she drew me into her arms. In that moment, the child-adult distinction evaporated. We were equals in our grief, connected by the loss of someone we both had deeply loved and cherished. As she cried, I felt no need to recoil in any discomfort. Even as a young insecure boy, I gladly stood to embrace and hold her, as she had done for me so many times before. It was a moment of transcendence at a very tender age – an experience of connection unlike any I had known before. And it would be decades before I understood the deeper gift she had bestowed upon me. Mary walked me up the stairs to Michael’s bedroom. “I want you to have something of Michael’s to take with you,” she said. “Find something you want, anything. Michael would have wanted that, I know.” She left me alone in his room to contemplate, to face yet another level of the reality of my best friend’s departure. I would never again be in that room with the Michael I had known and loved. Unbearably, I had to begin to face the loss that night. Michael’s funeral was held several days later in Bethlehem Chapel inside the National Cathedral. I was still perhaps too numb to register details of the service, but I will never forget the sight of Ruth Pinchot, Michael’s maternal grandmother, sobbing on the sidewalk as we left the church. There was something so pure and powerful about her explosion of grief, the kind of public display of emotion that was simply “not done” among her set. But in that moment, Ruth didn’t care what anybody thought, or how she might be perceived. Her honesty and courage were so much like her daughter Mary’s. Michael’s casket was taken to the Pinchot family’s estate, Grey Towers, in Milford, Pennsylvania, and then laid to rest in the Pinchot family plot in the Milford cemetery. He had always shared with me so much about Grey Towers – its bountiful trout streams, waterfalls, and forests – but it would take me nearly fifty years before I could bring myself to actually visit his grave. The late 1950s were not an auspicious time to be a grieving nine-year-old. The “in-vogue” thinking at that time was that beyond a certain point, displays of sadness were unbecoming. I was encouraged to accept what had happened and move on. In my attempt to do so, I sometimes stayed overnight with Quenty and Mark at the Meyers’ house, and would wake up crying in the middle of the night. On those occasions, it was always Mary who comforted me. Expressions of sadness were okay with her, even embraced. Soon, however, everything changed. Quenty revealed that his parents were divorcing, and that everyone was moving to Georgetown. Meanwhile, at my home, my parents were ill-equipped to handle my grief. They sent me to a psychiatrist, who, in true Freudian fashion, kept making a lot of allusions to my penis. During the six years following Michael’s death, I floundered. My self-confidence eroded. Increasingly, I was impulsive, delinquent, and unruly. Unmoored and untethered, I packed on weight as I turned to sugar in an effort to self-medicate. At fifteen, I left home for boarding school in New Hampshire. The woman who had comforted me in sorrow and reassured me in so many other ways was now gone forever. Like a volcano, the reality of her death had erupted, and reawakened something awful and inescapable. Why had my parents waited until I was home to tell me, I wondered? As I lay in my bed at dawn that Thanksgiving morning in 1964, the apprehension of uneasiness, even dread, engulfed me. There was something foreboding, something terrible – something I couldn’t possibly know or understand at the time. And that feeling would continue to haunt me for more than forty years. My father knocked on my bedroom door; it was time to get ready to go hunting. As I dressed, I thought back to what a terrible year it had been for Washington – and the nation. President Kennedy had been assassinated the previous November. In my American history course at school that fall, we were discussing something called the Warren Commission and its final report. I remember that our teacher, Mr. Fauver, had said something to the effect of “Gentlemen, this is a shining example of what makes our country so great, our democracy so vibrant, a government for the people, and by the people.” Reminding us that America was a republic, not a totalitarian state, he urged us to reflect on how President Kennedy’s assassination would have been handled in a country that didn’t have a democratically elected government. Two years later, in 1966, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was challenging the entire veracity of the Warren Report as a massive cover-up, implicating the CIA in President Kennedy’s assassination. When I brought this to my father’s attention for discussion, he became apoplectic that I should ever consider such a thing. [3] Sadly, it was the beginning of a never-to-be resolved rupture in our relationship, and a dramatic separation from my family into adulthood. That fall I entered Princeton as an undergraduate. The Vietnam War was approaching its full escalation, and I made it my focus to begin to understand what was taking place. Further enraging both my parents, I became increasingly vociferous about America’s incursion into Southeast Asia, as well as what the CIA, and my father, were actually doing in the world. Ten years later, in 1976 – twelve years after Mary Meyer’s murder – the National Enquirer broke the story about her relationship with President Kennedy. Awakened, but not yet fully conscious, I began a journey that culminated in this book. Somewhere inside the recesses of my being, I instinctively suspected there was a connection between the assassination of our president, and the slaying – less than a year later – of the woman he had come to trust and love. Chapter Notes [1] Erik Hedegaard, “The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2007. [2] This entire section was based on a collection of notes over a period of nearly twenty years that I began writing in the early 1970s. As a training clinical psychologist, it was part of my orientation to begin an intensive period of personal psychotherapy that lasted a number of years. All of the vivid recollections in this chapter were based on memories that had been elicited, and noted, in various psychotherapeutic encounters. [3] In the fall of 1966, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison reopened his investigation into the Kennedy assassination, after having made the mistake of turning over his earlier investigation to the FBI, which did nothing. Within days after Dallas, Garrison had arrested David Ferrie as a possible associate of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. Further convinced that Oswald could never have acted alone, Garrison soon widened his net to include Guy Banister and Clay Shaw. In March 1967, Garrison arrested Clay Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. Shaw’s trial would not begin until January 1969, but in the spring of 1968, after having been undermined by Life magazine, Garrison visited with Look magazine’s managing editor, William (“Bill”) Attwood, who had been a Princeton classmate of my father’s. Garrison, according to author Joan Mellen, “outlined his investigation through lunch, dinner and into the night.” Attwood became so impressed with what Garrison had discovered that he called his friend Bobby Kennedy “at one in the morning.” Look was prepared to do a major feature story on the Garrison investigation, but Attwood unexpectedly suffered a significant heart attack, and the article never materialized. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005), p. 259). May 4, 2012 Peter Janney grew up in Washington, DC, during the 1950s and 1960s. His father was a high-ranking CIA official and a close friend of Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton, and Mary’s husband, Cord Meyer. His mother and Mary Meyer were classmates at Vassar College.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138865/Former-Met-officer-unit-protects-Royal-Family-arrested-illegal-payments-police.html

News Corp was given private committee details, suggests Tom Watson MPs Louise Mensch and Tom Watson take to Twitter in ongoing row over select committee's report into phone hacking By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 May 2012 06.34 EDT The Commons culture, media and sport select Committee. MPs Louise Mensch and Tom Watson have been publicly at odds since the publication of the committee's report into phone hacking. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA Labour MP Tom Watson has suggested that News Corporation was given details of private discussions about the culture select committee's controversial phone hacking report, in an escalating row with his Conservative counterpart Louise Mensch. Watson, replying to Mensch during a Twitter spat following the Tory MP's appearance on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday morning, said a letter sent by James Murdoch, News Corp deputy chief operating officer, "seemed uncannily to answer concerns raised in private discussions" by committee members. The pair have been publicly at odds since the report's publication on Tuesday about the line claiming that Rupert Murdoch was "not fit" to run an international company, which Mensch and other Tory members of the committee opposed. In a seven-page letter sent to MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee in March, Murdoch expressed his deep regret over the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, but maintained he had not misled parliament over the affair. After an hour of testy back and forth on Twitter prompted by Mensch's appearance on Today, Watson threatened to publish all the amendments Tory MPs on the committee had put forward for the report. When Mensch replied that he ought to make sure he included a timeline of the amendments, Watson tweeted: "You mean James Murdoch's second letter that seemed to uncannily answer concerns raised in private discussions? No problem." Mensch hit back: "Are you accusing me of something? Not like you. Don't let temper get better of you. 'Fit' was error." Labour MP and phone-hacking victim Chris Bryant then joined in over allegations that the Tories were lobbied by News Corp over the final report. "Can I just check? Has @theresecoffey said whether she received private NI or News Corp briefings? @LouiseMensch @tom_watson," he tweeted. The Twitter row began after Mensch claimed the question of whether Murdoch was fit or not was not discussed in advance of a final select committee meeting on the report on Monday, with Watson insisting it had been raised six weeks earlier. Mensch tweeted to Watson: "You never discussed it nor asked for it to be discussed. All Cons members were stunned to find you pushing it – and Lab voting." Mensch was one of the four Tory MPs who voted against the "not fit" line being inserted into the report and on Tuesday, when it was published, criticised Watson and his Labour colleagues for introducing the amendment at the last minute. She argued the committee took no evidence on the issue and had not even discussed the criteria or standard by which someone could be judged fit to run a company. The vote split the committee, with the Conservatives refusing to support the final report. This rendered it partisan and essentially worthless, Mensch said on BBC2's Newsnight programme on Tuesday. Watson hit back on Twitter on Thursday morning, saying that the amendment was tabled six weeks earlier. "Oh @LouiseMensch. Amendment was in on 27th March. You waited until Monday to say you wouldn't support report of it was included." Mensch replied: "You will acknowledge all other contentious amendments 'parked' were extensively discussed at request of tabler." Earlier, Watson vented his spleen over Mensch's appearance on Radio 4's Today, tweeting the programme directly to seek a right of reply: "Good morning @BBCr4today Are you going to allow me to clarify my position? I think @LouiseMensch has given you a partial account of events." Late on Wednesday, ratings agency Moody's said that News Corp bondholders had nothing to fear from the fallout from the UK parliamentary report. Moody's said its rating of News Corp's debt would not be affected by the political hyperbole about Murdoch emanating from London. The media and entertainment giant's significant cash balance and strong free cash flow generation mitigated the uncertainty of additional financial fallout from the phone hacking scandal, the agency said, and News Corp continued to have a strong Baa1 unsecured rating. Murdoch also got the unaminous backing of the News Corp board late on Wednesday after an unscheduled meeting of directors by phone. News Corp said the board based its vote of confidence on Rupert Murdoch's vision and leadership in building the company from its modest roots, his ongoing performance and his demonstrated resolve to address the mistakes of the company identified in the select committee's report.

Earl Rose, Coroner When Kennedy Was Shot, Dies at 85 By DOUGLAS MARTIN The New York Times May 2, 2012 Earl Rose, who as the Dallas County medical examiner when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated insisted that he should do the autopsy, only to be overruled in a confrontation with presidential aides, died on Tuesday in Iowa City. He was 85. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Marilyn. On Nov. 22, 1963, Dr. Rose was thrust into the thick of a 20th-century American nightmare. He performed an autopsy on J. D. Tippit, the police officer who was believed to have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone suspect in the assassination. Two days later, he performed an autopsy on Oswald himself after the nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Four years later, Dr. Rose performed an autopsy on Ruby, determining that he had died of a blood clot in a lung. But it was the autopsy he did not do that has become the most historic. After demanding to conduct an autopsy on the president, as he was legally required to do in any murder, Dr. Rose reluctantly stepped aside to allow the president’s body to be returned to Washington, as the president’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his aides insisted. The autopsy was later performed at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland. The pathologists there did not know that a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the stricken president had been taken, had performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy that obscured a gunshot wound in his neck. Nor did they have access to the clothing the president was wearing. A forensic panel commissioned by Congress determined in 1978 that the Bethesda doctors had failed to dissect a wound in Kennedy’s upper back and had only probed it with a finger. The same year, pathologists involved in the autopsy admitted that they had been in “hurry up” mode. Conspiracy theorists have questioned whether high-ranking civilian and military officials who were present during the autopsy may have influenced its results. Dr. Rose said in 1992 that an autopsy performed in Dallas “would have been free of any perceptions of outside influence.” His confrontation with the president’s party occurred outside Trauma Room 1 at Parkland. Dr. Rose, a physician and lawyer who had become county medical examiner less than six months earlier, informed the Secret Service and other aides traveling with Kennedy that state law required that an autopsy in a murder be performed in the county where the crime had taken place. He said that it would take no more than 45 minutes, and that the doctors who had treated the president were there to advise. Critical evidence could be gathered at a time when the assassin or assassins were still at large. “You can’t break the chain of evidence,” Dr. Rose was quoted as telling them. Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s physician, reminded Dr. Rose that the country was dealing with the president and said he must waive local laws. At the time, however, there was no federal law expressly addressing assassinations. Any suspect would have been tried in a Texas state court. But historians have said that Mrs. Kennedy insisted on returning to Washington as soon as possible and that she would not leave without her husband’s body. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was to be shortly sworn in as the 36th president aboard Air Force One, supported the first lady’s decision. As Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the trauma room beside a gurney carrying the casket, tension mounted. Roy Kellerman, head of the White House Secret Service detail, squared off against Dr. Rose. Obscenities were shouted. Unconfirmed accounts said Mr. Kellerman had pointed a gun at Dr. Rose. Years later, Dr. Rose said that might have happened but that he was not sure. “Finally, without saying any more, I simply stood aside,” Dr. Rose said. Earl Forrest Rose was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Eagle Butte, S.D. His father worked on a ranch, and Earl rode his horse five miles to school. He dropped out of high school in 1944 to join the Navy, where he served on a submarine in the South Pacific. He graduated from Yankton College, now closed, in 1949, and went on to study medicine at the University of South Dakota for two years before finishing his medical studies at the University of Nebraska. He earned his law degree from Southern Methodist University while working as medical examiner in Dallas. After working in private medical practice in Lemmon, S.D., in the mid-1950s, Dr. Rose continued his medical education, completing residencies in surgical pathology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, in clinical pathology at DePaul Hospital in St. Louis, and in forensic pathology at the University of Virginia. He moved to Dallas in June 1963 at the age of 36, hired by the county to establish a scientifically valid medical examiner’s system to replace its existing system of elected lay coroners. Dr. Rose taught pathology at the University of Iowa from 1968 until his retirement in the early 1990s. He took writing courses, carved sculptures from cow bones and, with his wife, was a mediator in small claims court. Each Nov. 22, he could count on hearing from assassination buffs. He personally rejected conspiracy theories, however, believing that the Warren Commission had rightly concluded that three shots were fired by a single assassin and that Kennedy was struck from the rear by two of them. In addition to his wife, the former Marilyn Preheim, Dr. Rose is survived by his daughters Elise, Cecile, Karen, Miriam and Carol Rose, and 12 grandchildren. His son, Forrest, died in 2005. After witnessing several executions, Dr. Rose became an outspoken opponent of capital punishment. Several years ago he wrote that the most poignant tragedies usually do not involve important people. “Rather,” he wrote, “the most tragic deaths involve the people who have no reserve of emotional support, many of whom are poor.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ad38090-9426-11e1-bb47-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1tlJ6whkP US senators raise heat on Murdoch Financial Times May 2, 2012 By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York and Ben Fenton and Mark Wembridge in London Two Democratic senators have turned up the political pressure on News Corp, reviving questions about whether a scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers could jump across the Atlantic. A day after a damning parliamentary report into Mr Murdoch’s handling of the affair, News Corp’s directors gave him their unanimous backing, quelling speculation that he But their statement was followed by news that Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia had written to Lord Justice Leveson, who is leading an inquiry into the conduct of the British press, asking for any evidence that “troubling and sometimes criminal conduct” had occurred in the US or involved US citizens. Mr Rockefeller, who first raised concerns about phone hacking last summer, chairs the Senate commerce committee, which has the power to hold hearings, and has oversight of the Federal Communications Committee. The Federal Bureau of Investigations opened a probe into News Corp after Mr Rockefeller’s intervention. He widened his concerns to include allegations of payments to police officers and other public officials, saying US-traded companies such as News Corp had “a duty to exercise adequate financial controls over their subsidiaries”. Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey senator who called last summer for investigations into possible breaches of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, said allegations in Tuesday’s report by a House of Commons committee on media made it “critical” that US authorities ensured that US laws had not been broken. News Corp had no comment. In an unscheduled conference call on Wednesday morning, its board discussed Tuesday’s majority verdict by the Commons committee that Mr Murdoch was “not a fit person” to run a large international company. The board – briefed by lawyers including Gerson Zweifach, general counsel, and Joel Klein, one of Mr Murdoch’s closest executives – voiced “full confidence in Rupert Murdoch’s fitness” and said they wanted him to remain chairman and CEO. Mr Murdoch also received support from Moody’s, the credit rating agency, which said it saw no cause to cut News Corp’s Baa1 rating. Despite “the highly politicised hyperbole”, it said the company had ample liquidity to mitigate the scandal’s costs. However, Moody’s said the MPs’ report could influence Ofcom as the UK media regulator considers whether British Sky Broadcasting, the pay-television group News Corp controls, is a “fit and proper” holder of a broadcast licence. BSkyB moved to distance itself from its biggest shareholder on Wednesday. “It is important to emphasise that Sky and News Corp are separate companies,” said Jeremy Darroch, BSkyB chief executive. “We believe that Sky’s record as a broadcaster is the most important factor in determining our fitness to hold a licence.” “The likelihood of Ofcom removing BSkyB’s broadcasting licences is zero. BSkyB itself has no case to answer,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst. However, she said Ofcom could require James Murdoch to stand down as a BSkyB director.

Seat of Power ‘The Passage of Power,’ Robert Caro’s New L.B.J. Book By BILL CLINTON Published: May 2, 2012 The New York Times “The Passage of Power,” the fourth installment of Robert Caro’s brilliant series on Lyndon Johnson, spans roughly five years, beginning shortly before the 1960 presidential contest, including the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and other seminal events of the Kennedy years, and ending a few months after the awful afternoon in Dallas that elevated L.B.J. to the presidency. THE PASSAGE OF POWER The Years of Lyndon Johnson By Robert A. Caro Illustrated. 712 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Read All Comments (55) » Among the most interesting and important episodes Caro chronicles are those involving the new president’s ability to maneuver bills out of legislative committees and onto the floor of the House and Senate for a vote. One of those bills would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You don’t have to be a policy wonk to marvel at the political skill L.B.J. wielded to resuscitate a bill that seemed doomed to never get a vote on the floor of either chamber. Southern Democrats were masters at bottling up legislation they hated, particularly bills expanding civil rights for black Americans. Their skills at obstruction were so admired that the newly sworn-in Johnson was firmly counseled by an ally against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination on such a hopeless cause. According to Caro, Johnson responded, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” This is the question every president must ask and answer. For Lyndon Johnson in the final weeks of 1963, the presidency was for two things: passing a civil rights bill with teeth, to replace the much weaker 1957 law he’d helped to pass as Senate majority leader, and launching the War on Poverty. That neither of these causes was in fact hopeless was clear possibly only to him, as few Americans in our history have matched Johnson’s knowledge of how to move legislation, and legislators. It’s wonderful to watch Johnson’s confidence catch fire and spread to the shellshocked survivors of the Kennedy administration as it dawned on them that the man who was once Master of the Senate would now be a chief executive with more ability to move legislation through the House and Senate than just about any other president in history. Johnson’s fire spread outward until it touched the entire country during his first State of the Union address. The words were written by Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen, but their impact would be felt in the magic L.B.J. worked over the next seven weeks. Exactly how L.B.J. did it was perfectly captured later by Hubert Humphrey — the man the president chose as his vote counter for the civil rights bill and his Senate proxy to carve its passage. Humphrey said Johnson “knew just how to get to me.” In sparkling detail, Caro shows the new president’s genius for getting to people — friends, foes and everyone in between — and how he used it to achieve his goals. We’ve all seen the iconic photos of L.B.J. leaning into a conversation, poking his thick finger into a confidant’s chest or wrapping his long arm around a shoulder. At 6 foot 4, he towered over most men, but even seated Johnson commanded from on high. Caro relates how during a conversation about civil rights, he placed Roy Wilkins and his N.A.A.C.P. entourage on one of the couches in the Oval Office, yet still towered over them as he sat up close in his rocking chair. And he didn’t need to be in the same room — he was great at manipulating, cajoling and even bullying over the phone. He knew just how to get to you, and he was relentless in doing it. If you were a partisan, he’d call on your patriotism; if a traditionalist, he’d make his proposal seem to be the Establishment choice. His flattery was minutely detailed, finely tuned and perfectly modulated. So was his bombast — whatever worked. L.B.J. didn’t kiss Sam Rayburn’s ring, but his lips did press against his bald head. Harry Byrd received deference and attention. When L.B.J. became president, he finally had the power to match his political skills. The other remarkable part of this volume covers the tribulation before the triumphs: the lost campaign and the interminable years as vice president, in which L.B.J.’s skills were stymied and his power was negligible. He had little to do, less to say, and no defense against the indignities the Kennedys’ inner circle heaped on him. The Master of the Senate may have become its president, but in title only. He might have agreed with his fellow Texan John Nance Garner, F.D.R.’s vice president, who famously described the office as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Caro paints a vivid picture of L.B.J.’s misery. We can feel Johnson’s ambition ebb, and believe with him that his political life was over, as he was shut out of meetings, unwelcome on Air Force One, mistrusted and despised by Robert Kennedy. While in Congress he may not have been universally admired among the Washington elite, and was even mocked by them as a bit of a rube. But he had certainly never been pitied. In the White House, he invented reasons to come to the outskirts of the Oval Office in the mornings, where he was rarely welcome, and made sure his presence was noted by Kennedy’s staff. Even if they did not respect him, he wasn’t going to let anyone forget him. Then tragedy changed everything. Within hours of President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was sworn in as president, without the pomp of an inauguration, but with all the powers of the office. At first he was careful in wielding them. He didn’t move into the Oval Office for days, running the executive branch from Room 274 in the Executive Office Building. The family didn’t move into the White House residence until Dec. 7. But soon enough, it would become clear that the power Johnson had grasped for his entire life was finally his. As Caro shows in this and his preceding volumes, power ultimately reveals character. For L.B.J., becoming president freed him to embrace parts of his past that, for political or other reasons, had remained under wraps. Suddenly there was no longer a reason to dissociate himself from the poverty and failure of his childhood. Power released the source of Johnson’s humanity. Last year I was privileged to speak at the funeral of Sargent Shriver — a man who served L.B.J. but who in many ways was his temperamental opposite. I said then that too many of us spend too much time worrying about advancement or personal gain at the expense of effort. We might fail, but we need to get caught trying. That was Shriver’s great virtue. With Johnson’s election he actually had the chance to try and to win. Even as Barry Goldwater was midwifing the antigovernment movement that would grow to such dominance decades later, L.B.J., Shriver and other giants of the civil rights and anti­poverty movements seemed to rise all around me as I was beginning my political involvement. They believed government had an essential part to play in expanding civil rights and reducing poverty and inequality. It soon became clear that hearts needed to be changed, along with laws. Not just Congress, but the American people themselves needed to be got to. It was hard to do, absent a crisis like the losses of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. By the late 1960s, America’s increasing involvement and frustration in Vietnam, the rise of more militant civil rights leaders and riots in many cities, and the end of broad-based economic growth that had indeed “lifted all boats” in the early ’60s, made it harder and harder to win more converts to the civil rights and anti­poverty causes. But for a few brief years, Lyndon Johnson, once a fairly conventional Southern Democrat, constrained by his constituents and his overriding hunger for power, rose above his political past and personal limitations, to embrace and promote his boyhood dreams of opportunity and equality for all Americans. After all the years of striving for power, once he had it, he said to the American people, “I’ll let you in on a secret — I mean to use it.” And use it he did to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the open housing law, the antipoverty legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and much more. He knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve. Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service. Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States.

Lord Justice Leveson: Part 2 of my Inquiry into phone hacking may not be necessary Lord Justice Leveson has hinted that the second part of his inquiry into the press, which is due to look into phone-hacking, may not be necessary because of the mass of material that is likely to become public if journalists go to trial. By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter The Telegraph 11:11AM BST 02 May 2012 The Leveson Inquiry was split into two parts when it was set up, to avoid clashing with the ongoing police investigations into phone hacking, computer hacking and corrupt payments to public officials. The first part, which has been underway since last November, is examining the “culture, practice and ethics of the press”, and will result in a report to Parliament later this year setting out recommendations for a new regulatory regime. A second part, specifically looking into phone hacking, is due to follow at some point in the future, but the Inquiry chairman suggested it may never happen, inviting participants to consider “the value to be gained” from it. In a written judgment on the way the Inquiry Rules 2006 should be applied, he commented: “If there are [prosecutions for phone-hacking] it is likely that the process of pre-trial disclosure and trial will be lengthy so that Part 2 of this Inquiry will be delayed for very many months if not longer. “If the transparent way in which the Inquiry has been conducted, the Report and the response by government and the press (along with a new acceptable regulatory regime) addresses the public concern, at the conclusion of any trial or trials, consideration can be given by everyone to the “That inquiry will involve yet more enormous cost (both to the public purse and the participants); it will trawl over material then more years out of date and is likely to take longer than the present Inquiry which has not over focussed on individual conduct.” He said it was “undeniably a sensible strategic consideration for those who have participated in this Inquiry”. More than 50 people have been arrested so far by Metropolitan Police officers investigating hacking and alleged bribery, though no-one has yet been charged. Even if charges are brought in the next few weeks, it is unlikely that any trial would be concluded before next year, and if there were multiple trials the delay could be considerably longer. The first part of the Inquiry has already considered a large amount of evidence relating to phone-hacking, after hearing from victims including the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and celebrities including Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan. It has also considered the relationship between the press and the police and is currently taking evidence on the relationship between the press and politicians, hearing last week from Rupert and James Murdoch. In the final section of the current session, it will listen to suggestions on how a more effective system of regulating the media can be brought in that “supports the integrity and freedom of the press while encouraging the highest ethical standards”.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox broadcast licences targeted by US ethics group FCC called on to revoke licences in wake of British parliamentary report as phone hacking scandal widens abroad By Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe in New York guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 17.41 EDT A Washington-based ethics watchdog is calling on federal regulators to revoke News Corporation's 27 Fox broadcast licences in the wake of the highly critical report on phone hacking from the UK parliament. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) has written to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, calling on the regulator to pull the plug on Rupert Murdoch's lucrative television licences on grounds of character. The letter argues that the final report of the UK Commons culture, media and sport committee, which concluded that Murdoch was not fit to run a major international company, had implications for the US regulators that they had now to act upon. Melanie Sloan, Crew's director, said that the Murdochs had clearly failed the character test that is embedded within US media law as it is within British. "If they are not passing the character standard under British law, it seems to me that they are not going to meet the character standard in America." In their report, the British parliamentarians found Rupert Murdoch was "not a fit person" to exercise stewardship of a major international company. The Commons culture, media and sport select committee also concluded that James Murdoch showed "wilful ignorance" of the extent of phone hacking during 2009 and 2010. Under FCC regulations, broadcast frequencies can only be handed to firms run by people of good "character" who serve the "public interest" and speak with "candor". In making that judgment, the FCC is entitled to consider past conduct of media owners, including conduct that does not relate directly to their broadcasting interests, as well as any patterns of alleged misbehaviour. The FCC has so far shown an unwillingness to be drawn into the billowing phone hacking scandal concerning the News of the World and other News Corporation outlets in the UK. Last July, Genachowski indicated that he did not expect his agency to get involved in the probe. But Crew insisted that as more information emerges about the failure of News Corp to deal with its hacking crisis, federal authorities would eventually be forced to act. The watchdog has also written to the US Senate and House committees on commerce calling for congressional hearings into whether the Murdochs were fit to hold the Fox TV licences. A similar request from Crew last year went unanswered. Any suggestion that there was scrutiny of News Corp's TV licences would cause havoc within the company because its profits are closely tied to television in the US. However, the firm's shareholders appear to be relaxed in that regard, as News Corp's shares rose slightly after news broke of the scathing UK committee report. Analysts have long discounted the UK newspaper business as a distraction and too tiny to affect the bottom line. One speculated that investors were betting the report was likely to lead to News Corp focusing on its larger, more profitable US assets. Thomas Eagan, media analyst at Collins Stewart said more pressure on Murdoch meant more responsibility for Chase Carey, News Corp's chief operating officer. "That's a positive for us, we are big fans of Chase Carey," he said. The big unanswered question for shareholders is over the British pay TV giant BSkyB, Eagan said. Ofcom, the British media regulator, is currently assessing whether News is a "fit and proper" owner of the profitable firm. The hacking scandal effectively ended News Corp's bid for full control of BSkyB. Should Ofcom rule against Sky, it may have to sell all or part of its 39.1% holding in the pay-TV operator. Some shareholders are intensifying their calls for a shake-up at the top of News Corp on the back of the British parliamentary report. Change to Win, an advisory group that works with pension funds with over $200bn in assets, called for Murdoch to resign. Senior policy analyst Michael Pryce-Jones said News Corp's board should meet to form a succession plan immediately. "This is a company in crisis," he said. Pryce-Jones said that when he first saw the headlines about the report he had assumed they were talking about James Murdoch. "This is far worse than I had expected," he said. "The focus is now on Rupert." He added: "In any other company James would have have been sacked in July and we'd be preparing for succession. [Rupert] Murdoch clearly can not stay on a CEO and chairman of this company." Pryce-Jones said he blamed News Corp's independent directors for much of what had gone wrong. The directors include top US lawyer Viet Dinh, chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City department of education and Rod Eddington, former chief executive of British Airways. "They have said that they are going to act, but they have done nothing. They need a Plan B. Plan A was apparently to ignore this and hope it would go away," he said. Father Seamus Finn of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, who led a shareholder vote against Rupert and James Murdoch and other senior executives at News Corp's annual general meeting last year, said: "This report is exactly what I asked Mr Murdoch about last year, it's about the culture of the company and who sets the tone for that culture." He said the report "sets another stone on the balance" against Murdoch but that for US shareholders the political nature of the report was likely to lead many to discount its impact. "This is an extraordinary report but it is happening in a political context," he

http://nymag.com/news/features/ben-bradlee-2012-5/

Biography of Editor Keeps Watergate Twists Coming By JULIE BOSMAN Published: May 1, 2012 The New York Times It might say something about the state of politics that the biggest story in Washington on Monday happened 40 years ago. And it involves a potted plant. In a new authorized biography of the journalism legend Ben Bradlee, “Yours in Truth,” by Jeff Himmelman, Mr. Bradlee is quoted expressing some anxiety over some of the most provocative and enduring details of “All the President’s Men,” the famous unfurling of the Watergate scandal by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While Mr. Himmelman uses material from Mr. Bradlee’s old memos, letters, interviews and photos to write a “personal portrait” of the former Washington Post editor, the source of the Watergate conversation was an unpublished interview conducted in 1990 by Barbara Feinman, who was working with Mr. Bradlee on his memoir. At one point, Mr. Bradlee told Ms. Feinman, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat.” “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? ... And meeting in some garage,” Mr. Bradlee said, according to Mr. Himmelman’s book. “One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage. ... There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.” In an interview Monday, a day after New York magazine published an excerpt from the book, Mr. Woodward described Mr. Bradlee’s comments as outdated, long before the identity of Deep Throat, Mr. Woodward’s anonymous source, was revealed. “I can understand in 1990, when Ben doesn’t know all the details, he’s kind of musing and saying, ‘Gee, I’m not sure this is all straight because it seems so incredible,’ ” he said. “But all of Watergate was incredible.” He added, “This is a classic case of manufactured controversy, as best I can tell.” Mr. Himmelman, through his publisher, declined to be interviewed. The cinematic details of the secret meetings between Mr. Woodward and Deep Throat in a parking garage, including the use of the potted plant on Mr. Woodward’s terrace as a signal, helped turn “All the President’s Men” into a journalistic classic and an Oscar-nominated movie. Mr. Himmelman’s account has what could be called a twist out of another film, “All About Eve”: he once worked as a research assistant to Mr. Woodward, who hired him when he was 24. Mr. Woodward kept the identity of Deep Throat a secret for more than three decades until W. Mark Felt, a longtime official with the F.B.I., unmasked himself in 2005. Many of the details that Mr. Bradlee expressed his concern about would be known only to Mr. Woodward and to Mr. Felt, who died in 2008. The potted plant is mentioned in Mr. Felt’s book, “A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being ‘Deep Throat,’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington,” but his co-author, John O’Connor, told Politico that he had never confirmed that detail. Mr. Woodward’s books are known for their ability to rattle Washington with shadowy revelations about people in power, and he was once criticized for saying William J. Casey, a former director of the C.I.A., had given him a deathbed confession that he had known about money funneled to the contra rebels in Nicaragua. Perhaps trying to calm the latest Watergate storm, Mr. Bradlee released a statement on Monday to Politico through his wife, Sally Quinn, in support of Mr. Woodward. “No editor, no reader, can hope for more than Bob Woodward’s byline on a story that really matters,” Mr. Bradlee said in the statement. “I always trusted him, and I always will.” Ms. Quinn added that there was “nothing specific” that Mr. Bradlee had doubts about. A version of this article appeared in print on May 1, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Biography of Editor Keeps the Watergate Twists Coming.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9238815/MPs-phone-hacking-report-what-they-said-about-the-key-players.html

Rupert Murdoch 'not fit' to lead major international company, MPs conclude Select committee also says James Murdoch showed 'wilful ignorance' of extent of phone hacking at News of the World Read the full select committee report: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/may/01/rupert-murdoch-not-fit-select-committee By Dan Sabbagh and Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 06.31 EDT Rupert Murdoch is "not a fit person" to exercise stewardship of a major international company, a committee of MPs has concluded, in a report highly critical of the mogul and his son James's role in the News of the World phone-hacking affair. The Commons culture, media and sport select committee also concluded that James Murdoch showed "wilful ignorance" of the extent of phone hacking during 2009 and 2010 – in a highly charged document that saw MPs split on party lines as regards the two Murdochs. Labour MPs and the sole Liberal Democrat on the committee, Adrian Sanders, voted together in a bloc of six against the five Conservatives to insert the criticisms of Rupert Murdoch and toughen up the remarks about his son James. But the MPs were united in their criticism of other former News International employees. The cross-party group of MPs said that Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International, was "complicit" in a cover-up at the newspaper group, and that Colin Myler, former editor of the News of the World, and the paper's ex-head of legal, Tom Crone, deliberately withheld crucial information and answered questions falsely. All three were accused of misleading parliament by the culture select committee. Rupert Murdoch, the document said, "did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking" and "turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications". The committee concluded that the culture of the company's newspapers "permeated from the top" and "speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International". That prompted the MPs' report to say: "We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of major international company." James Murdoch is described as exhibiting a "lack of curiosity … wilful ignorance even" at the time of the negotiations surrounding the 2008 Gordon Taylor phone-hacking settlement and into 2009 and 2010. The younger son of Rupert Murdoch is criticised for failing to appreciate the significance of the News of the World hacking when the "for Neville" email first became public in 2009 and during subsequent investigations by parliament in February 2010 and a New York Times report in September 2010. "We would add to these admissions that as the head of a journalistic enterprise, we are astonished that James Murdoch did not seek more information or ask to see the evidence and counsel's opinion when he was briefed by Tom Crone and Colin Myler on the Gordon Taylor case," the select committee said. Even if James Murdoch did not appreciate the significance of the £700,000 Taylor payout, the committee concluded it was "simply astonishing" that he did not realise that the "one 'rogue reporter' line was untrue" until late 2010, after a previous inquiry by the culture select committee which ran during 2009 and reported in February 2010. According to minutes published by the committee, the MPs were almost unanimous in their criticism of Hinton, Myler and Crone. Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor and News International boss, was largely spared from the MPs' criticism. The report said that it would not draw conclusions on evidence to the committee about Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl whose voicemail messages were hacked by the News of the World in 2002, because of an ongoing police investigation into Brooks. However, the MPs said that Brooks must take responsibility for "the culture which permitted" unethical newsgathering methods over Dowler in 2002. The MPs said: "The attempts by the News of the World to get a scoop on Milly Dowler led to a considerable amount of police resource being redirected to the pursuit of false leads." Brooks is on police bail after being arrested as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into phone hacking on 17 July 2011 and, separately, on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice along with her husband, Charlie, on 13 March this year. Brooks denies knowledge of or involvement in phone hacking or other illegal activities. The culture select committee charged Hinton with being "complicit" in a cover-up of wrongdoing at Rupert Murdoch's media empire. MPs said that Myler and Crone deliberately withheld crucial information and answered falsely questions put by the committee. The executives demonstrated contempt for parliament "in the most blatant fashion", the MPs said, in what they described as a corporate attempt to mislead the committee about the true extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. The MPs said that Hinton, executive chairman of News International until December 2007, had "inexcusably" mislead the committee over his role in authorising the £243,000 payout to Clive Goodman, the former royal editor convicted of phone hacking in January that year. "We consider, therefore, that Les Hinton was complicit in the cover-up at News International, which included making misleading statements and giving a misleading picture to the committee," the MPs said. Crone and Myler were accused of deliberately misleading the MPs on the culture select committee in 2009 and again in 2011 about their alleged knowledge that phone hacking went beyond a single "rogue reporter" at the now-closed Sunday tabloid. "Both Tom Crone and Colin Myler deliberately avoided disclosing crucial information to the committee and, when asked to do, answered questions falsely," the MPs said in the report. All three executives now face the prospect of being called to apologise before parliament, in a constitutional move that has not been used for almost half a century. The report could prove especially problematic for Myler, who is only five months into his editorship at the New York Daily News. The select committee said it would table a Commons motion asking parliament to endorse its conclusions about misleading evidence. Myler said he stood by his evidence to the committee. "While I respect the work that the select committee has carried out, I stand by the evidence that I gave the committee. I have always sought to be accurate and consistent in what I have said to the committee," he said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon. "The conclusions of the committee have, perhaps inevitably, been affected by the fragmented picture which has emerged from the various witnesses over successive appearances and by the constraints within which the committee had to conduct its procedure. "These issues remain the subject of a police investigation and the Leveson judicial inquiry and I have every confidence that they will establish the truth in the fullness of time." Hinton has issued a statement denying the allegations. "I am shocked and disappointed by the culture, media and sport select committee's allegations that I have misled parliament and was 'complicit' in a cover-up," he said. "I refute these accusations utterly. I have always been truthful in my dealings with the committee and its findings are unfounded, unfair and erroneous. "To be clear, not once in my testimony before the committee did I seek to mislead it or pass blame for decisions to others. Nor did I participate in a 'cover-up'. Furthermore, there is nothing in my evidence to support the committee's findings that I did. I will be writing to John Whittingdale, the chair of the committee, to object formally." News Corp said in a statement: "News Corporation is carefully reviewing the select committee's report and will respond shortly. The company fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World and apologises to everyone whose privacy was invaded."

James Murdoch to face MPs' criticism over phone hacking Former News International chief failed to probe phone hacking at News of the World, parliamentary committee to report By Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 April 2012 15.00 EDT James Murdoch will be criticised by MPs investigating phone hacking on Tuesday, but their assessment of his conduct is expected to fall just short of accusing the former chairman of News International of misleading parliament about the extent of his knowledge of the affair. The all party culture media and sport select committee concluded they could not reach a final decision about whether Murdoch misled them because of what the MPs described as conflicting evidence, according to a source close to the process. However, there was enough to lead members to agree that Murdoch had not asked the questions that would help determine the true extent of phone hacking at the News of the World for several years. Some Conservatives on the committee are understood to have argued that Murdoch should not have been criticised at all, but in a three-hour meeting, in which much of the debate was taken up with agreeing the final wording as regards the News Corporation heir, their amendments are understood to have failed. News International now concedes in civil actions brought by hacking victims that illegal practice took place at the News of the World between 2001 and 2006, before Murdoch became executive chairman in late 2007. However, News International admits that it did not appreciate the extent of hacking until the very end of 2010, when it saw fresh evidence in a case involving the actor Sienna Miller. Murdoch appeared before the select committee in both July and November, and the outspoken Labour MP Tom Watson described him as acting like a mafia boss at that second hearing – a contention rejected by Murdoch. It fell to Damian Collins, a Conservative, to come closer to the committee's final conclusions, saying: "It may not be the mafia, but it doesn't sound like Management Today." The select committee will reserve some of its strongest condemnation for Murdoch's predecessor in the role, Les Hinton, who had appeared before the committee three times over the past five years. Hinton told the committee last October that he was right to have told MPs in 2009 that phone hacking was not rife at the newspaper. Hinton is expected to be accused of misleading parliament as a result, with MPs particularly focused on his evidence as regards Clive Goodman, the former News of the World royal editor, who went to jail for hacking in 2007. Goodman subsequently made an unfair dismissal complaint, saying hacking was "widely discussed" until reference to it was banned by the then editor. But Hinton said the complaint was unfounded, and amounted to "accusations and allegations". The parliamentary report will also criticise the former News of the World editor Colin Myler and the newspaper's long serving chief lawyer Tom Crone in a long awaited document due to be released on Tuesday. Myler, who is now editor of the New York Daily News, and Crone had been repeatedly pressed on their failure to uncover what had happened. However, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, the two previous editors of the Sunday tabloid when phone hacking took place, will not be singled out, because both have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the intercepting of voicemail messages. Committee members felt they could not condemn indiduals who had been arrested – providing some relief for David Cameron, who appointed Coulson as his chief spin doctor after Coulson resigned from the News of the World after Goodman was jailed. Individuals found guilty of misleading parliament can be called to the bar of the Commons to apologise. James Murdoch's father, Rupert, who gave evidence to the committee last July shortly after shutting the News of the World, is not accused of misleading parliament. But the MPs' report is understood to be critical of the corporate culture of News International, the UK subsdiary of his News Corporation, and the immediate parent company of the News of the World

News Corporation has sought to undermine elected governments Rupert Murdoch is a man driven not so much by market forces as a deep desire to optimise his empire's power and influence By David Puttnam guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 April 2012 16.00 EDT The story that unfolded last week at the Royal Courts of Justice has roots that stretch back more than three decades. Behind the highly rehearsed faux candour of Murdoch senior, and the bland evasions of his son, lies a story in which democracy – not just in the UK, but in the US, Australia and elsewhere – has been consistently and wilfully undermined in pursuit not simply of profit but, far more corrosively, of power. For the past 30 years, the Murdoch empire has sought to undermine and destabilise elected governments, and independent regulators, in pursuit of a political agenda that, while hiding behind a smokescreen of free market orthodoxy, is in the end nothing less than a sophisticated attempt to optimise the power and influence of News Corporation and its populist, rightwing agenda. That's to say low (or better still, no) corporate taxes, minimal state regulation and the creation of an aura of "exceptionalism" sufficient to convince and recruit many of the most senior politicians in the western world to either turn a blind eye or actively help the company to achieve its commercial objectives. The strategy is well-honed and, as Murdoch himself once admitted, brutally simple. "You tell the bloody politicians what they want to hear and once the deal is done don't worry about it," ran one quote in Thomas Kiernan's biography, Citizen Murdoch. "They're not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said wasn't what they wanted to hear. Otherwise, they're made to look bad and they can't abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass." The prime minister, Jeremy Hunt and other cabinet ministers were simply the latest in a long line, reaching back over three decades, to find themselves seduced by the possibility of Murdoch's support, only to discover their fair-weather friend has a habit of turning nasty when things fail to go his way. Indeed, as I once (unsuccessfully) tried to explain to Jeremy Hunt, vast quantities of political capital can be spent clearing up the unintended consequences of what might, at the time, have appeared politically expedient decisions. It is now clear that the extent of the secretary of state's prior dealings with the Murdoch empire, in opposition and then in government, were such as to make it totally inappropriate for him to have been handed political responsibility for oversight of News Corporation's bid for the whole of BSkyB. He now finds himself branded as having behaved, not impartially, but more like a dodgy ref who not only demonstrates bias on the pitch, but ducks into the dressing room at half-time to offer advice. To any politician with a serious interest in pursuing a "quasi-judicial" approach based on carefully assembled evidence, it ought to have been clear from the outset that the level of unregulated market and financial power that would accrue to News Corporation as a result of this transaction was likely to ensure the eventual emasculation of "free to air" public service broadcasting as we've known it. It should have been clear that the BBC and Channel 4 would in a relatively short time have become little more than publicly funded research-and-development operations for subscription services, in danger of following the trajectory towards irrelevance that's been the fate of the public broadcasting system in the US. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I had the privilege of chairing a joint committee (Lords and Commons) that sought to unhook any future secretary of state from the decision-making nightmare into which Mr Hunt has plunged himself. Clearly we failed. As he described it in Parliament last week: "This is a problem that has bedevilled politics for a very long time… they are very, very difficult issues." On 6 July 2009, the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, announced that, should he become prime minister, he would remove Ofcom's policy-making powers and cut back the communications regulator "by a huge amount". He went on to say that "the scope of their influence raises important questions for our democracy and our politics – these are organisations that feel no pressure to answer for what happens – in a way that is completely unaccountable". They must have been cheering him to the echo in Wapping and two months later the Sun came out, all guns blazing, for the Conservative party. Corporate objectives and political expediency had found themselves in perfect alignment. Rereading that "Bonfire of the Quangos" speech in the light of last week's events, it's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry! I've devoted the past 30 years of my life to issues of media plurality and the challenge of preserving the widest possible spectrum in the provision of both information and entertainment. Many will argue, with some justification, that the shotgun marriage that became BSkyB brought a significant degree of plurality and diversity to broadcast television, albeit at a cost few would have believed possible 25 years ago. However, a successful media environment does not happen by accident and, when it does occur, it can and to my mind absolutely should be supported by thoughtful and sensitive regulation. What is certain is that plurality and diversity are not, and never can be, a natural "byproduct" of unregulated market forces. I believe it's the responsibility of public policy to ensure the independence and diversity of opinion that have been a unique hallmark of our national culture, a quality much envied in other parts of the world. I've also attempted to be strictly non-partisan in my commitment to these issues. At different times, this has led to battles with most of the relevant unions and trade bodies, all of the broadcasters, even my own party. In every case, what I was opposing was the concentration of power – be it from the market or elsewhere. The impact of new communication technologies has, if anything, made this more rather than less challenging. I would argue that competition law, in a fast-moving sector such as the media, must be able to take account of, and make judgments based on, "highly probable" as well as "actual" market dominance. In the House of Lords and elsewhere, I have repeatedly called for a comprehensive cross-media impact study – so far to no avail. At the end of his session with Lord Justice Leveson, Rupert Murdoch described the digital landscape, which we have now entered, as one in which tablets and GPS-enabled smartphones are displacing newsprint. The potential of this technology to engender even greater competitive diversity in an intelligently regulated democracy ought to be very welcome. It should result in a broadening of the lens through which we see the world, not a narrowing of it. But that requires a clear regulatory framework that encourages, in fact enables, media plurality to flourish. We cannot, for example, legislate for good journalism, but we can legislate for the conditions under which the very best journalism is nurtured and sustained. We can create frameworks in which each new technology becomes a spur for diversity, not an instrument of its erosion. My passion was always based on a conviction that "information" and its related industries are unlike any other, in that they have an enormous influence on the broadest range of opinions and behaviour – in fact on the very health of society. As the distinguished historian Lord Hennessy put it: "This debate is about nothing less than the nature of 21st-century sovereignty." Lord Puttnam is a Labour peer and was chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Committee for the 2003 Communications Act

Why Cameron and Osborne fear losing their firewall The scandal over the BSkyB bid reveals how close Tory leadership was to News Corp By Jane Merrick, Brian Brady, Matt Chorley Sunday, 29 April 2012 The Independent When Jeremy Hunt delivered his less than certain Commons statement on his role in the BSkyB bid and the Frédéric Michel emails last Wednesday, David Cameron and George Osborne remained on the front bench next to the embattled Culture Secretary. For more than an hour, the Prime Minister and Chancellor were unable to move – to leave would suggest they were hanging Hunt out to dry. But their expressions revealed they were less than happy at their position. Cameron, who did not make eye contact with Hunt as the minister arrived at the Dispatch Box, appeared annoyed that he had to show his support. Next to him on the front bench sat Osborne, already grim-faced after news of the UK returning to recession. Ultimately, however, they could not move because these two men are personally as bound up in the current scandal as the hapless Culture Secretary and his special adviser Adam Smith, who had resigned that morning. This weekend, with Hunt's job hanging in the balance, Cameron and Osborne are weighing up whether to save the Culture Secretary or to force him to resign. The refusal by No 10 to order a separate inquiry into Hunt's conduct shows the balance is currently tipped in favour of saving him. To let him go would be to tear down the firewall between News Corp, with Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks on one side, and the highest ranks of the Tory party, with Cameron, Osborne and the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, on the other. The Prime Minister recognises that it is the closeness to the Murdoch empire of these three at the top of government that goes to the true heart of the scandal. In February 2009, News Corp, under its chief executive, James Murdoch, hired Frédéric Michel as its European public affairs director. Michel was to start smoothing the path for News Corp's bid to take over BSkyB, which would be announced following the 2010 election. With the Tories predicted to win that election, the contacts between News Corp and Cameron were stepped up. A year earlier, Cameron visited Rupert Murdoch on his yacht off Santorini, and had meetings with his son James and Rebekah Brooks, then editor of The Sun, promoted to chief executive of News International (NI) in June 2009. That summer, according to sources, Osborne ordered Hunt to get close to James Murdoch. And when further revelations of phone hacking at the News of the World emerged in July that year, Osborne took the extraordinary decision to rubbish them and attempted to distance Andy Coulson, the No 10 spin-doctor he helped to hire after resigning over hacking in 2007, from the fresh allegations. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday during the Norwich North by-election in July 2009, the shadow chancellor insisted: "I see no new allegations that are directly connected with Andy Coulson. I think it's up to those who made the allegations to substantiate them and I've not seen those allegations substantiated to date. And I thought it was pretty significant that the police came out and made it clear that they'd investigated all of this and there was no new evidence." In hindsight, it is easy to see why Osborne was so keen for the scandal to die down. In August 2009 Murdoch Jnr delivered a blistering attack on the BBC and Ofcom at the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival. That same month, Hunt took a trip to New York, where he met News Corp executives. Despite the putative BSkyB bid being mulled over inside News Corp, Hunt's aides have insisted that the issue of the satellite broadcaster did not come up. Cameron was summoned to a meeting with James Murdoch at George, a private members club in Mayfair, in September 2009, where he was informed that NI titles would switch their allegiance back to the Tories from Labour. It is clear that, from 2009, both the Tory and News Corp ships were sailing in the same direction. Once the BSkyB bid process started, the close links continued. The contacts that Hunt and Cameron had with the Murdochs have been widely reported. But it was also Osborne and Gove who were frequent dining companions of the media family. Government documents reveal that Osborne met senior NI figures, including Rupert and James as well as Brooks, at least 10 times in the first 15 months after he became Chancellor. Gove met his most senior former colleagues at NI on at least 12 occasions in his first 15 months as Education Secretary. Most importantly, however, was Cameron's contact. In a statement to the Commons in July 2011, the PM insisted he had had no "inappropriate conversations" with James Murdoch or other News Corp executives. However, as we now know after Murdoch Jnr's evidence to the Leveson inquiry last week, he did discuss the bid with Cameron in December 2010. Hunt told the Commons last Wednesday that the conversations were not "inappropriate" because Cameron was not in charge of the decision – a claim that stretches credulity, at best. Those who opposed the BSkyB bid were astonished to discover the special treatment given to Murdoch. The campaign group Avaaz, which mustered 40,000 people to respond to the government consultation, felt shut out in the cold. Repeated demands for a meeting were rebuffed. "We were well on Jeremy Hunt's radar. His special advisers would have clocked that Avaaz were out there, yet when we phoned up we got the brush-off," said its campaign director, Alex Wilks. In fact, the only meeting the group had was last April, outside a Sainsbury's supermarket in Godalming, in Hunt's Surrey constituency. "His main point was that he was scared that 'lawyers on both sides are ready to sue the pants off me if I mess up the scrutiny of this deal'," Wilks recalled. In May, Hunt slowed the consultation process, citing the huge response. Wilks said this weekend: "It is outrageous that Jeremy Hunt, while claiming to be fair and looking into all sides... was leaning over backwards to communicate with Murdoch's people and yet ignore members of the public. David Cameron should show leadership and show Jeremy Hunt the door." But, as things stood last night, Cameron is staying his hand. A hint of the lengths No 10 is going to to save the Culture Secretary came in the revelation that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, phoned Lord Justice Leveson on Tuesday in an effort to help Hunt. Officials claimed Heywood had been trying to ensure that "all key" witnesses, including those likely to support Hunt's defence, would appear as part of the inquiry. But critics said he had been trying to interfere with an independent process. Calls for Sir Alex Allan, the PM's independent adviser on the Ministerial Code, to investigate the allegations against Hunt have been stonewalled. The IoS understands that Heywood was asked to make the call because it was deemed inappropriate for Hunt himself to do it, but Leveson officials are understood to have been "bewildered" by the approach. However, with time apparently running out for Hunt, Cameron and Osborne's firewall is at risk, and things are about to get much more uncomfortable for the two men. He's no Walter Mitty, but a key player Under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, a Tory backbencher last week described News Corp lobbyist Frédéric Michel as a "Walter Mitty" figure who had exaggerated his influence with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to impress his boss, James Murdoch. But Michel – Fred to his friends – has played a key role behind the political scenes for more than a decade. Ten years ago, he was director of the New Labour think tank Policy Network; Peter Mandelson was chairman. With centre-left politics in the ascendant, he helped organise a private summit between the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and former US president Bill Clinton. The awayday at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire was dismissed by John Prescott (not invited) as a gathering of a "bunch of wonkers", but guests included the rising stars David Miliband and Yvette Cooper, as well as Mandelson himself. Michel left Policy Network in 2003 – amid reports of a falling out with Mandelson – to set up his own PR firm, ReputationInc. But his stock soared again when James Murdoch appointed him News Corp's director of public affairs for Europe in February 2009. Here, he began an under-the-radar operation to launch News Corp's bid to take over BSkyB. This included James Murdoch's MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2009, in which the News Corp heir launched an incendiary attack on the "chilling" activities of the BBC. As we now know, Michel's lobbying stepped up after the bid was formally announced, post the 2010 election, when he began dealing with Hunt's adviser Adam Smith. In early December 2010, Michel was approached by the EU foreign affairs chief, Baroness Ashton, to be her spin-doctor. He never made the move. Days later Vince Cable was caught in a sting and the decision on the BSkyB bid was passed to Hunt. Michel is not the first person to be dismissed as a "Walter Mitty" figure – David Kelly was famously described as such by No 10 after his death, a slur that was shown to be untrue and which continued to haunt Blair's government. It is a lesson Hunt and David Cameron would do well to heed. Jane Merrick The circumstantial evidence January 2006 Rupert Murdoch has lunch with David Cameron and George Osborne. May 2007 Andy Coulson becomes David Cameron's spin-doctor. February 2009 James Murdoch hires PR man Frédéric Michel to lobby for BSkyB bid. July 2009 First details of News of the World's cover-up of phone-hacking. December 2009 News International CEO Rebekah Brooks hosts Christmas dinner, with the Camerons, the Osbornes and the Murdochs. February 2010 Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt discusses Sky's commercial interests with James Murdoch. May 2010 The Conservatives form a coalition government. June 2010 News Corp announces its bid for BSkyB. November 2010 Vince Cable refers the BSkyB bid to Ofcom. 21 December 2010 Cable is removed from bid decision, Hunt is put in charge. 23 December 2010 The Camerons and James Murdoch attend Christmas dinner at the Brookses. The bid is discussed. 31 December 2010 Ofcom tells Hunt the bid might have to go to the Competition Commission. 6 January 2011 James Murdoch meets Hunt and officials at the DCMS. 21 January 2011 Andy Coulson resigns from 10 Downing Street. 24 January 2011 Hunt's office supplies News Corp with advance details of market-sensitive statement to be released the following morning. 26 January 2011 Metropolitan Police officially reopen NOTW phone-hacking inquiry. February 2011 Ofcom demands safeguards from News Corp. March 2011 Hunt announces green light for revised deal, subject to competition concerns. June 2011 Hunt sanctions the bid, subject to consultation. 4 July 2011 The Guardian reveals NOTW hacked Milly Dowler's phone. 6 July 2011 Cameron announces inquiry into phone-hacking. 7 July 2011 Rupert Murdoch announces closure of NOTW. 8 July 2011 Coulson arrested over phone-hacking allegations. 1 September 2011 Leveson inquiry starts hearing evidence. 26 April 2012 James Murdoch gives evidence; emails reveal extent of his contact with Hunt's office during the bid process. 27 April 2012 Adam Smith, Hunt's adviser, resigns over relationship with News Corp; Hunt tells Parliament he did not act improperly. 28 April 2012 Leveson rejects Hunt's request to give evidence early; Downing Street rules out inquiry over alleged breach of ministerial code.

David Cameron could fire Jeremy Hunt if new evidence emerges Mr Cameron said if new evidence emerged showing Mr Hunt's direct relationship with News Corporation had been too close, he could fire his minister. The Telegraph 10:39AM BST 29 Apr 2012 "If evidence comes out through this exhaustive inquiry where you're giving evidence under oath - if he did breach the ministerial code - than clearly that's a different issue and I would act," said Mr Cameron. Mr Cameron offered qualified support to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is facing calls for his resignation over his handling of the BSkyB deal. "As things stand, I don't believe Jeremy Hunt broke the ministerial code," Mr Cameron said. But Mr Cameron said that the email contact between Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's special adviser Adam Michel and News Corporation's lobbyist Frederic Michel was "wrong", "too close, too frequent and inappropriate". Mr Cameron said it would be "wrong" to sack Mr Hunt because his special adviser Adam Smith - who quit on Wednesday as the row grew - had been "too close" to the Murdoch empire and "acted inappropriately". "There's absolutely no doubt that the contact between the special adviser in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and News International, that was too close, too frequent and that's why there special adviser resigned, and that was the right thing to do," said Mr Cameron. But he added: "I don't think it would be right in every circumstance if a special advisers gets something wrong to automatically sack the minister." The Prime Minister went onto back beleaguered Mr Hunt, saying: "He does a good job, I think he's a good Culture, Media and Sport Secretary. "I think he's doing an excellent job on the Olympics and frankly I do think people deserve to have these things looked into properly." He called for "natural justice" to take its course so Mr Hunt could "explain his actions, all the information comes out". On the matter of his own contact with Rupert Murdoch and members of his media empire, the Prime Minister admitted that he was embarrassed and that he might have done things differently in hindsight. Mr Cameron admitted discussing matters with Mr Murdoch's son and top News Corp executive James Murdoch at a Christmas party at the Oxfordshire home of then News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks. Asked whether he was embarrassed that he was even at the party, Mr Cameron said: "Clearly, after all that's been written and said about it, yes of course one might do things differently." Mr Cameron said he did not recall the exact details of his conversation with Mr Murdoch but that it concerned the recent controversy over Business Secretary Vince Cable's comments that he had "declared war" on News Corporation. "What I recall saying, although I can't remember every detail of the conversation, is saying something like: clearly that was unacceptable, it was embarrassing for the Government, and to be clear from now on this whole issue would be dealt with impartially, properly, in the correct way, but obviously I had nothing to do with it, I recused myself from it," he said. But he maintained it was "not true" there was any agreement that in return for the Murdochs' support of the Government he would help their business interests or allow the BSkyB merger to go through. "It would be absolutely wrong for there to be any sort of deal and there wasn't he told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show. "There was no grand deal."

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