Douglas Caddy

An Interview with John Dean

By Matthew Rothschild

May 20, 2006

The Progressive Magazine

http://progressive.org/mag_wx052006

Here is a transcript of an interview with John Dean of Watergate fame.

Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel for three years and then testified again him. He is the author, most recently, of “Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.” On March 31, Dean testified in favor of Senator Russ Feingold’s censure bill. The interview was conducted on April 28 by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine. You can listen to the interview at http://progressive.org/radio_dean06.

Q: Tell me what you’re lasting impressions are of Richard Nixon.

Dean: In a way, he’s a comic figure. In other ways, he’s a tragic figure. I have a memory of a very complex man locked in my synapses.

Q: How long did you work for him?

Dean: A thousand days. When you listen to him on the tapes, he would be one person with his chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, he’d be somebody else with Henry Kissinger, he’d be somebody else with me. He had these different personae. I don’t think he ever had great administrative skills for the Presidency. He was slow to interact with his staff. He was very stiff. It was kind of like walking onto a set of an Oval Office when I used to first go into see him. But later on I’d walk in and he’d have his feet on the desk and he’d be talking to me around his shoes.

He was uneasy. In fact, one of the interesting things about Nixon is that we had to prepare something called talking papers for him. Anytime we brought someone in the office to meet the President, because he had a zero gift of gab, you literally had to have a few sentences, buzzwords, thoughts, so he could start a conversation with this person. Alex Butterfield, who ushered more people into the office than anybody else, told me that occasionally if Nixon didn’t have this he was literally speechless.

Q: And Butterfield was the guy who surfaced the tapes.

Dean: He’s the one who, indeed, corroborated the fact that there were tapes. I had speculated in my testimony that I thought I was taped. It was the only speculation I put in that testimony back in 1973, and thank god I did. Because when they were trying to discredit my testimony, they had a system where they fanned out and interviewed all sorts of people, and so they called Butterfield in, and said, “Dean made this amazing statement that he thought he was recorded. Now isn’t that impossible?” And Butterfield said, “No, I think he’s right.” What made me aware of the fact that I was being taped was Nixon’s behavior late in the game when he literally goes to the corner of his hideaway office and starts whispering around the potted palm, “I was foolish to do this” or, “I made a mistake when I did that.”

Q: Did you ever speak with Nixon after he resigned?

Dean: Never did. I think it would have been very difficult for him. I’m not the only one who never spoke to him. John Erlichman, his chief domestic adviser, never talked to him. Bob Haldeman and he had sort of parted ways. They did patch up before they both passed away.

Nixon actually was very flattering in one sense in his memoirs about me. When he started dealing with me, he’d written in his diary that I’ve got this bright young guy. But then he said I was obviously a traitor for breaking rank.

Q: How have you dealt with that accusation?

Dean: It doesn’t bother me at all because everybody for whom I had any respect I told what I was going to do before I did it. I said, “Listen, I’m not going to lie for anybody. So plan your life around that.” I said I was going to go to the prosecutors after I had told the President he was in deep trouble with the so-called cancer on the Presidency conversation. After that, people knew where I stood, and I actually had the support of some of my colleagues who said, “Do it.”

What my plan was, I thought my colleagues would do the right thing, that they would stand up and tell the truth and that would end it, and that Nixon might save himself by coming forward and saying, “Yeah, I made some bad mistakes. Here’s what I did.” But instead he just escalated the cover-up to the point where he had no choice but to resign or be impeached.

Q: Some people think he could have saved his Presidency by apologizing even at the eleventh hour?

Dean: Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It’s a natural tendency.

Q: I’m very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush.

Dean: Both mean learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don’t feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David—he just didn’t like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It’s like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House.

And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there’s no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It’s almost as if we’d left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, “This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try.” As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixon’s wildest dreams.

The reason I wrote a book with the title “Worse than Watergate,” and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon’s Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush’s abuses, and Cheney’s—to me, it’s a Bush/ Cheney Presidency—and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That’s much more serious.

Q: Dying in Iraq?

Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they’re dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we can torture during interrogations—I can’t even get their mentally. And when you read their briefs, they didn’t get there mentally.

Q: The amazing thing about your book is that it was written before Cheney went up to lobby for torture, before the NSA scandal broke, and before the Valerie Plame thing.

Dean: They just keep walking into my title and adding additional chapters.

Q: Talk a little bit more about Dick Cheney. You call him “co-President” in your book.

Dean: I do. It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win at the Supreme Court. I’ve got some friends who were in there and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Cheney’s setting things up the way he wants. He’s designing a National Security Council that’s more powerful than the statutory National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. And it was, and it is. She was the perfect foil for him because he can roll over her anytime he wants, and he does. Putting her over at State is even better: Keep her out on the road. The Cheney-Rumsfeld connection has really been driving the foreign policy since day one.

Q: Why do you think Bush divested so much of his power to Cheney?

Dean: Bush had expertise in one thing: How to run a Presidential campaign. He understands campaigns and Presidential politics. He has no interest or disposition or I think probably—he’s not stupid, but he’s not bright, he’s not a rocket scientist—he isn’t interested in policy.

Cheney is the opposite. He loves this stuff. He’s a wonk. He gets into it, and he’s had very strong feelings about issues that he’s held for a long time.

He has been determined to expand Presidential power. I can’t find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers.

Q: Tell me about the Feingold hearing on censure.

Dean: I’ve been invited several times over the last decade or more to testify before Congress, and I’ve always found a polite way not to do it.

Q: Why is that?

Dean: I knew it would make a certain sensation, my first return since the Watergate hearings. I thought it should be an issue that’s important. It should be an issue I felt strongly about. So when Senator Feingold invited me to appear on his censure resolution, I thought, this is a very good issue. I appeared not as a partisan. My partisan days are really long behind me.

Q: How do you identify yourself politically?

Dean: I’m registered as an independent. And I vote for as many Democrats as I do Republicans. I’m really a centrist in many ways. I don’t fly on either wing. I explained to the Senate committee that there was a lot of baggage connected with censure. But I said how important it was that the Senate do something since Feingold’s bill was addressing a blatant violation of law, the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he went to Congress to seek permission after the fact. We have a President who says, “Screw that, I’m just going to do it.” It’s an in-your-face attitude. And he’s rolling over the prerogatives of Congress.

Q: You made a comment that should be famous: When Bush said he was bypassing the FISA requirements, you remarked that it was “the first time a President has actually confessed to an impeachable offense.”

Dean:That’s exactly what he did. One of the provisions in Nixon’s bill of impeachment was his warrantless surveillance of media people, which is now covered directly by the FISA law. Warrantless wiretapping is an impeachable offense. It couldn’t be any clearer.

Q: In your book, you also talk about the possibility—I would say the likelihood—that Bush lied this country into war. Can Bush be impeached for that, too?

Dean: When I deconstructed his State of the Union just before the Iraq War and looked at the available information even then, it was clear that the representations he was making as fact were not fact. Is that lying? It certainly is a form of distortion. This is the highest point in a Presidency in his relationship to Congress when he reports for the State of the Union. It is a crime to lie to Congress. The founders thought that misrepresentation to Congress was to be an impeachable offense. And the way Bush did it in the follow up procedures he actually belittled Congress in sending them bogus material. It was really quite stunning when one peels it all apart. And I said, “Is there any question in my mind that this is an impeachable offense?” No.

Q: How do you respond to people who say impeachment is never going to happen?

Dean: There’s a political reality about impeachment. It’s purely a political process. The interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” can reach a long way, all the way to sex in the Oval Office, which was an absurd use of the impeachment clause. Impeachment is the big cannon. As long as the same party that controls Congress controls the White House it just isn’t going to happen. I’m not sure that even if a President murdered his wife, they would impeach him. But those who are focusing on this issue are raising important questions. And one of the reasons I thought a censure resolution was appropriate was because if somebody had censured Nixon or even if a resolution of either house had passed, saying what you’re doing is unacceptable to Congress, that shot across the bow might have straightened him up. I wish Feingold’s resolution could get more traction. It might provide us all some safety because there’s two more years left of this Presidency. And I must say there’s a good possibility in November that the House or Senate or both is going to go Democratic, and it’s going to be hell for this Presidency for the last two years, and they’ve earned it. And that’s when impeachment could become a true reality. I’d settle for oversight, but impeachment’s not out of the question.

Q: I’d think, if things get hotter, and the Democrats get control of the House, that censure might be attractive to Bush, if he’s got any sense, so he could put a lid on this cauldron.

Dean: It’s not a bad idea because they have supplied a steady diet of material. It’s going to be two years of executive privilege fights. The subpoena will change the complexion of the oversight.

Q: In your testimony at the Feingold censure hearing, you said that this is the first time you’ve actually feared our government. Why is that?

Dean: Now I don’t frighten easily, but I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works behind closed doors. And I know, from little tidbits I’m picking up from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that there’s more probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-called war on terror.

Q: Do you fear for our democratic system?

Dean: I fear for the system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties.

The Rebel Journalist

The Memoirs of Wilfred Burchett

By CHRISTOPHER REED

http://www.counterpunch.org/reed05132006.html

May 13/14, 2006

I had to wait for my review copy of this book for a few weeks. The publisher in Sydney explained that the copy scheduled for me had been diverted to an interloper who had urgently demanded a copy. The interloper turned out to be none other than General Giap, the military genius of the 20th century, vanquisher of the French at Dien Bien Phu, mangler of the world's mightiest battle machine.

That Vietnam's supreme hero was eager to have his copy of Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett (University of New South Wales Press, distributed in the US by the University of Washington Press) is not surprising. Burchett knew Giap personally, and mentions him numerous times in the volume's 756 pages. He also knew and was a valued friend of Chou En-lai, Ho Chi Minh, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Fidel Castro, Major Charles Orde Wingate, and a host of senior ministers, diplomats and politicians, mainly from China and Vietnam.

This does not mean Burchett (1911- 1983) was one of those journalists who love power and hang around with its purveyors and practitioners in the belief they, and only they, will provide the important news. On the contrary, Burchett came from the opposite school - and was the better reporter for it. He believed in being on the spot, but also in talking to ordinary people and above all in observing and probing events.

The book is co-edited by artist George Burchett, Wilfred's younger son, and Dr Nick Shimmin, an Anglo-Australian author and editor, who describes Wilfred as "the greatest journalist Australia has ever produced, and one of the best foreign correspondents the world has ever seen". I worked with Burchett, liked him a lot, agree with Shimmin's definition, and sadly his second point, that people exist "who have sustained decades-long, vitriolic attacks on him and his legacy." The reason: Burchett reported from "the other side" and made no secret of his Communist sympathies.

To a post-Cold War generation the intensity of this hatred may seem odd. Even to those of us who remember those days, the nastiness of the period's ideological divisions and the extremes to which the right would go in its hysteria and paranoia, stays as the sourest of memories . Among those in power that Burchett met, brash American bravado and ignorance remain unmatched in his account of four decades of making war and seeking peace, but for sheer oafishness his own hick Australians go unequalled. The British excel in racist snobbery and incompetence, backed by ghastly "old boy" camaraderie piled on uninvited, and which Burchett masterfully captures and pins. The wise Chinese, valiant Vietnamese and forbearing Russians mostly maintain a gallant composure, but as noted, the author is pro-Communist.

Yet was he a capital-c Communist, or a "Red" to use the old color scheme? This has been a recurring theme in evaluations of Burchett's work, and it returns with this book. As he made his beat unique, reporting the Vietnamese war literally from Vietcong underground tunnels, and from it scooped his journalist colleagues regularly, Burchett often featured in the news himself. On such occasions, the word "Communist" was simply an adjective placed in front of his name. Did it invalidate his findings? He always denied being a Communist and does so several times in the book. Nobody has ever produced a piece of paper belonging to a Communist party with Burchett's name and signature upon it. Does it matter if Wilfred Burchett joined the Communist Party of Australia in the Depression as a young man seeking work as a construction carpenter amid mass unemployment, and supporting the downtrodden against big bosses and rapacious landlords? Or did he join later somewhere else, or never?

My plea is to give the Burchett/CP membership charge an overdue and much deserved rest. It remains after all these years only a Cold War cudgel to beat one of the greatest providers of news from the left that journalism has produced, and who therefore mightily pissed off the authoritarian right because his scoops were so telling.

This is the man who in 1967 when preparing one of his 31 books, called it upon publication in 1968, Vietnam Will Win. The US was then claiming imminent victory, but was defeated eight years later. Burchett saw the issues he discusses up close. Employed in penury in his native Gippsland, Victoria, he discovers the power of workers who organize when they help him combat a ruthless boss. Later in 1938 as a travel courier in Germany - he was a self-taught multi-linguist - he helps many of his agency's Jewish customers to escape Nazi persecution. One he visits in Berlin is too distraught to speak. He later tells Burchett that literally two minutes before he rang the door bell, his brother had shot himself dead rather than face a concentration camp.

Burchettt did not become a reporter until almost 30. It was in Australia, where the war now raging that nobody thought would happen reminded editors of one reader's letters they consistently declined to publish. They came from a young man who seemed to know a lot about Germany and he was invited to write articles. This experience formed Burchett's opinion of the woeful laziness and lack of guts in the mainstream press that guided the rest of his life's journalism. He worked mainly for small left publications, after some glorious war reporting in Burma, India, and China - and scooping the world on Hiroshima - with the Daily Express of London, then one of the world's best papers for foreign coverage despite its eccentric Toryism. He lived in Indo-China, Moscow, East Europe and Peking, but was always away on stories. His weary months with cease- fire talks at Panmunjom during the Korean war demonstrate in detail the duplicity of American negotiators, who wanted the war to continue, and expose a dreadful truth: that military men and diplomats care more about scoring points off each other than the fact that their delays cause mass deaths each day they prevaricate.

He makes a strong circumstantial case that Americans did use germ warfare in Korea - another subject that dogged his career and inflamed opponents. His repeated spells of months living with National Liberation Front guerrillas, dressed in a black pajama-style outfit with a conical straw hat, riding a bicycle, crouching in tunnels, sleeping in hammocks, and moving mostly at night in areas "controlled" by American forces and their South Vietnam allies, often inside Saigon, showed him that no matter what military monster roared forth, the country was already lost to the foreign invaders and their puppets. He knew

then he would publish these truths. No wonder he was hated. In Greece in 1946 when his dispatches exposed the fake election and forecast civil war, the British consul-general who earlier called him "old boy," now told him he was expelled. An American journalist  George Polk -- was murdered. The civil war lasted more than three years. "I had merely reported what I observed", he writes, "drawing upon the natural and logical deductions from these observations. But the period in which what becomes obvious truth catches up with that perceived and published by a diligent journalist, can be very uncomfortable, as I have discovered many times in my career. And the process keeps repeating, with no credit from the critics of past bull's eyes when they are disputing the accuracy of the latest shot."

He makes it sound simple, and in fact it is not that complicated. Mainstream media are festooned with lies every day, especially in the US, where a major reason is American insistence on "objective" quotations. This means you print the lies officials tell you. These "officials" are selected with blatant bias. Months pass without hearing from one trade union leader. Left-of-liberal opinions are never sought. Known mountebanks mouth on unchallenged. And in wars, as we know, truth is the first casualty. Yet here is another important question raised by Burchett's book, which is an enlargement of his 1981 recollections, At the Barricades. Why is it considered wrong, even treacherous, for someone to report a war on the side fighting the nation in which he or she is a citizen? There is no law against it - although in Burchett's case his government wanted to pass one, while refusing for 17 years to replace his stolen passport.

As he points out, the New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury (quoted in the front as a Burchett admirer), and the leftish British journalist James Cameron, both visited north Vietnam during the war. They were not labelled "Communist agent" as Burchett was by Tom Lambert in the Los Angeles Times. Lambert's shoddy lies offer direct evidence that these are his customary currency. "With the inception of Communism, and its deliberate subjection of journalism to ideology, a new type of reporter came into being...the journalist political agent," Lambert fibs. Never, of course, has capitalism required ideological fealty from the journalists it employs... In another respect, Burchett readily admits to acting as an agent in the sense of participating in the historical events he finds himself reporting, to try to bring about something useful. It is the simple duty of a member of society, he argues. He became a key source for fellow journalists at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam and at Panmunjom; he conveyed constructive messages between warring sides; and he intervened to help an Australian prisoner of war in Korea (and was castigated by other ex-prisoners as a KGB agent for his trouble).

If there is criticism of this large work it is the final chapter and its ending. Burchett, as edited, concludes with an outraged account of the biased conduct of a court case for defamation he brought in Sydney in 1974. A miserable right-wing ex-senator, John Kane, wrote an article accusing Burchett of taking money from the KGB to act on its behalf while his own nation was at war with enemies the KGB supported. In other words he was a traitor. The main witness against him was a Soviet defector of notorious dishonesty, who claimed to have recruited him in Moscow where Burchett lived in luxury.

By bringing the $1m action, Burchett gave the Australian conservative dingbats who had always hated him a superb opportunity to air every foul slander and slur they could imagine. They exploited this fully. Adultery and blackmail were dragged in. He was said to bring down governments just by visiting their countries, as he had in Greece and Portugal. None of it was true but little real evidence for him was permitted, except an old Moscow acquaintance who recalled his apartment as modest. His case was unnecessary as Labor had won the recent election, in which Kane was ousted. It immediately restored Burchett's passport, whereupon the newspapers headlined him "Citizen Burchett". Months later, headlines screamed about wild courtroom allegations. He should have dropped the case and let Kane wallow in his inadequacies.

Instead, Burchett won a pyrrhic victory. The jury found he had been defamed, but that Kane had parliamentary privilege for his previously-spoken allegations - something a cub reporter could have spotted. Burchett was stuck with six-figure costs he could not pay, restoring the exile caused by his formerly missing passport. Never having learned libel as a trainee reporter, Burchett may not have known enough about parliamentary privilege; his lawyer should have warned him.

The book ends there, on a sad note not fully explained. Missing too for space reasons are his mid-1970s exploits in Portugal and its former African colonies, and elsewhere. The solution would be Volume 2 of Burchett's memoirs: his last travels and thoughts, the final fitting climax to a life magnificently lived by a good man doing a good job the best way he could.

Christopher Reed is a British freelance journalist in Japan. His email is christopherreed@earthlink.net.

From "A G-Man's Life"

A G-MAN'S LIFE

The FBI, Being "Deep Throat," and the Struggle for Honor in Washington.

By Mark Felt and John O'Connor.

Illustrated. 319 pp. PublicAffairs. $26.95.

Reviewed by John Dean

May 7, 2006

The New York Times Book Review

MARK FELT'S book "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington" was assembled by a California lawyer, John O'Connor. Assisted by the Felt family, O'Connor first resolved the mystery of Deep Throat's identity in an article for Vanity Fair last year. Unfortunately, the book they have now produced adds absolutely nothing to our understanding about Felt's role as Bob Woodward's source during Watergate.

All we know about Deep Throat is what Woodward has told us, and he reports in "The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat" that given Felt's current dementia (he's 92), unless he had "some secret record he had kept or had told to someone unknown," "the answers to the main questions" are "unavailable." Woodward cannot explain, for example, how Felt observed the flowerpot on Woodward's apartment balcony, indicating he wanted to meet; or how Felt marked home-delivered copies of Woodward's New York Times, indicating that Felt wanted to meet with him. Nor can he answer "the all-important question of his motive." "A G-Man's Life" suggests that Felt never kept such a record or confided such information.

If one compares what Felt supposedly told Woodward, as set forth in "All the President's Men," with the historical record — as I once did on a long flight (the results can be seen at writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20050603.appendix.html) — almost half of Felt's reported information is wrong. Obviously, only Felt himself could explain why he got so much wrong, but he is no longer able to do so.

O'Connor writes in the introduction that because Felt's memory has "faded," he has combined two earlier writings by Felt: his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," and "a subsequent manuscript." Felt was under indictment for authorizing illegal break-ins of friends and relatives of Weather Underground members when he wrote "The FBI Pyramid." (The copyright page suggests that Felt wrote it with the conservative writer Ralph de Toledano, who must be a bit peeved that Felt lied to him about being Deep Throat.)

After Felt's conviction and subsequent pardon by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O'Connor says, Felt prepared a manuscript in which he "recounted happier times as a counterspy and crime-busting G-man (including stories that had been left out of his published book)." In this vaguely described later material, O'Connor writes, Felt "edged closer to his Deep Throat identity." O'Connor used these two works to construct a chronicle of "the events and influences that helped shape Felt's hidden identity, from his days tracking Nazi and Soviet spies to his battles against the Kansas City mob to his role as protector of Hoover's ideals at the F.B.I."

Years ago, as a Throat sleuth, I purchased a copy of "The FBI Pyramid" in a used-book store for $1. Today, "The FBI Pyramid" sells online for up to $1,100 or so — because it is so rare, not because of anything valuable it contains. In his review for this publication, David Wise said that practically the only thing he had learned from the book about the F.B.I. was that its director, J. Edgar Hoover, mainlined vitamins: "Every morning, Valerie Stewart, the chief nurse of the F.B.I. Health Service, gave him an injection of multiple vitamins." If the "subsequent manuscript" has added anything important to "The FBI Pyramid," it escaped this reader's attention.

"A G-Man's Life," like "The FBI Pyramid," views the Federal Bureau of Investigation through rose-colored glasses. Felt virtually ignores the F.B.I. that was described in the 1976 reports of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), and he completely ignores the bureau that was more recently found to have let several men serve 30 years in prison for a murder it knew one of its informants had committed. If Felt's account were even close to accurate, some Republicans and Democrats would not be pursuing legislation to remove Hoover's name from the F.B.I. headquarters building. As Laurence Silberman, a senior federal judge, has nicely summed it up, "it is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr."

The Watergate narrative in "A G-Man's Life" (a slightly expanded version of the one in "The FBI Pyramid") suggests why Deep Throat provided so much bad information to Woodward. Felt's account is given to speculation, not hard evidence. His Watergate material is riddled with errors, some minor, others major. For instance, Felt seems unaware that the White House followed the F.B.I.'s Watergate investigation through Henry Petersen, chief of the criminal division, not through the acting director, L. Patrick Gray. Felt, who was passed over for the director's job, claims that in the period after Gray's departure from the F.B.I., he "knew that as long as John Dean and John Ehrlichman were in the White House," he "would have less chance of receiving the appointment than the man in the moon." But Ehrlichman and I were out of the White House at that time.

At one point he even claims that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, "had certainly been briefed" on the fact that he had been wiretapped at the White House's behest, an absurd assertion. O'Connor's addendum to Felt's Watergate material adds only conjecture to speculation about Felt's motives as Deep Throat; he addresses what Felt "could" have done, and shows a remarkable ability to enter the mind and memory of a man who is unable to do so himself.

With genuine disappointment, I must report that "A G-Man's Life" is weak biography or autobiography (for it is a bit of both), but it is even worse history. To borrow old Watergate vernacular, it isn't even a good "modified limited hangout."

----------------

John W. Dean is a former Nixon White House counsel. His seventh nonfiction book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," will be published in July.

Deep Throat's Other Secret

Watergate Source's New Book Reveals His Wife Committed Suicide

By Lynne Duke

Washington Post

Saturday, April 22, 2006

W. Mark Felt, who for nearly 33 years denied that he was Deep Throat, also held a tragic secret from his family: It was suicide, not a heart attack, that felled his wife after years of strain from Felt's FBI career and ensuing legal troubles.

In his new book, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington," Felt reveals for the first time that Audrey Robinson Felt, his wife of 46 years, shot herself in 1984 with his .38 service revolver after a long emotional and physical decline.

Co-authored with John O'Connor, the lawyer whose Vanity Fair article last year revealed Felt as Deep Throat, the book also reveals Felt's discomfort with the famous moniker given him by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story and brought down President Richard Nixon.

And the book tells of Felt's deep anger at what he believed was Woodward's violation of their source-reporter relationship. Felt did not want to be described in any way in print, but Woodward both described him and called him "Deep Throat" in 1974 in "All the President's Men."

"Mark has never seen himself as a chatterbox who gave up secrets," writes O'Connor in a lengthy introduction.

"If this book does nothing else, let it destroy that caricature. Deep Throat was a journalistic joke; the name never described Mark Felt. After Woodward revealed that he had a senior source in the executive branch, thereby breaking his agreement with Mark Felt, and after the journalist identified his confidant as 'Deep Throat,' the retired FBI man was furious -- slamming down the phone when Woodward called for his reaction" to the 1974 book.

In "The Secret Man," Woodward's 2005 book on Felt's outing as Deep Throat, Woodward also describes Felt's anger at "All the President's Men." Felt had wanted their agreement to be "inviolate," Woodward wrote. But Woodward wrote that he thought he had "some leeway" because Felt had not previously objected to Woodward's other published references to the secret source.

Though the Felt book appears well after Woodward's, it provides the unique perspective of "Watergate in the words of the person most responsible along with Woodward for exposing these massive crimes," O'Connor said in an interview.

Felt, now 92, suffers from dementia. He was hospitalized with a fever even as his book was about to go on sale.

He had been reluctant to publish a book on his secret identity. But his daughter, Joan Felt, convinced him by saying a book could potentially make enough money to pay off some of his grandsons' school bills.

Shortly after Felt publicly revealed his identity last year, he laughingly told the press staked out at his Santa Rosa, Calif., home that he planned to "write a book or something and get all the money I can."

The book is based on his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside," as well as a manuscript he prepared in the 1980s with his son, W. Mark Felt Jr., -- before he publicly revealed himself as Deep Throat. It also is based on FBI memos, recollections and interviews conducted by his family.

O'Connor, a former U.S. attorney in San Francisco who now is in private practice there, adds to Felt's own writings and recollections. In an introduction and epilogue, O'Connor puts into context Felt's many secrets and how he kept them, against the backdrop of Watergate and the malfeasance for which Felt himself was responsible.

"In the FBI, agents learned to keep secrets and compartmentalize, and nobody built more compartments than Mark Felt," O'Connor writes. "He isolated his family life from his Bureau life, hid aspects of his personal life and aspects of his professional life, and of course walled off his secret identity from his public identity."

Scandal engulfed him and his family when, after Watergate, he was prosecuted for ordering "black bag jobs," or secret, warrantless break-ins that in 1972 and 1973 targeted friends and relatives of Weather Underground members. His wife could not bear the trial. She attended only its first day. Even after Felt's 1980 conviction and his subsequent pardon by President Ronald Reagan, her health and stability continued to decline.

She had endured years of stress: moving the two Felt children from city to city to keep up with their father's career, being estranged from her daughter, Joan, who lived a countercultural lifestyle under the sway of a Northern California guru. Alcohol also played a role in Audrey Felt's decline, the book says.

Upon finding his wife's body in the guest bath of their Washington-area apartment, Felt phoned his son.

But as he had done for most of his life as an FBI man and a secret source on Watergate, O'Connor writes, Felt "immediately compartmentalized the family tragedy. Sitting with his son at a table for hours, the father decreed that the suicide would be kept a strict secret, even from Joan. Mark did not want to burden the family or the family history with the record of the suicide. The cover story would be that Audrey died of a sudden heart attack."

Though Felt portrays the strain his wife suffered as an FBI wife, he ultimately blamed the government, O'Connor writes, "charging it with killing his wife."

Next month, May 2006, will see the release of "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' and the

Struggle for Honor in Washington". The book's authors are Mark Felt, John D. O'Connor and W. Mark Felt.

Amazon.com is accepting pre-publication orders for the book.

So not to divert the 'Suite 8F' thread, I thought this topic might be worth exploring.

In 1959, the 18 year old son of I.B. Hale was cleared by a Coroner's Jury in the shotgun death of his 16 year old pregnant wife, Kathleen, who was the daughter of John Connolly. The jury found that Kathleen Hale was killed by the accidental discharge of a 20 gauge shotgun.

A fingerprint expert said no prints recognizable as Robert's were found on the gun. However, a palm print which could have been Kathleen's was found. Could have been?

Robert claimed she was in good spirits the night before her death but then suddenly she left their apartment and didn't return until late the following morning. He said that he went out to search for her on several occasions and when he returned from his last trip, she was seated on the couch holding a shotgun. Robert tried to persuade her to put it down but she brought the weapon up to her head. He claimed that, "at the last desperate moment, I lunged at the gun and hit it. It hit the wall and she was still." He claimed not to know if the gun went off before or after he had hit it.

Detective Bob Maige said, "It looked like it was very possible that it was an accident." He continued by saying that, "a little squabble like kids have preceded the shooting."

The charge that killed her entered behind Kathleen's right ear. What the...?

When police arrived on the scene, neighbors were restraining Robert from jumping out the second story window.

I'm am at a quandary as to this making complete sense.

James

In 1984, in accordance with Billie Sol Estes’ desire to have his book published on his relationship with LBJ/Mac Wallace, I arranged for Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent New York literary agent whom I knew, to travel to Texas to meet with Billie Sol.

I picked Lucianne up at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and we drove to Abilene to meet with Billie Sol. In the midst of our discussion with Billie Sol, Lucianne interjected the topic of the death of John Connally’s daughter. She said that when she read the small item about it in a newspaper at the time it occurred she remarked to herself that “this was the start of something big.” But for some reason the story never had legs, to use journalistic lingo.

Billie Sol responded to Lucianne’s observation by stating that when Connally’s daughter died under mysterious circumstances, Connally immediately went to where Robert Hale was and where the death had occurred and attempted to toss Hale over the balcony, which would have resulted in Hale’s death.

Billie Sol always maintained that the only person LBJ feared was John Connally, who would stop at nothing to achieve what he wanted.

When I told related this comment by Billie Sol to Shearn Moody soon after Lucianne Goldberg’s visit in 1984, Moody told me that in recent days the wife of a Galveston County public official had told him that a person close to Connally had called the official’s wife, who was a friend, in alarm and said that John Connally was “in a killing mood.”

Lucianne would later became famous as the key person who exposed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal using information that she obtained from Linda Tripp. She has her own web site, www.lucianne.com, where die-hard right-wingers daily post their news articles.

I suspect that Connally believed the conspirators were trying to kill him and Kennedy. Connally had been since 1948 LBJ closest political ally and an important member of the Suite 8F Group. Connally knew where all the bodies were buried. Don’t forget it was LBJ who pressurized JFK to give Connally the post of Secretary of the Navy. Along with the post of Secretary of the Treasury (Douglas Dillon), these were the most important appointments for the Suite 8F Group. It is no coincidence that LBJ’s buddy, Phil Graham pressurized JFK to give Dillon the job. It was also Phil Graham who persuaded JFK to make LBJ his running mate. When Connally resigned in 1962, the job goes to Fred Korth, another member of the Suite 8F Group. Korth was needed to get the X-22 and TFX contracts and to assure all those large oil contracts from the Navy went to Suite 8F members.

It is no coincidence that Nixon appointed Connally to his administration. He wanted him on board for the same reason he appointed William Sullivan to his staff. Both men knew what happened in Dallas. (Sullivan had run the FBI investigation into the JFK and MLK assassinations.) Nixon wanted to use this information to blackmail the FBI and CIA into protecting him from his own illegal activities.

[from John Simkin]

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

09/23/1993

LBJ initially resisted JFK assassination panel

By CLAY ROBISON, LYNWOOD ABRAM, ROSS RAMSEY, STEVEN R. REED, MIKETOLSON, BOB TUTT, Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau Staff

AUSTIN -- In the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson initially opposed the appointment of an independent commission to investigate the tragedy because he didn't want to send a "bunch of carpet-baggers" to Texas to interfere with the FBI and state authorities.

"We can't be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country," Johnson told then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a telephone conversation on Nov. 25, 1963.

A transcript of the conversation didn't make clear what Johnson was calling a "shooting scrape."

But the comments came three days after Kennedy was fatally shot in a Dallas motorcade, one day after accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was gunned down while in police custody and while interest in the appointment of an independent investigatory panel was growing.

Johnson soon agreed to name a special commission in order to head off congressional inquiries and to ease any threat of war if the Soviet Union was accused of being involved in his predecessor's murder.

And, according to documents made public Wednesday, then-Chief Justice Earl Warren resisted appointment to the panel but broke down and cried and agreed to chair it only after being summoned to Johnson's office.

The transcripts of 275 phone calls involving Johnson in the several weeks after the assassination were released Wednesday by the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

They portrayed a leader who expressed humility -- "I'm totally inadequate," he told two well-wishers the day after he was thrust into the presidency -- but was determined to have his way.

And they demonstrated compassion.

In the first recorded call, made at 4:30 p.m., Texas time, on Nov. 22, while the newly sworn-in president was en route to Washington from Dallas, Johnson told Nellie Connally to give her husband, then-Gov. John B. Connally, a "hug and a kiss for me."

Connally was seriously wounded in the shooting.

The next day, Johnson called to offer his condolences -- "you're a brave and a great lady" -- to the widow of J.D. Tippit, the Dallas police officer killed during the manhunt for Oswald.

And he told Sen. Edward Kennedy, brother of the slain president, "God Almighty and his wisdom work in mysterious ways."

Others Johnson spoke to over the phone during the first few days of his presidency included:

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King. "I want to tell you how grateful I am and how worthy I'm going to try to be of all your hopes," Johnson said.

George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO; Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers; and AT&T Board Chairman Fred Kappel. The new president asked for their support, and they pledged it.

U.S. Sen. George Smathers, D-Fla., who, on the day after the assassination, urged Johnson to consider Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota as a running mate in 1964.

"We've got to keep this Kennedy aura around us through this election," Johnson told Smathers.

The senator replied, "I think that the new president has just got to have a liberal running with him as VP candidate . . . and I think, my God, that most of the southerners would be for Hubert."

Smathers used only the first name, but Humphrey was LBJ's running mate in the 1964 Democratic landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater.

According to the transcript of a Nov. 24 conversation between Johnson aide Bill Moyers and Eugene Rostow, then-dean of the Yale Law School, who talked after Oswald had been shot by Jack Ruby, Rostow suggested that Johnson appoint a presidential commission to investigate the assassination.

"American opinion is just now so shaken by the behavior of the Dallas police that they're not believing anything," Rostow said.

On Nov. 25, Johnson told FBI Director Hoover that he opposed the idea and complained that he was feeling pressure from the Washington Post to appoint a commission. Johnson said he instead wanted an investigation by the FBI and a court of inquiry by then-Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr.

Ten minutes later, discussing the same issue with his friend, syndicated newspaper columnist Joe Alsop, Johnson insisted, "We don't send in a bunch of carpetbaggers. That's the worst thing we could do right now."

A few days later, however, Johnson had changed his mind, according to transcripts of conversations with members of Congress.

The president urged then-House Speaker John McCormack to block any attempt at an investigation by the House.

On Nov. 29, LBJ told Democratic Rep. Carl Albert of Oklahoma, "We don't want anything going in the House and Senate, bunch of television cameras or a lot of loose testimony. . . saying that Khrushchev has done this or Castro has done this."

Also on Nov. 29, Johnson appointed the seven-member Warren Commission, which eventually concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy and Ruby acted alone in murdering Oswald.

Johnson told Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia that Warren initially refused to serve on the commission but "started crying and said, "Well, I won't turn you down,"' after Johnson summoned him to his office.

Russell also had to be coerced by Johnson into serving.

"I don't like that man (Warren). I don't have any confidence in him at all," Russell told the president in another Nov. 29 conversation.

But Johnson was persistent.

"We've got to take this out of the arena where they're testifying that (Nikita) Khrushchev and (Fidel) Castro did this and did that and check us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour," Johnson told Russell.

"Don't tell me what you can do and what you can't. I can't arrest you, and I'm not going to put the FBI on you. But you're goddamned sure going to serve, I'll tell you that."

Besides, the president said, he already had publicly announced the senator would be on the panel.

Johnson also told Russell that Khrushchev, then the Soviet premier, "didn't have a damned thing to do with it (the assassination)."

In a Nov. 30 conversation with Don Cook, an LBJ confidant and president of the American Electric Power Co., Johnson discussed U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which eventually was to be his political undoing.

Johnson contended Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, didn't know what he was doing.

"We need an able, tough guy to go there as chief of mission . . . We've got to either get in or get out," he said.

The transcripts initially were not to be made public until 50 years after Johnson's death in 1973. They were released early in response to a 1992 federal law requiring the release of material relating to the Kennedy assassination.

All the calls were recorded by a secretary at Johnson's request. Another 12 transcripts were withheld, three for security declassification, six because they were "intensely personal" conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy and three because they contained information "unduly damaging to living persons," library officials said.

I am one of those (like Stephen?) who finds it difficult to imagine that Guy Bannister had any connection to the JFK assassination. The statements by Delphine Roberts and her daughter, made so many many years later, have very very little credibility. Of course even if they were true, all these statements would do is connect Bannister with Lee Oswald, which is not quite the same thing as connecting Bannister to the assassination.

Harold Weisberg did some first investigation into Bannister. According to Weisberg's book Oswald In New ORleans (P.339) Bannister had not paid the rent on his office since Sept/Oct 1963. His health was probably not the best by this time and he died in June of 1964, with the rent still in arrears.

I expect that when the killers of JFK are finally identified we will see that none of them was short of money in the period just before and just after the assassination.

News from http://www.unknowncountry.com/

April 6, 2006:

“Jim Marrs's May, 2005 interview with Ed Haslam, author of Mary, Ferry and the Monkey Virus has become a Dreamland classic. Not only can subscribers still listen to this fabulous information, now Ed Haslam has set up a website and you can get this rare, virtually unobtainable book directly from the author!

“Haslam asks the question: was AIDS manmade, and did people like Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Dr. Alton Ochsner, one of New Orleans' most famous residents play a role. AND why are some of these same names connected both to the horrible murder of eccentric genius Mary Sherman and Jim Garrison's abortive attempt to solve the Kennedy assassination?”

From the web site of Edward T. Haslam:

http://www.themonkeyvirus.com/

“Why is there so much cancer today? Did monkey viruses contaminate the polio vaccines in the 1950s? Was SV40 one of them? Is this the origin of the current epidemic of soft-tissue cancers? CFIDS? AIDS? Was there a desperate attempt to find a vaccine?

Were these noble efforts diverted by political extremists into an effort to kill Fidel Castro with a biological weapon?

And does this dark plot connect to Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK Assassination? If you think these fair questions, it’s time you read…

Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus

The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory

A non-fiction book by Edward T. Haslam”

One can read four free chapters from the new and revised edition of the book by going to Edward Haslam’s web site, using the above link.

Of special interest is Chapter 3, entitled The Classroom in which Nicky Chetta, son of the New Orleans Coroner, Dr. Nicholas Chetta, tells his classmates what really happened to the Garrison investigation. See page 16 of Chapter 3, which can be downloaded on Haslam’s web site.

I believe this is a valuable thread and worth keeping alive. I recently read something about Robert Anderson which I believe should be included here.

According to a Phillip Bonsal article in the January 1967 edition of Foreign Affairs, the Castro government was still on the fence in early 1960, but was pushed into the Soviet sphere of influence largely through American miscalculations, many of them made by Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson. In May 1960, Castro decided to bring in a million barrels of Russian crude oil, and was pressuring the British and American refineries still running in Cuba into refining the crude. Anderson, however, saw where this was heading, a situation where the Russians could under-cut the over-priced Venezuelan crude of the American companies throughout Latin America, and use their oil to gain leverage. And this could not be allowed to happen. And so he called a meeting in early June where he recommended as Secretary of the Treasury that the oil companies refuse to refine the Russian crude. Of course this caused Castro to nationalize the oil companies, which caused the U.S. to reduce the Cuban sugar quota to zero, which caused Castro to nationalize the Cuban sugar mills, which opened the door for the Russians to buy up all the Cuban sugar and exchange it for oil, effectively making Cuba a satellite of the Soviets.

Thus, Anderson's misguided loyalty to the U.S. oil industry pushed the world towards the brink of a nuclear war. This helps explain why Anderson was such a big advocate of assassinating Castro (as per Bissell's memoirs), and makes Ike's near-worship of the man more suspect. It should be remembered that Ike supported the oil industry's campaign on off-shore drilling, and that the oil industry supported him right back.

(He does make note in his memoirs, however, of his disgust with an oilman who gave a ton of business to a young businessman who just so happened to be the son of a Senator, in hopes of trying to buy influence with the young man's father. The father? Prescott Bush. The son? George HW Bush. )

Is history repeating itself? Is this why Chavez of Venezuela claims that Bush and the CIA are behind attempts to assassinate him? The article below sheds some light.

Oil Shock: No Shortage for 100 Years

05-Apr-2006

http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=5212

At $20 a barrel, there's a major world oil shortage. At $50 a barrel, there's enough oil to last well into the next century, regardless of increasing usage. Therefore, the ability of oil to sustain a price much above that level for very long is fictional. This is why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez intends to ask OPEC to set a minimum price for oil of $50 a barrel.

Venezuela's deposits of extra heavy oil in the Orinoco are the reason. Until recently, the have not been counted among the world's oil reserves because they were too expensive to exploit. But at $50 a barrel, refining them and selling them is a profitable enterprise. The reserves are truly massive. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy believes that they exceed the reserves of the whole Middle East. Including this oil, Venezuela therefore controls 1.3 trillion barrels, more than all of the rest of earth's reserves put together.

Chavez sees an end to the Iraqi war, which is what has driven oil prices from the pre-Bush $20 a barrel level up to the current $50-$60 price range. Like most of the oil patch, he knows that his own reserves will cause the price of more readily available oil to drop back to the $20-$30 range as soon as the Iraqi situation corrects itself. And the gigantic Venezuelan reserves will be there for the 22nd century and beyond to exploit. Assuming the world even uses oil as a fuel by that time. Our real crisis is not an oil crisis at all, it's an emissions crisis. We've got more oil than we need, and will have for at least another one to two hundred years. But what happens to the air when we burn it--that's the danger that we must confront.

A great American politician died yesterday: William Proxmire. After the Japanese Airforce bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Proxmire enlisted in the US Army as a private. He was assigned to counterintelligence work and was discharged in 1946 as a first lieutenant.

Proxmire moved to Wisconsin to be a reporter for The Capital Times in Madison. According to Proxmire: "They fired me after I'd been there seven months, for labor activities and impertinence." William Proxmire stayed in Wisconsin and worked briefly for a union newspaper. He also had a weekly radio show called Labor Sounds Off, sponsored by the American Federation of Labor.

Proxmire took an interest in politics and his idol was Robert La Follette. A member of the Democratic Party, Proxmire failed in his attempts to become governor of Wisconsin in 1952, 1954 and 1956. Proxmire was elected to the Senate in 1957 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Joseph R. McCarthy.

A strong supporter of Civil Rights, in his first term, he clashed with the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, because he thought he was blocking civil rights legislation. He was also a leading critic of the oil depletion allowance. Johnson used his position in the Senate to get Proxmire removed from the important Finance Committee. Proxmire responded by calling Johnson a dictator and a paid spokesman for the Texas oil industry.

John F. Kennedy agreed with Proxmire about the oil depletion allowance and talked of it being reduced from its high level of 27.5 per cent. This was not implemented before his death in November, 1963. It remained unchanged during Johnson's presidency. According to Barr McClellan this resulted in a saving of over 100 million dollars to the American oil industry. Soon after Johnson left office it dropped to 15 per cent.

Proxmire voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution but later felt that Lyndon Johnson had misled Congress and he became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He used his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee to spotlight wasteful military spending and was instrumental in stopping frequent military pork barrel projects (government spending that is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form of campaign contributions or votes).

Proxmire was unhappy that the United States government would not sign up in support of the genocide convention. Starting in 1967, he made a speech every day Congress convened - a total of 3,211 speeches - over a 19 year period. His campaign came to an end when the genocide convention was accepted in 1986.

In 1975 Proxmire established his annual Golden Fleece awards. In this way he "publicized outlandish government spending, bureaucratic wastage or money misused in the case of self-advancement". Some examples of his Golden Fleece awards was the US navy's use of 64 planes to fly 1,334 pilots to a reunion in Las Vegas and doormats that cost the navy $792 each.

Proxmire served as chairman of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs until his retirement in 1988.

Mondale, Kennedy Honor a Colleague

Proxmire Gave the 'Golden Fleece' Awards

By Frederic J. Frommer

Associated Press

Sunday, April 2, 2006

Washington Post

Former vice president Walter F. Mondale and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) saluted the late Wisconsin senator William Proxmire yesterday as a tenacious worker and moral crusader.

Proxmire, a Democrat best known for fighting government waste with his mocking "Golden Fleece" awards, died in December at 90. He had Alzheimer's disease.

At a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral attended by 350 people, Mondale called Proxmire a tireless "checks-and-balances machine."

Mondale is a Minnesota Democrat who served in the Senate with Proxmire. He paid tribute to Proxmire's work ethic.

Mondale recalled complaining once about having to take a red-eye flight. Proxmire responded that he loved the flights, which he would board every weekend as he returned home.

Voters grew accustomed to seeing him in Wisconsin, shaking hands with people outside whatever big event was going on.

"Wisconsin loved him," Mondale said.

Kennedy said Proxmire cast more than 10,000 consecutive votes over two decades -- "a Lou Gehrig record that no one will ever break, unless Cal Ripken wins a Senate seat," Kennedy said.

"I hated it when Boston reporters would say to me, 'Senator, how come you missed that vote last Friday? Senator Proxmire hasn't missed a vote in 20 years,' " Kennedy said.

Proxmire's hard work had a purpose, Kennedy said. He noted that the Wisconsin senator fought for decades for the Senate to act on an anti-genocide treaty, goading senators with frequent speeches. The Senate finally approved it in 1986, two years before Proxmire retired.

"It took 3,211 speeches, but his moral crusade finally prevailed," Kennedy said. "Bill Proxmire was one of the most original, decent and impressive people I've ever known in public life."

Kennedy said there was more to Proxmire's domestic legislative focus than his "Golden Fleece" awards.

"He also passed some of the most far-reaching public interest reform bills in the past half-century," Kennedy said. "Time and time again to protect the common good, he took on and defeated powerful special interests."

Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Proxmire was the "personification" of congressional oversight when Proxmire was chairman of the banking committee.

Proxmire was elected to the Senate in 1957 to fill the seat vacated by the death of Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), the senator who gained notoriety for his communist witch hunts. Proxmire was elected in 1958 to his first six-year term and was reelected in 1964, 1970, 1976 and 1982.

Here's a great review of a new book "American Theocracy" that tell it like it is. Truly frightening.

New York Times

March 19, 2006

'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html

The Washington Post today carries the following article by Kevin Phillips in which he declares that the United States is entering a dangerous period as the result of the shift in its politics in the last 40 years:

How the GOP Became God's Own Party

By Kevin Phillips

Sunday, April 2, 2006

Washington Post

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics. On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California, but debate concentrated on the argument -- since fulfilled and then some -- that the South was on its way into the national Republican Party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the alliance of oil, fundamentalism and debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. But members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I thought, the coming together of a heartland -- across fading Civil War lines -- would determine control of Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major infusion of conservative northern Catholics and southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican argument at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

Over the last 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political, economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the bull market of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of previous world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing -- all too plausibly -- that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.

Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" (Viking).

Mr. Caddy, have you had any dealings with Herskowitz?

No, I have never met or communicated with Mickey Herskowitz, a gifted writer for the Houston Chronicle who has worked with both John Connally and George W. Bush on their biographies.

Below is a review by Campusi, Inc. of John Connally's book, co-authored with Herskowitz, titled, "In History's Shadow: An American Odyssey" published in 1993:

In June 1993, John Connally, a legend in Texas and a powerful figure in national politics for several crucial decades of this turbulent century, died of complications of pulmonaryfibrosis, a condition brought on by wounds sustained from an assassin's bullet that fateful day in Dallas - November 22, 1963. In History's Shadow, finished right before Connally's death, is the story of his life in politics, told with anunmistakable Texas twang. It was a life of almost Shakespearean range, marked by great triumphs as well as personal tragedy and heartbreak. He wanted to be President, but that is the only ambition that eluded him. He lived under thirteenPresidents and served under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He knew American government - and the men who ran it - as intimately as anyone in our time. In History's Shadow is a true epic of the American century. Raised in rural povertyduring the Depression in a farm family of seven children, Connally retained a deep-seated love of the hardscrabble Texas land his whole life. "I am part of a dwindling breed shaped by the soil of rural America . . . you don't engage theland, let it punish and feed you, and not understand the cycles of life." He enrolled at the University of Texas at age sixteen, determined to train as a trial lawyer. While still in law school, he worked for the campaign of an aspiringcongressman named Lyndon Johnson, and followed him to Washington. Thus began an intimate political friendship that would have a decisive effect on Connally's life and career, as the rough-and-tumble young Texans rose to positions ofnational and international influence. Yet as closely as he served Johnson, and later President Richard Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury in the early 1970s, it was always events in his home state that gained John Connally his mostlasting notoriety.

I previously posted a review of John Connally's book that was co-authored by Mickey Herskowitz. Below is a revealing article from the Guerilla News Network about Herskowitz's relationship as a writer with President George W. Bush:

Published on Thursday, October 28, 2004 by 1. GNN.tv

Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer

by Russ Baker

HOUSTON -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work - and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war - has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush's unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters - well before he became president.

In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.

The revelations on Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.

Herskowitz also revealed the following:

In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.

Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."

Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.

Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.

Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews-in which he expressed consternation that Bush's true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people -Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.

Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. "I don't know anybody that's ever said a bad word about Mickey," said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz's account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.

One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. "I can't go near this," he said.

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

"I know [bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

Herskowitz's revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush's pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe 's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. 'I'd take 'em out,' [bush] grinned cavalierly, 'take out the weapons of mass destruction·I'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s father·It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker. "

The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties. In addition, in recent days, high-ranking US military officials have complained that the White House did not provide them with adequate resources for the task at hand.

Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush's father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)

In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush's staff expressed displeasure -often over Herskowitz's use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush's own words to describe the Texan's unprofitable business ventures, writing: "the companies were floundering". "I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, 'You've got some wrong information.' I didn't bother to say, 'Well you know where it came from.' [The lawyer] said, 'We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.' "

In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "

"They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it," he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.

According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard - and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was "excused." This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush's claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama - though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial "rewards" for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.

Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 - which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane - military or civilian - again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.

In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush's father to write a book about the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. "Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his office·He said, 'I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.' "

"He said to me, 'I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it's amazing how many times something good will come out of it.' I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [bush senior], 'Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?' He said yes."

That book, Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush , was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family's perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.

After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. "I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying 'Watch your back.' "

Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing - a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself - it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.

So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush's true feelings.

"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader."

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute .

Russ Baker is an award-winning independent journalist who has been published in The New York Times ,The Nation ,Washington Post ,The Telegraph (UK), Sydney Morning-Herald , and Der Spiegel , among many others.

I can't remember if it was in his HSCA interview or in one more recent, but Ramsey Clark said that Connally was always claiming "They were trying to shoot me. Don't tell me they weren't trying to shoot me!" As a consequence, I believe he might also have told Thompson there was more than one shooter.

40 Years After Shots in Dallas, A Survivor's Painful Memories By RALPH BLUMENTHAL The New York Times

Published: October 31, 2003

HOUSTON, Oct. 30 - ''It was a car full of yellow roses, red roses and blood, and it was all over us.''

In a luxury apartment tower rearing over the city's toniest shopping district, Nellie Connally pauses, her rush of words suddenly stilled. ''It's hard to explain,'' she continues after a moment. ''You can't believe the horror of being in that car.''

''I can't believe it's been 40 years,'' she says, ''nor can I believe that I'm the last person living that was in the back of that car'' -- a car that carried her in her hot-pink Neiman Marcus suit, and her husband, John, the new governor of Texas with his cowboy hat, and President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, in a triumphant motorcade through the streets of Dallas. It was an ebullient Mrs. Connally who gushed, ''Mr. President, you certainly can't say that Dallas doesn't love you'' -- perhaps the last words Kennedy ever heard.

After shots rang out -- and Mrs. Connally is adamant that three bullets, not two as officially established, found their mark -- the president was dead, her husband gravely wounded as she struggled to stanch his blood, and the course of history forever altered.

Now with the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, Mrs. Connally, at 84, is telling her story, a story that she first scrawled out 10 days after the 1963 events for grandchildren yet unborn and that has now been published as a memoir after she rediscovered the narrative in 1996 in a long-forgotten desk drawer.

This week, Mrs. Connally, in a lime-green Yves Saint Laurent suit, sat in her well-furnished but hardly opulent apartment filled with cheerfully obvious Impressionist fakes -- the Connallys lost their fortune in a calamitous bankruptcy in 1987 -- and in a wide-ranging interview rummaged through five decades of turbulent memories. She even brought out the pink suit she keeps to this day, cleaned and in plastic, as a grim memento of history.

Her thoughts carry her from an electric first encounter between Idanell Brill, a sparkling young ingénue at the University of Texas in 1937, and the tall and dashing student body president John Bowden Connally, through their marriage in 1940, Mr. Connally's years as an aide to the rising politician Lyndon B. Johnson, his appointment as secretary of the Navy by President Kennedy, election as governor in 1962, service as secretary of the Treasury for President Richard M. Nixon -- after Connally switched to the Republican Party -- his trial and acquittal on bribery charges, and quixotic bids for the presidency. There are subjects she does not volunteer, like her bout with breast cancer and a mastectomy, and things she will just not talk about, including her dislike of certain prominent Republicans, and the suicide of their eldest daughter, 17-year-old Kathleen, in 1958.

''Yes, there were a lot of bad things -- and a lot of good things,'' she said. ''You got to do what you got to do, and we did it every time.''

But mostly she talks about That Day in Dallas. It is a story she recounts in her memoir, ''From Love Field'' with the writer Mickey Herskowitz and just published by Rugged Land, that is propelling her into a limelight she never knew as the dutiful housewife of one of the era's more colorful politicians.

''He was my career,'' she said of John, who died in 1993, after hurriedly finishing his own memoir with Mr. Herskowitz.

''We were all in our 40's,'' she recalled of the events 40 years ago next month. ''We didn't think the world owed us a living. We thought we owed the world, and we were ready to charge.''

The Kennedys and the Connallys hit it off well, she said -- ''a happy foursome, that beautiful morning,'' as she wrote in her original notes. ''I had my yellow roses in my arms and Jackie had her red roses in hers.'' Both women, near disastrously, had turned up in pink.

She said that the president had not really come to Texas, as often stated, to repair a rift between the liberal Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Vice President Johnson. Rather, she said, he was looking to shore up his flagging popularity and raise money from wealthy Texans.

''He wanted to have four fund-raisers,'' she recalled. ''John said no,'' persuading the president, as she recalled, that it was wiser to limit himself to one benefit, in Austin, and make his other appearances nonpartisan.

All began well that fateful morning, she recalled. The two couples flew together from nearby Fort Worth to Dallas's Love Field, where the women were presented bouquets of roses. Wet clouds had lifted, and in the strong autumn sunshine the limousine's bubble top was removed. The president and his wife sat in the back, the Connallys on jump seats in front of them.

The crowds lining the sidewalks were effusive -- none of the right-wing hostility that had marred recent visits by the vice president and Adlai E. Stevenson, the United Nations representative. Mrs. Connally, her anxieties allayed, was moved to make her remark about the friendly reception. President Kennedy was delighted, she recalled, and ''he grinned that wonderful grin he had.''

Then, as she wrote: ''I heard a loud, terrifying noise. It came from the back.''

She turned to see the president's hands fly up to his neck and saw him sink down in the seat.

Then, she recounted in the book and interview, there was a second shot and her husband was hit as he blurted, ''No, no, no,'' and ''My God, they are going to kill us all.''

Finally, she said, there was a third shot, the one that shattered the president's head. (Mr. Connally later said that his exclamation was misconstrued to suggest advance knowledge of a conspiracy.)

''The car was covered with matter, bloody matter,'' she said. ''Tiny little specks, the car, my clothes, everything.''

The Warren Commission and subsequent investigations have concluded that the first shot, fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, went wild, that the president and the governor were both hit by a second bullet, and that President Kennedy alone was hit by a third shot.

''Well they're wrong,'' Mrs. Connally said this week at the beginning of a publicity blitz for the book that will keep her before the public, on television shows (with Larry King, Katie Couric and Dan Rather and Liz Smith), speeches and readings around the country. ''I was there, they weren't. When they argue with me, all I have to say is, 'Were you in that car?' The answer has to be no because there wasn't anybody else.''

(The two Secret Service agents in the front seat have since died; two other agents, Clint Hill, the agent in the following car who climbed on the trunk to help Mrs. Kennedy, and Win Lawson, who rode in the car ahead of the president, are still alive.)

''All I'm saying is there were three shots and I know what happened with each shot,'' she said.

She said, however, that she was not a conspiracist and that she believed -- and that her husband's own exhaustive study of records as Treasury secretary proved -- that Mr. Oswald was the lone gunman.

''A $15 gun and a scrambled-egg mind caused all that horror,'' she said.

She disputed an account by the author William Manchester attributed to Mrs. Kennedy suggesting that the Connallys were screaming afterward in the car.

''I don't know why she said that,'' Mrs. Connally said. ''She made an error.''

In fact, she said, a swath of her hair had turned white overnight, medical proof, she said, that she had internalized her trauma and not given vent to her grief.

She recalled distinctly, she said, that after the second shot hit her husband ''I was trying to figure out what I could do to help him.''

''I wanted to get him out of the line of fire so I just pulled him into my lap,'' she said.

She helped cover his open chest wound, which she said she heard later probably saved his life.

''I had him in my arms,'' she recalled. ''I said, 'Be still, it'll be all right,' and I said it over and over and over again.''

At Parkland Hospital, Mr. Connally, though only semiconscious, heaved himself out of the way so medics could get the president out of the car, she said. Inside the hospital she succumbed to flashes of resentment.

''I was just afraid that the president was in the other room, that all the doctors were with him,'' she admitted. She found she was wrong, that her husband was being attended to as well, but it was not clear whether he would survive.

She shook her head as if to banish the memory. ''It was a bad deal,'' she said.

Correction: November 5, 2003, Wednesday A front-page article on Friday about the memoir of Nellie Connally, who was in the presidential car in Dallas with her husband, Gov. John B. Connally, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, misstated the timing of Mr. Connally's switch to the Republican Party. It was in 1973 -- after, not before, his service as treasury secretary under President Richard M. Nixon.

Well, who would have thought that William Buckley would be telling us that a person has been identified in the crowd from a photograph that answers the question of who was behind the shooting of the Pope. No "lookalike" here, it's a slam dunk (even though I recall reading that the person so identified is wearing a disguise of glasses and beard in the photo).

I suggest that we immediately send Buckley the photo of Rip Robertson in Dealey Plaza. He should immediately see the striking resemblance (no beard here, and we know Rip wore glasses), and will hopefully arrange to have the "new technology" to which he refers (and what precisely is that?) applied to Rip's photo to make it official that the CIA had a hand in Dallas.

Or, far more likely, Buckley would probably tell us that we're full of crap and to stop wasting his time with lookalikes in photos.

Buckley apparently has a few regrets about some of the results of the conservative movement that he was instrumental in launching:

Buckley Says Bush Will Be Judged on Iraq War, Now a 'Failure'

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure.

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq,'' Buckley said in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. "If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam.''

Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.''

The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president,'' adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility.''

Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime friend, "a failed executor'' of the war. And Vice President Dick Cheney "was flatly misled,'' Buckley said. "He believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction.''

National Review

Buckley, often called the father of contemporary conservatism in America, articulated his beliefs in National Review magazine, which he founded in 1955. His conservatism calls for small government, low taxes and a strong defense. Both Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater said they got their inspiration from the magazine.

In the interview, Buckley criticized the so-called neo- conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion and the spreading of American values around the world.

"The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country,'' Buckley said.

While praising Bush as "really a conservative,'' he was critical of the president for allowing expansion of the federal government and never vetoing a spending bill.

The president's "concern has been so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have neglected conservatism'' on the fiscal level, Buckley said.

Appraising Presidents

Buckley also offered his perspectives on other recent presidents:

-- Richard Nixon "was one of the brightest people who ever occupied the White House,'' he said, "but he suffered from basic derangements,'' which precipitated his own downfall.

-- Ronald Reagan "confounded the intellectual class, which disdained him.'' Every year though, Buckley said, "there is more and more evidence of his ingenuity, of his historical intelligence.''

-- Bill Clinton "is the most gifted politician of, certainly my time,'' Buckley said. "He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with a capacity for mischief which is very, very American.'' He doubted that "anyone could begin to write a textbook that explicates his (Clinton's) political philosophy because he doesn't really have one.''

Buckley exalted in what he sees as the conservative success stemming from his call a half century ago in the National Review to "stand athwart history and yell stop.''

That, he remembered, was when Marxism was widely considered "an absolute irreversible call of history.'' The folly of that notion was demonstrated by the demise of communism a decade and a half ago, he said.

Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. "I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us,'' he said.

[quote name='Douglas Caddy' date='Mar 27 2006, 06:58 PM' post='58801']

Doug:

Barr does plan to sue HC. Now I am not sure if this is over the cancellation of The Guilty Men or the disgusting follow up HC did with the "three historians". Barr was libled in that show and the merits of The Guilty men were not at all debated. Did you happen to catch this little peice of trash? I taped it and after it was over J and I talked and J was so angry he was ready to take on HC himself. We referred to these "historians" as the "three stooges".

I also do not think $ was used to stop these shows, I think it was threats of some sort. It would be interesting to hear NIgel Turner's stance, and whether or not he will ever do another episode.

Dawn

ps A lot has been made about the Guilty Men and The Judyth Baker (The Love Story) episodes, but the third one - forgotten its title- (About Liggit) was extremely interesting. J was very involved-behind the scenes of course- with this episode as well.

This is good news indeed that Barr McClellan plans to file a lawsuit against the History Channel. Barr is a fighter, and not someone to be pushed around when he knows that he is in the right.

Within a few days after the History Channel banned “The Guilty Men” because of the accusation by Valenti & Crew that it was a work of fiction, the HC carried a show on how the pyramids in Egypt were built.

The show obviously was based on mere speculation, as no one today really knows know the pyramids were erected.

So for the sake of accuracy, the HC should have carried a disclaimer at the beginning of its show that this was just one version, among many, of how the pyramids were constructed. It should also have carried a panel of three historians afterwards who could have given their views on whether the show’s theory was sound or whether it was mere fiction or based on a false premise.

By banning “The Guilty Men” and bowing to the pressure of Valenti & Crew, the HC has turned the JFK assassination show into a hot and valuable commodity of which underground clandestine copies are made and distributed with increasing frequency. The HC can hardly file suit against those who make these clandestine copies as doing so would merely bring the spotlight of bad publicity on its own prior act of censorship and cause irreparable damage to its reputation as an educational exponent of “history.”

Have some of you folks forgotten the posts of about a week ago, in which Tom Purvis--and others--claimed that, unless the US had an actual combat situation into which to send its soldiers, their commanders would be inept?

And so it was that 9/11 occurred, and then Afghanistan, and then Iraq...if you follow their logic, these events were necessary in order to prevent our military leadership from being inept in the event of an "actual" combat situation. The events of 9/11, then, rather than being the tragedy they were, are then transformed into something fortuitous, a lucky accident that allows us to train better military leaders, and due to 9/11, to do so with the 100% backing of the American people.

So, extending this logic forward, America must ALWAYS be at war if there is ever to be a hope of peace. War is peace, peace is war. And George Orwell was a prophet.

Mark Knight is correct in his analysis that for America, "war is peace, and peace is war" if U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia is to be believed:

Judicial intemperance - Scalia flips message to doubting Thomases

By Laurel J. Sweet

Monday, March 27, 2006 - Updated: 12:36 PM EST

Boston Herald

Minutes after receiving the Eucharist at a special Mass for lawyers and politicians at Cathedral of the Holy Cross, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a special blessing of his own for those who question his impartiality when it comes to matters of church and state.

“You know what I say to those people?” Scalia, 70, replied, making an obscene gesture under his chin when asked by a Herald reporter if he fends off a lot of flak for publicly celebrating his conservative Roman Catholic beliefs.

“That’s Sicilian,” the Italian jurist said, interpreting for the “Sopranos” challenged.

“It’s none of their business,” continued Scalia, who was the keynote speaker at yesterday’s Catholic Lawyers’ Guild luncheon. “This is my spiritual life. I shall lead it the way I like.”

The conduct unbecoming a 20-year veteran of the country’s highest court - and just feet from the Mother Church’s altar - was captured by a photographer for the Archdiocese of Boston newspaper The Pilot, whose publisher is newly minted Cardinal Sean O’Malley.

Although one of his sworn duties is to uphold the freedom of the press, a jocular Scalia told the shutterbug, “Don’t publish that.”

Red Mass in the South End was attended by some 600 parishioners, including former state Senate President William Bulger, but O’Malley, to Scalia’s regret, remained in Rome.

“I wanted to spend some time with him. He’s a lovely, lovely man,” said Scalia, a Reagan appointee whose wife, Maureen, mother of his nine children, grew up in Braintree. She accompanied him to church.

Newsweek is reporting Scalia told a Swiss audience recently he was “astounded” at Europe’s “hypocritical” reaction to the Bush administration’s efforts to deny civil trials to Guantanamo detainees.

“War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” Scalia was quoted as saying. “Give me a break.

The notoriously media-wary Scalia just last month had a Boston man tossed for heckling him at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. In 2004, Scalia’s bodyguard confiscated a reporter’s digital recorder and erased a talk the judge had just given to a school assembly. The Justice Department later ruled the federal marshal had broken the law. In 1996, Scalia told a Baptist prayer breakfast that America was rife with enemies of Christians. In 2004, he ruffled feathers by duck hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney while the court was considering a case on Cheney’s energy task force.

As for what he gave up for Lent this year, Scalia was surprisingly tight-lipped and kept his hands at his sides, saying, “Christ says don’t do your penance out front. Keep it to yourself.”

I don't think there were any bribes involved, John. It was pure power politics. Valenti, Moyers, Johnson, Ford, Specter, etc, have a lot of friends in government and the media. A lawsuit could have been damaging regarding the History Channel's fact-checking, etc. Of course, The History Channel took the smart way out. They aired a contoversial program and weren't prepared to back it up. Therefore, they disowned the product and aired a retraction. That's what media corporations do. Freedom of Speech isn't as important to them as keeping the FCC off their back.

As I had assisted Barr McClellan, along with J. Harrison, in the very early stages of the research on his book, “Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ killed JFK,” I took a particular interest in how the History Channel reacted to the uproar organized by Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers following its airing of Nigel Turner’s “The Guilty Men.”

A spokesman for the History Channel initially took a strong public stand against the criticism of the show and the calls for banning the show from its archives and from allowing copies of it to be purchased by the public. In essence, the spokesman said that “The Guilty Men” was just another version of a conspiracy that might have been behind the JFK assassination, one version among others that it had aired. This defense by the History Channel continued publicly for several days until articles in the major media, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, lashed out vehemently against Nigel Turner’s work. Valenti and his crew of history-burners are quite powerful and have friends in high places and were able to mobilize these to bring pressure to bear on the History Channel.

A great number of the shows that appear on the History Channel are based on speculation and circumstantial evidence and are not subjected to fact-checking before they are aired. A lawsuit against the History Channel was unlikely as there existed no existing person who had legal standing to bring such an action. In any event such a lawsuit would have merely opened up the entire topic to intense public scrutiny, which would have proved counter-productive to Valenti and his crew.

In the weeks before the official release date of Barr McClellan’s book, I received a number of phone calls from a mysterious person who was quite concerned about the contents of McClellan’s forthcoming book and the fact that ultimately behind it was a major publishing concern that did not appear as the listed publisher. I reported these calls to Barr, who told me he had received similar calls from the same mysterious person. We agreed it was probably someone, a private investigator perhaps, who had been retained by those with a vested interest in keeping the LBJ-Estes-Wallace conspiracy cloaked in obscurity.

My educated guess is that the postings here in the Forum about LBJ’s connection to the Kennedy assassination are causing major heartburn-attacks in these same persons who want to keep things forever mum. Many of the Forum postings by its members contain invaluable information that will prove to be a treasure trove in the future for historians.

I have been doing some research on Dorothy Kilgallen. She was a journalist who was investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kilgallen managed to obtain the Dallas Police Department radio logs for the day of the assassination. This revealed that as soon as the shots were fired in the Dealey Plaza, the Chief of Police, Jesse Curry, issued an order to search the Grassy Knoll. However, up until that time, Curry had insisted that as soon as he heard the sound of the shots he told his men to search the Texas School Book Depository.

In September 1964 Kilgallen reported in the New York Journal American that Jack Ruby, J. D. Tippet and Bernard Weismann had a two hour meeting at the Carousel Club on 14th November, 1963. Later, Kilgallen managed to obtain a private interview with Jack Ruby. She told friends that she had information that would "break the case wide open". Aware of what had happened to Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe (two reporters who had both been killed after making such a claim), Kilgallen handed her interview notes to her friend Margaret Smith. She told friends that she had obtained information that Ruby and Tippet were friends and that David Ferrie was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

On 8th November, 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York apartment. She was fully dressed and sitting upright in her bed. The police reported that she had died from taking a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates. The notes of her interview with Ruby and the article she was writing on the case had disappeared. Her friend, Margaret Smith, who had been given the notes on the case, died two days later. The notes were never found.

I carried out a search on Kilgallen on the web. The first batch of pages contained information that I already knew about Kilgallen and were just recycled details that have appeared in various books about the assassination of Kennedy. However, I eventually came across an anti-Castro website. It included newspaper accounts revealing details of what Castro had been up to over the last fifty years. One account was a newspaper article written by Kilgallen for New York Journal American on 15th July, 1959. Like the other articles on the site it was highly critical of Castro. It also contained something else that surprised me a great deal. Kilgallen claimed that the CIA and the Mafia were involved in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. We now know this was true but it only became public knowledge during the Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1975. This article was written in July, 1959. Kilgallen was obviously well-informed about what was going on in the CIA at that time.

I continued my search and I eventually came across something that was even more interesting. It was the notes of a CIA report on Marilyn Monroe. Dated 3rd August, 1962, the actual report had been withheld but the notes themselves were very revealing. The report was based on the wire-tap of certain people’s telephone calls. This included those of Kilgallen, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Howard Rothberg, a lawyer working for Monroe. The CIA document claims that Monroe was threatening to tell secrets that she had obtained from her relationship with John F. Kennedy. This included the claim that Monroe "knew of the President's plan to kill Castro". It appears Rothberg was passing on information from Monroe to Kilgallen. The notes of course do not say what the CIA planned to do about this. That would have been in the report that is still being withheld. What we do know is that Marilyn Monroe was found dead two days after this report was written.

This raises a new question about the death of Kilgallen (she died in similar circumstances to Monroe). Was she killed because of what she knew about the Kennedy assassination or was it more to do with what she knew about the death of Marilyn Monroe?

Dominick Dunne, the famed author and court reporter, begins his monthly Diary, which is titled “Spilling Secrets” this time, in the April 2006 issue of Vanity Fair with these words: “It amazes me how many people remember the mysterious death in 1965 of Dorothy Kilgallen, the controversial gossip columnist and television personality, which was reported in headlines nationwide as an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and liquor....”

Dunne goes on to recount a telephone call that he received while a guest on the Larry King Live TV show from a woman in Oklahoma who asked if he had any opinion of Kilgallen’s death.

He writes in his Diary that “What I recalled for the woman from Tulsa was a persistent rumor at the time that the sleeping pills in Kilgallen’s stomach had not dissolved, which meant that they were undigested. Liz Smith, another famous gossip columnist, told me recently that the late Arlene Francis, who was also on the panel of What’s My Line? [with Kilgallen], had been with Kilgallen the evening she had died, and she always maintained that Dorothy was not drunk that night. I forgot to tell the woman who called in that no notes or tapes from the Ruby interview [that Kilgallen had with Jack Ruby] have ever been found. Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn’t want her to print. At least that’s my interpretation. She once wrote in her column that if Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow ever told the whole story of her life with Oswald it would “split open the front pages of the newspapers all over the world,” according to Lee Israel in her biography of Kilgallen."

There is more in Dunne’s Diary about Kilgallen in the April issue of Vanity Fair. His writings are always worth reading.

Everyone in our government needs to read the above information. Truly terrifying. Where are the real "fiscal conservatives"? Or is that term largely a myth?

The book "American Theocracy" is also very on point, thanks for the review. Need to get this one.

Dawn

The April 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine has as its cover article, “American Coup D’Etat: Military Thinkers Discuss the Unthinkable.”

The introduction to the article states that, “Given that the linchpin of any coup d’etat is the participation, or at least the support, of a nation’s military officers, Harper’s Magazine assembled a panel of experts to discuss the state of our own military – its culture, its relationship with the wider society, and the steadfastness of its loyalty to the ideals of democracy and to the United States Constitution.”

Unfortunately, no internet link exists to the article at this time, so, if not already a subscriber, one must obtain the magazine by other means in order to read this timely and worthwhile discussion by experts.

Doug Caddy was kind enough to send me a copy of Lyle Sardie's documentary, LBJ: A Closer Look. Although technically very flawed, it includes a lot of useful information. Has anyone else seen these documentary? Is it still available?

By typing in "LBJ: A Closer Look" on google, one can find how to obtain copies of the video.

I am interviewed in Lyle Sardie’s video and my voice is played over in other scenes in the work.

Here is some background as to how this came about.

Lyle had called me from his home in the Los Angeles area and had asked me to meet him at a hotel in Houston to discuss LBJ. When I arrived he immediately ushered me into another suite where his video camera was set up and started asking me questions with the camera rolling. Faced with this unexpected situation I decided to go ahead with the interview, although it would have gone better for both Lyle and myself had he informed me ahead of time that he planned to video-tape me. That way I could have given some prior thought as to exactly what I wanted to say.

However, I was deeply impressed with Lyle’s sincerity and his keen desire to make a historical record of the LBJ-Estes-Wallace conspiracy. Afterwards I supplied him with additional materials as best I could, including an article from People Magazine on Madeline Brown that he had not seen, and a key article from the Texas Observer on the murder of Henry Marshall.

Lyle was quite excited about the prospects of his completed video being shown at film festivals and of its being marketed successfully.

What he failed to realize was that Jack Valenti, LBJ’s former aide who was sitting in Hollywood as chief of the motion picture industry, would use all his power to make certain that Lyle’s video would go nowhere. If Estes is to be believed, Valenti has a personal reason to kill any expose of LBJ, a reason that goes beyond his faithful White House service.

Valenti was successful in torpedoing Lyle’s video in 1998, just as he was successful subsequently in bringing pressure to bear on the History Channel to ban from its archives Nigel Turner’s work, “The Guilty Men.”

However, by using Nazi methods to bury the truth, what Valenti has done is to pique the interest of historians and other persons who think maybe there may well be something here worth “a closer look.”

Excellent information Greg. I will try and get the same information on the providers of military services in the UK.

Here is Part 2 of the Tomdispatch interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, in which Johnson describes the corruptive power of the U.S. military that may bring about the monetary bankruptcy of the U.S. in the near future:

Tomdispatch Interview: Chalmers Johnson on Our Fading Republic

March 22, 2006

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70576

In Part 1 of his interview, Chalmers Johnson suggested what that fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, end-of-the-Cold-War moment meant to him; explored how deeply empire and militarism have entered the American bloodstream; and began to consider what it means to live in an unacknowledged state of military Keynesianism, garrisoning the planet, and with an imperial budget -- a real yearly Pentagon budget -- of perhaps three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Tom

What Ever Happened to Congress?

A Tomdispatch Interview with Chalmers Johnson (Part 2)

Tomdispatch: You were discussing the lunacy of the 2007 Pentagon budget…

Chalmers Johnson:What I don't understand is that the current defense budget and the recent Quadrennial Defense Review (which has no strategy in it at all) are just continuations of everything we did before. Make sure that the couple of hundred military golf courses around the world are well groomed, that the Lear jets are ready to fly the admirals and generals to the Armed Forces ski resort in Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or the military's two luxury hotels in downtown Seoul and Tokyo.

What I can't explain is what has happened to Congress. Is it just that they're corrupt? That's certainly part of it. I'm sitting here in California's 50th district. This past December, our congressman Randy Cunningham confessed to the largest single bribery case in the history of the U.S. Congress: $2.4 million in trinkets -- a Rolls Royce, some French antiques -- went to him, thanks to his ability as a member of the military subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add things secretly to the budget. He was doing this for pals of his running small companies. He was adding things even the Department of Defense said it didn't want.

This is bribery and, as somebody said the other day, Congress comes extremely cheap. For $2.4 million, these guys got about $175 million in contracts. It was an easy deal.

The military is out of control. As part of the executive branch, it's expanded under cover of the national security state. Back when I was a kid, the Pentagon was called the Department of War. Now, it's the Department of Defense, though it palpably has nothing to do with defense. Hasn't for a long time. We even have another department of the government today that's concerned with "homeland security." You wonder what on Earth do we have that for -- and a Dept of Defense, too!

The government isn't working right. There's no proper supervision. The founders, the authors of the Constitution, regarded the supreme organ to be Congress. The mystery to me -- more than the huge expansion of executive branch powers we've seen since the neoconservatives and George Bush came to power -- is: Why has Congress failed us so completely? Why are they no longer interested in the way the money is spent? Why does a Pentagon budget like this one produce so little interest? Is it that people have a vested interest in it, that it's going to produce more jobs for them?

I wrote an article well before Cunningham confessed called The Military-Industrial Man in which I identified a lot of what he was doing, but said unfortunately I didn't know how to get rid of him in such a safe district. After it appeared on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, the paper got a couple of letters to the editor from the 34th district in downtown LA saying, I wish he was my congressman. If he'd bring good jobs here, I wouldn't mind making something that just gets blown up or sunk in the ground like missile defense in Alaska. I mean, we've already spent $100 billion on what amounts to a massive high-tech scarecrow. It couldn't hit a thing. The aiming devices aren't there. The tests fail. It doesn't work. It's certainly a cover for something much more ominous -- the expansion of the Air Force into outer space or "full spectrum dominance," as they like to put it.

We need to concentrate on this, and not from a partisan point of view either. There's no reason to believe the Democrats would do a better job. They never have. They've expanded the armed forces just as fast as the Republicans.

This is the beast we're trying to analyze, to understand, and it seems to me today unstoppable. Put it this way: James Madison, the author of our Constitution, said the right that controls all other rights is the right to get information. If you don't have this, the others don't matter. The Bill of Rights doesn't work if you can't find out what's going on. Secrecy has been going crazy in this country for a long time, but it's become worse by orders of magnitude under the present administration. When John Ashcroft became attorney general, he issued orders that access to the Freedom of Information Act should be made as difficult as possible.

The size of the black budget in the Pentagon has been growing ever larger during this administration. These are projects no one gets to see. To me, one of the most interesting spectacles in our society is watching uniformed military officers like General Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, sitting in front of Congress, testifying. It happened the other day. Hillary Clinton asked him: Tell us at least approximately how many [NSA warrantless spying] interventions have you made? "I'm not going to tell you" was his answer. Admiral Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was asked directly about a year ago, are we still paying Ahmed Chalabi $340,000 a month? And his reply was, "I'm not going to say."

At this point, should the senator stand up and say: "I want the U.S. Marshall to arrest that man." I mean, this is contempt of Congress.

TD: You're also saying, of course, that there's a reason to have contempt for Congress.

Johnson: There is indeed. You can understand why these guys do it. Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA back in 1977, was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress. He said, no, we had nothing to do with the overthrow of [Chilean President] Salvador Allende when we had everything to do with it. He gets a suspended sentence, pays a small fine, walks into the CIA building at Langley, Virginia and is met by a cheering crowd. Our hero! He's proudly maintained the principles of the secret intelligence service, which is the private army of the president and we have no idea what he's doing with it. Everything they do is secret. Every item in their budget is secret.

TD: And the military, too, has become something of a private army…

Johnson: Exactly. I dislike conscription because it's so easily manipulated, but I do believe in the principle of the obligation of citizens to defend the country in times of crisis. Now, how we do that is still an open question, but at least the citizens' army was a check on militarism. People in the armed forces knew they were there involuntarily. They were extremely interested in whether their officers were competent, whether the strategy made sense, whether the war they might have to fight was justified, and if they began to believe that they were being deeply lied to, as in Vietnam, the American military would start to come apart. The troops then were fragging their officers so seriously that General Creighton Abrams said, we've got to get them out of there. And call it Vietnamization or anything else, that's what they did.

I fear that we're heading that way in Iraq. You open the morning paper and discover that they're now going to start recruiting down to level four, people with serious mental handicaps. The terrible thing is that they'll just be cannon fodder.

It's not rocket science to say that we're talking about a tragedy in the works here. Americans aren't that rich. We had a trade deficit in 2005 of $725.8 billion. That's a record. It went up almost 25% in just over a year. You can't go on not making things, fighting these kinds of wars, and building weapons that are useless. Herb Stein, when he was chairman of the council of economic advisers in a Republican administration very famously said, "Things that can't go on forever don't."

TD:: So put our problems in a nutshell.

Johnson: From George Bush's point of view, his administration has achieved everything ideologically that he wanted to achieve. Militarism has been advanced powerfully. In the minds of a great many people, the military is now the only American institution that appears to work. He's enriched the ruling classes. He's destroyed the separation of powers as thoroughly as was possible. These are the problems that face us right now. The only way you could begin to rebuild the separation of powers would be to reinvigorate the Congress and I don't know what could shock the American public into doing that. They're the only ones who could do it. The courts can't. The President obviously won't.

The only thing I can think of that might do it would be bankruptcy. Like what happened to Argentina in 2001. The richest country in Latin America became one of the poorest. It collapsed. It lost the ability to borrow money and lost control of its affairs, but a great many Argentines did think about what corrupt presidents had listened to what corrupt advice and done what stupid things during the 1990s. And right now, the country is on its way back.

TD: But superpower bankruptcy? It's a concept nobody's really explored. When the British empire finally went, we were behind them. Is there somebody behind us?

Johnson: No.

TD: So what would it mean for us to go bankrupt?. After all, we're not Argentina.

Johnson: It would mean losing control over things. All of a sudden, we would be dependent on the kindness of strangers. looking for handouts. We already have a $725 billion trade deficit; the largest fiscal deficit in our history, now well over 6% of GDP. The defense budgets are off the charts and don't make any sense, and don't forget that $500 billion we've already spent on the Iraq war -- every nickel of it borrowed from people in China and Japan who saved and invested because they would like to have access to this market. Any time they decide they don't want to lend to us, interest rates will go crazy and the stock exchange will collapse.

We pour about $2 billion a day just into servicing the amounts we borrow. The moment people quit lending us that money, we have to get it out of domestic savings and right now we have a negative savings rate in this country. To get Americans to save 20% of their income, you'd have to pay them at least a 20% interest rate and that would produce a truly howling recession. We'd be back to the state of things in the 1930s that my mother used to describe to me -- we lived in the Arizona countryside then -- when someone would tap on the rear door and say, "Have you got any work? I don't want to be paid, I just want to eat." And she'd say, "Sure, we'll find something for you to do and give you eggs and potatoes."

A depression like that would go on in this country for quite a while. The rest of the world would also have a severe recession, but would probably get over it a lot faster.

TD: So you can imagine the Chinese, Japanese, and European economies going on without us, not going down with us.

Johnson: Absolutely. I think they could.

TD: Don't you imagine, for example, that the Chinese bubble economy, the part that's based on export to the United States might collapse, setting off chaos there too?

Johnson: It might, but the Chinese would not blame their government for it. And there is no reason the Chinese economy shouldn't, in the end, run off domestic consumption. When you've got that many people interested in having better lives, they needn't depend forever on selling sweaters and pajamas in North America. The American economy is big, but there's no reason to believe it's so big the rest of the world couldn't do without us. Moreover, we're kidding ourselves because we already manufacture so little today -- except for weapons.

We could pay a terrible price for not having been more prudent. To have been stupid enough to give up on infrastructure, health care, and education in order to put 8 missiles in the ground at Fort Greeley, Alaska that can't hit anything. In fact, when tested, sometimes they don't even get out of their silos.

TD: How long do you see the dollar remaining the international currency? I noticed recently that Iran was threatening to switch to Euros.

Johnson: Yes, they're trying to create an oil bourse based on the Euro. Any number of countries might do that. Econ 1A as taught in any American university is going to tell you that a country that runs the biggest trade deficits in economic history must pay a penalty if the global system is to be brought back into equilibrium. What this would mean is a currency so depreciated no American could afford a Lexus automobile. A vacation in Italy would cost Americans a wheelbarrow full of dollars.

TD: At least it might stop the CIA from kidnapping people off the streets of Italy in the style to which they've grown accustomed.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Their kidnappers would no longer be staying in the Principe di Savoia [a five-star hotel] in Milano, that's for sure.

The high-growth economies of East Asia now hold huge amounts in American treasury certificates. If the dollar loses its value, the last person to get out of dollars loses everything, so you naturally want to be first. But the person first making the move causes everyone else to panic. So it's a very cautious, yet edgy situation.

A year ago, the head of the Korean Central Bank, which has a couple of hundred billion of our dollars, came out and said: I think we're a little heavily invested in dollars, suggesting that maybe Dubai's currency would be better right now, not to mention the Euro. Instantaneous panic. People started to sell; presidents got on the telephone asking: What in the world are you people up to? And the Koreans backed down -- and so it continues.

There are smart young American PhDs in economics today inventing theories about why this will go on forever. One is that there's a global savings glut. People have too much money and nothing to do with it, so they loan it to us. Even so, as the very considerable economics correspondent for the Nation magazine, William Greider, has written several times, it's extremely unwise for the world's largest debtor to go around insulting his bankers. We're going to send four aircraft-carrier task forces to the Pacific this summer to intimidate the Chinese, sail around, fly our airplanes, shoot off a few cruise missiles. Why shouldn't the Chinese say, let's get out of dollars. Okay, they don't want a domestic panic of their own, so the truth is they would do it as subtly as they could, causing as little fuss as possible.

What does this administration think it's doing, reducing taxes when it needs to be reducing huge deficits? As far as I can see, its policies have nothing to do with Republican or Democratic ideology, except that its opposite would be traditional, old Republican conservatism, in the sense of being fiscally responsible, not wasting our money on aircraft carriers or other nonproductive things.

But the officials of this administration are radicals. They're crazies. We all speculate on why they do it. Why has the President broken the Constitution, let the military spin virtually out of control, making it the only institution he would turn to for anything -- another Katrina disaster, a bird flu epidemic? The whole thing seems farcical, but what it does remind you of is ancient Rome.

If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist.

TD: Do you think that our all-volunteer military will turn out to be the janissaries of our failed empire?

Johnson: They might very well be. I'm already amazed at the degree to which they tolerate this incompetent government. I mean the officers know that their precious army, which they worked so hard to rebuild after the Vietnam War, is coming apart again, that it's going to be ever harder to get people to enlist, that even the military academies are in trouble. I don't know how long they'll take it. Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the attack on Baghdad, did say that if there were another terrorist attack in the United States comparable to 9/11, the military might have no choice but to take over. In other words: If we're going to do the work, why listen to incompetents like George Bush? Why take orders from an outdated character like Donald Rumsfeld? Why listen to a Congress in which, other than John McCain, virtually no Republican has served in the armed forces?

I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

Now, I'll grant you, I could be wrong. If I am, you're going to be so glad, you'll forgive me. [He laughs.] In the past, we've had clear excesses of executive power. There was Lincoln and the suspension of habeas corpus. Theodore Roosevelt virtually invented the executive order. Until then, most presidents didn't issue executive orders. Roosevelt issued well over a thousand. It was the equivalent of today's presidential signing statement. Then you go on to the mad Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, whom the neocons are now so in love with, and Franklin Roosevelt and his pogrom against Americans of Japanese ancestry. But there was always a tendency afterwards for the pendulum to swing back, for the American public to become concerned about what had been done in its name and correct it. What's worrying me is: Can we expect a pendulum swing back this time?

TD: Maybe there is no pendulum.

Johnson: Today, Cheney tells us that presidential powers have been curtailed by the War Powers Act [of 1973], congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies, and so on. This strikes me as absurd, since these modest reforms were made to deal with the grossest violations of the Constitution in the Nixon administration. Moreover, most of them were stillborn. There's not a president yet who has acknowledged the War Powers Act as legitimate. They regard themselves as not bound by it, even though it was an act of Congress and, by our theory of government, unless openly unconstitutional, that's the bottom line. A nation of laws? No, we are not. Not anymore.

TD: Usually we believe that the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse and, in essence, our victory. A friend of mine put it another way. The United States, he suggested, was so much more powerful than the USSR that we had a greater capacity to shift our debts elsewhere. The Soviets didn't and so imploded. My question is this: Are we now seeing the delayed end of the Cold War? Perhaps both superpowers were headed for the proverbial trash bin of history, simply at different rates of speed?

Johnson: I've always believed that they went first because they were poorer and that the terrible, hubristic conclusion we drew -- that we were victorious, that we won -- was off the mark. I always felt that we both lost the Cold War for the same reasons -- imperial overstretch, excessive militarism, things that have been identified by students of empires since Babylonia. We've never given Mikhail Gorbachev credit. Most historians would say that no empire ever gave up voluntarily. The only one I can think of that tried was the Soviet Union under him.

TD: Any last words?

Johnson: I'm still working on them. My first effort was Blowback. That was well before I anticipated anything like massive terrorist attacks in the United States. It was a statement that the foreign-policy problems -- I still just saw them as that -- of the first part of the 21st century were going to be left over from the previous century, from our rapacious activities in Latin America, from our failure to truly learn the lessons of Vietnam. The Sorrows of Empire was an attempt to come to grips with our militarism. Now, I'm considering how we've managed to alienate so many rich, smart allies -- every one of them, in fact. How we've come to be so truly hated. This, in a Talleyrand sense, is the sort of mistake from which you can't recover. That's why I'm planning on calling the third volume of what I now think of as "The Blowback Trilogy," Nemesis. Nemesis was the Greek goddess of vengeance. She also went after people who became too arrogant, who were so taken with themselves that they lost all prudence. She was always portrayed as a fierce figure with a scale in one hand -- think, Judgment Day – and a whip in the other…

TD: And you believe she's coming after us?

Johnson: Oh, I believe she's arrived. I think she's sitting around waiting for her moment, the one we're coming up on right now.

Excellent information Greg. I will try and get the same information on the providers of military services in the UK.

Here is an excellent interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, that provides more information on the U.S. military's power over the national government:

Part I: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

Interview With Chalmers Johnson

TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 21 March 2006

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. "It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says, "the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city."

Soon, we're heading toward their home just up the coast in one of those fabled highway traffic jams that every description of Southern California must include. "We feel we're far enough north," he adds in the kind of amused tone that makes his company both alarming and thoroughly entertaining, "so we could see the glow, get the cat, pack up, and head for Quartzsite, Arizona."

Chalmers Johnson, who served in the U.S. Navy and now is a historian of American militarism, lives cheek by jowl with his former service. San Diego is the headquarters of the 11th Naval District. "It's wall to wall military bases right up the coast," he comments. "By the way, this summer the Pentagon's planning the largest naval concentration in the Pacific in the post-World War II period! Four aircraft-carrier task forces - two from the Atlantic and that's almost unprecedented - doing military exercises off the coast of China."

That afternoon, we seat ourselves at his dining room table. He's seventy-four years old, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and bad knees. He walks with a cane, but his is one of the spriest minds in town. Out the window I can see a plethora of strange, oversized succulents. ("That's an Agave attenuata," he says. "If you want one, feel free. We have them everywhere. When the blue-gray Tequila plant blooms, its flower climbs 75 feet straight up! Then you get every hummingbird in Southern California.") In the distance, the Pacific Ocean gleams.

Johnson is wearing a black t-shirt that, he tells me, a former military officer and friend brought back from Russia. ("He was amused to see hippies selling these in the Moscow airport.") The shirt sports an illustration of an AK-47 on its front with the inscription, "Mikhail Kalashnikov" in Cyrillic script, and underneath, "The freedom fighter's friend, a product of the Soviet Union." On the back in English, it says, "World Massacre Tour" with the following list: "The Gulf War, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Angola, Laos, Nicaragua, Salvador, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Karabakh, Chechnya… To be continued."

Johnson, who served as a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy in the early 1950s and from 1967-1973 was a consultant for the CIA, ran the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times…"), but is probably the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since, anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback: "The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense… In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naiveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."

Retired, after a long, provocative career as a Japan specialist, he is the author of the prophetic Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in 2000 to little attention. After 9/11, it became a bestseller, putting the word "blowback," a CIA term for retaliation for U.S. covert actions, into common usage. He has since written The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. ("As an academic subject, the American Empire is largely taboo," he tells me. "I'm now comfortably retired, but I had a successful academic career. I realize that young academics today will take up the subject and start doing research on aspects of our empire only if they've got some cover. They need somebody to go first. I've had some of my former graduate students say, 'Look, you're invulnerable. If you won't take the lead, why do you expect us to go do a research project on the impact of American military whorehouses on Turkey. I mean, let's face it, it's a good subject!")

He is just now completing the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. It will be entitled Nemesis.

Sharp as a tack, energetic and high-spirited, by turns genuinely alarmed and thoroughly sardonic, he's a talker by nature. Our encounter is an interview in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a question that had been on my mind, but it's hardly necessary.

Tomdispatch: Let's start with a telltale moment in your life, the moment when the Cold War ended. What did it mean to you?

Chalmers Johnson: I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so.

There's no doubt that, in some ways, the Soviet Union inspired a degree of idealism. There are grown men I admire who can't but stand up if they hear the Internationale being played, even though they split with the Communists ages ago because of the NKVD and the gulag. I thought we needed to protect ourselves from the Soviets.

As I saw it, the only justification for our monster military apparatus, its size, the amounts spent on it, the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex that [President Dwight] Eisenhower identified for us, was the existence of the Soviet Union and its determination to match us. The fact that the Soviet Union was global, that it was extremely powerful, mattered, but none of us fully anticipated its weaknesses. I had been there in 1978 at the height of [soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's power. You certainly had a sense then that no consumer economy was present. My colleagues at the Institute for the USA and Canada were full of: Oh my god, I found a bottle of good Georgian white wine, or the Cubans have something good in, let's go over to their bar; but if you went down to the store, all you could buy was vodka.

It was a fairly rough kind of world, but some things they did very, very well. We talk about missile defense for this country. To this day, there's only one nation with a weapon that could penetrate any missile defense we put up - and that's Russia. And we still can't possibly match the one they have, the Topol-M, also known as the SS-27. When [President Ronald] Reagan said he was going to build a Star Wars, these very smart Soviet weapon-makers said: We're going to stop it. And they did.

As [senator] Daniel Moynihan said: Who needs a CIA that couldn't tell the Soviet Union was falling apart in the 1980s, a $32 billion intelligence agency that could not figure out their economy was in such awful shape they were going to come apart as a result of their war in Afghanistan and a few other things.

In 1989, [soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev makes a decision. They could have stopped the Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, but for the future of Russia he decided he'd rather have friendly relations with Germany and France than with those miserable satellites Stalin had created in East Europe. So he just watches them tear it down and, at once, the whole Soviet empire starts to unravel. It's the same sort of thing that might happen to us if we ever stood by and watched the Okinawans kick us out of Okinawa. I think our empire might unravel in a way you could never stop once it started.

The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States instantly - pure knee-jerk reaction - began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War.

That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous. George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It's over. What a huge cost we've paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the enemy - and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then.

I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened. The chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated - the same structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the building of weapons - was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire?.

Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole thing breaks down badly and this caused me to realize that I had some rethinking to do. The wise-ass sophomore has said to me - this has happened a number of times - "Aren't you being inconsistent?" I usually answer with the famous remark of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who, when once accused of being inconsistent, said to his questioner, "Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?"

A personal experience five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union also set me rethinking international relations in a more basic way. I was invited to Okinawa by its governor in the wake of a very serious incident. On September 4, 1995, two Marines and a sailor raped a 12-year old girl. It produced the biggest outpouring of anti-Americanism in our key ally, Japan, since the Security Treaty was signed [in 1960].

I had never been to Okinawa before, even though I had spent most of my life studying Japan. I was flabbergasted by the 32 American military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there. My first reaction as a good ?old Warrior was: Okinawa must be exceptional. It's off the beaten track. The American press doesn't cover it. It's a military colony. Our military has been there since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. It had all the smell of the Raj about it. But I assumed that this was just an unfortunate, if revealing, pimple on the side of our huge apparatus. As I began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the world.

TD: The way we garrison the planet has been essential to your rethinking of the American position in the world. Your chapters on Pentagon basing policy were the heart of your last book, The Sorrows of Empire. Didn't you find it strange that, whether reviewers liked the book or not, none of them seemed to deal with your take on our actual bases? What do you make of that?

Johnson: I don't know why that is. I don't know why Americans take for granted, for instance, that huge American military reservations in the United States are natural ways to organize things. There's nothing slightly natural about them. They're artificial and expensive. One of the most interesting ceremonies of recent times is the brouhaha over announced base closings. After all, it's perfectly logical for the Department of Defense to shut down redundant facilities, but you wouldn't think so from all the fuss.

I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex in our society. We use euphemisms like supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-em-up-again project, now we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons makers around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.

TD: As a professional editor, I would say that when we look at the world, we have a remarkable ability to edit it.

Johnson: Absolutely. We edit parts of it out. I mean, people in San Diego don't seem the least bit surprised that between here and Los Angeles is a huge military reservation called Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the First Marine Division. I was there myself back in the Korean War days. I unfortunately crossed the captain of the LST-883 that I was serving on. We had orders to send an officer to Camp Pendleton and he said, "I know who I'm going to send." It was me. (He laughs) And I'll never forget it. The world of Marine drill sergeants is another universe.

In many ways, as an enthusiast for the natural environment, I am delighted to have Pendleton there. It's a cordon sanitaire. I spent a little time with its commandant maybe a decade ago. We got to talking about protecting birds and he said, "I'm under orders to protect these birds. One of my troops drives across a bird's nest in his tank and I'll court martial him. Now, if that goddamn bird flies over to San Clemente, he takes his chances." Even then I thought: That's one of the few things going for you guys, because nothing else that goes on here particularly contributes to our country. Today, of course, with the military eager to suspend compliance with environmental regulations, even that small benefit is gone.

TD: So, returning to our starting point, you saw an empire and…

Johnson: …it had to be conceptualized. Empires are defined so often as holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.

So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot them out today.

An empire of bases - that's the concept that best explains the logic of the 700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the war ends and we never give them up. We discovered that it's part of the game; it's the perk for the people who fought the war. The Marines to this day believe they deserve to be in Okinawa because of the losses they had in the bloodiest and last big battle of World War II.

I was astonished, however, at how quickly the concept of empire - though not necessarily an empire of bases - became acceptable to the neoconservatives and others in the era of the younger Bush. After all, to use the term proudly, as many of them did, meant flying directly in the face of the origins of the United States. We used to pride ourselves on being as anti-imperialist as anybody could be, attacking a king who ruled in such a tyrannical manner. That lasted only, I suppose, until the Spanish-American War. We'd already become an empire well before that, of course.

TD: Haven't we now become kind of a one-legged empire in the sense that, as you've written, just about everything has become military?

Johnson: That's what's truly ominous about the American empire. In most empires, the military is there, but militarism is so central to ours - militarism not meaning national defense or even the projection of force for political purposes, but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or getting comfortable. I guarantee you that the first Marine Division lives better in Okinawa than in Oceanside, California, by considerable orders of magnitude. After the Wall came down, the Soviet troops didn't leave East Germany for five years. They didn't want to go home. They were living so much better in Germany than they knew they would be back in poor Russia.

Most empires try to disguise that military aspect of things. Our problem is: For some reason, we love our military. We regard it as a microcosm of our society and as an institution that works. There's nothing more hypocritical, or constantly invoked by our politicians, than "support our boys." After all, those boys and girls aren't necessarily the most admirable human beings that ever came along, certainly not once they get into another society where they are told they are, by definition, doing good. Then the racism that's such a part of our society emerges very rapidly - once they get into societies where they don't understand what's going on, where they shout at some poor Iraqi in English.

TD: I assume you'd agree that our imperial budget is the defense budget. Do you want to make some sense of it for us?

Johnson: Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way we've become dependent on it. Empires in the past - the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Japanese Empire - helped to enrich British citizens, Roman citizens, Japanese citizens. In our society, we don't want to admit how deeply the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life; that we really have no more than four major weapons manufacturers - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics - but these companies distribute their huge contracts to as many states, as many congressional districts, as possible.

The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent bu?get. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.

This is not, of course, free enterprise. Four huge manufacturers with only one major customer. This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting out of the Great Depression - counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to keep people employed.

The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk about closing bases and it has nothing to do with politics. New England goes just as mad over shutting shut down the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as people here in San Diego would if you suggested shutting the Marine Corps Air Station. It's always seen as our base. How dare you take away our base! Our congressmen must get it back!

This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.

And the precedents for this should really terrify us. The greatest single previous example of military Keynesianism - that is, of taking an economy distraught over recession or depression, over people being very close to the edge and turning it around - is Germany. Remember, for the five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he was admired as one of the geniuses of modern times. And people were put back to work. This was done entirely through military Keynesianism, an alliance between the Nazi Party and German manufacturers.

Many at the time claimed it was an answer to the problems of real Keynesianism, of using artificial government demand to reopen factories, which was seen as strengthening the trade unions, the working class. Capitalists were afraid of government policies that tended to strengthen the working class. They might prove to be revolutionary. They had been often enough in that century. In this country, we were still shell-shocked over Bolshevism; to a certain extent, we still are.

What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers. This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise. And that's how - my god - in 1966, only a couple of decades after we started down this path, we ended up with some 32,000 nuclear warheads. That was the year of the peak stockpile, which made no sense at all. We still have 9,960 at the present moment.

Now, the 2007 Pentagon budget doesn't make sense either. It's $439.3 billion…

TD: … not including war…

Johnson: Not including war! These people have talked us into building a fantastic military apparatus, and then, there was that famous crack [Clinton Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright made to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Well, if you want to use it today, they charge you another $120 billion dollars! (He laughs.)

But even the official budget makes no sense. It's filled with weapons like Lockheed Martin's F-22 - the biggest single contract ever written. It's a stealth airplane and it's absolutely useless. They want to build another Virginia class nuclear submarine. These are just toys for the admirals.

TD: When we were younger, there were always lots of articles about Pentagon boondoggles, the million-dollar military monkey wrench and the like. No one bothers to write articles like that any more, do they?

Johnson: That's because they've completely given up on decent, normal accounting at the Pentagon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and a colleague at Harvard have put together a real Pentagon budget which, for the wars we're fighting right now, comes out to about $2 trillion. What they've added in are things like interest on the national debt that was used to buy arms in the past. Turns out to be quite a few billion dollars. Above all, they try to get a halfway honest figure for veterans' benefits. For this year, it's officially $68 billion, which is almost surely way too low given, if nothing more, the huge number of veterans who applied for and received benefits after our first Gulf War.

We hear on the nightly news about the medical miracle that people can be in an explosion in which, essentially, three 155 millimeter shells go off underneath a Humvee, and they survive through heroic emergency efforts. Barely. Like Bob Woodruff, the anchor person from ABC News. The guy who saved his life said, I thought he was dead when I picked him up. But many of these military casualties will be wards of the state forever. Do we intend to disavow them? It leads you back to the famous antiwar cracks of the 1930s, when Congressmen used to say: There's nothing we wouldn't do for our troops - and that's what we do, nothing.

We almost surely will have to repudiate some of the promises we've made. For instance, Tricare is the government's medical care for veterans, their families. It's a mere $39 billion for 2007. But those numbers are going to go off the chart. And we can't afford it.

Even that pompous ideologue Donald Rumsfeld seems to have thrown in the towel on the latest budget. Not a thing is cut. Every weapon got through. He stands for "force transformation" and we already have enough nuclear equipment for any imaginable situation, so why on Earth spend anything more? And yet the Department of Energy is spending $18.5 billion on nuclear weapons in fiscal year 2006, according to former Senior Defense Department Budget Analyst Winslow Wheeler, who is today a researcher with the Center for Defense Information.

TD: Not included in the Pentagon budget.

Johnson: Of course not. This is the Department of Energy's budget.

TD: In other words, there's a whole hidden budget…

Johnson: Oh, it's huge! Three-quarters of a trillion dollars is the number I use for the whole shebang: $440 billion for the authorized budget; at least $120 billion for the supplementary war-fighting budget, calculated by Tina Jones, the comptroller of the Department of Defense, at $6.8 billion per month. Then you add in all the other things out there, above all veterans' care, care of the badly wounded who, not so long ago, would have added up to something more like Vietnam-era casualty figures. In Vietnam, they were dead bodies; these are still living people. They're so embarrassing to the administration that they're flown back at night, offloaded without any citizens seeing what's going on. It's amazing to me that [Congressman] John Murtha, as big a friend as the defense industry ever had - you could count on him to buy any crazy missile-defense gimmick, anything in outer space - seems to have slightly woken up only because he spent some time as an old Marine veteran going to the hospitals.

Another person who may be getting this message across to the public is Gary Trudeau in some of his Doonesbury cartoons. Tom, I know your mother was a cartoonist and we both treasure Walt Kelly, who drew the Pogo strip. How applicable is Pogo's most famous line today: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Thanks, Douglas. Very interesting indeed.

In the mid 1960's, Moody and Jack C. Vaughn tried to merge their companies. Are you aware of any details there?

Also, did you ever cross paths with Moody's lobbyist, Jimmy Day?

Cheers,

James

It seems that Moody and John Connally didn't exactly see eye to eye.

FWIW.

James

I have no recollection of Shearn Moody, Jr. ever mentioning that he desired to merge his Alabama insurance company with another entity. Of course, by the time I began working with him he had lost his company to unscrupulous Alabama insurance regulators in years prior, so I don’t have a complete grasp of what transpired in that period.

Jimmy Day was Shearn’s lobbyist in Austin, Texas, the state capital. When Carter was elected President he moved to Washington, D.C. There, according to Shearn, he got himself charged with the felony of “puffery” and was sent to prison. Shearn said that Day “lifted” stationery while visiting the White House and then wrote a letter on the White House letterhead that praised himself as being most meritorious and signed the name of a White House official. He used this to impress potential clients for his lobbying expertise..

Day was sent to federal prison at Big Spring, Texas, which is where Billie Sol Estes was incarcerated. It was Day who suggested to Billie Sol that he call Moody to request a grant from the Moody Foundation to help in getting the story out about his relationship with LBJ.

I met Jimmy Day on only one occasion, when he visited with Shearn soon after his release from Big Spring prison. Subsequently, he disappeared from the scene and Moody never mentioned him again. Billie Sol at no time spoke about Day to me.

In 1984, I invited Shearn to be my guest at the annual dinner of the U.S. Supreme Court Society, which had been organized by Chief Justice Warren Burger. The dinner was held in the Supreme Court building and guests were free to roam around the building before dinner. Shearn went into the conference room where the justices weekly met to discuss the cases before them. In a playful mood he “lifted” a note pad from the conference table that bore the title of “Supreme Court of the United States” on it and started to walk out. Mrs. Burger intercepted him and gently suggested that he return the pad to where it belonged. It was lucky that she was good-natured about it, otherwise he might have found himself later charged with “puffery” also.

Mr. Caddy - did Shearn ever mention John Tower at all?

- lee

Lee: No, at no time did Shearn Moody, Jr. ever mention the name of John Tower to me.

Mr. Caddy, do you have any insight into Moody's feelings about LBJ? Were they involved in a long-time feud? In your talks with Moody, did the subject of Howard Hughes or Robert Maheu ever come up?

No, the names of Howard Hughes or Robert Maheu were never mentioned by Shearn Moody, Jr. to me.

There was no feud between LBJ and Moody to my knowledge. After Billie Sol Estes from prison initially contacted Moody about getting financial help in telling his story about his relationship with LBJ, Moody did tell me in 1983 that he had heard on reliable authority that Johnson had created "a secret financial empire" while holding public office.

Such a secret LBJ financial empire is, of course, the subject of Barr McClellan's book, "Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ killed JFK", which was published in 2003, some 20 years after Moody talked to me about it.