Douglas Caddy

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.

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.”

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

Shearn Moody, Jr. on numerous occasions told me how John Connally had attempted to take over the Moody Foundation of Galveston, Texas. At one time the Foundation was placed in the hands of strangers and only through a lawsuit filed by Shearn Moody, Jr., did the Moody family regain control. Moody provided me with documents showing that one means that Connally utilized his power illicitly was through Project Southwest, which was instituted by the Internal Revenue service under the Nixon Administration. After Professor John A. Andrew of Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania published his book titled “The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics,” he informed me that he had begun writing another book. This additional work would deal with abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. I provided Prof. Andrew with materials that Moody had given me on Project Southwest. Prof. Andrew was intrigued by what he read and through the Freedom of Information Act obtained additional documents on IRS abuses, including more on Project Southwest. However, before he finished his book, he suddenly died in 2000. His manuscript was later completed, using his writings and research materials that he left behind, and was published in 2002. Its title is “Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon” and is available from amazon.com. Among the documents that I gave to Prof. Andrew was a letter-to-editor from me on Project Southwest that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 1998. A few days after my letter was published, The Wall Street Journal published a letter-to-editor from former IRS Commissioner Johnny Walters, who served in the Nixon Administration, disputing my allegation of IRS abuses through Project Southwest while he was Commissioner. Prof. John Andrew, who had previously studied at the University of Texas and written a book on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, contended in his communications to me that Connally, while serving as Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Administration, had used IRS Project Southwest to go after his political enemies in Texas. He maintained that Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, also from Texas, had indicted Connally in part in retaliation for devising Project Southwest. The indictment charged that Connally had accepted a bribe while serving as Secretary of the Treasury. The evidence was strong that he had done so but a Washington, D.C. jury, comprised mainly of African-Americans, found Connally not guilty after the Rev. Billy Graham and Member of Congress Barbara Jordan of Texas, a prominent African-American, testified as character witnesses in his behalf. In 2001, at its Commencement Ceremony Franklin and Marshall College remembered Prof. Andrew in a eulogy that contained, in part, the following words: History Professor John Andrew Honored Posthumously at Franklin and Marshall Commencement A member of the faculty since 1973, Andrew earned his bachelor's and master's at the University of New Hampshire and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas - Austin....At the time of his death, Andrew was deeply immersed in writing a history of the political uses of the Internal Revenue Service from Kennedy to Nixon. He became interested in this subject while researching The Other Side of the Sixties, and soon became an expert in filing Freedom of Information Act petitions to gain access to IRS documents. http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/Colle...0-01/PR171.html Publisher’s Weekly in its review had this to say about Prof. Andrew’s book on the IRS: As historian Prof. Andrew (Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society) shows in this dense study, during the 1960s and '70s the White House used the power of taxation to attack enemies-and reward friends-with relative impunity. President Kennedy, for example, started an "Ideological Organizations Project" that used the IRS to challenge the tax-exempt status of (and thus choke off the funding from) such right-wing opponents as the John Birch Society. Johnson often promised tax favors to wealthy individuals who could deliver votes. But these abuses pale in comparison to the corruption of the Nixon administration, which used the IRS to persecute people on the president's notorious "Enemies List." At Nixon's request, the IRS launched audits and investigations of a host of real and imagined opponents, including the Jerry Rubin Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism (which funded Seymour Hersh's reporting on the My Lai massacre) and the Center for Corporate Responsibility. The basic intent, Nixon aide John Dean wrote, was to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." Though known to Watergate prosecutors, these abuses went largely unreported in the mainstream media because they weren't sexy enough for the general public. In my opinion, had Watergate not erupted and had not Connally been swept up in its wake, he might well have succeeded in using his position as Secretary of the Treasury to steal the Moody Foundation from the Moody Family. Discussions that took place in the Oval Office in the White House would seem to support this. Thus, Shearn Moody, Jr., had proper reason to be on guard against Connally’s ambitions.

Mr. Caddy - thanks for that. Incredible! I really enjoyed reading every word. Sounds as if you were born under a lucky star for sure. On the final note - I haven't seen anything at all - it just occurs to me that Galveston would have been a very powerful area of a lot of 'mixing' of interests. Howard Hughes, 'rich Houston Oilmen' and others, visiting the Balinese Room - the Maceo Brothers, etc. Prostitution in Galveston apparently was common since the 1830s. A large center of power, influence and trafficking, even though it appears that the migration to Nevada for casinos was taking place in late 1950s, since Galveston was effectively shutdown by the Rangers. I did enjoy reading about the techniques used by the Balinese Room to thwart investigation into their gambling activities. Anyway - I have not seen any kind of connection of any kind whatsoever, aside from the question as to what kind of relationship Ruby may have had with Shearn, and some interest in Galveston, and insurance companies funding Maffia casinos and hotels. I would point out though - that if the operation in Dealey Plaza was compartmentalized - with multiple 'cells' made up of multiple players, being directed by multiple channels and through funding provided by multiple sources - all with plausible denial and on a 'need to know basis,' using code names, and etc., well....the Estes / Wallace thing would only be a small piece of the overall puzzle - and unrelated to other pieces. - lee Lee – Re: Shearn Moody, Jr., you are correct. I should not hastily foreclose any possibility in the consideration of the JFK assassination conspiracy, especially since it has been previously disclosed in the Forum that Moody was apparently financially involved in the funding of the Bay of Pigs project. This came as news to me. I am slowly reading all the past topics on the Forum dealing with the assassination and am constantly amazed at the quality and quantity of valuable materials being posted by Forum members. It is a real eye-opener and should serve as a terrific educational tool for anyone, student and non-student alike, wishing to learn how the world really works.

In regard to Shearn Moody, Jr., I wish to add the following information: In 1979, I moved from Washington, D.C. to Houston, Texas. I was admitted to the Texas Bar that same year. In 1980, George Strake, Jr., who was the Texas Secretary of State in the first administration of GOP Governor William Clements, asked me to join his staff as Director of Elections for the State of Texas. Enforcement of the Texas election code in the state’s 25 4 counties fell within the purview of the Secretary of State (and still does today.) In 1981, while still employed by the State of Texas, I was contacted by Howard Phillips, Chairman of the Conservative Caucus, Inc., of Vienna, Virginia, who had been one of the original founders of Young Americans for Freedom. Phillips asked me to become legal counsel to the Texas Policy Institute, which was about to receive a $250,000 grant from the Moody Foundation of Galveston, Texas. The Moody Foundation had three trustees, brothers Robert and Shearn Moody, Jr., and their aunt, Mary Moody Nothern, daughter of the founder of the financial dynasty. Shearn Moody was the sponsor of the Foundation grant to the Texas Policy Institute. After receiving the grant, the Texas Policy Institute in 1982 organized a National Conference on Star Wars to encourage the authorization of the Star Wars Project, which later was officially proposed by President Reagan. Howard Phillips invited Senator Jesse Helms to address the conference at its opening session, which took place at a well-attended dinner at the Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas. At the dinner Howard Phillips presented an award for conservatism to Senator Helms, who left early the next morning to return to Washington. Senator Helms was correct, then, when he stated that he was unfamiliar with the name of Shearn Moody, Jr. Although an attendee at the dinner, Moody played no role in its activities. To Helms the key person at the event was Howard Phillips, whom he knew to be a national conservative activist. By the way, among the Star Wars Conference other attendees was historian J. Evetts Haley, author of “A Texas Looks at Lyndon.” I worked with Shearn Moody, Jr. for the three years following the 1982 Star Wars Conference on a number of other Moody Foundation grants.. However, I know next to nothing about Moody’s activities in the period before 1981, when I met him for the first time. When I worked with him he had serious health problems stemming from high blood pressure and had long since stopped giving any wild parties at his ranch in Galveston. He spent much of each year in Durham, N.C., where he was enrolled under supervision on the low-sodium rice diet made famous by a doctor associated with Duke University. In the posting by Lee Forman, mention is made of Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta today is an extremely successful businessman, owner of a chain of restaurants around the U.S., including Landrys. He has extensive business interests in Galveston, where he is engaged in heated business rivalry with Robert Moody, Shearn Moody’s brother, usually to the latter’s detriment who is not popular locally due to his arrogant attitude. When Bill Clinton was President, on a number of occasions he attended fund-raising events for the Democratic Party at Fertitta’s home, located in the River Oaks section of Houston. In 1986, Shearn Moody, Jr. fell under the influence of a con man, William Pabst. His association with Pabst eventually led to his losing his post as a trustee of the Moody Foundation. Pabst fled Houston in 1986 and is today still a fugitive from justice, wanted by both federal and Texas law enforcement for his criminal activities. Moody was convicted of defrauding the Moody Foundation due to his association with Pabst. His conviction was later reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His other conviction for bankruptcy fraud, however, was affirmed. His close adviser for many years, Norman Revie, was convicted with him of bankruptcy fraud and is today, like Pabst, a fugitive from justice. Ultimately Moody was set free from prison by an order of a federal judge after I wrote a letter to the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas and asked to appear voluntarily before the federal grand jury to testify how an agent from the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Internal Revenue Service had directed me to spend $38,000 of a Moody Foundation grant. I asked that both I and the agent be required to testify under oath, with the threat of perjury, about the transaction. The U.S. government refused to let the IRS Criminal Intelligence agent testify (because my evidence was air-tight) and, as a consequence, the federal judge ordered Moody’s release from prison on the ground that the U.S. government had failed to disclose the role of the IRS agent at Moody’s trial. Below is an article from the Houston Chronicle of January 18, 1987, which describes my association with Moody. Houston Chronicle January 18, 1987 “In harm's way, again What do Watergate, CIA and Moody probe have in common? Caddy By Dianna Hunt Staff HE HAD RECEIVED bomb threats, been followed, had his phones tapped and the windows of his office shot out in the night. Yet Douglas Caddy still feared he might just be paranoid. "We used to joke about it," says Caddy, a Houston author and attorney. "Do you think somebody's trying to give us a message?" His fears, apparently, were not unfounded. In a sworn statement submitted to a Houston private investigator and the FBI, a former military explosives expert says Caddy was the target of an alleged bomb plot hatched by Galveston millionaire Shearn Moody Jr. Moody, says the expert, tried to hire him to "blow (Caddy's) legs off" because Caddy prompted investigations into impropriety within the multimillion-dollar Moody Foundation. For Caddy, the front-row seat in a money-and-power scandal is an all-too-familiar occurrence. As a defense attorney and witness in the Watergate scandal, a friend and former roommate to South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, and a one-time publicist in a CIA front company, Caddy turns up in the strangest places. "I don't know why," he concedes. "I just do." He flatly denies ever working for the Central Intelligence Agency. "I get tarred with it, but I never have worked for the CIA," Caddy says. Caddy, 48, emerged as a central figure in the latest scandal after approaching Moody Foundation officials in 1985 with information about the possible mishandling of millions of dollars in foundation grants. His complaints prompted an internal Moody Foundation probe, which ultimately led to the hiring of Houston private investigator Clyde Wilson to look into the matter. The state attorney general's office and federal officials likewise are investigating. Five people - including Moody and his administrative aide Norman Revie - already have been indicted by a Houston federal grand jury. Caddy's life the last three decades has been scattered with similar brushes with important people and events. A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and New York University Law School, Caddy became involved in the Watergate scandal just half an hour after the arrest of five burglars in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel - when he received a 3 a.m. call from former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. Caddy served as defense lawyer to both Hunt and another Watergate conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy, and later testified about his refusal to accept $25,000 in "hush money." His involvement in Watergate stemmed from his friendship with Hunt, with whom he shared office space in the Washington-based Mullen Company - a public relations firm and offshoot of General Foods that was later identified as a front company for the CIA. Caddy went to work as a lobbyist in General Foods' New York office in 1967, but transferred to the Mullen Company in 1969. He left the company in 1971 to go into private practice as an attorney. "I didn't ask to be put in the Mullen Company," Caddy says now. "General Foods put me there. "I didn't even know the Democrats had their headquarters in the Watergate." Just a few years later, though, Caddy would be back in the midst of another scandal - one involving his former college roommate, Tongsun Park, a Korean rice dealer. Park, a glittering party-giver and a central figure in "Koreagate," was granted immunity from criminal prosecution in 1978 for his much-publicized testimony that he paid members of Congress in exchange for political favors. Caddy says Park was the first person he met at Georgetown University, and they later became class officers together, as well as friends. During that time, Caddy said he suspected - but never knew - that Park worked for the Korean CIA. "I suspected - much like working in the Mullen office - that something was up," Caddy said. Caddy says he was questioned by staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives ethics committee about his relationship with Park, but never testified publicly. Through it all, Caddy remained active in conservative Republican politics and helped found two youth groups, the Young Americans for Freedom and the International Youth Federation for Freedom. And in 1974, he wrote a book, "The Hundred Million Dollar Pay-off," about organized labor's role in campaign financing. Caddy came to Texas in 1979, and went to work in 1980 in Austin as director of elections for then-Secretary of State George Strake. While there, he agreed to a friend's request to serve as local counsel to a non-profit foundation that wanted to apply for a Moody Foundation grant. He moved to Houston in 1981. Caddy said he first met foundation trustee Shearn Moody Jr. at the foundation's Galveston offices, where they and other officials discussed the grant. Caddy eventually would serve as director or legal counsel to several organizations that would receive more than $1 million in Moody Foundation grants. Those grants are now among more than $3 million in grants under investigation. Caddy says the investigation of him is "retaliation" for his raising the initial allegations with officials. He also attributes the probe to what he says is a friendship between the Moodys and Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox. Caddy says he has cooperated fully with investigators because he has "nothing to hide." "We're very proud of what we did," Caddy said. "We fulfilled our contracts for the purposes stated." Among his grant-funded projects were conferences on terrorism, Hispanics and the "Star Wars" technology, and - at Moody's request - an investigation into allegations raised by convicted West Texas swindler Billie Sol Estes. Estes has long claimed to have information implicating former President Lyndon B. Johnson in wrongdoing. During that time, Caddy says he began to consider himself a friend to Moody, and once agreed to work undercover posing as Moody's lawyer to help an FBI investigation of alleged corruption among Alabama state officials. The friendship began to cool, however, after Moody's lawyer revealed the "cover" in a North Carolina bankruptcy court, Caddy said. Moody's increasing association with William R. Pabst, convicted in 1985 of charity fraud, furthered the split. Caddy said Moody ignored repeated warnings to steer clear of Pabst. On Oct. 31, 1985, Caddy urged the Moody Foundation to investigate grants to several foundations Pabst and his associate, Vance Beaudreau, helped set up. Moody, Pabst and Beaudreau have since been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly diverting Moody Foundation grants to pay personal expenses. It wasn't long after his split with Moody that Caddy says he started receiving threats. Caddy said he received three or four bomb threats over a period of several days, and the windows in his sixth-floor office were shot out during the night. About a month later, he found a spent cartridge near his desk. Throughout, he says, his house has been watched, he's been followed and his telephones have been wiretapped. Friends and associates, too, have been harassed, Caddy says. In a July 22, 1985, letter to Moody, Caddy attributed the threats to "Pabst and his kooky paramilitary colleagues." Last week, D. Michael Hollaway, the explosives expert, said under oath that Moody and Pabst tried to hire him later that year to plant explosives in Caddy's car. Hollaway said Moody told him he wanted to "blow his (Caddy's) legs off," or have him shot by a sniper. Hollaway declined the offer. "William R. Pabst just talked to me about using enough explosives to scare Caddy, but Shearn Moody wanted him either dead or his legs blown off," Hollaway said. "Shearn Moody was not kidding about this but was very serious." Hollaway said he was approached by Moody and Pabst "at the time that Douglas Caddy started causing problems at the Moody Foundation." Caddy says he's not surprised by Hollaway's allegations. "It's what comes out of a case involving a family fortune and a family dynasty," Caddy said. "I think quite frankly, yes, they were trying to send us a message." He remains worried, though - particularly since Pabst and Beaudreau are fugitives believed to be hiding in Mexico. "It still bothers me that Pabst and Beaudreau are still running around out there, because they're unstable people," Caddy said. "I am still fearful for my life and the lives of my associates. "We're not just paranoid. If he (Moody) had found the right guy, they would have done it." [End] Any attempt to tie Shearn Moody, Jr., to the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, in my opinion, is a waste of time and energy as there is no connection. History, however, does owe him a debt of gratitude for his responding favorably when Billie Sol Estes contacted him about the latter publicly telling the story of his relationship with Lyndon Johnson. Had Moody not encouraged Billie Sol to do so, much of what is now known of LBJ’s use of the stone killer, Malcolm (Mac) Wallace, would still be cloaked in secrecy.

The 1961 column is vintage Alice Widener. It is interesting some 45 years later to read what the Anonymous Administrator in the State Department wrote in the Washington Post and Alice Widener’s response. Both seemed to hit their marks about 50 per cent of the time. Castro has endured and his influence in Latin America has never been greater. In fact, Latin America has never been so unified against the U.S. as it is today. In this regard the link below will bring up a recent interview with Noam Chomsky, titled “What’s happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere,” which was published on March 7, 2006 in Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/dwyer03072006.html

Alice Widener worked closely with the FBI on internal security matters. On a number of occasions the bureau chief of the FBI's Manhattan office visited her in her residence and sought her counsel or information that she might have on these matters. However, in all the years that I knew her, primarily in the 1960's and early 1970's, I never heard her speak of the CIA. For this reason, I do not think that she had any connection with J.J. Angleton.

In the period leading up to the expansion of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1965, I was in general agreement with Senator Goldwater’s views, with the exception of his advocacy of the use of nuclear weapons. I was unaware that he maintained this particular position until I read your posting. At this time I was in NYU law school and living in the Manhattan coop owned by Alice Widener. Mrs. Widener, a newspaper columnist and publisher of USA magazine, every few months talked on the phone with J. Edgar Hoover. She had for many years infiltrated Communist Party meetings in New York City using the name of Alice Berezowsky, widow of a prominent Russian emigre, Sergei Berezowsky, her first husband. Hoover valued her inside reports on the Party’s meetings. Her writings were frequently published in Barron’s Financial Weekly, whose editor, Robert Bleiberg, was a frequent dinner guest in her coop, along with James Dines, another Barron’s writer. The topic at these dinner meetings invariably dealt with Vietnam and while everyone was in general agreement that the American war effort must be supported, there was also discussion of public statements of Senator William Fulbright, an opponent of the war. His views had a certain credibility, or so it seemed to those around the dinner table. Of course, Johnson defeated Goldwater in 1964 and America got the Vietnam War, big-time. In retrospect, the Vietnam War obviously was a disaster for the U.S., just as is Bush’s war in Iraq. Johnson’s military experience in World War II was a joke. Mainly photo-ops for a few weeks in the Pacific theater. Goldwater, on the other hand, had a distinguished military record and was a jet pilot. He was Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I firmly believe that had Goldwater been elected, the Vietnam War would not have been the total wipe-out for America that took place under Johnson’s leadership. (I still remember in my mind’s eye seeing on television General Douglas MacArthur meeting reporters on the lawn of the White House in 1963 after conferring with President Kennedy, who had sought his views on Vietnam. MacArthur declared that, “the chickens are coming home to roost,” a reference of the Korean War, which even today lacks final resolution.) Another topic that to my mind merits discussion, but not at this time, is whether communism and the Soviet Union were actually the threat that 99.9 percent of the world’s free population were led to believe or whether they were instead the strategic product of controlling financial interests in London and on Wall Street who stood to profit by the cold war. I visited the Soviet Union in 1974 with a group of lawyers and was flabbergasted at the poor living conditions that I saw. Upon my return I proposed to Allan Ryskind, editor of Human Events, the conservative newspaper for which I had worked while attending Georgetown University, that I write an article stating that other than for its nuclear weaponry, the Soviet Union was essentially a third-world country that posed only a limited menace to the U.S. Ryskind responded that if Human Events were to publish such an article it would lose its readership, which much preferred to believe that the Soviet Union posed a dire threat to America’s survival. I have often wondered what Alice Widener, a strident anti-communist but possessor of a sophisticated mind, would have thought had she had been able to visit the Soviet Union in the 1970's.

I promised in a prior posting to provide information concerning link between Dr. Alton Oschner of New Orleans, a key figure in the Kennedy Assassination debate, and the election of George Bush as President in 2000. This follows. There is no need to go into the background of Dr. Oschner, which has already been disclosed by others in prior Forum postings. The Oschner link involves the super-secret Council for National Policy. Below is an article from the New York Times of August 28, 2004 that provides background on the Council: August 28, 2004 Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK The New York Times Three times a year for 23 years, a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country have met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference, the Council for National Policy, to strategize about how to turn the country to the right. Details are closely guarded. "The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before of after a meeting," a list of rules obtained by The New York Times advises the attendees. The membership list is "strictly confidential." Guests may attend "only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee." In e-mail messages to one another, members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name, to protect against leaks. This week, before the Republican convention, the members quietly convened in New York, holding their latest meeting almost in plain sight, at the Plaza Hotel, for what a participant called "a pep rally" to re-elect President Bush. Mr. Bush addressed the group in fall 1999 to solicit support for his campaign, stirring a dispute when news of his speech leaked and Democrats demanded he release a tape recording. He did not. Not long after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld attended a council meeting. This week, as the Bush campaign seeks to rally Christian conservative leaders to send Republican voters to the polls, several Bush administration and campaign officials were on hand, according to an agenda obtained by The New York Times. "The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement," the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, told the gathering as he accepted its Thomas Jefferson award on Thursday, according to an attendee's notes. The secrecy that surrounds the meeting and attendees like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and the head of the National Rifle Association, among others, makes it a subject of suspicion, at least in the minds of the few liberals aware of it. "The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week," Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said. Mr. Lynn was referring to the list of moderate speakers like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York who are scheduled to speak at the convention. "The C.N.P. members are not going to be visible next week," he said. "But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party." A spokesman for the White House, Trent Duffy, said: "The American people are quite clear and know what the president's agenda is. He talks about it every day in public forums, not to any secret group of conservatives or liberals. And he will be talking about his agenda on national television in less than a week." The administration and re-election effort were major focuses of the group's meeting on Thursday and yesterday. Under Secretary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, a spokesman for the State Department said. Likewise, a spokesman for Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta confirmed that Mr. Acosta had addressed efforts to stop "human trafficking," a major issue among Christian conservatives. Dr. Frist spoke about supporting Mr. Bush and limiting embryonic stem cell research, two attendees said. Dan Senor, who recently returned from Iraq after working as a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator, was scheduled to provide an update on the situation there. Among presentations on the elections, an adviser to Mr. Bush's campaign, Ralph Reed, spoke on "The 2004 Elections: Who Will Win in November?," attendees said. The council was founded in 1981, just as the modern conservative movement began its ascendance. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, an early Christian conservative organizer and the best-selling author of the "Left Behind" novels about an apocalyptic Second Coming, was a founder. His partners included Paul Weyrich, another Christian conservative political organizer who also helped found the Heritage Foundation. They said at the time that they were seeking to create a Christian conservative alternative to what they believed was the liberalism of the Council on Foreign Relations. A statement of its mission distributed this week said the council's purposes included "to acquaint our membership with those in positions of leadership in our nation in order that mutual respect be fostered" and "to encourage the exchange of information concerning the methodology of working within the system to promote the values and ends sought by individual members." Membership costs several thousand dollars a year, a participant said. Its executive director, Steve Baldwin, did not return a phone call. Over the years, the council has become a staging ground for conservative efforts to make the Republican Party more socially conservative. Ms. Schlafly, who helped build a grass-roots network to fight for socially conservative positions in the party, is a longstanding member. At times, the council has also seen the party as part of the problem. In 1998, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family spoke at the council to argue that Republicans were taking conservatives for granted. He said he voted for a third-party candidate in 1996. Opposition to same-sex marriage was a major conference theme. Although conservatives and Bush campaign officials have denied seeking to use state ballot initiatives that oppose same-sex marriage as a tool to bring out conservative voters, the agenda includes a speech on "Using Conservative Issues in Swing States," said Phil Burress, leader of an initiative drive in Ohio, a battleground state. The membership list this year was a who's who of evangelical Protestant conservatives and their allies, including Dr. Dobson, Mr. Weyrich, Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty; Wayne LaPierre of the National Riffle Association, Richard A. Viguerie of American Target Advertising, Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Not everyone present was a Bush supporter, however. This year, the council included speeches by Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and Michael A. Peroutka of the ultraconservative Constitution Party. About a quarter of the members attended their speeches, an attendee said. Nor was the gathering all business. On Wednesday, members had a dinner in the Rainbow Room, where William F. Buckley Jr. of the National Review was a special guest. At 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, members had "prayer sessions" in the Rose Room at the hotel. [End] The Council for National Policy was incorporated in 1981. Its first Executive Director was Woody Jenkins, a protege of Dr. Alton Oschner. Woody Jenkins was introduced to the contra cause in Nicaragua by Dr. Oschner, head of the Caribbean Commission. It was Oschner who suggested Jenkins start Friends of the Americas (FOA), which became a conduit to the contras. Oschner's father was a prominent white supremacist. Jenkins had been a member of the Oschner’s Caribbean Commission. Friends of the Americas was a Caribbean Commission spinoff. Through Jenkins' membership, FOA was also linked to the Council for National Policy. Jenkins was the Executive Director of the Council in 1982-83, and in 1987. Further information on Jenkins and Dr. Oschner can be found in the links below: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/foa.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_E._%22Woody%22_Jenkins George Bush addressed the Council for National Policy in 1999, and, as noted in the Times’ article, since then has steadfastly refused to release a copy of his speech. It is alleged that in his speech he outlined to the assembled conservatives the goals he would seek to achieve if elected president. Historians have already labeled the Bush presidency as a failure, probably the worst in American history. It would, therefore, be of interest to history to find out now exactly what promises he made in 1999 to these key conservatives before his election the following year. Bush is recognized as being a lame-duck president. The conservatives, operating through the secretive Council for National Policy, are already making plans to elect his successor. Because this is the most important conservative group in America, it is important that its future plans and activities become publicly identified. The best means to do this is to read the past and future postings on the Council that appear in www.google.com.

I had a volunary working relationship while still in high school in New Orleans with Kent and Phoebe Courtney. This was from 1954-56, until I left for college. I did not maintain contact after that date and am aware of any activities in which they engaged subsequently. I helped with the preparation of their publication, Free Men Speak and, later, The Independent American. The publication reprinted editorials from conservative newspapers, such as the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader and the N.Y. Daily News. There was little original editorial comment by the Courtneys in their publication during this period. I did not know that Gay Bannister was recommended to the La. or Miss. Sovereignty Commissions. I have never heard the name of Frank McGehee before. The John Birch Society had essentially through its activities tarnished its public image so that no thinking young conservative would have seen much benefit with associating with the group. I do not think that YAF in any way was used a vehicle to recruit members for the Society. Senator Strom Thurmond was a strong YAF supporter and spoke at YAF-sponsored events. I have no knowledge about his views of the John Birch Society.

I do not consider William F. Buckley to be either a racist or opportunist. He is an extremely cerebral man, obviously gifted with a high I.Q. But even one so intelligent as he can make a grievous decision with disastrous results. Only within the last week has Buckley publicly acknowledged that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that now is the time to admit defeat and remove our troops. Millions of persons around the globe far less gifted intelligently than Buckley marched against the Iraq War in the months preceding the invasion. They foresaw disaster. Why didn’t Buckley? He is a captive to his significant role in history in jump-starting conservatism by writing “God and Man at Yale” in 1953 and initiating National Review magazine in 1955. In 1950, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling declared that “the plain fact” was that there were no conservative ideas being seriously considered in public discourse. Buckley changed that. The real question today is: Now that Buckley has admitted that the Iraq War is a disaster, will he have the courage to go further and acknowledge that the conservative ideology has become morally bankrupt, and that its leaders, who control all three branches of the U.S. government, by their actions pose a threat to the viability of Western Civilization?

The John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom were both conservative organizations and probably shared similar views on a number of public issues in the 1960's. The Birch Society mainly stressed anti-communism, while YAF had a broader view of public policy. YAF certainly did not embrace the view of Robert Welch, the Society’s founder, who proclaimed that “Eisenhower is a communist.” YAF’s public image was more moderate in its approach to public discourse. As a result, YAF attracted the support of leading conservative figures, while the Society did not. YAF’s membership was comprised of young persons, while the Society attracted adults. YAF sponsored it first conservative rally in March 1961, six months after its founding, which merited a front page article in The New York Times. The rally was held at the Manhattan Center on 34th street in New York City and over 3000 persons were turned away because the Center was already full with an even larger number. As the Times reported, those on the outside were assuaged by Senator Goldwater, who went outside the meeting hall and talked to them just before the rally began. The Times previously had recognized that something interesting was afoot when it carried an article about the activities of Youth For Goldwater at the Republican Convention in Chicago in August 1960. The Times’ reporter interviewed me and conveyed the significance of what was taking place then, while nevertheless characterizing me as a “young fogey.” In 1962 YAF held a second conservative rally at Madison Square Garden, which was packed with almost 20,000 attendees. On the other hand, the John Birch Society, due to its extremist image, was never able to mount a public meeting that attracted more than a few hundred people on any one occasion. For those who wish to learn more about the early years of YAF, the link below will bring up a YAF web page titled “Rebels with a Cause - Part I, The YAF Story 1960-1967" by Lee and Anne Edwards, both of whom were involved in the origins of YAF. http://www.yaf.com/rebels1.shtml

Re: Tim Gratz threat: this article includes information about the NY civil suit filed recently in the Holloway case against the Aruba boy and his father. It shows that even if the civil case is decided against the boy and his father, the impact on them would probably be of no effect. Spilbor: The Case of Missing Alabama Teen Natalee Holloway http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20...27_spilbor.html

I attended Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans from 1954 until I was graduated in 1956. That same year I departed New Orleans and enrolled in the School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1954, the Senate took up the matter of the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Kent and Phoebe Courtney organized a public meeting of those who supported McCarthy and opposed his being censured. I attended and within days set up a small table in Jackson Square, in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, to solicit signatures on a petition opposing McCarthy’s censure. McCarthy was catholic, so there was no lack of signatories on the petition from those attending mass in the Cathedral. After the national petition drive, which had been organized by General Albert Wedemeyer, ended with the Senate’s censure of McCarthy, I did voluntary work after high school in helping the Courtney’s launch their publication, Free Men Speak, which later was re-named The Independent American. Later, at a public meeting of the Kohn Crime Commission, a quasi-governmental investigatory body set up to monitor organized crime in New Orleans, Kent Courtney introduced me to Guy Bannister. I departed New Orleans several years before Lee Harvey Oswald arrived and thus never met Oswald. As is known, Oswald was recruited by Bannister for “undercover” work and also was also recruited by Dr. Alton Oschner of the Oschner Cancer Clinic for “specialized” work . There are other topics already in the Forum that cover the period that Oswald worked with Oschner, so I won’t elaborate any further here on this aspect. However, there is a direct link between Dr. Oschner and the election of George Bush as President in 2000. I shall describe this in a forthcoming posting

Civil Rights was not topic on the agenda of Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. My recollection is that it was not a topic on the agenda of Conservatives or Republicans until President Johnson initiated his civil rights legislation from 1964 to 1968. Then the Conservatives and the GOP united to oppose the legislation. Senator Goldwater was outspoken against the proposed legislation. I, myself, was not immune. In 1962 I hosted a reception for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the presidential candidate for the Dixiecrat Party in 1948, at the residence I shared with Tong Sun Park in the Georgetown section of Washington. Looking back, I can only say to myself, "Where was my mind?" A number of conservatives came to regret their opposition to civil rights. I remember how James Jackson Kilpatrick, a national conservative columnist and one-time editor of the Richmond (Virginia) News-Leader, wrote in his later years what a mistake steeped in human tragedy it was that he and the conservative movement failed to recognize the legitimacy of civil rights legislation. Louis Auchincloss, the wall street lawyer and author of many novels based on the elite WASP society, also was to write how he suddenly awoke and realized how wrong the conservatives were in some of their policy stands. Later I attempted to make amends. From 1980-81 I served as Director of Elections for the State of Texas in the first administration of GOP Governor William Clements. I used my position to make certain that the votes of African-Americans and Hispanics were correctly counted in the elections conducted in the 254 counties comprising Texas. In 1982, when the extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act was being considered by Congress, I testified before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee in favor of the legislation. My prepared statement, entered into the printed record, drew upon information that I had learned as Director of Election for Texas.. Lyndon Johnson achieved his goal of becoming President of the United States with blood on his hands. But, give the devil his due, his civil rights and much of his Great Society legislation were monumental steps in making the American dream come true for millions of persons, citizens and non-citizens.

In response to your query about the policy positions of YAF in 1960: YAF in its first year, when I was its National Director, merely coalesced around the general principles enunciated in the Sharon Statement, which was adopted at its founding meeting in Sharon, Connecticut at the Buckley family estate. During this period I was interviewed by The New Leader Magazine, which placed my picture on its cover. I was asked by its reporter at the time what YAF's policies were and replied, "Our policy is to have no policy." Behind this statement was the strategy of making certain that the new organization did not become "radioactive" by being labeled extremist as the result of embracing one particular policy that could be singled out for special criticism by the media. For example, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society about this time proclaimed publicly that "Eisenhower was a communist." This pretty much put an end to the Society's effectiveness because the media thereafter consigned it to the lunatic right. (Shortly after Welch made his statement, YAF chairman, Robert Schuchman, then a student at Yale University Law School, had breakfast with Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb. Schuchman made light of Welch's statement about Eisenhower being a communist and was dumbfounded when Teller said he agreed with Welch.) The Sharon Statement, which has been posted in the Forum, provided the perfect umbrella to explain where YAF stood on policy issues in its first year without having to get too specific. Later, YAF began publishing its monthly magazine, The New Guard, whose editor was Lee Edwards, son of famed Chicago Tribune reporter, Williard Edwards. Each issue of The New Guard contained articles that dealt with policy issues of the day.

First, in regard to Marvin Liebman: As I had indicated in a prior post, Liebman in his columns in the three or so years prior to his death (circa 1994) that were published in gay newspapers around the country had written about his early days in the Young Communist League. Also, when we had worked together in the 1960's in launching YAF, he had told to me about his prior communist affiliation. So when he declared at our last visit just prior to his death that he had written a column titled "Lenin Was Right" and was prepared on the spot to fax it to the gay newspapers, I was not overly surprised. I do not remember exactly what was contained in the column but do retain the impression from our talk that he had become thoroughly disillusioned with the Republicans and the Conservatives. He believed that all their talk about capitalism and free enterprise merely served as a smokescreen that obscured their real purpose, which is make the rich richer at the expense of those in society who are less fortunate. My only motive in discouraging him in sending out the column was to save him from suffering a backlash, one that could have led to emotional trauma at a time when his death was imminent, from those who admired him for his work in creating the modern conservative movement. I am not certain whether I made a mistake in so advising him. The ultimate decision to send the column was, of course, his to make. Several years ago I related this above story about the column to Richard Viguerie, the fund-raising guru for America's right-wing. He considered Liebman to have been one of his closest friends. Viguerie registered complete shock upon so hearing. It could be that Liebman never told him of his communist past and, of course, not being a reader of the nation's gay newspapers, Viguerie was unaware of Liebman's writings in the twilight of his life. In regard to the split that took place in the initial YAF board of directors: It was concerned with strategy. Why did Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention advise the Youth for Goldwater activists to make their organization a permanent one? He could just as well have said: stay active in the Young Republican National Federation. His concept, embraced by myself and others involved in the founding of Young Americans for Freedom, was to use the new organization to reach out and convert others to the conservative movement who did not consider themselves Republicans. These included members of the academic community, rank-and-file union members, Southerners, members of the media, and other segments of society. Up until the time when National Review under William Buckley appeared on the scene and a mass conservative movement emerged through YAF, the right-wing in America was an intellectual desert. Again, for more information about the subject, reference should be made to Prof. John Andrew's book, The Other Side of the Sixties, available through amazon.com.

From what you know, why was the Watergte broken into? Steve Thomas I do not know why the burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. When Howard Hunt came to my residence about 3:30 A.M. on June 17, 1972, 60 minutes after the burglars were arrested, he remained there for about an hour. During this time the emphasis was on how to get the five arrested individuals out of jail on bail as soon as possible. I immediately telephoned one of the partners of the law firm of which I was an associate attorney and explained what had occurred, as related to me by Hunt who was present. The partner, who knew Hunt and was a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, then arranged for another attorney skilled in criminal law to accompany me in an attempt to post bail quickly for the arrested five, an effort that was doomed to failure from the start. I talked on the telephone with Gordon Liddy from my residence while Hunt was still there. Both Hunt and Liddy, besides retaining me to represent them individually, also retained me to represent the five arrested persons. After this initial meeting, Hunt disappeared. Apparently he had been ordered to leave town. He telephoned me from an unknown location several times but our conversations were short and stilted because by then I had been served with a subpoena to appear "forthwith" before the Watergate grand jury. On one of these occasions, Dorothy Hunt was in my office when Howard called. I did not have a lengthy substantive conversation with Hunt until after he was released from prison, when on one occasion we had dinner at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Even then our conversation was circumspect, so that today I am still in the dark as to why there was a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters. About a week after the case broke, Gordon Liddy visited my office one Saturday afternoon. In a boastful manner he declared that Watergate was the biggest criminal case of the 20th century. He was cool as a cucumber and appeared to be thrilled at the prospect of being a key player in the case.

It should also be noted that Bennett's purchase of Mullen was orchestrated by Colson. Colson was Nixon's point man in winning back Howard Hughes, and his money... When Hughes fired Maheu, Nixon was horrified to find out that Maheu had put Larry O'Brien on Hughes' payroll. Nixon was scared that Maheu had told O'Brien about the pay-offs Maheu had given to Rebozo. Nixon had Colson work with Hughes and find Hughes a Washington representative, one that Nixon could trust. It's unclear whether it was Hughes or Colson who came up with the idea of finding a good Mormon to work for Hughes. (Hughes trusted Mormons.) Anyhow, Bennett fit the bill, got the Hughes gig (through Colson) and got Mullen (through Colson). Ironically, Neither Nixon nor Colson had any idea that Mullen was also a CIA front, and that, as a result, Bennett also got a case officer along with his Mullen gig. When Colson and Nixon found out about Bennett's CIA ties, they decided that all of Watergate had been a set-up and that it had been orchestrated by the CIA using Hunt, and Bennett as its principle agents. The irony, of course, was that both these men had achieved their proximity to the White House entirely through Colson's machinations. I've read where Bernard Barker said that Hunt worked for Hughes in the sixties. His official story was that he was with the CIA during this time. Did Hunt ever let on that he'd worked for Hughes prior to his working oin the Hughes account at Mullen? Do you still talk to Hunt? Is he working on any more books about his exploits? This is the first time I have heard that Charles Colson was responsible for Robert Bennett purchasing the Mullen Company from Robert Mullen. The scenario that you outline makes a great deal of sense, although I lack any personal information to support it. As I have indicated in a prior post, Robert Mullen wanted to retire and had approached Howard Hunt and myself about purchasing the Mullen Company. At that time I was an employee of General Food Corporation, a Mullen client, and did not know the Mullen Company was a CIA front. Howard Hunt obviously did know of the CIA connection as he was placed in the Mullen Company by Richard Helms, CIA Director. This took place soon after I commenced working out of the Mullen offices as a General Foods employee. When Robert Mullen suddenly disclosed that he was selling his company to Robert Bennett, both Hunt and I were taken by complete surprise. Hunt, even then, was a close friend of Colson through their Brown University alumni association. It would seem more likely that Colson would have asked Bennett and Hunt to be the co-purchasers of the Mullen Company, but I have no evidence to support this thesis. Whenever I see Robert Bennett on television these days, as the U.S. Senator from Utah, I say to myself that "The Secret State" has it own man looking after its interests directly in the U.S. Congress, a disturbing thought indeed. I am not in communication these days with Hunt. The last communication that I received was a letter from his wife about two years ago informing me of Hunt having undergone a hospital operation and reporting on his health developments. When the Advocate article of August 16, 2005 about my role in Watergate was published, I sent a copy of the magazine to both Hunt and Gordon Liddy but never received a reply back from either. While there is controversy about some of the activities that Hunt engaged in during his professional career, in my opinion his motivation was always to do what he thought was best for his country, which included at times putting his own life on the line.

I noticed that I failed to answer a question that you recently posed about whether I have been in communication with Billie Sol Estes since 1984. The answer is negative. After he failed to meet with the FBI agents sent to Abilene to interview him in Sept. 1984, our communications ceased. I did keep in contact for a brief time with Pam Estes, his daughter, who completed an unrelated research paper for which she was paid through a Moody Foundation grant. I might add other clarifications here also. I have seen Forum posts linking me to Operation Gemstone, which was part of Watergate. I was in no way connected with Gemstone and only learned about it from reading the press. About three months before the Watergate case broke in June 1972, one of the partners of the law firm at which I was employed assigned me to do volunteer legal work for John Dean, Counsel to the President. Up until the case broke I did legal work on campaign financing issues on a part-time basis out of the White House under Dean's direction and one of his close associates. I also prepared a legal paper on campaign financing for Gordon Liddy, who was Counsel for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. To the best of my recollection, I was never questioned about this legal work for Dean or Liddy either when I was before the Watergate grand jury or by the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Apparently, these authorities were aware of the work and had checked it out and found it not relevant. I was never interviewed by the Senate Watergate Committee, although I sent its chairman, Senator Sam Ervin a copy of my first book "The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff", which carried an introduction dealing with Watergate, and received a nice letter from the Senator in response. Also, in regard to Marvin Liebman: After Liebman and William Rusher, two adults, engineered the takeover of Young Americans for Freedom by making it an auxiliary of the Young Republican National Federation in 1961, I ceased contact with Liebman. He claimed that I had brought about a split in the YAF board of directors over the issue when in fact the takeover of the organization took place when I was on 6-months active duty in the U.S. Army. I did oppose the takeover but being in the service at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, severely limited my ability to influence the outcome. However, Liebman asked me to visit him just prior to his death, which took place about six years ago (I cannot remember the precise year.) At our visit we made amends for any ill feelings that stemmed from the YAF controversy that occurred over 30 years previously. Only then did Liebman tell me that he was dying of cancer. He showed me a column he had written that he proposed to send to the various gay newspapers around the country that regularly carried his writings. The title of the column was "Lenin was Right." Liebman maintained, correctly, in the column that the Republicans and the conservatives were reverting to their old roots that espoused advocating only the cause of the elite and wealthy. (Liebman, in prior columns in the gay newspapers, had written about his days in the youth arm of the Communist Party in the 1930's.) I advised him that sending out a column with the inflammatory title of "Lenin was right" in light of his failing health would only serve to alienate many of those in the modern conservative movement who admired what he had done in launching it. He reluctantly agreed. As we parted, he said, "See you on the other side." When he died soon thereafter, no memorial service was held, which was in accordance with his expressed wishes.