Douglas Caddy
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I am in the initial process of sending query letters to several dozen accredited literary agents concerning “Watergate Exposed,” my book manuscript and movie script that is based on the life story of Robert Merritt, a long-time government informant. My letter inquires whether the literary agent would be interested in representing us in placing the manuscript with a book publisher.
The query letter on my letterhead is reproduced below. Should any member or reader of the Forum know of a literary agent or movie agent who might be interested in the manuscript, please feel free to encourage the agent to establish direct communication with me. Thank you.
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DOUGLAS CADDY
ATTORNEY AT LAW
7941 Katy Freeway
Suite 296
Houston, Texas 77024
713-867-3476
email: electionreform@aol.com
April 6, 2009
[Name and address of literary agent]
Dear [name of agent]
I am writing this query letter at the suggestion of Donald O. Graul, Jr., Executive Director of American Independent Writers, who has consented graciously to the use of his name in this effort to obtain the professional services of your literary agency.
I am the co-author with Robert Merritt of a book manuscript titled:
Watergate Exposed
A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals
Other Monumental Government Dirty Tricks
By Robert Merritt
As told to
Douglas Caddy
Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven
Our manuscript takes up where Jim Hougan’s1984 best seller “Secret Agenda” left off, wherein he wrote on page 320, “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin Committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 break-in was about to occur. In particular, skeptics as politically disparate as H. R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting officer Carl Shoffler.”
Shoffler arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972. He had recruited Robert Merritt as a Confidential Informant for the police two years earlier and had worked and lived with him in the intervening years. On June 1, 1972 Merritt provided Shoffler with the confidential information of the proposed break-in at Watergate – more than two weeks before the event occurred -- information that Merritt had obtained the day before from a most unlikely source. In reality, the burglars planned the break-in for Sunday, June 18, but Shoffler, utilizing the wire-tapping skills that the government previously had taught him at its Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia, skillfully enticed the unsuspecting burglars to move the date up by one day so that it would occur on Shoffler’s birthday as a special kind of present to himself. It was the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.
Shoffler, upon learning of the proposed break-in from Merritt, brought two other persons into his set-up scheme: a military intelligence agent and a retired CIA agent. The latter, upon hearing Merritt relate the planned break-in, exclaimed that Shoffler was about to become the most famous police detective in U.S. history.
But Watergate Exposed is more than an earthshaking rewriting of the history of the greatest presidential scandal in American history. For Merritt, under Shoffler’s tutelage, also became a Confidential Informant for the FBI, ATF, Secret Service and other government entities. His CI services are vetted by documents obtained under FOIA from these agencies and the National Archives. Of special note are FBI documents about its wire-tapping and infiltration of the Institute of Policy Studies and reports prepared at the time by the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor after Merritt met with the prosecutor’s staff in 1973, accompanied by his distinguished attorney, David Isbell of Covington and Burling.
Even after Watergate broke, Merritt continued his CI role, becoming involved in mind-bending activities of all kinds in the nation’s capital.
Merritt left Washington, D.C. in 1985 as a “fugitive from justice” and since that time has lived in New York City. For most of these years, even though he was a “fugitive,” he worked directly as a CI for the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, his real identity being unknown all the while to these law enforcement entities. This was done with the assistance from Shoffler, his long-time mentor. Eventually all charges against Merritt were dropped and a judge ordered his criminal record expunged.
Merritt entered my life three days after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, although I was not aware of this at the time. It was only in 1977 – five years later -- when I read an interview with him in the gay publication, The Advocate, that I first learned he had been recruited by the Washington, D.C. Police and the FBI to establish an intimate relationship with me. This effort occurred when I was the attorney for the Watergate defendants, although the defendants themselves and the general public were unaware at the time of my gay sexual orientation. On two occasions – in June 1972 and in February 1973 -- law enforcement agents attempted to enlist Merritt in establishing a sexual liaison with me, offering him tens of thousands of dollars if he were to agree to do so. As a gay person himself, he was repulsed by these overtures to entice confidential legal information from me and rejected them outright on both occasions. Hence a relationship of any type was never established, that is until June 2008 when Merritt telephoned to ask that I help him write his manuscript. By way of reference, my own biography appears in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.
Our manuscript’s table of contents is as follows:
Preface by Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven
Introduction
Chapter I – How the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up: 1970-1972
Chapter II – The Special Watergate Prosecutor’s Interviews of Merritt: 1973
Chapter III – Merritt’s Post-Watergate Period in Washington, D.C.: 1972-1985
Chapter IV – The New York Years 1986- 2009
Chapter V – Flotsam and Jetsam: Dramatic Episodes in Merritt’s Life
Chapter VI – Epilogue by Douglas Caddy: How Judge John Sirica and the original
Watergate prosecutors denied the seven Watergate defendants their
Sixth Amendment’s right to legal counsel.
As indicated in the table of contents, the untold story about Watergate, which makes other books on the scandal obsolete, comprises only about thirty percent of the dramatic twists and turns in Merritt’s life, a confidential informant’s true story that is both stranger and scarier than fiction.
Would your agency be interested in representing us in placing our manuscript with a publisher? A prompt response would be most appreciated.
Sincerely yours,
Douglas Caddy
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Lamar Waldron will be the featured guest tonight (April 4) on coasttocoastam, the world’s most popular night time radio program. He will discuss the Martin Luther King assassination, as well as the JFK and RFK assassinations. Listeners can also access the program live on the Internet.
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Poster's note: For years I have thought that I was the only person who remembered in his mind's eye the scene shown on TV of General Douglas MacArthur on the grounds of the White House immediately after he had briefed President Kennedy on Vietnam. MacArthur, who advised the president against getting involved deeper in the war, declared that "the chickens are coming home to roost..." Ray McGovern, in his article below, also remembers that scene. If only MacAthur's advice had been followed, if only JFK had not been assassinated...but we now know of the hatred LBJ had towards MacAthur, which led him to boycott the General's funeral that took place not long after Kennedy's death.
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Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President
Obama Bombs
By RAY McGOVERN
March 30, 2009
www.counerpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern03302009.html
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama’s rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft proven ability of Afghan “militants” to drive out foreign invaders—from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians—he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.”
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops—not to mention 2 to 3 million Vietnamese—dead in Vietnam. John Kennedy became president the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
Innocent of History, and Distracted
But he was certainly old enough to absorb the fecklessness and brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And his instincts at that time were good enough to see through the administration’s duplicity. And, with him now in the White House, surely some of his advisers would be able to brief him on both Vietnam and Iraq, and prevent him from making similar mistakes—this time in Afghanistan. Or so I thought.
Deflecting an off-the-topic question at his March 24 press conference, Obama said, “I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy … right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is, are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe?”
Okay, it is understandable that President Obama has been totally absorbed with the financial crisis. But surely, unlike predecessors supposedly unable to do two things at the same time, our resourceful new president certainly could find enough time to solicit advice from a wide circle, get a better grip on the huge stakes in Afghanistan, and arrive at sensible decisions. Or so I thought.
It proved to be a bit awkward Friday morning waiting for the president to appear…. a half-hour late for his own presentation. Was he for some reason reluctant? Perhaps he had a sense of being railroaded by his advisers. Perhaps he paused on learning that just a few hours earlier a soldier of the Afghan army shot dead two U.S. troops and wounded a third before killing himself, and that Taliban fighters had stormed an Afghan police post and killed ten police earlier that morning. Should he weave that somehow into his speech?
Or maybe it was learning of the Taliban ambush of a police convoy which wounded seven other policemen; or the suicide bomber in the Afghan border area of Pakistan who demolished a mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers, killing some 50 and injuring scores more, according to preliminary reports. Or, more simply, perhaps Obama’s instincts told him he was about to do something he will regret. Maybe that’s why he was embarrassingly late in coming to the podium.
Another March of Folly
One look at the national security advisers arrayed behind the president was enough to see wooden-headedness.
In her best-selling book, “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,” historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset: “Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs … acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”
Tuchman pointed to 16th Century Philip II of Spain as a kind of Nobel laureate of wooden-headedness. Comparisons can be invidious, but the thing about Philip was that he drained state revenues by failed adventures overseas, leading to Spain’s decline.
It is wooden-headedness, in my view, that permeates the “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” that the president announced yesterday. Author Tuchman points succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
“Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it…Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,’ an academic disguise for ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.’”
It seems only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman’s daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against “cognitive dissonance.” A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, "The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
In any case, Obama explained his decision on more robust military intervention in Afghanistan as a result of a “careful policy review” by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghani and Pakistani governments, NATO allies, and international organizations.
No Estimate? No Problem
Know why he did not mention a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the likely effects of this slow surge in troops and trainers? Because there is none. Guess why. The reason is the same one accounting for the lack of a completed NIE before the “surge” in troop strength in early 2007.
Apparently, Obama’s advisers did not wish to take the risk that honest analysts—ones who had been around a while, and maybe even knew something of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan—might also be immune to “cognitive dissonance,” and ask hard questions regarding the basis of the new strategy.
Indeed, they might reach the same judgment they did in the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism. The authors of that estimate had few cognitive problems and simply declared their judgment that invasions and occupations (in 2006 the target then was Iraq) do not make us safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
The prevailing attitude this time fits the modus operandi of Gen. Petraeus ex Machina, who late last year took the lead by default with the following approach: We know best, and can run our own policy review, thank you very much. Which he did, without requesting the formal NIE that typically precedes and informs key policy decisions. It is highly regrettable that President Obama was deprived of the chance to benefit from a formal estimate. Recent NIEs have been relatively bereft of wooden-headedess. Obama might have made a more sensible decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
As one might imagine, NIEs can, and should, play a key role in such circumstances, with a premium on objectivity and courage in speaking truth to power. That is precisely why Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair appointed Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, the body that prepares NIEs—and why the Likud Lobby got him ousted.
Estimates on Vietnam
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war.
Sensitive ones bore this unclassified title: “Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam.” Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed were: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand?
Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being “good team players.” But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that.
Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were often pooh-poohed as negativism. Policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account, and often didn’t. The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best estimate as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.
So, hats off, I suppose, to you, Gen. Petraeus and those who helped you elbow the substantive intelligence analysts off to the sidelines.
What might intelligence analysts have said on the key point of training the Afghan army and police? We will never know, but it is a safe bet those analysts who know something about Afghanistan…or about Vietnam would roll their eyes and wish Petraeus luck. As for Iraq, what remains to be seen is against whom the various sectarian factions target their weapons and put their training into practice.
In his Afghanistan policy speech on Friday, Obama mentioned training eleven times. To those of us with some gray in our hair, this was all too reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric at the start of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In February 1964, with John Kennedy dead and President Lyndon Johnson improvising on Vietnam, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara prepared a major policy speech on defense, leaving out Vietnam, and sent it to the president to review. The Johnson tapes show the president finding fault:
LBJ: “I wonder if you shouldn’t find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.”
McN: “The problem is what to say about it.”
LBJ: “I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom … Our purpose is to train the [south Vietnamese] people, and our training’s going good.”
But our training was not going good then. And specialists who know Afghanistan, its various tribes and demographics tell me that training is not likely to go good there either. Ditto for training in Pakistan.
Obama’s alliterative rhetoric aside, it is going to be no easier to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with more combat forces and training than it was to defeat the Viet Cong with these same tools in Vietnam.
Obama seemed to be protesting a bit too much: “Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course.” No sir. There will be “metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable!” Yes, sir! And he will enlist wide international support from countries like Iran, Russia, India, and China that, according to President Obama, “should have a stake in the security of the region.” Right.
Long Time Passing
“The road ahead will be long,” said Obama in conclusion. He has that right. The strategy adopted virtually guarantees that. That is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, late last year when Gates, protesting the widespread pessimism on Afghanistan, started talking up the prospect of a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style “surge” of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. “The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,” McKiernan stated, adding that what is required is a “sustained commitment” that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
McKiernan has that right. But his boss Mr. Gates did not seem to get it.
Late last year, as he maneuvered to stay on as defense secretary in the new administration, Gates hotly disputed the notion that things were getting out of control in Afghanistan.
The argument that Gates used to support his professed optimism, however, made us veteran intelligence officers gag — at least those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
“The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces,” Gates explained.
Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. (Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which “insurgents” attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as “contact.”)
Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost.
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
The Military Brass
I don't fault the senior military....Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, “a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones standing in back of Obama yesterday have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT’S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect. Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan—probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero General Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after WW-II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama’s fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young president in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." When JFK's top military advisers, critical of his reluctance, virtually called him a traitor—for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example—Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in—despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy. Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the president."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young president so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Obama and Kennedy
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country. Kennedy resisted the kind of pressures to which President Obama has now succumbed. (There are even some, like Jim Douglass in his book "JFK and the Unspeakable," who conclude that this is what got President Kennedy killed.)
Mr. Obama, you need to find some advisers who are not still wet behind the ears and who are not brown noses—preferably some who have lived Vietnam and Iraq and have an established record of responsible, fact-based analysis. You would also do well to read Douglass' book, and to page through the "Pentagon Papers," instead of trying to emulate the Lincoln portrayed in "Team of Rivals." I, too, am a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but Daniel Ellsberg is an author far more relevant and nourishing for this point in time. Read his “Secrets,” and recognize the signs of the times.
There is still time to put the brakes on this disastrous policy. One key lesson of Vietnam is that an army trained and supplied by foreign occupiers can almost always be readily outmatched and out-waited in a guerilla war, no matter how many billions of dollars are pumped in.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the only non-American military historian on the U.S. Army’s list of required reading for officers, has accused former president George W. Bush of “launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them.”
Please do not feel you have to compete with your predecessor for such laurels.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, DC. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
This article was originally posted on Consortiumnews.com.
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March 29, 2009
American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio
The Sunday Times U.K.
Review by Hugo Barnacle
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle5976558.ece
When the American drama series Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen as the 35th president, was aired in 1983, the show was rather stolen by Vincent Gardenia as JEdgar Hoover, a sinister, buttoned-up xxxxx who took the president's unruly libido as a personal affront, hissing: “The Kennedy weakness is sex.” As the critic Christopher Dunkley observed, this device “acknowledged the hero's imperfections without the need to show them”.
In his remarkable new novel about the president, Jed Mercurio decides to show them, and does it unsparingly. So, there are the two White House secretaries, codenamed Fiddle and Faddle by the embarrassed secret- service agents who keep an eye on things; plus Fuddle, a Wall Street heiress picked up at some function; the gangsters' moll Judith Campbell; poor Marilyn, who daftly thinks she'll be the next first lady; Mary, a friend of Mrs Kennedy; Ellen, a German prostitute who is deported when Hoover decides to pretend she's a Stasi spy; and so on and on. It wears you down a bit, and is meant to, but it still exerts a grisly fascination.
Arthur Schlesinger, as Kennedy's court historian, claimed that not even half the stories about the president's sex life could be true, because he could never have found the time. While Mercurio's account is largely made up, since no record survives of most of these trysts, it shows plausibly how Kennedy could indeed find the time and, in his own view, had to.
The psychology of philandering is well laid out. Monogamy is a deadly prison and every man wants every woman he can get, but only the truly dedicated man, with sound but simple planning, long practice and the ruthless suppression of all feelings of guilt, can get away with it. The president is that dedicated because, without the release that new and stimulating partners bring, he will suffer his famous headaches (and backaches, bowel trouble and an inflamed prostate). Besides, his private life is his own concern, the press have no jurisdiction and there won't be a scandal.
But then the Profumo affair happens in Britain, bringing down the president's friend, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. The jubilant press get the taste for muck-raking and Hoover appoints a “Special Investigator” (called Kenneth, like that malign Mr Starr) to examine the American implications. Oh, bother. But for a nut with a gun, conspirator or loner, an awful stink might have arisen.
Mercurio adopts a distant, quasi-clinical tone throughout, referring to Kennedy as “the subject” and using odd, alienating vocabulary - at one point, “feculence” (muckiness) and “cark” (to worry) appear on successive pages. All this promotes an effective form of irony.
It doesn't quite clear Mercurio of the charge of reductive prurience, but the novel makes the case that Kennedy's vice is worth studying as the tragic flaw in a genuine hero. The man's wit, courtesy, peacemaking vision and cool judgment are all here, vividly re-created, as well as his courage in the face of near-disabling infirmity and pain. Mercurio notes in an afterword that, despite the womanising, Kennedy's reputation still grows “as successors continue to fall short”. It was hardly a coincidence that the makers of The West Wing hired Sheen to play their ideal leader.
After Kennedy's assassination, the US Mail issued a stamp bearing the president's features and a line from his inaugural address, which originally referred to America's creative optimism, but now seemed to prefigure his own legacy and the eternal flame that burns on his grave: “And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” The present incumbent benefits from great goodwill, and talks a good game - but will anyone ever write, or read, such a gripping and thoughtful novel about him?
American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio
Cape £12.99 pp357
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The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
BY MATT TAIBBI POSTED MAR 19, 2009 12:49 PM
ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...he_big_takeover
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Email received on March 23, 2009:
Dear Friends,
I have finally finished editing the last video interview with my
father, E. Howard Hunt.
Those of you who have read my book "Bond of Secrecy", will recall that
I wrote about the delicate nature of these interviews. In order to keep
costs down, I offer a no frills DVD with zero production
gimmicks...just the straight video of my father discussing the JFK
assassination. This is very controversial stuff and is available to you
through my website www.saintjohnhunt.com.
I also want to thank each and every one of you for all your support.
Sincerely,
Saint John
saint@saintjohnhunt.com
P.S. I will personally autograph each DVD to you!
Link to Saint John Hunt’s Home Page
Link to “Last Testament of E. Howard Hunt”-DVD Page
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Feeding the Pigs
Obama and the Altar of Greed
By PROF. DAVID MICHAEL GREEN
Counterpunch.org
March 20-22, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/green03202009.html
Barack Obama is dumber than a bag of hammers.
I never thought I’d say that about the guy. I thought he would probably disappoint me with many of his policies. I thought he would probably fail to be bold enough for his times. I thought he might miss opportunities to do great things because of his seeming desire to be Mr. Rogers, complete with cardigan. But I never expected him to be really dumb.
But if you’re willing to risk the entirety of a potentially great presidency on making sure that a handful of already wealthy sociopaths who got rich destroying the global economy are not denied massive taxpayer-funded bonuses to keep them in jobs they’ve already completely mishandled, despite the fact that many of them took the money and left the job anyhow – if that’s you, and you’re the new president of the United States with a load of challenges and lots of public good will solidly behind you – well, then, you’re dumber than a bag of hammers.
Like I said, I never thought I’d say that about Barack Obama. But then I never thought I’d witness such inane stupidity (or, worse – is it venality?) from the man.
If you think that I’m exaggerating when I say that Obama may be betting his entire promising presidency by taking the wrong side in this AIG scandal, think again. His presidency rises and falls on essentially one question: Is he doing everything he can to fix the economy? In order to fix the economy, given the astonishing mess he’s inherited, he is going to continue to need unprecedented forbearance from the public and Congress so as to take unprecedented steps. People are already freaking out at what has been done and what has been spent, and we’re only just starting the rescue, with all its enormous costs. The Republicans, who made this mess, are going to try to block Obama at every turn. The president needs to convince the public to trust him and follow him, if he is going to win the legislation necessary fix the economy.
But if people see that Obama is using their hard-earned tax money to reward the predatory parasites at AIG, even after they’ve wrecked everything in sight, how is he ever going to get public support for spending another trillion bucks to repair the economy? And if he can’t get the tools necessary to do the job, how can he ever expect it to get fixed? And if it doesn’t get fixed, how can he expect to have a successful presidency?
He can’t, and he won’t. And, thus, it is no exaggeration to say that this vibrant and well-liked president, who carries the hopes and aspirations of a nation on his shoulders with a robust foundation of good will to match, is potentially giving away everything in order to make sure that a band of corporate pirates keep their stolen taxpayer money. And doing that, ladies and gentlemen, is as dumb as... Well, you know.
Or maybe even a lot dumber still. Month after month of headlines detailing the latest scandal, many of them involving not just the theft of people’s savings but crashing the global economy as well, and you begin to wonder if there’s any bottom to the barrel of fiscal depravity and governmental enabling. Obama is now charting new paths in that direction. Just the concept that AIG executives who brought down the roof should get anything besides pink slips and orange jumpsuits is sickening, let alone that they should get bonuses.
But wait, it gets better. Then we’re told that the bonuses are necessary because only these criminals can undo the mess they’ve created. So they’re paid millions to stay. As if those who know how to wreck a global economy also know how to fix it. As if these are the only folks in the world who have these skills.
Okay, well, fine then. At least they have to earn these ‘retention bonuses’, right? Nah. That would so responsible. Turns out that a bunch of them took the money supposedly provided as incentives for them to stay and then split anyhow. One guy grabbed $4.6 million in retention bonus cash from the taxpayers, funneled through AIG, then promptly unretained himself. More than fifty others did the same, eleven of whom took over a million bucks to stay. Except they didn’t.
Then we have Team Obama telling us that these are legal contracts that cannot be violated. As knowledgeable legal commentators have pointed out, however, that seems highly unlikely for a whole slew of reasons. There are all sorts of legitimate mechanisms recognized by the law through which contractual agreements can be bypassed in order to serve higher societal purposes.
But even apart from all that, let’s remember that these are bonuses! Isn’t the very nature of a bonus – as opposed to salary – the idea of contingency on performance? Do the contracts say, “We’ll reduce you bonus down to eight figures if you destroy the company, and a mere several million bucks if you take down the global economy”? If not, why weren’t these people paid 23 cents in order to fulfill a legal obligation and told to go hide in Argentina or something? And count their blessings? Instead, over seventy employees of the AIG London-based unit that brought down the company and the rest of us to boot have become millionaires.
Why did Democrats in Congress creep in late at night and remove language from the bailout bill which would have prevented this noxious use of taxpayer money? Why did Obama sign such a bill? Is there really no depredation that greed cannot induce anymore? Is there really no politician in America who actually thinks these crimes are crimes anymore?
Of course, it’s not exactly shocking news when Washington politicians are found to be in bed with the corrupt captains of American finance. Indeed, if there’s one thing that Democrats and Republicans can most readily agree upon, surely it’s how cool it is to whore for Wall Street.
Still, I can’t help being a little disappointed (some will no doubt say a lot naive) observing the degree to which Obama has joined this crowd. Admittedly, I don’t get invited to the smoke-filled rooms where political deals are cut between politicians and the people who buy them, so maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about. But it strikes me that Obama never had to be just another corporate Democrat, like Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer.
The Obama campaign was a political and, especially, a financial juggernaut, the likes of which we’ve never seen, from either party. He was practically printing campaign dollars. They were pouring in from so many ordinary contributors, in such a high volume, that he literally walked away from tens of millions of free federal funding he could have had simply by opting for government financing of his campaign. But he actually pulled in way more by foregoing the matching funds and just opening up the floodgates for a public anxious to throw money at Change They Could Believe In.
So why does a guy in that happy situation staff his economic team with Wall Street mercenaries like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers? Does he really believe that these people hold some sort of leverage over him and over the United States government? It’s just astonishing to think so.
The reality is that the American overclass has just been on the most amazing feeding frenzy for three decades now, to the extent that they’ve simply lost any sense of proportion, whatsoever. The sense of predatory entitlement has become what water is to fish. It is so much a part of their world view that they no longer even have consciousness of it, or any alternative to it, any more than a tuna ever wonders what it might be like to walk on two legs and breathe air.
Fine. I mean what a shock it is, eh?, to find that there are people in this world whose social conscience maxed out in kindergarten, where instead of coloring they instead cut business deals to trick the other kiddies out of their graham crackers. It’s just a given that we have that sort of sicko running around. That’s why we have jails, and that was once why we had the SEC.
Far less clear is why those who are supposed to represent the public’s interests need adopt such mentalities – though, of course, many of them are readily and frequently bought off. But, again, it seems to me that Barack Obama had nothing to gain and everything to lose by carrying water for the mansion-on-every-continent set. Obama has an independent base of support – some of it quite emphatic – and a national crisis or six on his plate compelling even those who are skeptical about the guy in the direction of wishing him every success as president, since his will be theirs as well. So why is he turning his back on those hundreds of millions of supporters and instead looking out for the interests of what are the financial equivalent of serial rapists?
Is this a case of ideological osmosis? Of a complete failure of imagination? Have we simply reached the point where anyone who could plausibly be president in this country cannot fathom government existing for any other purpose than to enrich the already fabulously wealthy, any more than our friend the tuna could possibly dream of playing soccer?
Political analysts have long spoken of ‘regulatory capture’, the process by which industries which are meant to be regulated instead capture control of the government agencies which are meant to be regulating them. A more contemporary version of this concept, and one more applicable perhaps to Obama than to his minions, is the arguably far more dangerous idea of ‘cognitive regulatory capture’. Under that scenario, you don’t even need to infiltrate the agency, because you’ve already captured its mind and narrowed the range of what is thinkable therein. Just as in Orwell’s “1984", the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.
Has Barack Obama been the object of cognitive regulatory capture? It’s hard to know. But it is astonishing that time after time he keeps deferring to the interests of not only the economic elites, but of the outrageously criminal economic elites. He puts Tim Geithner in his cabinet, not Bernie Sanders. And when somebody floats the idea of capping salaries at companies on the government dole, or of limiting bonuses, or of the government truly acting like the owner it actually has become of many of these bailed out firms, there’s Geithner and Summers telling him (and, presumably, Robert Rubin telling them), “No, no, you can’t do that”. And, in fact, no, no, Obama doesn’t.
Imagine that radical concept. Limit executives who have crashed their firms, and the global economy as well, from taking multi-million dollar bonuses out of taxpayer-funded bailout money? Sounds vaguely Marxist, doesn’t it? After all, we can’t have government intervention in the private sector. Don’t forget your catechism. (And just ignore the seeming contradiction of government intervention in the form of bailouts. I mean, why bother with having a religion if you’re not going to be hypocritical?)
When Bill Clinton did this stuff it was surprising, only because he was the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to sell out the public’s interests as if he were a full-blown Republican. What makes it surprising in Obama’s case is that he has so little need to do so, given the crisis we’re in and the support and good will that it automatically provides him, not to mention the self-mutilation of the opposition party’s credibility.
And what makes it really surprising is that Obama not only doesn’t need to go down this path, but he is potentially destroying his presidency by doing so. There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
Crawling into bed with Public Enemy Number One against the leading wedge of a populist revolt is about as stupid an idea as imaginable for the Obama administration. Why doesn’t he offer another monotone denunciation while he’s at it, this one of pedophiles? Perhaps adding a heartfelt expression of how disappointed he is that there just isn’t more that can be done, darn it. Danged legal contracts! Hey, maybe he could also staff up his Justice Department with paroled sexual predators, too, precisely as he has done in the equivalent manner at Treasury.
And while he’s at it, he can complete the job he began by putting so many Republicans in the cabinet. The GOP has been busy committing suicide for years now, but has dramatically sped up the pace of late, trotting out clown-like figures the likes of which neither Barnum nor Bailey could ever have conceived, even on a particularly pungent acid trip. Jindal, Steele, Limbaugh, Palin, Palin’s daughter. Wow. If there is a Hell, you can bet Barry Goldwater is down there right now furiously trying to change his party registration. Best of all, not only are these losers the face of the Republican Party, lately they’ve taken it a step yet further and have been bringing out the long knives to eviscerate each other. It’s hard to imagine a better situation to be in for a Democratic president.
Which makes Obama’s idiocy all the more astonishing. Probably no one on the planet could rescue the GOP right now, except for Barack Obama. So why on earth is he doing so? Why is he throwing a rope to a drowning disease? And then handing it a cudgel? Why is he breaking into the vault at the CDC in order to cut loose the smallpox virus once more? What could he be thinking? Or is the bag of hammers thinking at all?
Republicans, in their usual fashion, have been highly successful at marketing disastrously pernicious ideas. So, lately, they’ve been out there associating Obama’s massively expensive economic rescue plan with wasteful government spending. In fact, it isn’t that at all. In fact, it is the only hope remaining for reviving this horridly destructive economy that the greedy Wall Street sharks and their political minions created. There will be no monetary policy solution. Interest rates are close to zero, and there’s nowhere left to drop. Demand from China is not going to rescue this economy. Consumer spending? Yeah, right. Rising property values as ATMs for homeowners? How very 2007. This is likely the whole enchilada. If wholesale Keynesianist countercyclical government spending doesn’t rescue the economy, it’s really hard to see what Plan B could possibly be.
But, of course, Republicans have never met a national interest they weren’t anxious to steamroll on the way toward achieving their own narrow self-interests, and this situation is no different. If you’re in the GOP and all you care about is winning elections (and, if you are in the GOP, that is all you care about), your only bad scenario looking ahead is for Obama to successfully rescue the economy. So you try to block him at every turn, and you lie about his program, calling a desperate last-ditch rescue effort straight out of the Macro Economics 101 textbook a porkbarrel exercise in wasteful government spending.
The public doesn’t necessarily want to hear that right now, and certainly doesn’t put a lot of trust in the source. But then there’s old Brilliant Barack, staffing his economic team not only with Wall Street hacks, but tax-cheating, TARP-blowing, Wall Street hacks at that. And then these flunkies tell us there’s just no way that public money can be stopped from being used as a reward for the scam artists who got us into this mess originally. And guess what? All of sudden, miraculously, the worst offenders in the Republican Party start to sound credible.
And if that happens, Obama’s already sinking chances of passing massive rescue legislation sufficient to end this nightmare will diminish fast.
And if that happens his chances of fixing the economy will fall rapidly.
And if that happens his presidency will swirl down the toilet.
And if that happens it will be Jeb Bush in a walkaway in 2012.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
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Latest CIA Scandal Puts Focus on How Agency Polices Self
By Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post
March 20, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews
As a novice CIA case officer in the Middle East, Andrew Warren quickly learned the value of sex in recruiting spies. Colleagues say that he made an early habit of taking informants to strip clubs, and that he later began arranging out-of-town visits to brothels for his best recruits. Often Warren would travel with them, according to two colleagues who worked with him for years.
His methods earned him promotions and notoriety over a lengthy career, until Warren, 41, became ensnared in a sex scandal. Two Algerian women have accused the Virginia native of drugging and sexually assaulting them, and, in one instance, videotaping the encounter.
Six weeks after the allegations came to light, Warren has been formally notified by CIA Director Leon E. Panetta of his impending dismissal, according to U.S. government officials familiar with the case. But the episode -- one of three sex-related scandals to shake the CIA this year -- has drawn harsh questions from Congress about whether the agency adequately polices its far-flung workforce or takes sufficient steps to root out corrupt behavior.
The CIA says that these problems involve a tiny fraction of its workforce, and that those found to have breached rules are punished or fired. But former officers say the cases underscore a perennial challenge: guarding against scandal in a workforce -- the size of which is classified but is generally estimated to be 20,000 -- that prides itself on secrecy and deception.
"You have an organization of professional liars," said Tyler Drumheller, who oversaw hundreds of officers as chief of the agency's European division. Experienced field managers are needed, he said, because inevitably "some people will try to take advantage of the system . . . and it's a system that can be taken advantage of."
The allegations against Warren drew an angry blast from the Senate panel that oversees the CIA. "The alleged activities are completely unacceptable," committee leaders Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) said in a joint statement last month. Feinstein also criticized the CIA for what she said was not promptly informing Congress about the case, given its potential to damage U.S. relations with Algeria.
Repeated attempts in recent weeks to contact Warren through relatives were unsuccessful.
The recent string of embarrassing revelations started with the CIA's former No. 3 officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who was indicted on corruption charges two years ago. Court documents released in recent weeks depict Foggo as bullying the office of the agency's general counsel into giving a job to his mistress, whose subsequent performance reviews were subpar.
Last month, agency officials confirmed the firing of Steve Levan, a 16-year veteran who pleaded guilty to misusing CIA credit cards. Levan, an analyst, worked at the agency's headquarters for the No. 2 official, Stephen R. Kappes. As part of his plea agreement, Levan acknowledged obtaining credit card numbers assigned to undercover operatives and using them to run up bills surpassing $115,000. Much of the money was spent on hotel rooms and gifts for a mistress, according to two agency officials familiar with the case. He is awaiting sentencing this spring.
Michael S. Nachmanoff, Levan's attorney, declined to comment on the case. In a pre-sentencing motion filed last week, Nachmanoff said the judge should consider his client's strong record of service for the CIA -- a record the agency had declined to release, he said.
But the most damaging revelations involved Warren, an Arabic speaker and Middle East specialist who was on a rapid ascent after CIA postings in Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt and Algeria. He most recently served as Algiers station chief. But the State Department ordered him home in October after two Algerian nationals alleged that he assaulted them in separate incidents at his apartment.
The women told State Department investigators that Warren assaulted them after giving them drug-laced drinks that made them pass out. State referred the matter to the Justice Department, where an investigation is ongoing. Warren has not been charged.
While looking into the allegations, U.S. officials discovered in Warren's apartment more than two dozen video recordings that he apparently made of his sexual encounters, according to news accounts and two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation. One of the women behind the rape allegations appears in one of the videos, the officials said.
Current and former agency officials say that Warren and Levan were considered competent professionals with stellar work records, qualities that perhaps explain why their alleged misdeeds would have gone undetected.
"The fact of the matter is that the thousands of people who work at CIA are exceptionally dedicated, and cases of impropriety are extremely rare," agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said. When there are such cases, he said, the CIA "looks into the allegations, follows up on them and cooperates fully with law enforcement authorities."
Several colleagues of Warren's, though, spoke of warning signs that might have alerted the CIA sooner. Some who worked with him over several years said they were particularly concerned about the frequency of Warren's use of strip clubs and other sex-related establishments for recruiting. The former officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency does not allow them to discuss their CIA work publicly, said they were not surprised by the assault allegations.
As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say. But for Warren, "it was a lifestyle thing," costing the agency thousands of dollars, said one former co-worker who describes himself as a friend. The bills were routinely paid, he said.
"As long as you were doing good work, it was okay," he said.
A. John Radsan, a former CIA assistant general counsel, said there are internal guidelines and structures -- including the CIA inspector general's office and a separate review board that oversees clandestine operations -- that are intended to guard against scandal. In reality, he said, it is a self-regulating system with few incentives for reporting bad behavior.
"You want a culture that values innovation and creativity and doesn't mind violating the laws of other countries, but at the same time, you want a culture of compliance and honesty," Radsan said. "It is a built-in contradiction."
The agency's internal management practices were also called into question last month during court proceedings for Foggo, who served as the top CIA administrator from November 2004 to May 2006.
A lengthy prosecution memo, made public over the objections of Foggo's attorneys, listed a series of ethical alarms that did not prevent his reaching the agency's highest ranks. Two personnel reports in 1989, for example, noted that Foggo "takes a very liberal and self-serving position regarding the interpretation of Agency rules and regulations" and warned that "he is likely to remain a potential threat to security through his poor judgment."
In a court filing last month, Foggo's attorneys said that their client has "committed his life to public service" and that his dedication and skills justified his promotions. They declined to comment further yesterday.
"Foggo was never a truly honest public servant" during his 24 years in the CIA, three prosecutors wrote in their memo to a federal judge in Alexandria shortly before Foggo was sentenced to 37 months in prison for corrupting the agency's contracts. "He spent years defrauding the country."
When Foggo manipulated agency contracts in 2003 and 2005, his colleagues and subordinates did not act on their suspicions of wrongdoing, the prosecutors said. Instead, they demonstrated a persistent reluctance to challenge authority that seems at odds with the climate of dissent and debate that the agency says it encourages.
After a former colleague of Foggo's who had become his mistress was turned down for a job in the general counsel's office, Foggo, who was the CIA's executive director, called an associate general counsel into his office and "grew increasingly loud in tone and condescending," according to a memo the counsel placed in her files. "peaking in the third person, [Foggo] said, among other things, that when the EXDIR has an interest in a candidate for employment that I had better respect the EXDIR's interest."
The mistress was subsequently hired after an accelerated security check, because her paperwork was tagged "ExDir interest." When her failure to perform required duties provoked her supervisor's complaints, Foggo arranged for the supervisor -- a 20-year veteran who had won many performance awards -- to be ousted and moved to the Defense Department. The supervisor alleged in a court affidavit that her ouster was retaliatory.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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40 Years Since RFK Assassination, Mounting Evidence of CIA Involvement
Rock Creek Free Press
May 19, 2009
http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/...ing-evidence-of
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 40 years ago this month at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24 year old immigrant, is the alleged lone gunman and is presently serving a life sentence.
In a new book, An Open and Shut Case, Dr. Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag have joined a growing list of people who don’t believe that Sirhan acted alone.
Joling and Van Praag, both forensic scientists, claim that after analyzing audio recordings of the assassination they have concluded that at least 13 shots were fired. The handgun Sirhan used only had the capacity to fire eight shots. They believe that there were two guns and that the fatal shot came from behind Robert Kennedy, while witnesses claim that Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. According to a March 27, 2008 ABC report by Pierre Thomas, Joling claims, “It can be established conclusively that Sirhan did not shoot Senator Kennedy. And in fact not only did he not do it, he could not have done it.”
Los Angeles Coroner Thomas Noguchi conducted the official autopsy on the body of Robert Francis Kennedy on the morning of June 6, 1968. Noguchi stated that the shot that killed RFK “had entered through the mastoid bone, an inch behind the right ear and had traveled upward to sever the branches of the superior cerebral artery.”
At a conference in Connecticut forensic scientists met to discuss their independent findings. The conference presenters argued that Sirhan Sirhan could not have fired the fatal shot that killed Kennedy. Dr. Robert Joling has studied the Kennedy assassination for nearly 40 years, he concluded that the fatal shot came from behind Kennedy, while Sirhan was four to six feet in front of the senator and never got close enough to shoot him from behind.
Philip Van Praag analyzed the Pruszynski recording (a Canadian journalist’s tape recording) and determined that 13 shots were fired while Kennedy was killed, although Sirhan’s gun only held eight bullets. This suggests that a second shooter was involved in the assassination.
Other questions regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy have recently been voiced in a new BBC documentary by Shane O’Sullivan, which supports the conclusion that the CIA planned and executed the killing of Robert Kennedy. The result of a three year long investigation includes photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of the murder. These three operatives have been positively identified as David Morales, Gordon Campbell and George Joannides. All three men worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA’s Miami base for its secret war on Castro.
Again the question of the murder weapon is raised. The LAPD claimed no bullets were found lodged in the “bullet holes”, and yet the doorframes in which some of the bullets had lodged were burned and two expended bullets, dug out of the wood, were found in the front seat of Sirhan’s car. Then inexplicably, the LAPD destroyed their records of the tests that had been done on the “bullet holes” in the doorframe.
Michael Ruppert, former Los Angeles Police detective, author, journalist and editor of From the Wilderness, has conducted his own investigation of the RFK assassination, using inside contacts deep within the LAPD. His investigation definitively proves that the assassination was a CIA operation, and he names Thane Eugene Cesar, a private security guard just hired out of Lockheed, as the triggerman.
As in other high profile crimes, JFK, MLK and 9/11, the investigation was bungled and evidence was destroyed. Van Praag and Joling are talking to other forensic experts around the country and lobbying for the case to be reopened. “What we would basically like to see at this point, is a new investigation certainly based on new facts that we have come up with, take a fresh look at this case and to bring the authorities in,” said Van Praag. (ABC News March 27, 2008, Pierre Thomas). Thomas ends with “The question is whether, after nearly 40 years, authorities will have any interest in reopening a painful chapter in American history.” There is no statue of limitations on murder – no matter how painful.
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Valenti's Sexuality Was Topic For FBI
Under Pressure, LBJ Let Hoover's Agents Investigate Top Aide
By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2009; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...21803819_3.html
When Beltway insider Jack Valenti died two years ago at age 85, he was playing the role of intermediary between Washington and Hollywood as the theatrical, snowy-haired president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
But back in 1964, Valenti was a Houston ad executive newly installed at the White House as a top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. And J. Edgar Hoover's FBI found itself quietly consumed with the vexing question of whether Valenti was gay.
Previously confidential FBI files show that Hoover's deputies set out to determine whether Valenti, who had married two years earlier, maintained a relationship with a male commercial photographer. Republican Party operatives reportedly were pursuing a parallel investigation with the help of a retired FBI agent, bureau files show. No proof was ever found, but the files, obtained by The Washington Post under the federal Freedom of Information Act, provide further insight into the conduct of the FBI under Hoover, for whom damaging personal information on the powerful was a useful tool in his interactions with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon.
Johnson initially blocked the FBI from obtaining a sworn statement from Valenti or approaching the photographer, asserting that Valenti was "attracted to the women and not to the men," files show. But under FBI pressure, the president relented and approved an investigation of his close friend.
In the Washington of the early 1960s, allegations or proof of homosexuality could end a career. In October 1964, Walter Jenkins, another senior aide in the Johnson administration, was arrested for allegedly having sex in the men's room of the Washington YMCA. The news leaked just before the election, and Johnson, rushing to stem the political damage, quickly secured the resignation of Jenkins, then his longest-serving aide.
Even Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members. Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.
In Valenti's case, agents located the photographer and he confirmed that he had attended parties with Valenti and stayed at his apartment on two occasions. But he stressed that Valenti was strictly a platonic friend, records show. Historians have suggested that Hoover himself may have been gay and that the bureau's fascination with the sex lives of others was a manifestation of deeper currents in his psychology. Hoover never married and was a constant companion of his longtime FBI aide Clyde Tolson.
Valenti was a successful Texas businessman before joining Johnson in the White House in the hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. After three years in Washington, Valenti was named head of the Motion Picture Association, where he served as Hollywood's chief lobbyist from 1966 to 2004. His tanned face became a fixture on the annual Academy Awards broadcast.
The FBI file shows that a routine background check performed when Valenti joined the Johnson administration in 1963 turned up a series of picayune concerns. The file noted that Valenti's father and father-in-law had spent time in prison for embezzlement, and that his father-in-law had an "undesirable credit record" and had once been arrested for "being drunk."
A number of informants alleged that Valenti was good friends with a "top hoodlum and prominent gambler" in Houston, and agents suspected that the underworld figure had underwritten the cost of Valenti's wedding and a honeymoon suite at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas.
Most people interviewed praised Valenti, his morals and his social skills; one described him as "smiley" and "able to charm the horns off a billy goat."
Agents asked about Valenti's dating habits and quizzed his friends about whether they thought he had been faithful since he married Johnson's personal secretary the previous year.
One informant told agents that when Valenti was a bachelor, "he always dated extremely attractive women" and that "his only trouble with his female acquaintances was 'they all wanted to marry him.' "
The informant said Valenti told him he was waiting for the "real thing." When he met the woman who would become his wife in 1962, he was "very much in love." The informant added that all of "Valenti's relations with the opposite sex were moral in all respects."
Nothing discovered during the background check was solid enough to endanger Valenti's position as a special assistant to the president.
Then, in October 1964, a man whose name has been redacted from the records called an FBI official in New York. The caller encouraged the FBI to investigate Valenti "as a sex pervert," files show. "He based this request on the fact that he had read in the newspapers that Valenti swims in the nude in the White House pool."
A month later, the bureau found out that the Republican Party had hired a retired FBI agent to look into rumors that Valenti was attracted to men. The agents then focused on Valenti's relationship with the photographer, whose connections with Valenti had enabled him to photograph Johnson two years earlier, the memo said.
The agents learned that Valenti was a frequent party host in Houston, and the photographer often attended. An FBI memo dated Nov. 12, 1964, stated that the photographer "has the reputation of being a homosexual." The photographer and "Valenti have allegedly been having an affair for a number of years," the memo said.
Six days later, Hoover reported the allegations to the president. Johnson spoke to Hoover lieutenant Cartha D. DeLoach and asserted that "Valenti was all right; however, his judgment was faulty inasmuch as he felt Jenkins had been all right," files show.
DeLoach advised Johnson to have Valenti submit a sworn affidavit regarding his association with "this homosexual." Johnson demurred, saying Valenti had no need to defend himself.
"The President indicated that if I were to ask him if 'Lady Bird' were virtuous he would feel it would be unnecessary to reply, inasmuch as he knew 'Lady Bird' was virtuous," DeLoach wrote in a note. "The President stated that Valenti was attracted to the women and not to the men. The President also stated that in his opinion the FBI should not interview the photographer."
Seven days later, DeLoach pressed Johnson again and he relented. In the same conversation, a memo shows, they discussed a request from Moyers, then a special assistant to Johnson, that the FBI investigate two other administration figures who were "suspected as having homosexual tendencies."
On Dec. 1, 1964, the FBI interviewed the photographer. He said that he had "homosexual tendencies" and that he "engaged in homosexual activities on a 'discreet' basis." He added that he had once been arrested on a sex charge, but was so drunk at the time that he could not remember the circumstances.
The photographer said that he had known Valenti for about 15 years and that they had attended parties together, along with their female dates. The photographer told the agents that Valenti had "never engaged in homosexual activities and he does not have these tendencies," according to an FBI memo sent to Moyers.
"He said that he enjoyed Valenti's company very much on a social basis inasmuch as Valenti possessed a dynamic and very interesting personality. He said that he could never under any circumstances consider Valenti as 'sexually attractive,' but merely thought of him as a very charming and intelligent individual."
The photographer said he was sure that Valenti did not know he was attracted to men. At the end of the interview, the photographer was so distraught that he was "unable to make available a signed statement."
Hoover and Johnson were apprised, and the matter appears to have been dropped. The investigation did not seem to sour Valenti's relations with Hoover.
Two years later, Hoover sent Valenti his "heartiest congratulations" on the birth of his son. Two months after that, Hoover sent a letter of praise that was read at a testimonial dinner in Valenti's honor in Houston.
"Mr. Valenti's loyalty, devotion and dedication to the basic principles of this country have become hallmarks of the Federal Government," Hoover wrote.
Valenti responded that he would always treasure Hoover's remarks.
"Words are simply too frail to express to you adequately the depth of my gratitude for the magnificent letter," Valenti wrote. "This is something I shall always treasure."
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Ex-Secret Service agent talks at Rotary Club about JFK assassination
By Scott Rochat
Longmont (Colorado) Times-Call
Feb. 6, 2009
http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=14293
LONGMONT — No grassy knolls. No mob conspiracies. Just one man, one rifle and three shots.
That was and is the conclusion of Dale Wunderlich, a retired Secret Service agent who helped investigate the death of President John F. Kennedy as part of the Warren Commission. Wunderlich spoke about the assassination Thursday at the Twin Peaks Rotary Club.
“There’s a lot of theories about what happened,” said Wunderlich, who lives in Parker. “At some point, you have to wonder — if it had been a conspiracy, do any of you really believe that anyone in Washington can keep a secret for 46 years?”
Wunderlich helped protect five presidents, from Kennedy through Jimmy Carter. On Nov. 22, 1963, he looked after Kennedy during a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, but was off duty when the president went on to Dallas.
Wunderlich was at the airport when he heard the motorcade had been shot at. An early report said a Secret Service agent had been hit, and Wunderlich hurried back.
As he arrived, he realized that all the agents were accounted for. “Who got killed?” he asked agent Roy Kellerman.
“The president,” Kellerman said.
The sight of Kennedy’s body, face down in the hospital, is still engraved on Wunderlich’s mind. So is the funeral ceremony, when even the agents themselves were in mourning.
“I had such tears in my eyes that I couldn’t see anything,” Wunderlich said. “If someone had wanted to kill President (Lyndon) Johnson, that would have been the best time to do it. Everyone had tears in their eyes. No one could see.”
Since then, he said, there have been a lot of stories and myths about the assassination. Among them:
The Secret Service was drunk. Not true, Wunderlich said. Several agents did go to a place called the Cellar Bar the night before, but despite the name, the Cellar didn’t sell liquor. “We had sandwiches and near-beer,” he said.
There was a fourth shot. Not likely, Wunderlich said. Researchers at California Polytechnic State University analyzed the Zapruder film — a home movie that captured the assassination — a few years back, he said, and concluded the sound of the “fourth shot” was actually a police Harley-Davidson backfiring.
Oswald couldn’t have shot so fast, so accurately. The range wasn’t very far, especially for the rifle used, Wunderlich said — 192 feet for the closest shot and 292 feet for the longest one. Moreover, he said, Lee Harvey Oswald had spent hours practicing rapid-fire shots.
Fast enough to fire three shots in 8.5 seconds? As a test, Wunderlich said, investigators sent a truck filled with hay bales down the street at the same speed while the FBI armorer and the Secret Service armorer took shots at it. In 8.5 seconds, each put five shots in the kill zone.
Oswald was trying to kill Texas Gov. John Connally. That may never be known, Wunderlich said. He said Oswald is believed to have had a grudge against Connally, who as secretary of the Navy wouldn’t change his “hardship” discharge to an “honorable” one. The field of fire would have allowed a good shot at Connally, who was wounded by a bullet that clipped Kennedy’s shoulder first. And Kennedy may not have even been in the sights when the second shot was fired — his head was in his wife’s lap after the first shot hit; the second hit his head as she pulled him up.
“Sam Donaldson is the biggest supporter of this theory,” Wunderlich said. “I love to watch people’s eyes when I describe it. It’s another thing that could be logical.”
Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, was on the mob payroll. Actually, Wunderlich said, Ruby was a big admirer of Jacqueline Kennedy and closed himself in his club after the Kennedy assassination, drinking heavily. He knew several police officers and had a permit to carry a gun because he frequently carried bank deposits with him.
He was on his way with a deposit and had made up a slip to put $20 in an employee’s account when he saw the crowd of media around the police station. After finding out it was Oswald on his way to be arraigned, Wunderlich said, Ruby worked his way close and shot Oswald — a gun in one hand and a bank bag in the other.
“If you plan to kill someone, are you going to be prepared to also make a deposit?” Wunderlich asked. “I think it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
To this day, he said, America remains fascinated with the case, conspiracy or no.
“Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see something related to Kennedy,” Wunderlich said. “It’s a topic I don’t think will ever go away
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Patrick Cockburn: The reality behind Deep Throat
The Mark Felts of this world want to use the media as a weapon against their enemies
Saturday, 20 December 2008
The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...at-1205010.html
Mark Felt, the senior official at the FBI who was the highly placed informant or Deep Throat who famously leaked information during the Watergate scandal, died this week. His nickname, drawn from a pornographic movie of the day, has since become a generic term for well-informed anonymous source.
It was Mr Felt, with access to all FBI files, who met Bob Woodward of The Washington Post in an underground parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. He famously steered him and Carl Bernstein towards exposing the Watergate burglary of the Democratic Party's national offices in Washington as only one part of a general campaign of sabotage and political spying directed by the White House. Mr Felt's role was long suspected but confirmed by him only in 2005.
His motives for directing Woodward and Bernstein towards the links between the White House and the Watergate burglars were two fold. After 30 years at the FBI, Mr Felt had expected to succeed J Edgar Hoover as its director when he died in 1972 and was enraged to be passed over for the job by President Nixon's nominee Patrick Gray III.
There was more at work here than the frustrated ambition of one man. Mr Felt's secret revelations to Mr Woodward were part of a general counterattack by US government law enforcement agencies against President Nixon who had been trying to place his own men in charge of them. The FBI man was not alone. A striking aspect of Watergate was the sheer quantity of leaks damaging to Nixon coming from all parts of the government, from the CIA to the Internal Revenue Service.
The Watergate investigation is often held up as the apogee of journalistic investigation, but the public memory of what happened gives a highly misleading and exaggerated impression of what journalists can achieve. The blow-by-blow account of Woodward and Bernstein in investigating the break-in are at the heart of their book All the President's Men and the film of the same name.
An impression is given that there are always lots of leakers out there desperate to leak and the assiduous journalist will always come up with an informant. In fact, Watergate was one of a kind as a scandal in the number of highly placed informants from the security agencies covertly willing to tell the media about the White House's illegal operations because they were defending their own turf.
The self-interested motives of the Deep Throats seldom comes across in accounts of the scandal in part because of the journalistic convention to pretend that anonymous sources make revelations from a sense of outraged morality or for no reason at all.
Journalists may think of themselves as spies, unrelenting investigators discovering and publishing dark secrets about the malpractices of government. This is the image commonly portrayed in movies about the media. But in practice every journalist soon discovers that people have an irritating inhibition about admitting to acts that might land them in court or in jail.
If they are forced to make admissions, as were so many of those involved in Watergate, it was because they are threatened with legal penalties by prosecutors and judges. A close look at the scoops attributed to Woodward and Bernstein shows that most of their accurate information was second hand and was extracted under threat of legal penalty by the Watergate prosecutors.
Most crimes are easy to discover and describe in general terms. I once covered the Lloyd's insurance market for the Financial Times in 1989-90 when it was perpetually mired in litigation and scandal. It did not take long to work out how those running some of the syndicates were parting investors from their money. But it was almost impossible to prove in detail what was happening because those making money out of it were intelligent enough to cover their tracks.
I had the same feeling a decade later when I was in Moscow as correspondent of The Independent and wanted to write about the Russian mafia. I knew a photographer whose uncle was a mafia boss in a city on the Volga north of Moscow. We met the uncle who politely asked why he should talk to us since this might lead to him being sent to prison. I said I could think of no reason in the world. He added that even to be seen talking to a journalist might lead to him being killed by his fellow mafiosi. I said that this was undoubtedly true. Nothing could be proven. We then drank a spectacular amount of vodka, and the uncle explained over the course of a long evening how his main racket worked. This turned out to be a simple but highly lucrative scheme for getting cut-price gasoline from the local oil refinery by a mixture of bribes and intimidation and selling it at a large profit. Unfortunately, the information was unpublishable because the local criminals had had the sense to hide their activities behind a maze of dummy companies and foreign bank accounts.
There is nothing wrong with Woodward and Bernstein benefiting from leaks that were generated by bureaucratic warfare in Washington in 1972. Anybody reporting on government will be dependent on sources within government. The Mark Felts of this world do not act simply out of a sense of righteousness but because they want to use the media as a weapon against their enemies.
At the height of the scandal over the Watergate break-in, Mr Felt found nothing strange in ordering nine equally illegal burglaries of the homes of friends and relatives of members of a left-wing splinter group. Crucial he may have been to the downfall of Nixon, Deep Throat was scarcely a single-minded opponent of the obstruction of justice.
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If anyone is interested in the subject of Mark Felt I would suggest they take a look at this thread:
W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95
By TIM WEINER
The New York Times
December 19, 2008
W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif.
His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.
In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.
The disclosure even surprised Mr. Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Mr. Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Mr. Felt that he did not introduce him to Mr. Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal. The three met for two hours one afternoon last month in Santa Rosa, where Mr. Felt had retired. The reporters likened it to a family reunion.
Mr. Felt played a dual role in the fall of Nixon. As a secret informant, he kept the story alive in the press. As associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he fought the president’s efforts to obstruct the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Watergate break-in.
Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate — shorthand for the revealed abuses of presidential powers in the Nixon White House, including illegal wiretapping, burglaries and money laundering. Americans might never have seen a president as a criminal conspirator, or reporters as cultural heroes, or anonymous sources like Mr. Felt as a necessary if undesired tool in the pursuit of truth.
Like Nixon, Mr. Felt authorized illegal break-ins in the name of national security and then received the absolution of a presidential pardon. Their lives were intertwined in ways only they and a few others knew.
Nixon cursed his name when he learned early on that Mr. Felt was providing aid to the enemy in the wars of Watergate. The conversation was recorded in the Oval Office and later made public.
“We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex.
“Somebody in the F.B.I.?” Nixon asked.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Haldeman replied. Who? the president asked. “Mark Felt,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Now why the hell would he do that?” the president asked in a wounded tone.
No one, including Mr. Felt, ever answered that question in full. Mr. Felt later said he believed that the president had been misusing the F.B.I. for political advantage. He knew that Nixon wanted the Watergate affair to vanish. He knew that the White House had ordered the C.I.A. to tell the bureau, on grounds of national security, to stand down in its felony investigation of the June 1972 break-in. He saw that order as an effort to obstruct justice, and he rejected it. That resistance led indirectly to Nixon’s resignation.
Mr. Felt had expected to be named to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the bureau for 48 years and died in May 1972. The president instead chose a politically loyal Justice Department official, L. Patrick Gray III, who later followed orders from the White House to destroy documents in the case.
The choice infuriated Mr. Felt. He later wrote that the president “wanted a politician in J. Edgar Hoover’s position who would convert the bureau into an adjunct of the White House machine.”
Hoover had sworn off break-ins without warrants — “black bag jobs,” he called them — in 1966, after carrying them out at the F.B.I. for four decades. The Nixon White House hired its own operatives to steal information, plant eavesdropping equipment and hunt down the sources of leaks. The Watergate break-in took place six weeks after Hoover died.
While Watergate was seething, Mr. Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The F.B.I. had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because national security required it.
In a criminal trial, Mr. Felt was convicted in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Nixon, who had denounced him in private for leaking Watergate secrets, testified on his behalf. Called by the prosecution, he told the jury that presidents and by extension their officers had an inherent right to conduct illegal searches in the name of national security.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.”
Seven months after the conviction, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mr. Felt. Then 67, Mr. Felt celebrated the decision as one of great symbolic value. “This is going to be the biggest shot in the arm for the intelligence community for a long time,” he said. After the pardon, Nixon sent him a congratulatory bottle of Champagne.
Mr. Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth.
William Mark Felt was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, on Aug. 17, 1913. After graduating from the University of Idaho, he was drawn to public service in Washington and went to work for Senator James P. Pope, a Democrat.
In 1938, he married his college sweetheart, Audrey Robinson, in Washington. They were wed by the chaplain of the House of Representatives. She died in 1984. The couple had a daughter, Joan, and a son, Mark. They and four grandsons survive Mr. Felt.
Days before Pearl Harbor, after earning a law degree in night classes at George Washington University, Mr. Felt applied to the F.B.I. and joined it in January 1942. He spent most of World War II hunting German spies.
After stints in Seattle, New Orleans and Los Angeles, Hoover named him special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City and Kansas City offices in the late 1950s. Rising to high positions at the headquarters in the 1960s, he oversaw the training of F.B.I. agents and conducted internal investigations as chief of the inspection division.
In early 1970, while waiting in an anteroom of the West Wing of the White House, Mr. Felt chanced to meet a Navy lieutenant delivering classified messages to the National Security Council staff. The young man in dress blues was Bob Woodward. By his own description fiercely ambitious and in need of adult guidance, Mr. Woodward tried to wring career counseling from his elder. He left the White House with the number to Mr. Felt’s direct line at the F.B.I.
On July 1, 1971, Hoover promoted Mr. Felt to deputy associate director, the third in command at the headquarters, beneath Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime companion, Clyde A. Tolson. With both of his superiors in poor health, Mr. Felt increasingly took effective command of the daily work of the F.B.I. When Mr. Hoover died and Mr. Tolson retired, he saw his path to power cleared.
But Nixon denied him, and he seethed with frustrated ambition in the summer of 1972.
One evening that summer, a few weeks after the Watergate break-in, Mr. Woodward, then a neophyte newspaperman, knocked on Mr. Felt’s door in pursuit of the story. Mr. Felt decided to co-operate with him and set up an elaborate system of espionage techniques for clandestine meetings with Mr. Woodward.
If Mr. Woodward needed to talk, he would move a flowerpot planted with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment on P Street in Washington. If Mr. Felt had a message, Mr. Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20. Mr. Woodward would leave his apartment by the back alley that night and take one taxi to a downtown hotel, then a second to an underground parking garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Va.
Within weeks, Mr. Felt steered The Post to a story establishing that the Watergate break-in was part of “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” directed by the White House. For the next eight months, he did his best to keep the newspaper on the trail, largely by providing, on “deep background,” anonymous confirmation of facts reporters had gathered from others. The Post’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave him his famous pseudonym, taken from the pornographic movie then in vogue.
By June 1973, Mr. Felt was forced out of the F.B.I. Soon he came under investigation by some of the same agents he had supervised, suspected of leaking information not to The Post but to The New York Times. He spent much of the mid-1970s testifying in secret to Congress about abuses of power at the F.B.I. Millions of Americans knew him only as a shadowy figure in the 1976 movie made from the Watergate saga, “All the President’s Men,” which made “Woodward and Bernstein” legends of American journalism. In the movie, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) gives Mr. Woodward (Robert Redford) probably the most famous bit of free advice in the history of investigative journalism. It was a three-word road map to the heart of the matter: “Follow the money.”
Mr. Felt never said it. It was part of the myth that surrounded Deep Throat.
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The BBC is reporting that Felt = 100% Deep Throat - a rather long leap and journalistic misdeed, IMO.
They said the same on BBC TV news today. However, they did show a news conference where Mark Felt denied he was Deep Throat. As he said, he would admit it if it was true as he thought it would have been his moral duty to remove a corrupt politician from power. However, he said, it was not possible to take credit for being Deep Throat.
Thank you your commentary above. It is most revealing about Mark Felt, as my upcoming book will show. Also illuminating is today's New York Times online obituary, whose sixth paragraph begins with these words: "Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate..." Stayed tuned for .......
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In tapes, LBJ accuses Nixon of treason
Johnson thought meddling derailed planned Vietnam peace talks on eve of 1968 election, according to final recordings made public.
By Mark Lisheron
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, December 05, 2008
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news...05lbjtapes.html
Just days before the pivotal 1968 presidential election featuring Vice President Hubert Humphrey's bid to succeed him, President Lyndon Baines Johnson suspected Humphrey's Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, of political sabotage that he called treason, according to the final recordings of Johnson's presidency to be publicly released.
As Johnson tried to arrange peace talks between North and South Vietnam on the eve of the election, he and his closest advisers received information indicating that Nixon allies had asked that South Vietnam avoid peace talks until after the election, the tapes show.
Johnson and his advisers, Humphrey included, kept their concerns secret at the time. But given that Nixon defeated Humphrey by just 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast and that Nixon's suspected perfidy involved the unpopular war in Vietnam, there is ample cause to wonder how history might have been changed had the concerns Johnson voiced 40 years ago been made public.
The LBJ Library made those conversations public Thursday with the release of 42 hours of recordings made from May 1968 until the Johnson family left the White House in January 1969. Johnson's daughters, Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Johnson Robb , were on hand to listen to and comment on the tapes and their father.
Harry Middleton, the first director of the LBJ Library and the original overseer of the LBJ tape project, said Thursday that he was satisfied that the body of material complied with Johnson's wish that the American people be given the opportunity to see the 36th president of the United States "with the bark off."
Betty Sue Flowers, the current director, praised Middleton's decision 15 years ago to countermand the wishes of his old boss that the tapes be kept private for 50 years after his death. Johnson died in 1973.
"He had the foresight to say no to President Johnson," Flowers said at a news conference Thursday.
"It was easier to do when he was dead," Johnson Robb shot back from her seat in the small audience.
The final recordings take their place alongside more than 600 hours that have been released as they were processed and archived by the library over the past decade. The conversations span the breadth of Johnson's ascendancy after the assassination of President John Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 , until January 1969.
In these last months of 1968 alone, Johnson is heard offering to Sen. Edward Kennedy and his family condolences after the assassination of his brother, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Robert Kennedy; discussing his reasoning for the continued bombing of North Vietnam; and reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
With an election hanging in the balance, however, there is added drama in the flurry of calls in late October and early November concerning Johnson's attempt to bring the North and South Vietnamese governments together for the first time to discuss peace.
On March 31, under heavy pressure from the anti-war wing of his Democratic Party, Johnson shocked the American people by saying he would not run for re-election or accept his party's nomination. Instead, Johnson endorsed Humphrey, who inherited the warmonger label critics had hung on Johnson.
Luci Baines Johnson recalled the agony of her father, who she said sincerely wanted a just end to the war. She said she and her sister were stung by the protesters who picketed outside the White House.
"The last thing you would hear before you went to bed at night were protesters chanting, 'Hey, hey LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?' " Johnson said as her sister dabbed at tears.
To test the good faith of the North Vietnamese, Johnson ordered that all bombing in the north cease on Oct. 31 , six days before voters were to go the polls. The cease-fire gave the Humphrey campaign an immediate jolt — polls showed Nixon's 8-percentage-point lead had shrunk to 2 points.
The precise nature of any communication between Nixon's allies and the South Vietnamese government isn't revealed in the tapes — nor is the way Johnson and his advisers learned of them.
In the tapes, Johnson tells Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "It's pretty obvious to me it's had its effect."
In a segment aired at the news conference, Johnson tells Sen. Everett Dirksen , the Republican minority leader, that it will be Nixon's responsibility if the South Vietnamese don't participate in the peace talks.
"This is treason," LBJ says to Dirksen.
"I know," Dirksen replies, very softly.
Confronting Nixon by telephone on Nov. 3, Johnson outlines what had been alleged and how important it was to the conduct of the war for Nixon's people not to meddle.
"My God," Nixon says to Johnson, "I would never do anything to encourage the South Vietnamese not to come to that conference table." Instead, Nixon pledged to help in any way Johnson or Rusk suggested, "To hell with the political credit, believe me."
For Johnson and his top advisers, it wasn't a matter of whether Nixon was telling the truth but whether accusing Nixon of meddling would give the appearance that Johnson — rather than Nixon — was using the war to influence the election.
In the end, the South Vietnamese stayed away from the proposed peace talks. And Johnson listened to his advisers and suggested to Humphrey that he not use what he had learned.
"For God's sake, you want everybody to know you don't play politics with human lives, that we did what's right," Johnson tells Rusk on one of the recordings.
In several of the recordings, Johnson wonders what will become of a Democratic Party so riven by the war that it would not unite behind Humphrey.
"I'm sorry I let you down a little," Humphrey tells Johnson.
"No, you didn't; no you didn't," Johnson replies. "A lot of other folks (did), not you. You fought well and hard."
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More Nixon tapes, records being made public
Presidential memo dramatizes White House dilemma over Vietnam
The Associated Press
updated 1:17 p.m. CT, Tues., Dec. 2, 2008
WASHINGTON - Documents released Tuesday from the Nixon years shed new light on just how much the Nixon White House struggled with growing public unrest over the protracted war in Vietnam.
Newly released information Tuesday from Richard M. Nixon's years in the presidency includes nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents.
A newly declassified memo to Nixon from his secretary of defense at the time reflects just how much the administration felt and discussed public pressure — even as it weighed U.S. geopolitical strategy — in anguished internal debate over war policy.
The seven-page document cautions the president against a proposal from the military brass to conduct a high-intensity air and naval campaign against North Vietnam.
Then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said such a plan would involve the United States in "expanded costs and risks with no clear resultant military or political benefits."
With peace talks "seemingly stalled in Paris, with combat activity levels reduced in South Vietnam, but with seemingly rising levels of discontent in the United States, we should review the overall situation and determine the best course of action," the defense secretary writes the president on Oct. 8, 1969.
"The sum total of the considerations ... casts grave doubt on the validity and efficacy" of the proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the memo concludes.
At the time of Laird's memo, the Nixon administration was secretly conducting a massive bombing of Cambodia to destroy sanctuaries for North Vietnamese enemy troops.
"We must, for example, act in a fashion which will maintain the support of the American people," Laird wrote, outlining a number of objectives. The Nixon administration didn't go forward with the Joint Chiefs' plan. But in December 1972, it launched what became known as the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi when peace talks hit a dead-end. The effort stirred even more anger with the American public. North Vietnam called it a terrorist act.
Laird became the biggest proponent of the concept called Vietnamization, urging Nixon to follow through on a policy of troop withdrawals, putting the burden of fighting the conflict on South Vietnamese troops.
The massive B-52 strikes over Hanoi and Haiphong in the last two weeks of December 1972 were a gambit to shock North Vietnam into a serious posture in peace negotiations. The newly released tapes cover the period leading up to the bombing as well as the execution and are expected to include Oval Office discussions about the assault.
The recordings are of Nixon's White House conversations from November 1972 to January 1973 and cover his re-election that fall, steps to bomb North Vietnam and also to make peace with it.
Historians hoped for insights into the 1972 "Christmas bombing," one of the most controversial acts in a divisive war and the most concentrated air attack of the conflict.
The documents take historians closer than the latest tapes do to the Watergate scandal that gathered force in 1973 and peaked with Nixon's resignation in disgrace in August 1974.
The records include 65,000 pages from the files of J. Fred Buzhardt, Nixon's attorney in the titanic struggle over White House tapes that ultimately betrayed Nixon's complicity in the scandal.
Other Watergate figures are represented in the collection, too. Thousands of pages are being released from the files of Nixon aides Charles W. Colson, H.R. Haldeman, Patrick J. Buchanan and John W. Dean.
As well, there are more than 8,000 pages of correspondence from and to Nixon's political lieutenants at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, John Mitchell and committee deputy Jeb Magruder.
Burglars working for the committee broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in June 1972, setting off a chain of events that tied Nixon's top men and the president himself to a cover-up of illegal political machinations.
Over the years, a mountain of paper and tape has emerged shedding light on the inner workings of a president who operated in great secrecy but, ironically, seemed to chronicle every step for history.
This is the 12th release of Nixon White House tapes since 1980. More than 2,200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House now are available, according to the National Archives, which joined the Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., in releasing the material Tuesday.
All the recordings in the latest release are being put online while the papers can be seen at the two institutions.
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On November 28, 2008, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration released a document that had been requested in connection with a book that I am writing on Watergate. This is only one of several hundred documents provided by the National Archives and my posting to the Forum at this time is concerned with only one investigation conducted by the Plumbers Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, U. S. Department of Justice. Below is the pertinent excerpt from the document:
Memorandum
June 27, 1975
To: The Files
From: Nick A----. (last name is obscured by overlapping initials “NA”)
Set forth below are my summaries of six relative minor investigations conducted by the Plumbers Task Force. None of these investigations were very extensive but they should be referenced in a miscellaneous category to indicate that this office looked into the allegations involved. To the extent possible, I have listed them chronologically.
Diem Cables
An investigation was conducted in July and August, 1973, into the allegations that State Department cables had been fabricated by E. Howard Hunt to implicate the Kennedy Administration in the assassination of Vietnamese Premier Diem. [FOIA (
(3) – Rule 6(e). Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand Jury.] On July 23, 1973, I interviewed William Lambert, the Life reporter, whom Hunt had approached with the cables to attempt to entice Life to print an expose of the Kennedy Administration’s involvement in the Diem assassination. Hunt and Colson were interviewed on August 7, 1973, and August 15, 1973, respectively. Colson denied he had instructed Hunt to fabricate the cables, but after his plea in the Fielding case Colson related to Bill Merrill a different version of this incident which was not recorded. Charges were not brought forth simply because it was concluded that no crime had been made out by these activities. -
From:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
In our 6th annual JFK Assassination Special, a panel of experts including JFK Historian Lamar Waldron, and E. Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt will share startling new evidence as we close in on finding out who really murdered the late president.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
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My recollection of listening to the full audio tape is that Hunt asserts that he was asked to join in participating in The Big Event but passed on it. The full audio tape is somewhat more definitive in some respects than the video. The release of the video at this time may indicate that his son, St. John, might still have information given to him by his father that may become public sometime in the future.
My view is that if asked, he would join in. Did he tell his son anything important about Watergate?
I do not know about any information on Watergate that Howard might have passed to Saint John. I have in the past been in email correspondence with Saint John and will send him an email at this time and pose your question to him.
I am in possession of new material about Watergate that hopefully will be published in book form early next year. I wish Howard were still alive so that I could run this material by him for his opinion as it is explosive in its content. It appears that certain personnel in military intelligence and the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police were aware of the Liddy-Hunt break-in plan two weeks before the plan was executed, which resulted in the arrests of the five persons inside the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.
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Howard Hunt’s Deathbed Video
The following is reprinted from www.unknowncountry.com of this date:
E. Howard Hunt's audio interview saying that the CIA was responsible for the JFK assassination was covered by the Associated Press, Rolling Stone and many others. In this video, released exclusively by PrisonPlanet.com, Hunt goes much further, naming CIA Agents Cord Meyer, who had been cuckolded by JFK, and William K. Harvey, who had been sidelined by Robert Kennedy after he tried to mount an unauthorized action against Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the people who managed the assassination for LBJ. To watch the video, click on the link below:
Thank you for posting this. It is a shame the film does not cover David Morales in any detail. There was some interesting photographs of Bill Harvey that I had not seen before. I assume they came from Hunt. The disappointing thing about the video is that Hunt's comments are speculative and do not appear to be based on any hard evidence. I am not convinced that Cord Meyer's motive concerned the fact that JFK had "cuckolded" him. Mary Pinchot Meyer had actually divorced Cord Meyer in 1958, five years before the assassination.
I am sure that Hunt knew who was behind the assassination but I am not convinced that he tells us everything he knows on the video. I suspect it was just another "limited hangout".
My recollection of listening to the full audio tape is that Hunt asserts that he was asked to join in participating in The Big Event but passed on it. The full audio tape is somewhat more definitive in some respects than the video. The release of the video at this time may indicate that his son, St. John, might still have information given to him by his father that may become public sometime in the future.
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Howard Hunt’s Deathbed Video
The following is reprinted from www.unknowncountry.com of this date:
E. Howard Hunt's audio interview saying that the CIA was responsible for the JFK assassination was covered by the Associated Press, Rolling Stone and many others. In this video, released exclusively by PrisonPlanet.com, Hunt goes much further, naming CIA Agents Cord Meyer, who had been cuckolded by JFK, and William K. Harvey, who had been sidelined by Robert Kennedy after he tried to mount an unauthorized action against Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the people who managed the assassination for LBJ. To watch the video, click on the link below:
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A Hale Chief? Better Check Up on That.
By Robert Dallek
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1
The American public seems pretty sure that it knows everything it needs to know about whether John McCain and Barack Obama are healthy enough to be president. I'm not. And whenever I think about whether both men are fit to serve, physically speaking, I think about the sinking feeling I had one lovely spring afternoon in 2002 when an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library wheeled out the cartload of files showing how badly we had all been deceived about JFK's health.
The secret details of Kennedy's medical history were buried in 10 beat-up old cartons of records the library had held for 40 years. Past requests for access to these materials had all been refused by a committee of loyalists that included one of JFK's closest advisers, speechwriter Ted Sorensen. To my surprise, the committee had given me the chance to read the files; I had to agree not to photocopy them but was free to take notes or read passages into a tape recorder. Now I -- along with a physician friend, Jeffrey Kelman -- felt as if I were breaching a wall of secrecy. Here were not the usual neat boxes of presidential records, preserved in red-blue-and-silver-trimmed containers, but musty cardboard cartons that seemed to have sat untouched in some corner of the library since Janet Travell, one of Kennedy's physicians, had given them to the library after JFK's assassination in November 1963.
Between May 1955 and October 1957, Kennedy had been hospitalized nine times for a total of 44 days, including one 19-day period and two week-long stretches. Despite his public image of "vigah," as his accent rendered it, he suffered from bouts of colitis, accompanied by abdominal pain, diarrhea and dehydration; agony in his back triggered by osteoporosis of the lumbar spine; prostatitis, marked by severe pain and urinary infections; and Addison's disease, a form of adrenal insufficiency. Some of his difficulties, such as his back pain and Addison's, were open secrets among the press corps during his 1960 run for the White House, but the extent and severity of his problems -- to say nothing of the promiscuous variety of medications and doctors he relied upon to maintain his health -- had remained undisclosed. That's largely because the Kennedy campaign made every effort to hide his health problems -- obviously convinced that these disclosures, combined with his youth and Catholicism, would sink him.
Kennedy was following in a little-known but troubling tradition in American politics -- and one we should remember when we assume that McCain and Obama have told us everything we need to know. Since that day at the Kennedy library, I have been advocating the full disclosure of all presidential candidates' medical histories, physical and psychological, in no small measure because the Kennedy campaign's deceptions were in line with the deceits or shadings offered by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt during their own presidential bids.
Unbeknownst to the public, Wilson had suffered several small strokes before he ran in 1912 and continued to suffer them while in office; they proved to be preludes to a massive stroke in September 1919 that left him with a paralyzed left arm and leg and limited cognitive function. He could not stay alert for sustained periods of time or keep anything resembling a normal presidential work schedule. But the White House hid, as best it could, the extent of the president's incapacity from the public. Even though Wilson still had 18 months remaining in his term, which was being dominated by an economic recession and widespread fears of radicalism provoked by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the press, foolishly, deferred to the president's desire for privacy. White House subordinates declined to reveal the truth about the president's condition -- an amazing display of recklessness.
The public did not fully understand how badly Roosevelt's health was failing when he ran for a fourth term in 1944. He died the following April, during the waning months of World War II, of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by arteriosclerosis. When Winston Churchill's physician saw FDR at Yalta in February 1945, the British doctor predicted that the president would be dead in a matter of months. After his death, shocked Americans wondered whether he should have run again in 1944 and whether he had performed as effectively as he might have at the Yalta conference with Stalin.
If Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy had fully disclosed their health problems, it might have cost them the Oval Office. Wilson would have been pressured to resign, something he considered doing in January 1920, and turn the presidency over to his vice president, former Indiana governor Thomas R. Marshall. Wilson's and his closest advisers' decision to keep the president's disability secret was an undemocratic abuse of presidential power.
If FDR and JFK had allowed the public to know about their own health problems in 1944 and 1960, respectively, they might well have lost. Then again, Roosevelt's hold over the electorate remained considerable, so he might have prevailed. And if JFK had leveled with the public about the pain he bore, he might have been seen as heroic for achieving so much despite his suffering.
But such calculations are beside the point, then and now. Politicians' political problems are their own. Their health problems belong to all of us, and if candidates don't like that, they need not run for president. It was and is the public's right to have the fullest possible information about a potential president's physical condition. If you want to be the most powerful person in the world, you will also have to be one of the least private. Voters deserve to know the full picture -- no ifs, ands or buts.
Those who squirm at this standard often point to the examples of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, both of whom suffered from depression, and argue that these titans might never have taken office if they had offered full disclosure of their emotional struggles. I do not take so dim a view of the electorate and believe that American and British voters would still have recognized their greatness. Democracy rests on informed decision-making, and I see no decent argument for secrecy -- especially if we may be passing the world's largest nuclear arsenal into ailing hands.
So on Oct. 3, when I read a full-page ad in the New York Times by 2,768 medical doctors calling on John McCain to release fully his health records to the public, I cheered. The voters' judgments should rest on the fullest possible information about the presidential candidates' potential performance in office. The fact that McCain could be our oldest elected president, a 72-year-old man with a history of skin cancer and a largely untested running mate, makes it all the more urgent that we know more about his health before voting. It's admirable that he shared 1,173 pages of his medical records with a small number of reporters during a three-hour period in May. But the limits the McCain campaign imposed on the review of those materials -- the eyebrow-raising time constraints, the exclusion of a New York Times reporter with an M.D. from the pool, the refusal to permit photocopying -- raise questions about what medical experts might find if given unrestricted access.
The requirement for full disclosure should apply to Barack Obama as well. His campaign has released only a single page of information about his health history. He is just 47 and seemingly in excellent health, but nobody is immune from illnesses that voters might want to take account of in November. And remember, we all thought JFK was the picture of youthful vigor, too.
Advances in modern medicine and in public understanding of diseases suggest that someone with a history of cancer or some other life-threatening illness need not be seen as barred from serving as president. But in an era when presidents shoulder such staggering responsibilities, voters in the United States -- and people around the world -- are entitled to know as much as possible about the person who will have so much to say about all our lives and futures.
rdallek@aol.com
Robert Dallek is the author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." His latest book is "Harry S. Truman."
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New Kennedy tape revealed
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#27168561
Tape of informal conversation with JFK on January 5, 1960 before he was elected president. It was recorded at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.
A portion of the tape was played on the NBC Nightly News today, October 13, 2008.
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I don't believe this allegation by Rosen of Faux News Channel is historically accurate but since it may attract some public attention I am posting this article about his new book:
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New Watergate book says John Dean ordered break-in
By Steve Holland
Reuters US Online Report Top News
May 19, 2008 01:03 EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new book on the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon alleges that White House counsel John Dean ordered the infamous Watergate break-in in 1972, a charge Dean strongly rejected.
James Rosen, a Fox News Channel correspondent in Washington, made the charge based on interviews and an exhaustive review of documents for "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate."
The biography is being released this week about Nixon's attorney general, a central Watergate figure.
Dean called Rosen's assertion "pathetic."
The Watergate scandal began with the bungled election-year break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Wasington on June 17, 1972. The aim was to wiretap the telephones.
Initially dismissed by the White House as a "third-rate burglary," the scandal was slow in evolving and had no impact on the outcome of the 1972 election -- Nixon easily defeated Democratic Sen. George McGovern to win a second term.
But by 1974 investigators had traced Watergate and various other political scandals back to the White House and Nixon was forced to resign on August 9, 1974.
Dean was most famous for telling Nixon in a taped Oval Office conversation in 1973 that Watergate was "a cancer growing on the presidency."
Though convicted of several Watergate-related felonies, he has been widely viewed as somewhat of a sympathetic figure in the case because he became a key witness for the prosecution, thus reducing his prison time.
Rosen quoted from a 1990 interview from another central Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, that "the first plan that we got had been initiated by Dean."
To help build his case, Rosen quoted from a statement that Magruder made in a legal deposition in 1995 about "Gemstone," Watergate planner G. Gordon Liddy's code-name for the burglary:
"Question: 'Is it true that John Dean was one of the people in the White House that was pushing for the Gemstone plan?'
"Magruder: 'Yes.'
"Question: ... Is it, in fact, truthful that you and John Dean had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in?'
"Magruder: 'Yes."'
Dean told Reuters, "I hope this book is being sold as fiction, for if it is not, readers are being defrauded."
"His conclusions are pathetic. Rosen has simply ignored all the sworn testimony to the contrary, including my own," he said.
Rosen notes that Dean has always denied ordering the break-in. "I wasn't even aware of the Watergate until after it happened," Rosen quotes Dean as saying in 1999.
Many previous accounts have alleged that Mitchell ordered the break-in.
Rosen's book also alleges that the doomed wiretapping was deliberately sabotaged by the CIA.
Rosen says he had a rich trove of previously undiscovered information to scour for his book, including 5,000 pages of executive session testimony by key witnesses before the Senate Watergate committee, including Dean, Magruder, James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and Alexander Haig.
Source: Reuters US Online Report Top News
It seems clear that this Rosen is just another republican hatchet man, out to redeem poor John Mitchell, wrongly maligned all these years. That this book comes at a time when another Republican Attorney General, appropriately named A.G. has been exposed as a political hack and criminal, is just a coincidence, of course. Dean has written a few books bad-mouthing the Bushies for their crimes. It was just a matter of time before they fought back. I suspect this is it.
Note: I don't necessarily agree with all that Valentine writes below or with the tone of his writing but I think it deserves a reading.
_________________
Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain
Strong Man, Straw Dog and the FoxNews Circus
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
www.counterpunch.org
October 11-12, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine10122008.html
A lot of people believe, as Joe Biden recently said, that Sarah Palin and her running mate John McCain are going “over the edge” in a desperate attempt to assassinate Barack Obama’s character. Biden and other critics specifically cite the frenzied calls at Palin-McCain rallies to “kill” the “terrorist” Obama – calls for violence that go unheard by the sleepy Secret Service.
In response, Palin and McCain cite Obama’s “attacks” on “hardworking middle class Americans,” code words that transform fascism, racism and religious fanaticism into righteousness. Their allies in government (like the Secret Service) tacitly turn a blind eye; they commit no overt acts to further the Palin-McCain conspiracy but advance it through sins of omission.
Indeed, as America sinks deeper in the morass of the Wall Street meltdown, the Republican Party finds invisibility a virtue. Look around their rabid rallies and nowhere will you see any sign of its amoral leader for the last eight years, the washed-up and universally despised George W Bush.
In the maelstrom of freewheeling capitalism and mass murder Bush engendered, mere mendacity, however, is a minor sin. Palin-McCain exhortations that Obama is untruthful about his associations with “domestic terrorists” are repeated every day as “news” by the mainstream media, while the frothing mouthpiece of the Republican Party, Fox News, broadcasts 24/7 the Big Lie that Barack “Hussein” (Palinesque wink and wiggle) Obama is really a Communist Muslim born in Africa who seeks to destroy America.
Soon Fox will certainly unearth documentary evidence of his membership in Al Qaeda.
It’s pathetic the way the mindless Republican hordes fall prey to Palin-McCain fear-mongering. But violence has its greatest appeal to “the silent majority” in hard times, and nothing is quite as American as visiting death and destruction upon the enemy within.
Back in the 1960s there will still signs that said, “n, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in,” say, “Arizona,” where McCain opposed a national holiday for Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, ostensibly because King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
King got his holiday, after being assassinated, and McCain remains “a great purveyor.”
The murder and mayhem incited by Palin-McCain at their lynch mob rallies even has mainstream hack David Gergen saying, “There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. And I think we’re not far from that.”
Duh.
David Brooks, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, is “appalled” by Palin-McCain Black Shirt tactics and recently described Palin, a working class heroine in the minds of many deluded individuals, as a "fatal cancer to the Republican party.”
Maybe so. Then again, maybe Palin will incite some James Earl Ray wanna-be to kill Obama, thus solving all the Republican part’s current problems?
In any case, Brooks’ use of the word “cancer” is no accident, and harkens back to March 1973, when President Nixon’s erstwhile legal counsel, John Dean, famously said, in reference to the brewing Watergate scandal, that there was a “cancer” growing within the White House.
Unlike cancer, the meaning of Watergate is open to interpretation. For Dean, it means the June 1972 break-in and telephone bugging of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. In his 2004 book, Worse than Watergate, Dean claimed that when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush regime makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. Lies and cover-ups are still the Republican strong suit, he admits, but they are worse today because Nixon’s was a petty crime which pales in comparison to the Bush Regime deceiving the world about 9/11 and using it to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.
This seems a very limited interpretation and many of us consider the Watergate scandal more than a petty crime. We see it as a symbolic validation of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. We cannot separate Watergate from racism and the Vietnam War, just as we cannot separate Bush and Iraq.
Watergate, we know, led to the investigation and disgrace of the CIA, FBI and military, all of which conspired with the Nixon White House in an all-out right-wing assault (including murder) on the rights of all Americans. Nothing like that ever came from the Left.
Ultimately, for anyone involved in the Anti-War or Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s, Watergate was the culmination of a culture war that has been revived by Bush, advanced by Fox News, and taken to its logical extreme by Palin and McCain.
The Straw Man
Working for Fox News is a curse, if you wish others to take you seriously. To work for Fox is to condemn yourself to the sideshow in the carnival, along with Snake Boy, the Bearded Lady, Table Top Joe, and the famous mistakes of nature featured on Fox News: Bill “The Human Vibrator” O’Reilly, Sean “Hermaphrodite” Hannity, and Ann “Fly Trap” Coulter.
One such Fox freak, James Rosen, has written a book that purports to be a scholastic work about Watergate. Titled The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, it is over 600 pages long – and reads like it were 10,000.
I crossed paths with Rosen a few years ago while researching my new book on the CIA’s usurpation of federal drug law enforcement during the Watergate era. Rosen and I were both speaking with E. Howard Hunt, the veteran CIA officer and pathological xxxx convicted of organizing the Watergate break-in. During this period I learned that Rosen, in the early 1990s, had gotten a grant from William F. Buckley to begin working on the Mitchell biography. Buckley, it should be noted, was Hunt’s CIA partner in Mexico in the early 1950s.
Although born and raised in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he apparently developed his fondness for sideshows and mutants, Rosen adopted Buckley’s class affectations and traded off his patron’s right wing contacts like Hunt. The result is that Rosen is now Fox’s premier “war on terror” correspondent and Playboy’s resident scholar on Watergate. Pretentious to a fault, like Buckley, Rosen even asserts that The Washington Post was “extraneous” to the outcome of Watergate, as were Woodward and Bernstein.
If that doesn’t give you a sense of Rosen’s scholasticism, consider that he makes his money at Fox by painting Bush regime war criminals like Condoleezza Rice in flattering colors. The geek has no shame at all, and in Strong Man he pours lipstick with a fire hose on Mitchell. The result is nauseating. Voted the funniest celebrity in Washington, Rosen had me holding my stomach and vomiting into a barf bag as he presented beady-eyed AG as a champion of civil rights and a super-hero fighting anti-war subversives.
Anyone who was alive and aware in the 1960’s knows that Mitchell was a Wall Street bond lawyer whom Nixon chose as his campaign manager in 1968. (Written before the recent financial calamity, Strong Man argues that the denizens of Wall Street are paragons of virtue.) Nixon was so grateful after stealing the election that he made Mitchell his first attorney general, a job Mitchell had no training or talent for. In 1972 Nixon put Mitchell in charge of his re-election committee (CREEP) and set Mitchell as a collision course with the Watergate scandal.
Nixon loved Mitchell so much that he let him take the fall in the cover-up, and Mitchell has the distinction of being the highest US government official to serve prison time.
Rosen, like Nixon, is infatuated with Mitchell, and for equally perverse and exploitive reasons. But Mitchell, a fat Wall Street lawyer, was too boring to rate a book to himself. So Rosen’s bloated book isn’t really about Mitchell at all. It’s about revising history.
As Rosen once boasted, “Wilde said that our lone duty to history is to continually rewrite it.” And Rosen does his re-writing by the shovel full.
Those of who were there know that Mitchell led the domestic war against civil rights demonstrators and anti-war protestors. Mitchell hated us with a vengeance and, according to Rosen, rightfully so! You can feel Rosen trembling with glee as he quotes Mitchell comparing us to “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them and denying other people their civil rights. They were called Hitler’s Brown Shirts.”
Talk about turning mortgage debt and junk bonds into gold! As we all knew back then, Mitchell and his felonious minions at Justice were the proudest bald headed fascists of the day. But Rosen is undeterred by fact and, by his account (hold your barf bag near) Mitchell also single-handedly desegregated the South’s public schools. Negro and Negro-loving white community organizers played no significant role whatsoever.
Think that’s bad? Well, it gets worse.
Revising Watergate for Modern Consumption
Although Rosen admits that Mitchell's role in the Watergate bugging and cover-up “is indisputable,” he claims that Mitchell was “framed” by a “wicked alliance” of co-conspirators “eager to tell lies." Which brings us to Rosen’s “call girl” conspiracy theory, in which John Dean ordered the Watergate burglary and the CIA, under Democrat Richard Helms, assisted.
What, inquiring people ask, is the “call girl” theory?
According to Rosen, it’s the fact that employees at the Democratic National Committee “were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza.” And John Dean bugged the Watergate because his wife Maureen was one of the calls girls!
According to Rosen, “Dean’s unique knowledge of all the players and their complex interconnections…makes him the only logical answer in the three-decades-old mystery of …who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder [Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP] to send [Howard Hunt’s partner, G. Gordon] Liddy and his team back into the DNC.”
“This is not your father’s Watergate,” Rosen quips.
No, it definitely is not. It’s The X-Files meets Desperate Housewives. Or, as John Dean says about Rosen, “I will probably deal with him in court. His material, to put it mildly, is bullxxxx.”
History as It Was
Rosen the Straw Man really hates John Dean and anything that smacks of civil rights or anti-war liberalism. Then again, what else would one expect from a Fox News geek?
Rosen’s hatred of Dean and love of Mitchell is steadfast in the face of the awful truth. The major fact being that Mitchell approved G. Gordon Liddy's Gemstone Plan to subvert George McGovern’s 1972 campaign through black bag jobs, assassination, kidnapping, rumor mongering and any other means necessary. Liddy, who enjoyed eating the heads off of living rats (not to prove his strength, but because he liked the taste), presented Mitchell with his plan in January 1972. As the top law enforcement officer in America, Mitchell had the legal imperative to Just Say No. If he had been half the circus Strong Man Rosen pretends, fat flabby Mitchell would have kicked Liddy out of his office.
But Nixon’s moral compass showed his true colors and agreed to Liddy’s crazy plan, thus giving the world Watergate and Rosen something to re-write about.
The other sad fact is that Mitchell was unscrupulous and corrupt, and narrowly dodged a charge that he and Nixon’s Commerce Secretary helped Robert Vesco (a drug smuggler fugitive living under the DEA’s nose in Costa Rica) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, after Vesco made a secret $200,000 cash contribution to Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign. The SEC, notably, was then chaired by former OSS spy William Casey, later Reagan’s DCI. (People rarely realize that the CIA is more closely allied with Wall Street than the it is to The White House.) Vesco was acquainted with Nixon's brothers, Edward and Donald, and the latter's son worked as Vesco’s bagman to CREEP. After the payoff, Mitchell immediately connected Vesco’s emissary to Casey.
Rosen also fails to mention that Mitchell approved the CIA’s infiltration of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. BNDD Director John Ingersoll told me that someone asked him to participate in the Watergate cover-up. Ingersoll had two friends in the Nixon Administration – Mitchell and Dean – but he wouldn’t say which one it was.
Mitchell has also been linked to mobster Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, wing nut Howard Hughes, and mob activities at the same Vegas casinos where McCain feels compelled to play craps.
Truth be told, Mitchell got off easy when in the fall in 1974 he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. He was convicted of suborning his CREEP deputy’s perjured testimony before the Watergate grand jury.
Mitchell went to prison without complaining that he was framed. He never corrected the false notion that he commanded John F. Kennedy during World War II, or the “bogus suggestion that he played hockey for the New York Rangers.”
It was as if he knew that a false Messiah like Rosen would one day come along and pretend that all the charges against him were Lies! Damned Lies!
Like Nixon would say, “And Bush is not a war criminal.”
Rosen spent 17 years sifting through the evidence and carefully discarding anything that pointed at Mitchell. What remains in Strong Man is as credible as the barrage of partisan distortions one hears daily, hourly, minute-by-endless minute on Fox News. And by mutating John Mitchell from a villain into a victim, James Rosen has proven himself a carnival act worthy of inclusion in the right wing-nut hall of shame.
Douglas Valentine is the author of four books which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html His fifth book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Personalities and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA, will be published in September 2009 by Trine Day.
(3) – Rule 6(e). Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Grand Jury.] On July 23, 1973, I interviewed William Lambert, the Life reporter, whom Hunt had approached with the cables to attempt to entice Life to print an expose of the Kennedy Administration’s involvement in the Diem assassination. Hunt and Colson were interviewed on August 7, 1973, and August 15, 1973, respectively. Colson denied he had instructed Hunt to fabricate the cables, but after his plea in the Fielding case Colson related to Bill Merrill a different version of this incident which was not recorded. Charges were not brought forth simply because it was concluded that no crime had been made out by these activities.
My Query Letter to Literary Agents re: "Watergate Exposed"
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
I have previously posted this in the Watergate section of the Forum. However, because my book and movie script deal tangentially with Howard Hunt’s revelations about his knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, I am also posting it here:
I am in the initial process of sending query letters to several dozen accredited literary agents concerning “Watergate Exposed,” my book manuscript and movie script that is based on the life story of Robert Merritt, a long-time government informant. My letter inquires whether the literary agent would be interested in representing us in placing the manuscript with a book publisher.
The query letter is reproduced below. Should any member or reader of the Forum know of a literary agent or movie agent who might be interested in the manuscript, please feel free to encourage the agent to establish direct communication with me. Thank you.
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DOUGLAS CADDY
ATTORNEY AT LAW
7941 Katy Freeway
Suite 296
Houston, Texas 77024
713-867-3476
email: electionreform@aol.com
April 6, 2009
[Name and address of literary agent]
Dear [name of agent]
I am writing this query letter at the suggestion of Donald O. Graul, Jr., Executive Director of American Independent Writers, who has consented graciously to the use of his name in this effort to obtain the professional services of your literary agency.
I am the co-author with Robert Merritt of a book manuscript titled:
Watergate Exposed
A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals
Other Monumental Government Dirty Tricks
By Robert Merritt
As told to
Douglas Caddy
Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven
Our manuscript takes up where Jim Hougan’s1984 best seller “Secret Agenda” left off, wherein he wrote on page 320, “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin Committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 break-in was about to occur. In particular, skeptics as politically disparate as H. R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting officer Carl Shoffler.”
Shoffler arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972. He had recruited Robert Merritt as a Confidential Informant for the police two years earlier and had worked and lived with him in the intervening years. On June 1, 1972 Merritt provided Shoffler with the confidential information of the proposed break-in at Watergate – more than two weeks before the event occurred -- information that Merritt had obtained the day before from a most unlikely source. In reality, the burglars planned the break-in for Sunday, June 18, but Shoffler, utilizing the wire-tapping skills that the government previously had taught him at its Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia, skillfully enticed the unsuspecting burglars to move the date up by one day so that it would occur on Shoffler’s birthday as a special kind of present to himself. It was the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.
Shoffler, upon learning of the proposed break-in from Merritt, brought two other persons into his set-up scheme: a military intelligence agent and a retired CIA agent. The latter, upon hearing Merritt relate the planned break-in, exclaimed that Shoffler was about to become the most famous police detective in U.S. history.
But Watergate Exposed is more than an earthshaking rewriting of the history of the greatest presidential scandal in American history. For Merritt, under Shoffler’s tutelage, also became a Confidential Informant for the FBI, ATF, Secret Service and other government entities. His CI services are vetted by documents obtained under FOIA from these agencies and the National Archives. Of special note are FBI documents about its wire-tapping and infiltration of the Institute of Policy Studies and reports prepared at the time by the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor after Merritt met with the prosecutor’s staff in 1973, accompanied by his distinguished attorney, David Isbell of Covington and Burling.
Even after Watergate broke, Merritt continued his CI role, becoming involved in mind-bending activities of all kinds in the nation’s capital.
Merritt left Washington, D.C. in 1985 as a “fugitive from justice” and since that time has lived in New York City. For most of these years, even though he was a “fugitive,” he worked directly as a CI for the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, his real identity being unknown all the while to these law enforcement entities. This was done with the assistance from Shoffler, his long-time mentor. Eventually all charges against Merritt were dropped and a judge ordered his criminal record expunged.
Merritt entered my life three days after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, although I was not aware of this at the time. It was only in 1977 – five years later -- when I read an interview with him in the gay publication, The Advocate, that I first learned he had been recruited by the Washington, D.C. Police and the FBI to establish an intimate relationship with me. This effort occurred when I was the attorney for the Watergate defendants, although the defendants themselves and the general public were unaware at the time of my gay sexual orientation. On two occasions – in June 1972 and in February 1973 -- law enforcement agents attempted to enlist Merritt in establishing a sexual liaison with me, offering him tens of thousands of dollars if he were to agree to do so. As a gay person himself, he was repulsed by these overtures to entice confidential legal information from me and rejected them outright on both occasions. Hence a relationship of any type was never established, that is until June 2008 when Merritt telephoned to ask that I help him write his manuscript. By way of reference, my own biography appears in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.
Our manuscript’s table of contents is as follows:
Preface by Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven
Introduction
Chapter I – How the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up: 1970-1972
Chapter II – The Special Watergate Prosecutor’s Interviews of Merritt: 1973
Chapter III – Merritt’s Post-Watergate Period in Washington, D.C.: 1972-1985
Chapter IV – The New York Years 1986- 2009
Chapter V – Flotsam and Jetsam: Dramatic Episodes in Merritt’s Life
Chapter VI – Epilogue by Douglas Caddy: How Judge John Sirica and the original
Watergate prosecutors denied the seven Watergate defendants their
Sixth Amendment’s right to legal counsel.
As indicated in the table of contents, the untold story about Watergate, which makes other books on the scandal obsolete, comprises only about thirty percent of the dramatic twists and turns in Merritt’s life, a confidential informant’s true story that is both stranger and scarier than fiction.
Would your agency be interested in representing us in placing our manuscript with a publisher? A prompt response would be most appreciated.
Sincerely yours,
Douglas Caddy