John Simkin
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The pollster Louis Harris.
Very impressive. Where did you get that answer from?
Google?
No, if you put the quote in Google the only website listed was this thread on the forum. Michael probably got it from one of those old fashioned things called books.
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Gaeton Fonzi's wife of 55 years, Marie, has sent me some of her favourite photographs of her husband to put on my webpage on him. I thought members might like to see them. The first one includes a good quote from Mark Twain.
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The pollster Louis Harris.
Very impressive. Where did you get that answer from?
In 1959 John F. Kennedy recruited Harris to do all his polling for the forthcoming presidential campaign. At the time George Gallup dominated this industry but was believed to be a strong Republican Party supporter. (In fact it later emerged he had been fiddling the results in order to get Republicans elected). Harris was a Democrat and was on record as saying: "For this poll-taker's part, he will never undertake to work for any candidate he believes will set back human progress."
Kennedy paid Harris $400,000 for his surveys, much more than a political pollster had ever received before. Harris argued in his autobiography, The Anguish of Change (1973): "I don't think any poll-taker before or since has sat on a strategy committee. Joe Kennedy, Bobby and Jack Kennedy, and I - we were the inner strategy committee. So I was part of and privy to the whole bloody campaign. The only people who got the polls were Jack and Bobby, nobody else." Elmo Roper attacked those "so-called public opinion researchers," who allow their polls to be exploited "rather openly for propaganda purposes."
After his victory in the 1960 Presidential Election, Kennedy apparently told Harris that "maybe next to me you've got more power than anybody else in this country." Harris agreed and he told the New York Times: "When polls figure largely in the outcome of a major victory, such as... President Kennedy's in Virginia in May, 1960, the poll-taker becomes a kind of political miracle worker." One former Kennedy aide commented: "Face it, politicians have big egos, bigger than anybody's. Harris was smart. He'd come in with these polls that showed that everybody adored Kennedy, and Kennedy ate it up." Ted Sorensen disagreed with this assessment and claimed that Kennedy "felt that a pollster's desire to please a client and influence strategy sometimes unintentionally coloured his analysis."
Michael Wheeler, the author of Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America (2007), has pointed out: "During the campaign he would sometimes engage in flights of fancy about his future after the election... some people close to Harris at the time say he would wistfully imagine himself as director of the CIA one day and secretary of commerce the next... Having supposedly masterminded a presidential campaign, Harris became the number one political pollster. Democrats who wanted to win came to him, and they paid top dollar for what they got."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPYharrisL.htm
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After his victory in the 1960 Presidential Election, who did John F. Kennedy tell "maybe next to me you've got more power than anybody else in this country."
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Adolf Berle was placed in charge of distributing the funds. On 20th February, Berle recorded: "Jay Franklin (J.F. Carter) came in to see me today. He stated as a result of his conversation with the President and with you, and preparatory to the work he had been asked to do, he had spent some seven hundred dollars, and that he would be broke by the end of this week... He wanted an advance of some kind against the compensation which he would eventually receive for his work. Accordingly I lent him seven hundred dollars... I am not, of course, familiar with what the President has asked him to do, nor do I wish to be."
Who was Berle writing to?
He was writing in his diary.
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John Franklin Carter was a journalist who first met Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1932. The two men became close friends and Carter became an ardent supporter of the New Deal. He was also an advisor and speechwriter for Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture. He was described by a colleague as "brilliant, cynical, occasionally cockeyed and always exciting." He was also the author of the books, The New Dealers (1934) and American Messiahs (1935).
In 1936 Carter adopted the pen name, Jay Franklin, and began a syndicated column, We, The People. His office in the National Press Building was close to the White House and usually reflected the views of Roosevelt. In January 1941, Carter told undersecretary of state Sumner Welles, that America's various intelligence services were "pretty well loused up and floundering around" and "there might be a use for a small and informal intelligence unit operating out of the White House without titles".
According to Joseph E. Persico, the author of Roosevelt's Secret War (2001): "Carter made his pitch to the President for the informal White House intelligence ring and found FDR receptive... The man (Carter) seemed to know everybody - officials, diplomats, the entire press corps domestic and foreign, and corporate executives all over the globe. He also had access to the National Broadcasting Company's worldwide shortwave network. And FDR grasped that Carter's profession offered the perfect cover for delivering intelligence, a Washington journalist coming to the White House occasionally to interview the President."
On 13th February, 1941, the President approved the establishment of "a small special intelligence and fact finding unit" under Carter. Persico also claims that President Franklin D. Roosevelt arranged for plausible deniability. Carter later admitted: "The overall condition was attached to the operation by President Roosevelt that it should be entirely secret and would be promptly disavowed in the event of publicity... That year's military appropriations act included an Emergency Fund for the President, from which FDR transferred $10,000 to the State Department... to finance Carter, ostensibly by buying from him surveys on conditions in various countries, with Germany leading the list.... By the end of 1941 Carter... was operating with $54,000 from the President's emergency funds."
Adolf Berle was placed in charge of distributing the funds. On 20th February, Berle recorded: "Jay Franklin (J.F. Carter) came in to see me today. He stated as a result of his conversation with the President and with you, and preparatory to the work he had been asked to do, he had spent some seven hundred dollars, and that he would be broke by the end of this week... He wanted an advance of some kind against the compensation which he would eventually receive for his work. Accordingly I lent him seven hundred dollars... I am not, of course, familiar with what the President has asked him to do, nor do I wish to be."
One of Carter's first tasks was to deal with Charles Lindbergh, one of the leaders of the American First Committee. Roosevelt was furious with Lindbergh after a speech he made on 23rd April, which included the following: "It is not only our right but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend. I ask you to look at the map of Europe today and see if you can suggest any way in which we could win this war if we entered it. Suppose we had a large army in America, trained and equipped. Where would we send it to fight? The campaigns of the war. show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an army, on a hostile coast."
President Roosevelt told Henry Morgenthau, "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi." He wrote to Henry Stimson and claimed that: "When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient." Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover to keep a watch on him. He willingly did so for he had been upset by Lindbergh's critical comments about the failures of the FBI investigation into the kidnapping and murder of his infant son.
According to the author of Roosevelt's Secret War (2001): "Within days, he (Carter) delivered a fifty-page report for placement in the President's night time reading file. Thus armed, FDR was able to fire back when a reporter at a press conference asked him why Colonel Lindbergh had not been called to active duty. That was simple. Lindbergh, the President explained, was the equivalent of the arch-Civil War Copperhead Clement L. Vallandigham. The thrust drew blood. Lindbergh wrote FDR three days later resigning his commission as a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve. In Roosevelt's mind, his assignment to Carter had not been prompted by personal animus. Lindbergh, in FDR's eyes, was an enemy of his country, as dangerous as any fifth columnist, and had to be exposed."
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Yeah, but given that teeth were no better in painting subjects I don't get that bit.
Portraits were usually commissioned. You would not get much work if you painted in their bad teeth.
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People had to sit motionless for up to a minute while having their photograph taken during Dickens's lifetime. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to hold a smile for that time. Therefore virtually decided to look serious in the photograph. The state of dental care in the 19th century was another reason why people kept their mouth shut when they were photographed.
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I would like to file a formal complaint that Mike Rago has - five times, stepped on my Valkyrie thread posts - without good reason, and if he continues to do so, after I have politely requested him to stop - I would like to have him placed on moderation so that his posts will be read by moderators before they can be seen to prevent him from engaging further in this childish behavior.
I agree this is a problem with this Forum. Steven Gaal also does this. If you remember, Tim Gratz used to do this. It is a difficult one to deal with. Is it bad enough to put them on moderation? I would be interested in what other members think about this.
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According to people who knew him, the painted portraits of Charles Dickens more accurate than photographs taken of him? Any ideas why? You might find it helps to look at the paintings and photographs on these pages.
1812-1836 (Part 1)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens.htm
1836-1840 (Part 2)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens1.htm
1840-1850 (Part 3)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens2.htm
1850-1860 (Part 4)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdickens3.htm
1860-1870 (Part 5)
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The Case Of Tyler Kent by John Howland Snow: ftp://myebooks.dyndns.org/conspiracy/Snow%20-%20The%20Case%20of%20Tyler%20Kent%20(Pearl%20Harbor%20whistleblower)%20(1982).pdf
Tyler Kent & MI5 The Full Story (Chapter 1) by Brian Clough: http://homepage.ntlw...ugh/ch1-pdf.pdf
http://www.statesecrets.co.uk/
According to Drew Pearson, Tyler Kent was on the board of Liberty Lobby: http://news.google.c...yler kent&hl=en
Thank you as always.
I have just purchased "Conspirator: Untold Story of Churchill, Roosevelt and Tyler Kent" by Ray Bearse and Anthony Read (9 Oct 1992). Apparently, the authors had access to Tyler Kent's FBI files.
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Ironically, (maybe) Lippmann was the journalist that LBJ feared the most as he began the introduction of US ground troops to Vietnam, which JFK had resolutely opposed so many times. Johnson made many efforts to try to keep British criticism quiet in 1964 and 1965. Perhaps the Lippmann, England link was connected here, although Lippmann carried lots of weight as probably the most internationally respected American journalist. His ideas of the Phantom Public , originally published in the 1920s and strengthened by the vastness of WWII, did much to create elite rationalization for total secrecy when it came to the National Security State. So there is some irony that Lippmann was one of the strongest critics of Vietnam .. fairly early but as Logevall shows, not loud AND early enough.
The anti-American establishment trusted Lippmann and his attitude towards the assassination was very important. CIA official, Tom Braden, made it clear in an interview he gave in 1975 that it was far more important to control left-leaning journalists than those on the right.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbraden.htm
(2) Tom Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975)
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Has anyone come across Tyler Kent's name during their research into the assassination?
Tyler Kent is an interesting character. He was born in China in 1911. His father was a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. Kent was educated at Princeton, the Sorbone, the University of Madrid and George Washington University. Kent, who spoke French, Greek, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish, joined the State Department in 1934 as a clerk in the Foreign Service and was posted to Moscow.
While in the Soviet Union Kent was accused of helping White Russians to smuggle into the United States various Imperial Russian treasures. It was later revealed that he was also passing on documents to Nazi intelligence while in Moscow.
Kent was transferred to London to work as a cypher clerk at the American Embassy. His arrival in England in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a Gestapo agent, brought him to the attention of MI5. Kent, later admitted, that he had "anti-Semitic tendencies for many years." He also believed that "all wars are inspired, formented and promoted by the great international bankers and banking combines which are largely controlled by the Jews."
In February 1940, Tyler met Anna Wolkoff. Her father, Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff, was the former aide-to-camp to the Nicholas II in London. After the Russian Revolution Wolkoff decided to remain in England. The Wolfoff family ran the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington, a place where members of the secret society, the Right Club, used to meet. Wolkoff introduced Tyler to Archibald Ramsay, the leader of the organization. Wolkoff, Kent and Ramsay talked about politics and agreed that they all shared the same political views.
MI5 agent, Joan Miller, had infiltrated the Right Club. She later recorded that "he appeared strongly anti-Communist and pro-Fascist in outlook." Kent was concerned that the American government wanted the United States to join the war against Germany. He said he had evidence of this as he had been making copies of the correspondence between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Kent invited Wolkoff and Ramsay back to his flat to look at these documents. This included secret assurances that the United States would support France if it was invaded by the German Army. Kent later argued that he had shown these documents to Ramsay in the hope that he would pass this information to American politicians hostile to Roosevelt. (If this information came out it was feared that Roosevelt would have lost the 194o Presidential Election.
On 13th April 1940 Anna Wolkoff went to Kent's flat and made copies of some of these documents. Joan Miller and Marjorie Amor were later to testify that these documents were then passed on to Duco del Monte, Assistant Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy. Soon afterwards, MI8, the wireless interception service, picked up messages between Rome and Berlin that indicated that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence (Abwehr), now had copies of the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence.
Soon afterwards Wolkoff asked Miller if she would use her contacts at the Italian Embassy to pass a coded letter to William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) in Germany. The letter contained information that he could use in his broadcasts on Radio Hamburg. Before passing the letter to her contacts, Miller showed it to her boss, Maxwell Knight.
On 18th May, Knight told Guy Liddell about the Right Club spy ring. Liddell immediately had a meeting with Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador in London. Kennedy agreed to waive Kent's diplomatic immunity and on 20th May, 1940, the Special Branch raided his flat. Inside they found the copies of 1,929 classified documents including secret correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
The Special Branch officers also found duplicate keys to the embassy code room. The officers were also shocked to find that in Kent had what became known as Ramsay's Red Book. This book had details of the supporters of the Right Club and had been given to Kent by Archibald Ramsay for safe keeping. This included the names of several leading figures of the British establishment. (the Red Book went missing and was not discovered until the 1970s when most of these figures were dead).
Tyler Kent was arrested on 20th May, 1940. According to Joseph E. Persico, the author of Roosevelt's Secret War (2001): "They found 1,929 U.S. embassy documents, including secret correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The content of these messages was such that their exposure to the public could harm the President and the Prime Minister, and jeopardize America's presumed neutrality in the European war. What they revealed could also influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election."
In December 1945 Tyler Kent was deported to the United States. Surprisingly, his former employer the Department of State decided not to prosecute him for working as a spy for Nazi Germany.
After marrying a wealthy woman he lived in Texas. He also became a publisher of a newspaper that supported the Ku Klux Klan. In the early 1960s Kent condemned President John F. Kennedy as a communist. After the assassination of Kennedy he claimed that he was killed by agents of the Soviet Union because he was abandoning his communist beliefs. What is interesting is that released FBI documents show that he was being followed by the agency in the early 1960s. However, for some reason, this investigation was discontinued in 1963. Considering his hostile comments towards Kennedy, I would have thought that was a strange decision.
Tyler Kent died in poverty in a Texas trailer park on 20th November 1988.
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Why not? For the most part it is true.
It might be different in the US but in the UK you could never win an election after slagging off 47% of the voters. It is probably true that about 30% of the electorate would never vote for your party, but never 47%. If that was the case, it would not be worth standing. One of the things we know about elections in recent years is the importance of the "floating voter" that is often close to 40% of the electorate.
It is actually 46% of the US population that do not pay income-tax. However, that includes a large number of retirees, students and members of the military not paying income-tax. Is he really not interested in these people like he said in the video? ("My job is not to worry about these people.") Yet, he did not correct these comments following the release of the video. As Obama pointed out yesterday, he was "the president of all the people, not just those who voted for him".
His comments about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is factually incorrect and will make it impossible to be a peace-broker in the region. That probably makes no difference to most of the US electorate but it does mean a lot to the international community. It would seem that Romney is no better informed about foreign policy than Bush.
It reminds me of an incident that took place many years ago. I found an article written by Keith Joseph, a Conservative politician, in his youth, saying the the role of the party was to help the rich to stay rich. He was a government minister at the time. When he asked for questions I read out part of the article and asked him if he still believed this. He looked around him to see if the press was present than said: "yes, everyword of it". Of course, this was a time before the video phone.
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Walter Lippmann, like many journalists in Operation Mockingbird, originally worked for British intelligence. In the 1930s, with the support of Helen Rogers Reid, the owner of New York Herald Tribune, he worked very closely with British Security Coordination (BSC). Released BSC documents list Lippmann as "among those who rendered service of particular value". Thomas E. Mahl, the author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998) has argued: "In late winter or early spring 1940, Lippmann even told the British to initiate Secret Intelligence Service operations against American isolationists. His exact thoughts are unknown. His specific ideas were 'too delicate' for the British Foreign Office to put to paper, but the idea is quite clear. Lippmann was a heavy weight. His suggestions on how to handle the American public reached as high as the British War Cabinet."
Lippmann's public papers show he was in regular contact with Ivar Bryce, an BSC agent. Nicholas J. Cull, the author of Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American Neutrality (1996), has argued: "During the summer of 1941, he (Bryce) became eager to awaken the United States to the Nazi threat in South America." It was especially important for the British Security Coordination to undermine the propaganda of the American First Committee.
After the US joined the Second World War he was passed onto the new American intelligence unit, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), established by President Roosevelt in 1942. He continued to work for American intelligence when the OSS became the CIA in 1947.
When JFK was assassinated in 1963, Lippmann was probably the most famous journalist in the US. In the months following the assassination he wrote no articles about the investigation. On the publication of the Warren Report, Lippmann supported the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in assassinating JFK. He wrote in his syndicated column, Today and Tomorrow on 29th September, 1964, that there was "no ground on which any contemporary man, here or abroad, should question the verdict". However, that was not what he really thought. He told his friend, Ronald Steel, that he suspected that Kennedy had been killed as part of a conspiracy. Steel includes this information in his book, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1999)
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Can Mitt Romney win after the publication of this video?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/18/romney-secret-video-government-dependent
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It seems that Gove is proposing a two-tier system: English Baccalaureate[/color] and non-exam. It might be a popular idea with the editor of the Daily Mail but will not be accepted by the general public. The introduction of GCSE exam was one of the best things that the Thatcher government introduced. Gove seems to be completely unaware of the problems that existed before the exam was introduced. As Kenneth Baker, who was education secretary at the time it was introduced, said yesterday: "It's vital that schools and colleges provide education which develops practical skills and personal qualities as well as subject knowledge."
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One of the interesting aspects of "Operation Mockingbird" is that it started with a British intelligence operation against fascism in 1940 but had to be turned into a CIA anti-communist operation in the 1950s. By the time of the JFK assassination, it was a totally integrated intelligence operation that controlled the media in the western world. Here is an interesting passage that helped to explain what was going on in the early 1950s.
Wilfrid Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce (1982)
For a Spellman, anti-communism rallied his flock into a Church militant and gave a fighting edge to their faith, while it also made him seem nationally important, a quasi-statesman; for Joe McCarthy, it gave a classic American showman a chance to do his stuff, and eventually to make a mockery of the whole cause; for "the Luces," it was a chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of a global America, wielding a power and vitality like unto their own, in the cause of Western Christian civilization. Clare's friend Senator Arthur Vandenberg had told Harry Truman, "You've got to scare hell out of them," in order to get Americans involved in the outside world at all. In other words, you cannot have a Marshall Plan without a cold war; you cannot do good without an enemy to do it against.
Both Clare and Harry felt that isolationism would stunt America's growth and choke off its manifest destiny, which Harry had made his own, and they were willing to do whatever amount of saber-rattling would prevent this. But for them it had to be good clean saber-rattling, not the back-alley switch-blade stuff McCarthy went in for. Unfortunately, since most Americans can see only two of everything, us and them, Left and Right, all the anti-Communists found themselves herded into the same tent, like so many liberals. It was in vain for Time to attack Joe McCarthy as a vulgarian; Spellman gave Joe a memorial dinner, to bolster his own constituency; Fulton Sheen and Spellman went to Australia together to review the Pax Americana, as a sort of benign Cohn and Schine, and Clare was Sheen's convert. Around and around went the web, saints and knaves all weaving together.
McCarthy gave the Right a bad name, in which the Luces willy-nilly received their share. But he also gave it protection in the Mafia style. This had nothing to do with specific witch-hunts. It has often been said that Joe never came up with any real Communists, but it can be seriously debated whether he needed to. The chief object of the game was simply to neutralize the American Left and to keep it from mounting sustained attacks on such institutions as NATO and SEATO and our overseas military investment, or on the business structure at home that complements these: all Luce's babies. And in this respect, McCarthyism was a smashing success, with or without victims, with or without Joe himself.
For Luce to become a moderate, a mighty displacement had to occur, as with a large man on an elevator; and this was taken care of by the goon squad. By calling George Marshall a traitor and Dean Acheson "the Red Dean of Washington" the McCarthy gang moved the Left so far to the center that you could barely call it a Left at all. One spent so much time denying that one was a Communist or even a Socialist or a disarmer or a troop-withdrawer that the statement one finally felt free to make was scrupulously emasculated. This was the era that spawned liberals like Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow and John F. Kennedy (who, as we know, took sick leave when McCarthy was censured), colder-than-thou warriors against the veriest hint of communism.
Insofar as the Luce interventionist Right considered this a tolerable climate (it certainly made the Pax Americana hum), they can be said to have profited from McCarthyism, as a southern aristocrat profits from a redneck sheriff. With Clare, this tenuous link further alienated her from the young Catholic Left, which was having its own troubles. We were damned if we were going to be called Communists by anybody. But McCarthyism had given so many blunt weapons to the know-nothings that we spent desperate evenings distinguishing among shades of pink and agreeing finally to denounce McCarthy's "methods," as if McCarthy were anything but methods and as if his methods were not the sole reason for our having to argue like this in the first place.
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Wilfrid Sheed was a socialist journalist on the left of John Kennedy. The author of, The Kennedy Legacy (1984) once argued: "Reagan is said to have made Americans feel good about themselves, but Kennedy accomplished the far more difficult trick of making other people feel good about us."
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The best ever documentary on football is about Malcolm Allison and John Bond - two former players at West Ham who joined up together at Manchester City. It is in five parts but it is well worth watching.
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Two more:
Dave Bassett and Sheffield United
Graham Taylor and England
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Some interesting examples of football managers in the past giving team-talks.
Peter Reid and Sunderland
John Sitton and Leyton Orient
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg_lPJ8hHP0
Neil Warnock and Huddersfield Town
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As a Republican I am in favour of anything that undermines the monarchy. When I first heard of the Duchess of Cambridge photographs I thought it was a matter of vanity. After all, why would she go topless in a place which could be captured by a long-range camera? She must be proud of her breasts and wanted her adoring public to see them. However, it is the photograph that has not been mentioned in the press that convinced me that it was a cock-up and not a conspiracy. You will need to go to Google images to see what I mean.
How Romney Made His Fortune
in Political Conspiracies
Posted