Jack Ruby

[Harry J.Dean]

Jack Ruby braved the odds when he put the finger on our network operations in Dallas,Texas Appearing before a Warren Commission hearing on June 7 1964 Ruby testified to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and U.S. Conggressman Geral Ford {later president of U.S.} about a fearful and 'powerful' organization and some of it's members:

Ruby: There is an organization here...Chief Justice Warren, if it takes my life at this moment to say it, there is a John Birch Society, a very powerful organization right now in activity, and Edwin Walker is one of the top men in this organization... unfortunately for me, giving these people the opportunity to get into power, because of the act that I committed {shooting of Oswald} has put a lot of people in danger of their lives.

Warren: Yes, they are powerful, very powerful indeed!

Ruby: Would you rather I just delete what I said and just pretend that nothing is going on?

Warren: If you think anything I am doing or anything that I am asking you is endangering you anyway, shape, or form, I want you to feel absolutely free to say that this interview is over.

Ford: Isn't it true, Mr. Chief Justice, that the same maximum protection and security Mr. Ruby has been given in the past will be continued?

Ruby: Now that I have divulged certain information..........?

The upper layer of our network leadership quickly branded Ruby a Communist, and lifelong brutal gangster. Every smokescreening effort was brought into action to offset Ruby's testimony about the secret works of General Walker and the nation-wide intrigues of the conspiracy vanguard {JBS} This is the lesser price Ruby had to pay for daring to expose the naked condition of treachery in Kennedy's death.

Ruby was a ruffian, an emotional jerk, and the killer of Oswald, but he shook the foundations of the ' very powerful ' select few in their Rocky Mountain Fortress, Utah, and at their JBS apolitical/political headquarters in the Boston area, with the clearly brave truth about these who mislead the innocent!

Ruby died one month before his new trial was to begin, and a lot of other people lost their lives.

[Lee Forman]

This stuff just keeps rising to the surface again and again for me...

Interesting to note that Ruby also pointed to 'A Texan looks at Lyndon' as evidence of who was behind the assassination - a book that was apparently given out by the carload by the JBS, as per the last quote.

The JBS [and Minutemen, YAF]

The Old Catholic Church

The Knights of Malta [a.k.a. Shickshinny Knights]

The Mormans - or the Malta Moormans

The Jesuits

Is it possible that some or all of these religious societies were linked, in some way associated or under the control of an over-arching organization?

These are some names that seem to continually float to the top.

Edwin Walker

Charles Willoughby

Phillip Corso

What group did Fred Crisman belong to? Who was the head of Oak Ridge at the time of the assassination?

http://mamihlap.blogspot.com/2004/10/shick...ny-knights.html

The Knights were a sort of supersecret rightwing schismatic Knights of Columbus, dedicated to the impeachment of Earl Warren, among other things. The Catholic Church didn't like 'em much, and they included Eastern Orthodox (a lot of the Knights, and of the population of Shickshinny in general, were White Russians), Old Catholics, High Episcopalians, etc.

That paves a nice in for David Ferrie and Earl James [Old Catholic] - maybe George DeMohrenschildt [White Russians]?

http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/ferrie.htm

In 1962-1963 David Ferrie made seven long distance phone calls from New Orleans to an unlisted number in the (416) area code:  Toronto Canada.

In 1967, at the request of the New Orleans district attorney's office, Metropolitan Toronto Police linked the unlisted number to Earl Anglin Lawrence James, a bishop in the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America, a shadowy and highly factionalized heretical sect in which Ferrie was reportedly ordained and subsequently defroked [defrocked] as a priest.

http://alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_early_days.html

The Early Days of the John Birch Society:

Fascist Templars of the Corporate State

By Alex Constantine

    "The new America will not be Capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be Socialist. If at the moment the trend is toward Fascism, it will be an American Fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions and the hopes of the great middle-class nation." E.F. Brown, associate editor, Current History Magazine, July 1933

    "We have absorbed into our own legal system the German tyranny that we fought and inveighed against. The approach, copied from the Nazis, works this way: The press and radio first lay down a terrific barrage against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of evidence shriek of atom bomb spies or plots to overthrow the government, of espionage, of high treason, and of other bloodcurdling crimes. We are now ready for the second stage: the pinning of the label 'Red' indiscriminately on all opposition." Abraham Pomerantz, U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel, Nuremberg Trials.

An Ornery Bunch Lays Down

a Terrific Barrage Against the Red Menace

    If you live in southern California and traveled with any liberal organization in the early 1980s, chances are your name appeared on a secret file. On May 25, 1983, L.A.'s Public Order Intelligence Division (PDID) was exposed to the world as a clearinghouse of spies gathering intelligence on the left. The PDID kept files on thousands of law-abiding liberals at a cost of $100,000 in tax revenues. The PDID utilized a computer dossier system purchased by the late Representative Larry McDonald's Western Goals, the intelligence gathering branch of the John Birch Society. McDonald was the national leader of the Birchers. Late political researcher Mae Brussell noted in "Nazi Connections to the John F. Kennedy Assassination" that the Birch Society officer [he perished in the Flight 007 shootdown] was "exceedingly active in Dallas preceding the Kennedy assassination. Western Goals has offices in Germany run by Eugene Wigner [a Hungarian-born scientist who worked on the atamic bomb at the University of Chicago] that feed data to the Gehlen BND [post-WW II Nazi intelligence division]. On the board of Western Goals sat Edward Teller, Admiral Thomas Moorer [Reporter Bob Woodward's superior officer in the Naval wing of the Pentagon within a year of the Watergate series published by the Washington Post] and Dr. Hans Senholt, once a Luftwaffe pilot."

    The Birchers had much in common with their fascist contacts in Germany. Fred J. Cook, in The Warfare State (MacMillan, 1962), wrote that the Birch Society was named after an obscure Christian missionary and "OSS captain who was murdered by Chinese Communist guerrillas ten days after World War II ended." The JB Society's Web site provides more background on this paragon of American virtues: "Shortly after America's entry into the war, John Birch volunteered to join General Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force, known also as the Flying Tigers. Birch was of particular value in the war because of his facility with various Chinese dialects and it was thus that he was assigned primarily to intelligence work." The society named after Birch, Cook wrote, "is a completely monolithic organization, as authoritarian in its own way as any Communist dictatorship.... Welch's John Birch Society is as secret as the Ku Klux Klan, as monolithic and unbalanced as the Nazi Party of Hitler, with many of whose ideas and methods it would find itself quite compatible."

    What would the Cold War have been without the inebriating nationalism of the Birchers, dismissed as "yahoos" by most casual observers, frightening to those who looked into them?

    The Birch Society was founded in 1959 by Robert Welch. Welch attended the U.S. Naval Academy and studied law at Harvard for two years. He was vice president of the James O. Welch candy company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was also vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party Finance Committee in 1948. Welch made an unsuccessful bid for the office of Lt. Governor in the 1950 Republican primary. He was a ranking director of the National Association of Manufacturers, the subject of many a rancorous essay by George Seldes, who found NAM, in the 1950s, to be a hive of reactionary corporate intrigues.

    The Birch Society's Web site observes that in Welch's time, "self-reliance, good manners, moral uprightness, respect for hard work, and especially rigorous honesty were as pervasive among Americans then as watching television and collecting welfare are for a great many of them today." His funding came primarily from Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt - a Texas oil "patriot" and the sponsor of a vitriolic right-wing radio program, Lifeline, that aired in 42 states - Pew's Sunoco, and NAM's corporate constituents.

    Welch learned, according to the JBS Internet site, that "The Conspiracy" was more "deeply rooted than he had previously thought, and supported this thesis by tracing its origins back over a century to an occult group known as the Illuminati, founded on May 1, 1776 by a Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt. Tenaciously tracking back through the pages of obscure books and dusty old documents, he found that this "Satanic" conspiratorial alliance had participated in the French Revolution of 1789, "which infamous uprising, as we know, struck out with intense savagery against God and civilization and resulted in the murder of roughly a million human beings. Clearly, the upheavals and atrocities of 1789 served as a model for revolutions to come, especially the Bolshevik Revolution."

    Robert Welch introduced his vision of the John Birch Society at a meeting of twelve "patriotic and public-spirited men" in Indianapolis on December 9, 1958. The first chapter was formed in February 1959. "The core thesis of the society," reports Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachussetts, "was contained in Welch's initial Indianapolis presentation, transcribed almost verbatim in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and subsequently given to each new member. According to Welch, both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"

    This was the game, substituting "fascist" with "socialist," reversing the perceived polarity of corporatism. The Birch Society "incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector."

    Welch's Society had a corporate foundation, primarily oil companies and miliitary contractors and served as a line of "defense" to stanch the influences of the left. Before the war, B. Palme Dutt, in Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers, 1935), found that capitalism "can no longer maintain its power by the old means. The crisis is driving the whole political situation at an escalating pace." The rise of the labor unions and social movements threatened to usurp the power, wealth and privilege of the ruling class. Every segment of society was affected by this clash. The Lords of Industry, with one eye askance at developments in the Russian satellites and the Far East, was "driven to ever more desperate expedients to prolong for a little while its lease on life." Fascist organizations like the Birch Society were a "desperate expedient" of social control, undermining any attempt to trespass on the self-serving authority of the country's military-industrial barons.

    In the wings of the Birch Society, with its insistent rejection of "collectivism," lurked corporate sponsors. In an address to the Cooperative League of the United States, T.K. Quinn, a former vice president of General Electric, an "Insider," shared his dim view of the corporations that created the Society and supported it: "In forms of organization and control, these giants are essentially collectivistic, fascist states, with self-elected and self-perpetuating officers and directors, quite like the Russian politiboro in this respect. Their control extends directly over production, over tens of thousands of small supplying manufacturers and subcontractors, and over thousands of distributors and dealers. Indirectly, the control of these giant corporations influences legislation through paid lobbies in state capitals and Washington, and it is seen and felt in the magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations, all dependent upon these giants and their associates for their existence" (George Seldes, "Postscript: NAM and the John Birch Society," in Never Tire of Protesting, Lyle Stuart, 1968, p. 124).

    The ranking corporations were unified by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Robert Welch had been an officer of NAM. This front and related organizations didn't score too badly in their lobbying efforts in a sample year:

                                                        WON    LOST    PERCENT

  NAM                                                    6          0        1,000

  Committee for Constitutional

Government    7          1          .875

  U.S. Chamber of Commerce                6          2          .750

    Liberal lobbying groups didn't fare so well. The American Federation of Labor won three lobbying campaigns and lost seven. The League of Women Voters was successful in one attempt to see legislation passed, but lost four. The Farmers' Union was 1-in-8. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, 1-in-5 (Seldes, pp. 124-125, from a Congressional Quarterly scorecard). Seldes observed that NAM, "the richest and most powerful lobby in the nation, got all the laws it sponsored passed by Congress." The Committee for Constitutional Government, "called 'America's No. 1 fascist organization' by Congressman Wright Patman, won seven in eight that it sponsored" (p. 125). Clearly, favoritism at the legislative level favored the right-wing corporate fronts and not the dreaded left.

    The Birch Society was an arm of NAM and its constituent corporations: General Motors, DuPont, Sunoco, U.S. Steel, and so on. "Another organization," Seldes wrote, "apparently founded with the intention of the Birch Society to unite reaction in a vast and powerful political weapon, calls itself Americans for Constitutional Action and unites NAM leaders, the owners of the Reader's Digest, and Birchites; it is reaction's answer to Americans for Democratic Action" (p. 121).

    Reader's Digest?  The "funny little magazine" dredges up another directorate often linked to such groups - the CIA. In the Eisenhower period, propagandists on the Agency payroll were featured on a regular basis in the Digest, including Allen Dulles, Carl Rowan, James Burnham, Brian Crozier and Stewart Alsop. The magazine remains a glib tool of CIA propaganda.

    Another is the National Review, in the early days indistinguishable from Birch Society propaganda. It was edited by William F. Buckley, a close friend of Welch's. In the first issue, released on November 19, 1955, Buckley printed a "Publisher's Statement" in which he  declared war on "the Liberals who run the country," echoing the rhetoric of the Birch Society. The Review, Buckley boasted, "stands athwart history, yelling Stop!"

    In March, 1956, John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote: "Last November, newstands throughout the country offered the first issue of a new magazine, National Review, which described itself as 'frankly conservative.'" But the magazine's first half-dozen issues made it clear that the Review "was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism ... [and] like most of the extremist little magazines, it seems to be aimed at an audience of True Believers." NR's readership were "emotional people who throw themselves frantically into a cause often to make up for some kind of frustration in their private lives. They form the hard core of many religious, nationalist and revolutionary movements: they have great capacity, in Hoffer's words, for 'enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance ... blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.' They are the opposite of conservatives" (William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right, William Morrow, 1984, pp. 47-48).

    Dwight MacDonald, a staff writer for the New Yorker, opined, "NR seems worth examining as a cultural phenomenon: the MaCarthy nationalists - they call themselves conservative, but that is surely a misnomer - have never before made so heroic an effort to be intellectually articulate. Here are the ideas, here is the style of the lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated ... who responded to Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Senator McCarthy.... These are men from underground, the intellectually underprivileged who feel themselves excluded from a world they believe is ruled by liberals (or eggheads, the terms are, significantly, interchangeable in NR)."

    William F. Buckley advertised himself as an independent thinker, journalist and publisher. But documents declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board have debunked his profiling. In Watergate "Plumber" Howard Hunt's Office of Security file, Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee found a number of documents concerning William F. Buckley. He was not merely a CIA agent. Buckley was a ranking officer, stationed for a spell in Mexico City to direct covert operations. Thereafter, Buckley attempted to conceal his CIA rank with Hunt's assistance. Documents subpeoned by Congress note that some articles published by the National Review were in fact written by the CIA's E. Howard Hunt (for instance, a review of The Invisible Government, by David Wise, a book highly critical of the Agency). When Buckley left the CIA to publish National Review, he maintained a subdued relationship with Hunt. (Jim DiEugenio, "Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa," Probe, January-February 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2).

    Buckley also distanced himself publicly from Robert Welch in the April 21, 1961 issue of the Review. There was growing interest in the Birch Society, Buckley claimed, because "the Liberals, and to the extent their programs coincide, the Communists, feel threatened by the revived opposition. Accordingly they have taken hold of a vulnerable organization and labored to transform it into a national menace." It could be argued that the Society itself had something to do with its rep, that the left did not have to "labor" too strenuously, after all. Buckley himself admitted in his next breath that the Birch Society was "an organization of men and women devoted to militant political activity."

    "I myself have known Robert Welch since 1952," he acknowledged. "I have read all his books, and most of his articles and editorials. He bought stock and debentures in National Review in its early years (less than one percent of our original capital). We have exchanged over a dozen letters, and spoken from the same platform on two occasions. I have always admired his personal courage and devotion to the cause."

    But, Buckley wrote, he had to part with Welch's conclusion that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a "willing agent of the Soviet Union," though Buckley believed "most definitely" that the "Communist conspiracy" was a "deadly serious matter." In the future, he hoped that the Birch Society "thrives," so long as "it resists such false assumptions as that a man's subjective motives can automatically be deduced from the objective consequences of his acts."

Coup Plots

    Buckley hoped to salvage the organization's political usefulness to the fascist cause by plotting to separate his "old friend" Welch from the Birch Society. George Seldes notes that Welch's "paranoid and idiotic libels" of President Eisenhower caused a stir in the Republican Party: "It resulted in an attempt to separate Welch from Birch and set Welch adrift. Editor William Buckley of the National Review, and a highly popular Birch radio orator, Fulton Lewis, Jr. (who outdid all the Birchites by favoring lynching, not merely indicting, the chief justice), joined in a suggestion that Welch resign and thus purge the John Birch Society, which would then continue in their favor. They did not succeed" (Seldes, Never Tire of Protesting, p. 220).

    Welch was not one to forget a minor slight like a coup attempt. He'd been betrayed by the Skull-and-Bones CIA Yalie, and he was bitter. His affairs were tangled up with Buckley's, however, and the connection went far beyond a minor stock holding. Welch had influence at Young Americans for Freedom, founded in September 1960. YAF was a fascist front crawling with Birchers. It also served as an enclave for incoming Nazi spies arriving from Munich, Germany (Dick Russell,The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992).

    And it's leadership was loyal to William F. Buckley. In the summer of 1961, Robert Welch enlisted the aid of Nelson Rockefeller (in Birch lore, the country's most powerful closet "Communist") and launched a counter-coup of the student organization. Together, William Rusher recalls, an incredible, unlikely alliance, "Welch and Rockefeller, in league, through their youthful agents, [attempted] to wrest control of the national board of YAF from the friends of National Review!"  In the end, the fanatical Birch faction was outvoted and the Buckley crowd remained in control of the radical right student union (Rusher, pp 115-116).

    Birchers have never been content to sit idly by, swapping tales of phantom communist conspiracies. They took an active hand to throttle the amoral, anti-capitalist "imperialists" threatening to bury God's chosen people. (Never mind that the U.S. has interfered in the politics of every country on earth, installed fascist dictators in most and often assassinated any leaders who rejected the American corporate model.)

    General Edwin A. Walker resigned from the Army in November1961 after he was chastised by the Pentagon for distributing Birch Society propaganda to his troops. He was temporarily relieved of command, pending an investigation. Walker - a Bircher, also the head of Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture, a group with chapters in Bonn, Germany established by a Nazi - ultimately buffooned his way into a number of footnotes in Camelot history. Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly attempted to kill him, and the general once made a bid for governor but finished last in the 1962 Democratic runoff. Dick Russell recalls, "Late in September, 1962, the general made headlines around the world. James Meredith was seeking to become the first black ever admitted to the University of Mississippi. It was a landmark moment in the fight against racial segregation. Meredith's entry was mandated by a federal court order, and when Mississippi governor Ross Barnett set out to block it, Kennedy ordered National Guardsmen deployed on Meredith's behalf. That was when General Walker called for ten thousand civilians to march on Oxford, Mississippi, in opposition. Walker was on the scene when rioting erupted against four hundred federal marshals escorting Meredith onto the campus." Two people were killed in the melee, and 70 were wounded. The next morning, "Walker was arrested by federal authorities on four counts, including insurrection, and flown for psychiatric observation to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri." The Liberty Lobby, another fascist front, hastened to General Walker's defense, and blamed the Kennedys for waging a campaign against Walker to "reduce his prestige" and "asset value to the anti-Communist cause" (p. 309).

    Back in 1957, General Walker made the cover of Time magazine and was actually credited with furthering the cause of racial integration after he led federal troops integrating the schools in Little Rock, Ark. Actually, Gen. Walker led the troops only after President Eisenhower refused his resignation, historian Don E. Carleton, author of Red Scare, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "He did not want to carry out that order," Mr. Carleton said. "He did not believe in racial integration" (General Walker obituary, AP release, November 2, 1993).

    Walker flew the U.S. flag upside down to express his rage over the perceived "communist" leanings of Kennedy and other government officials, according to Darwin Payne, a former Dallas newspaper reporter. "He was not a good speaker. He was a poor campaigner and finished last in a field of six [in the gubernatorial race], which was a surprise because he had so many ardent followers in the right wing," Mr. Payne says (Walker obituary).

    General Walker loudly declared himself a martyr in the war against creeping communism. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1962, he testified that the "Conspiracy" was, in the words of columnist Jack Anderson, "clearing the way for world communism by systematically slandering and discrediting its effective opponents. The cast of victims of this 'hidden policy' ran to thousands ... and he undertook to name the brightest of the fallen: General Douglas MacArthur, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Senator Joseph McCarthy, General George Patton, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas. Walker's litany of martyrs was standard among the 'anti-communist' right; it could have been liften intact from the speeches of Senator Joseph McCarthy or Gerald L.K. Smith a decade earlier, just as it would be reproduced a decade later in the pamphlets on the fanatical fringe, except that in the latter case the roster of unheeded prophets would be updated by the addition of Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Michael Feighan of Ohio (Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker, Random House, 1979, pp. 100-101).

    Liberals, even within the Republican Pary, were targeted by the Birch Society. Thomas Kuchel, U.S. senator for 16 years and the last major liberal Republican to hold office in California, was one of them. Kuchel expressed particular pride in his support of civil rights bills for enfranchisement of blacks and desegregation of public facilities under the Johnson administration. In 1994, the Los Angeles Times reported that Kuchel "said with characteristic disdain, the main feature of 'right wing Republicans,' as he understood them, 'was militant anti-Communism.' 'They seemed convinced we were about to be invaded by the Communists.' Mr. Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right to his response to a surge of mail he got from members of the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. Kennedy became president. 'I got thousands of letters telling me that Chinese Communists were in Mexico preparing to invade California,' he recalled. After checking with military authorities, Mr. Kuchel wrote a short form letter in response: 'We have no evidence of Communists gathering in Mexico, Chinese or otherwise.' Shortly thereafter, Mr. Kuchel learned that he was being labeled a 'Comsymp,' a term he had not heard of until that time. 'I got a little tee'd off, and prepared a carefully researched speech critical of the John Birch Society and that kind of mentality,' he remembered. 'I kicked them around, and they never forgave me'" (Kuchel obituary, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1994, ).

    An editorial writer for the Times Record News in Witchita Falls followed the political machinations of the Birch Society from an early age ("A Society of Hate," Oct. 25, 1998), and observed that JBS founder Robert Welch "was not in government but despised most of those inside it, was never stopped, and his influence grew even as McCarthy's bulb dimmed and died out."

    Birchers in Texas were politically hyperactive in those days, gained a foothold in local politics, "and that's how I know they were an ornery bunch. The first person I actually came to know as a Bircher was a kid I'd gone through school with who showed up one day outside the schoolhouse with the trunk of his car loaded down with boxes of paperback books. He was standing there with the trunk lid up handing out free books to anybody who'd take one. I could kick myself now for not taking one then because it would be interesting to have it just to show my kids what mean times those were. If you think the Starr Report made President Clinton look bad, you should've seen this book. The name of the book was A Texan Looks at Lyndon. I came to know quite a number of Birchers in various contexts, some through church, some through groups my parents socialized with, some through my job as a journalist, but I didn't know them as Birchers until I started connecting the dots.

    "They were a sneaky bunch, and mean, and at one time they ran the government in my hometown, and used their offices to preach against communism and socialism as though evil was right there at the city limits threatening to come in and take over. I never ran across a communist or socialist back then, so maybe the Birchers were successful. I dunno. A little later, they tried to take over the entire Republican Party in the county where I lived by putting stealth candidates on the ballot for every position at the last minute. I guess they knew so much about communist infiltration that they'd become experts at it. The ones I knew were a humorless bunch, sullen, suspicious and stiff-necked. They saw America going straight to hell right before their eyes, and they resented the fact that so few heeded their doomsday predictions."

    An exception to the public apathy that met Welch's cultic bund was William Kintner, a former CIA officer who castigated critics of the extreme right in the the May, 1962 issue of Reader's Digest. Kintner maintained that the "campaign" waged against radical right havens like the John Birch Society began when "dossiers in Moscow's espionage headquarters were combed for the names of unsuspecting persons in the United States who might do the Kremlin's work." Anyone maligning the home corporate-military state was therefore a suspected Soviet agent hawking "disinformation."

"Hey, Hey, JFK - How Many Birchers

Gunned You Down Today?"

    But the Birch Society's ambitions went far beyond control of small-town politics. Members taking objection to Kennedy's Communist "appeasement" policies went so far as to plot the overthrow of the government.

    In 1962, Dallas officials of the John Birch Society attended a meeting with H.L Hunt, General Edwin Walker, Robert Morris (leader of the Defenders of American Liberty, president of Plato University in New Jersey and former chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee), and Larrie Schmidt, a veteran of two tours of Army duty in Munich who idolized Hermann Goering. Back home, Schmidt, his head wheeling with Bircher propaganda disseminated by General Walker back in Germany, took a position at United Press International. He had made plans while stationed in the Rhineland to start an organization he called CUSA, short for "Conservatism U.S.A."

    By the summer of 1962, Schmidt organized a platoon of zealots from the Military Police and Counter-Intelligence Corps. Look magazine (January 26, 1965) reported that Schmidt "trained a small, disciplined band of soldier-conspirators to follow him stateside and do, he hoped, 'whatever is necessary to accomplish our goal.'" Schmidt's coup plan called for infiltrating conservative organization around the country, and marshalling  them to overthrow of the Kennedy government. The core of this seditious secret army was to be the first organization drawn into Schmidt's plan - Young Americans for Freedom, the Birch Society offshoot that boasted some 50,000 members - by arrangement with Heidelberg-born Major General Charles Willoughby, true name Weidenbach, a YAF founder, alleged by Dick Russell to be one of the central participants of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    The coup plan was exposed when Warren Commission investigators happened upon Schmidt's role in the purchase of a newspaper ad framed with a thick, black border that ran in the Dallas Morning News the morning Kennedy was shot, pronouncing the president guilty of treason for alleged diplomatic dalliances with the Russians (Russell, pp. 320-24).

    The name Kennedy irritated the colons of good Birchers everywhere. Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors' Guild and FBI snitch, under secret contract with MCA management, emerging political star in Hollywood, was closer to the mark. After the 1964 presidential election, Democratic Party officials crafted a plan to take on right-wing extremists in the public arena, including one of Reagan's support groups, Citizens for Constitutional Action a "conservative" grassroots organization that had backed Goldwater in his presidential run and thereby splinter the Republicans.

    As it happened, both Goldwater and the John Birch Society received lavish support from J. Howard Pew, owner of the Sun Oil Company (Colby and Dennett, The Will Be Done, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 453).

    The Republicans countered with measures tailored to ensure party unity. Reagan was cautioned not to allow himself to be defined as either a moderate or conservative. "During one secret strategy meeting," Curt Gentry (in The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California Putnam's, 1968) wrote, "John Rousselot, national public relations director of the John Birch Society, approached Stuart Spencer with a coldly pragmatic offer: the society would be glad to endorse Reagan or denounce him, whichever would help most" (p. 125). When Reagan was sworn in as governor of California on January 2, 1967, he was congratulated by Robert Welch himself. Welch proudly proclaimed that the Birch Society was, "in large part," deserving of credit for Reagan's electoral victory.

    "We had chosen California as a state in which to concentrate, practically since the beginning," Welch said. "As a rule, about fifteen percent of the total field staff we could afford, and hence at least fifteen percent of our total membership has been in California" (Gentry, p. 285).

    The political ascent of Ronald Reagan occurred in the Society's halcyon period, before public opinion forced conservative politicians to distance themselves from Welch's hyper-vigilant Commie hunters. But the Birch Society remained symbiotic with the very corporate-military elite it denounced. The Editorial Advisory Committee of Welch's American Opinion magazine claimed four past presidents of the signally fascistic National Association of Manufacturers. Other editorial advisors: General A.C. Wedemeyer from the Pentagon's War Plans Division under the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Colonel Laurence Bunker, formerly the ranking aide-de-camp to General Douglas MacArthur; and the Honorable Spruille Braden, a shoe-in for "Insider" as former undersecretary of state (Mike Newberry, The Yahoos, Marzani & Munsell, 1964, p. 21).

    The Birch Society identified the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) as the beating heart of the world Marxist conspiracy. Ironic, again, that many of the leaders of the JBS also sat on the CFR, according to Who's Who, including William Grede, founder of the Birch Society National Council, director of the 7th Federal Reserve Bank, an arm of the much despised CFR; William Benton McMillan, the first Life Member of the Birch Society and ramrod of the St. Louis Committee of the CFR; Robert Waring Stoddard, a JBS Council member and chairman of the Board of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a newspaper that employed editors belonging to the local committee of the JBS National Council. Braden was a fixture of the CFR, sat on the Council and was a director of the W. Averell Harriman Securities Corporation.

The John Birch Salon

"I've always been opposed to the secret government." John F. Kennedy, 1958

    JB Society leader Thomas Anderson, a hardened advocate of racial segregation, gave the game away when he whined in Straight Talk: "Invariably, hiding behind the sanctimonious cries of 'freedom of the press,' and 'academic freedom' are defenders of Alger Hiss, Fifth Amendment addicts, attackers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, people who urged barring Mein Kampf from distribution. In short, the enemies are: Criminals, Socialists and Communists"

    Mein Kampf? How did Hitler become a cause celebré?

    Of critical importance to the anti-communist wars of the Birch Society was Welch's relationship with Dr. J.B. Matthews, former chief investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Joseph McCarthy announced that he held a list of Soviet agents "in my hands," he referred to one of Matthew' s compilations. When McCarthy  fell into disrepute, J.B. strolled off into the gloaming, taking his files on known "communist subversives" with him, moved on to become Robert Welch's aide-de-camp. "My opinion of various characters," Welch wrote in his Blue Book of the Birch Society, "formed entirely independently, has [proven] to coincide with the opinion of J.B. Matthews." Welch boasted that he had "a fairly sensitive and accurate nose" for rooting out agents of the communist underground.

    Dr, Matthews pushed the number of "agents," "subversives" and "travellers" among the nation's clergymen in Birch Society files from 1,000 to 7,000 names. America's parishes evidently swarmed with spies and dupes of "The Conspiracy." In July 1961, the Birch Society Bulletin claimed that there were no less than "300,000 to 500,000 Communists in the United States" (Newberry, p. 89). Welch and Matthews dreamed of assembling files on every one of them.

    The American Opinion reading room was the place to learn all about these subversives, an alternate universe of right-wing briefings devoid of recognizable reality. Medford Evans, formerly editor of the National Review and the Birch Society's Texas coordinator, published a critical tour-de-force in Human Events magazine (January 26, 1957), a CIA-subsidized publication: "WHY I AM AN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL." Evans once served under Admiral Lewis Strauss at the Atomic Energy Commission. The dossiers of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller were cleared by the AEC's proud "anti-intellectual" chief of security (Newberry, p. 138).

    In the halcyon days, Welch's Society was allied with William Regnery, whose name appears on American Security Council (ASC) incorporation papers. The ASC was a domestic covert operations arm of the military-corporate complex, closely aligned with the JBS, Libery Lobby and other sons of the fascist revolution. Regnery and a pair of pre-war America First isolationists began the Human Events radio program and the Regnery publishing firm in the mid-1950s. The first two books published by Regnery were critical of the Nuremberg Trials, and the third found fault with allied bombing campaigns during WW II.

    In 1954, Regnery turned out a couple of tracts for the John Birch Society. The nascent publishing concern also printed up William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, subtitled, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. "In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books," SpritOne Information Services comments, "it is interesting to note that Regnery Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The reader is reminded to remember [the] point ... concerning the CIA and its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery, along with Bunker Hunt, funded Western Goals." Western Goals was organized by the John Birch Society.

    In 1986, President Ronald Reagan "appointed Alfred Regnery to help dismantle the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice. In the 1990s, [Regnery] has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears (I would use the word 'books' but that would be a lie by any measure) attacking President Clinton. [A] direct linkage between the past pro-Nazi groups of the 1930s and today's right wing has been fully established" (http://www. spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930s.htm).

    Gary Allen, one of the foremost propagandists in the Birch pantheon, was the author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a "'76 Press" product, a Birch Society bible and stunning success that has sold over four million copies, according to a publisher's blurb. Picture, if you will, the nation's corporate elite driving for a "Great Merger" with the Soviet Kremlin, poisoning the entire world with Communism. This is among the central themes of The Rockefeller File (1976), Allen's critique of the most powerful family in the world, the dreaded CFR and United World Federalists the One World people. At first glance, Allen's books may appear a confused clot of paranoid political fantasies. He claims that the Carnegie and Rockefeller money machines have "jumped into the financing of education and the social sciences with both Left feet" - as though these foundations traveled with Fidel Castro, when in fact they have proven time and again to serve as funding conduits of the CIA, an agency with interests that do not exactly correspond with socialism. The result, Allen laments, has been "a sharp Socialist-Fascist turn" (p. 45). Decipher this one, and you have clambered onto the eerie, fog-bound island of ultra-conservative conspiracy theories, teeming with nationalistic puffery and Bible-thumping "moral" sentiment.  The Union Theological Seminary, the reader learns, turns out armies of "Christian-Communists." Dan Smoot, an infamous fascist organizer, "scholar," a former FBI agent, was, from Allen's perspective, a heroic David who stood his ground against the wicked Environmental Protection Agency (p. 142). The New York Times, per Allen, is a clearinghouse of left-wing mind control (p. 66).

    Gary Allen's oblique reasoning was often identical to Adolph Hitler's anti-democratic tirades. "The present democracy of the West," wrote Germany's Fuhrer, "is the forerunner of Marxism which would be unthinkable without it. It is democracy alone which furnishes this universal plague the soil in which it spreads."

    How many communists plagued the soil of democracy? The John Birch Society Bulletin on July 1961 let on that there were "not more than a million allies, dupes and sympathizers." Welch proposed compiling a list of these internal saboteurs, "the most complete and most accurate files in America on the leading Comsymps, Socialists and liberals" (Newberry, pp. 89-90), presaging the Western Goals database of known leftists.

    Another scholar of the extreme right who fed Birch Society anti-communist hysteria was Antony Sutton, author of National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, and a series of chapbooks on Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity. Antony Sutton was once employed as a research fellow at the arch-conservative Hoover Institute. To this day, he publishes in The New American, a Birch Society publication. He also turned out books for the "'76 Press," a fascist-right small press that featured the "America First"-style manipulations of W. Cleon Skousen, the former FBI agent and author of The Naked Capitalist, a revival of Carroll Qugley's views of worldwide economic subversion by British elitists. Skousen was the chief of police in Salt Lake City until the Mayor, a Bircher himself, dismissed him in 1960, explaining that the outgoing chief was "an incipient Hitler" (Group Research Reports, 1980, Washington, D.C., Group Research, Inc., p. 20). Skousen had no qualms about publishing in the Sun Myung Moon organizations American Freedom Journal, despite his "America for Americans" posturing. Other "'76 Press" writers included  the vigorously anti-EPA Phyllis Schlafly - who, in 1960, hotly denied that she was a member of the Birch Society ... after Welch announced that she was "one of our most loyal members" (Carol Felsenthal, Phyllis Schlafly, Doubleday, 1981, p. xviii), the founder of the Eagle Forum. Then there was nuclear strategist Admiral Chester Ward, a former law school professor, architect and Naval Judge Advocate, commended by President Eisenhower for his courageous opposition to "the Communist conspiracy." (Felsenthal, p. 221).

    Antony Sutton has always been very concerned about who is funding who - yet it doesn't appear to sink in that the Birch Society is a front organization organized and funded with seed money from the same domestic fascists who supported Hitler before WW II, the same propaganda front that claimed the Rockefellers and Morgans to be closet "communists" and frightened the religion out of its many followers am pong the Boobocracy by claiming there is a massive conspiracy afoot to turn the U.S. into a Lenin-style Superstate.

    Sutton's approach to conspiracy genera was spliced with the anti-communist venom of Robert Welch and his theory of the "Hegelian Dialectic," the time-tested strategy of left-right tensions. Sutton's racial views were certainly curious for one who wore his patriotism on his sleeve. He was an advocate of separation between the races in South Africa. His passages on the CFR and Illuminati flirt with anti-Semitism and echo the fiercely anti-communist sentiments of Skousen, Ward, Allen, Dan Smoot and other proponents of the fascist right. Sutton, who publishes a newsletter, The Future Technology Intelligence Report, contends that "possible advanced alien technology" has been reverse-engineered and is squandered by the federal government. (The "reverse engineering of ET technology" schtick was whistled up by Phillip Corso in the 1960s. Corso was a charter member, under Charles Willoughby, the aforementioned YAF co-founder, of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta in Pennsylvania, a conspiratorial fraternal order patterned after the military order of the Vatican.)

        Guy Bannister, a Birch Society pamphleteer, was Lee Harvey Oswald's handler at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Bannister employed an investigator, Jack S. Martin, a fascist co-conspirator with his boss and Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach (formerly General MacArthur's intelligence chief in Korea), a core strategist in the Kennedy assassination, according to Mae Brussell, Dick Russell and others. Bannister was a drunkard, a former FBI agent and Naval Intelligence officer. He published a racist newsletter. He choreographed the activities of a group of anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He died nine months after the murder of John Kennedy.

    Jim Garrison investigated Oswald's connection to Bannister and CIA pilot David Ferrie. The devout, alcoholic anti-communist had Oswald passing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers on street corners.

    What would Bannister and his fellow Birchers say if they could speak openly, sans the Jeffersonian platitudes and geopolitical shaggy-dog  tales? In a privately-published paper on Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach, "Looking for 'Hate' in all the 'Right' Places," political researcher William Morris McLoughlin can't resist speaking for the Birchers: "We have been sitting on our hands and 'gnawing the rug' since 1945, when, as far as we are concerned, World War III actually began, with the murder of our hero, John Birch in Manchuria, China" The war was waged "entirely by members of various national and international right-wing, militantly extremist groups still united under the auspices and control of the World Anti-Communist League. Its U.S. affiliates include the U.S. Council for World Freedom and the American Security Council, part of the Liberty Lobby, as well as other organizations," including the Birch Society.

    The JBS waged its grass-roots, populist approach to psychological warfare with much scape-goating. In The Radical Right (Random House, 1967), Epstein and Arnold offer that at the 1965 convention of the Christian Crusade, another fascist front, General Walker, "in speaking of the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin, urged his listeners not to forget that Ruby's name was Rubenstein, and they can't change that fact no matter how often they refer to him as Ruby."

    Overall, Robert Welch tried to keep the race question out of the discussion. He insisted that the enemy was the left, not the Jews. Nevertheless, there was no holding back the anti-semitism that many Birchers, cryptically or not, felt the need to convey. There was Florida Bircher Bernard "Ben" Klassen, author of The White Man's Bible. And there was William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, who cut his ideological teeth as a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society. Pierce left the Birch Society to shift the thrust of his "research" to the "international Jewish conspiracy," the very fountainhead, he maintained, of communist subversion, the true Insiders behind the Insiders. (Pierce, "Enemies on the Right," National Vanguard Magazine, August 1996).

    Pierce: "One thing I am grateful to the Birch Society for is that it directed me to a number of books on Communism, and from those books I learned enough about the nature and background of Communism that I knew I wanted to learn much more. That was really the beginning of my education: the start of my quest for understanding about history, race, politics, and, in fact, nearly everything except the physics and mathematics to which I had devoted myself until that time. The half-dozen or so other members of the chapter seemed to be decent enough, if not very stimulating, fellows. The term that best characterizes them is 'middle class.' They were pretty much the sort one can meet in any American Legion hall, except they were a little more intense - especially when talking about the Communist Conspiracy, which was practically the only thing they talked about."

    The world certainly seemed to be going to the dogs. Thanks so much, communist conspirators.

    General Albert Wedemeyer, a guest on the Manion Forum, a radio program hosted by Clarence Manion of the Birch Society's National Council, claimed the seeds for the advancing Red Tide were planted when Roosevelt entered the war against the Axis: "The Soviet colossus would not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war - at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other." (A realistic expectation? One side, perhaps the Germans, would have prevailed, or so some pre-war "isolationists" hoped.) "But Franklin D. Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy, was as successful as any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had re-elected him only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war" ("Historical News and Comment," Journal of Historical Review, undated, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 495-499).

    But a social backlash against the antics of the Society's"Yahoos" was mounting. In 1965, a group of moderate Republican governors met with the Party's coordinating committee to urge a statement denouncing the John Birch Society. On December 24, the New York Times reported that the committee voted in the interest of party unity to adopt a "diplomatic resolution." The GOP would "reject membership in any radical or extremist organization ... which seeks to undermine the basic principals of American freedom and constitutional government." Former House Representative John Rousselot, a Christian Scientist - also the John Birch Society's national director of public relations - told the press that the resolution meant communists and the KKK would be denied access to the Republican Party - but not members of the Birch Society.

    The GOP, after all, had scores of Birchers in its ranks, and many of them were "high-minded" loyalists to the Party. Why, the JB Society bestowed awards on policemen who acted heroically in the line of duty. This endeared police officers around the country to the front organization. A reporter in New York noticed that most of those attending one Birch Society rally sported "Police Benevolent Association" badges. Well-known law enforcement officials were drawn to Society-sponsored media events, including L.A. Police Chief Willam Parker, who turned up for an interview on the Manion Forum. In 1966, Sheriff James Clark, a Bircher who found fame for his resistance to the civil rights movement - was voted president of the national sheriff's organization by the rank and file. (Seymour-Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 317-18).

    Not publicized were the lives they led behind the hoopla. General Walker, one of the most visible of Birchers, kept up his relationship with Nazi Gerhard Frey back in Germany. Walker phoned Frey's newspaper after Oswald was identified as the poor marksman who fired four shots through his window. Frey was the publisher of the Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung. Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany mentions that Frey's weekly newspaper "has become a central organ of all ultra-right neo-fascist forces in West Germany and defames each and every movement advocating a realistic policy. Thus von der Heydte, SS man and parachute officer of the nazi Wehrmacht, called for long sentences of penal servitude for 'renunciation politicians,' meaning those forces striving for normal relations with the neighboring peoples in the east and south-east of Europe. This paper advocates with peculiar zeal a general amnesty for nazi and war criminals."

    Frey's sheet applauded the acquittal of Erich Deppner, an SS storm trooper who ordered the murder of 65 Russian prisoners, a "turning point in the trials of war criminals" (Brown Book, p. 338-39).

    Another prominent Bircher with a secret life was Edward Hunter, the CIA mind control operative who coined the word "brainwashing" back in 1950. The word quickly, John Marks observed in The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, "became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines." Hunter, an OSS veteran and CIA propagandist employed as a "journalist," wrote scores of books and articles on the emerging science of mind manipulation. His many readers responded with outrage at the communist menace he exposed in his articles, and its insidious mind control tactics. The enemy had developed methods "to put a man's mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue," Hunter reported, "what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator" (p. 125-26). The country's elected representatives had no choice but to allow the CIA to conduct its own inhumane experiments on unconsenting human subjects.

    But there was no brainwash like the Birch brainwash.

    In 1962, Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government exposed as fronts for international Bolshevism a number of policy groups. Democracy was teetering. Smoot had unearthed the enemies in our midst: the Committee for Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council (formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory Council and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot, incidentally, reported to FBI headquarters in Washington before he was bitten by the bug to publish his neo-fascist newsletter, The Dan Smoot Report. "Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government," he wrote, "are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship under the control of the Kremlin" (Political Research Associates).

    The rabble rousing of Welch, Manion, Smoot and other Birch Society celebrities was understandably disturbing to some of the political targets of the abuse.

    President John Kennedy responded to the noisy extremists of the Birch Society in an address delivered at a fund-raising dinner hosted by the Democratic Party at the Hollywood Paladium on November 18, 1961. "In recent months," Kennedy said, "I have spoken many times about how difficult and dangerous a period it is through which we move. I would like to take this opportunity to say a word about the American spirit in this time of trial. In the most critical periods of out nation's history, there have been those on the fringes of out society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat." Political extremists, he said, sought the easy explanation for every national crisis and ignored political complexities. A downturn in the econmy "could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants." Wars are orchestrated by "international bankers." China ended trade relations with the world not as a result of internal conflicts, but due to "treason in high places." With their rhetoric, "these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant facts or unresolved problems."

    Cold War is oppressive, Kennedy acknowledged, and "the discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for 'a man on horseback' because they do not trust the people."

    The extreme right equated the Democratic Party with "the welfare state," said Kennedy. They object, "quite rightly, to politics intruding on the military - but they are anxious for the military to engage in politics." He urged his supporters, "Let us not heed these counsels of fear and suspicion.... Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence rather than crusades of suspicion" (Entire speech published verbatim in Rusher, pp. 121-123).

    In 1965, a Republican leader told the Arizona Republic that eighty percent of all Birch Society members were "dedicated, patriotic and frightened Americans. More than 19 percent are nuts whose brains and judgment are warped. And the remaining people frighten me to death."

    Many conservative Americans found the "crusade of suspicion" irresistible. Most Birch Society members, about 60,000 all told, lived in cozy suburbs in the south and southwest (Rusher, p, 118).

    The Phoenix chapter of the Society was founded in 1960, and six more cropped up within two years. By 1965, there were 100 chapters in the state and some 2,000 members. Most of them lived in the suburbs around Phoenix.

    They came in all ages, but one of the youngest and most receptive to the call was young Robbie Jay Matthews of Phoenix, Arizona, a prototypical middle-class American kid who, as an adult, went on to muster a bund he called The Order, the neo-nazi cell that murdered radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.

    Twenty years before, on  October 25, 1964, Una Matthews, his mother, drew Robbie's attention to a tabloid insert in the Arizona Republic entitled, The John Birch Society: A Report. In The Silent Brotherhood (Signet, 1989), Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt describe the momentous day that Robbie Matthews, age 12,  became a fascist: "Una flipped through the magazine's pages, each marked 'advertisement' at the top.... The article described how the society was composed of local chapters with ten to twenty members, usually formed by someone in the neighborhood who was concerned about communism. A full-time coordinator gave assistance and direction to the chapters."

    "This group really wants to do something about it," Una Matthews told her son, who took the magazine to his room and studied it thoroughly. "He didn't understand everything, but he understood enough to become increasingly alarmed. These people he'd been hearing about, these Russian communists, wanted to take over the world." Young Matthews dwelt on the implications. He feared for his family. Reading: "How are we reacting to the realities of our world? What do we think of the steady gain of communism - of the millions killed, tortured and enslaved by this criminal conspiracy? Do we still laugh at Kruschev's claim that our children will live under communism? Do we shrug off Cuba? Will we shrug off Mexico? Do we watch with curiosity? De we pull down the curtains on these disturbing thoughts?" Robbie Matthews, a future "man on horseback," clipped the coupon and sent the Birch Society $5.00 for a copy of Robert Welch's Blue Book, the group's manifesto.

    "No more," Flynn and Gerhardt write, "would the world be just what he could see up and down West Lawrence Lane..." (p. 29-30).

=-=-=-=-=

[Lee Forman]

Interesting to note that Ruby also pointed to 'A Texan looks at Lyndon' as evidence of who was behind the assassination - a book that was apparently given out by the carload by the JBS, as per the last quote.

The JBS [and Minutemen, YAF]

The Old Catholic Church

The Knights of Malta [a.k.a. Shickshinny Knights]

The Mormans - or the Malta Moormans

The Jesuits

Is it possible that some or all of these religious societies were linked, in some way associated or under the control of an over-arching organization?

These are some names that seem to continually float to the top.

Edwin Walker

Charles Willoughby

Phillip Corso

What group did Fred Crisman belong to? Who was the head of Oak Ridge at the time of the assassination?

http://mamihlap.blogspot.com/2004/10/shick...ny-knights.html

The Knights were a sort of supersecret rightwing schismatic Knights of Columbus, dedicated to the impeachment of Earl Warren, among other things. The Catholic Church didn't like 'em much, and they included Eastern Orthodox (a lot of the Knights, and of the population of Shickshinny in general, were White Russians), Old Catholics, High Episcopalians, etc.

That paves a nice in for David Ferrie and Earl James [Old Catholic] - maybe George DeMohrenschildt [White Russians]?

http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/ferrie.htm

In 1962-1963 David Ferrie made seven long distance phone calls from New Orleans to an unlisted number in the (416) area code:  Toronto Canada.

In 1967, at the request of the New Orleans district attorney's office, Metropolitan Toronto Police linked the unlisted number to Earl Anglin Lawrence James, a bishop in the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America, a shadowy and highly factionalized heretical sect in which Ferrie was reportedly ordained and subsequently defroked [defrocked] as a priest.

http://alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_early_days.html

The Early Days of the John Birch Society:

Fascist Templars of the Corporate State

By Alex Constantine

    "The new America will not be Capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be Socialist. If at the moment the trend is toward Fascism, it will be an American Fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions and the hopes of the great middle-class nation." E.F. Brown, associate editor, Current History Magazine, July 1933

    "We have absorbed into our own legal system the German tyranny that we fought and inveighed against. The approach, copied from the Nazis, works this way: The press and radio first lay down a terrific barrage against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of evidence shriek of atom bomb spies or plots to overthrow the government, of espionage, of high treason, and of other bloodcurdling crimes. We are now ready for the second stage: the pinning of the label 'Red' indiscriminately on all opposition." Abraham Pomerantz, U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel, Nuremberg Trials.

An Ornery Bunch Lays Down

a Terrific Barrage Against the Red Menace

    If you live in southern California and traveled with any liberal organization in the early 1980s, chances are your name appeared on a secret file. On May 25, 1983, L.A.'s Public Order Intelligence Division (PDID) was exposed to the world as a clearinghouse of spies gathering intelligence on the left. The PDID kept files on thousands of law-abiding liberals at a cost of $100,000 in tax revenues. The PDID utilized a computer dossier system purchased by the late Representative Larry McDonald's Western Goals, the intelligence gathering branch of the John Birch Society. McDonald was the national leader of the Birchers. Late political researcher Mae Brussell noted in "Nazi Connections to the John F. Kennedy Assassination" that the Birch Society officer [he perished in the Flight 007 shootdown] was "exceedingly active in Dallas preceding the Kennedy assassination. Western Goals has offices in Germany run by Eugene Wigner [a Hungarian-born scientist who worked on the atamic bomb at the University of Chicago] that feed data to the Gehlen BND [post-WW II Nazi intelligence division]. On the board of Western Goals sat Edward Teller, Admiral Thomas Moorer [Reporter Bob Woodward's superior officer in the Naval wing of the Pentagon within a year of the Watergate series published by the Washington Post] and Dr. Hans Senholt, once a Luftwaffe pilot."

    The Birchers had much in common with their fascist contacts in Germany. Fred J. Cook, in The Warfare State (MacMillan, 1962), wrote that the Birch Society was named after an obscure Christian missionary and "OSS captain who was murdered by Chinese Communist guerrillas ten days after World War II ended." The JB Society's Web site provides more background on this paragon of American virtues: "Shortly after America's entry into the war, John Birch volunteered to join General Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force, known also as the Flying Tigers. Birch was of particular value in the war because of his facility with various Chinese dialects and it was thus that he was assigned primarily to intelligence work." The society named after Birch, Cook wrote, "is a completely monolithic organization, as authoritarian in its own way as any Communist dictatorship.... Welch's John Birch Society is as secret as the Ku Klux Klan, as monolithic and unbalanced as the Nazi Party of Hitler, with many of whose ideas and methods it would find itself quite compatible."

    What would the Cold War have been without the inebriating nationalism of the Birchers, dismissed as "yahoos" by most casual observers, frightening to those who looked into them?

    The Birch Society was founded in 1959 by Robert Welch. Welch attended the U.S. Naval Academy and studied law at Harvard for two years. He was vice president of the James O. Welch candy company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was also vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party Finance Committee in 1948. Welch made an unsuccessful bid for the office of Lt. Governor in the 1950 Republican primary. He was a ranking director of the National Association of Manufacturers, the subject of many a rancorous essay by George Seldes, who found NAM, in the 1950s, to be a hive of reactionary corporate intrigues.

    The Birch Society's Web site observes that in Welch's time, "self-reliance, good manners, moral uprightness, respect for hard work, and especially rigorous honesty were as pervasive among Americans then as watching television and collecting welfare are for a great many of them today." His funding came primarily from Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt - a Texas oil "patriot" and the sponsor of a vitriolic right-wing radio program, Lifeline, that aired in 42 states - Pew's Sunoco, and NAM's corporate constituents.

    Welch learned, according to the JBS Internet site, that "The Conspiracy" was more "deeply rooted than he had previously thought, and supported this thesis by tracing its origins back over a century to an occult group known as the Illuminati, founded on May 1, 1776 by a Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt. Tenaciously tracking back through the pages of obscure books and dusty old documents, he found that this "Satanic" conspiratorial alliance had participated in the French Revolution of 1789, "which infamous uprising, as we know, struck out with intense savagery against God and civilization and resulted in the murder of roughly a million human beings. Clearly, the upheavals and atrocities of 1789 served as a model for revolutions to come, especially the Bolshevik Revolution."

    Robert Welch introduced his vision of the John Birch Society at a meeting of twelve "patriotic and public-spirited men" in Indianapolis on December 9, 1958. The first chapter was formed in February 1959. "The core thesis of the society," reports Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachussetts, "was contained in Welch's initial Indianapolis presentation, transcribed almost verbatim in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and subsequently given to each new member. According to Welch, both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"

    This was the game, substituting "fascist" with "socialist," reversing the perceived polarity of corporatism. The Birch Society "incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector."

    Welch's Society had a corporate foundation, primarily oil companies and miliitary contractors and served as a line of "defense" to stanch the influences of the left. Before the war, B. Palme Dutt, in Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers, 1935), found that capitalism "can no longer maintain its power by the old means. The crisis is driving the whole political situation at an escalating pace." The rise of the labor unions and social movements threatened to usurp the power, wealth and privilege of the ruling class. Every segment of society was affected by this clash. The Lords of Industry, with one eye askance at developments in the Russian satellites and the Far East, was "driven to ever more desperate expedients to prolong for a little while its lease on life." Fascist organizations like the Birch Society were a "desperate expedient" of social control, undermining any attempt to trespass on the self-serving authority of the country's military-industrial barons.

    In the wings of the Birch Society, with its insistent rejection of "collectivism," lurked corporate sponsors. In an address to the Cooperative League of the United States, T.K. Quinn, a former vice president of General Electric, an "Insider," shared his dim view of the corporations that created the Society and supported it: "In forms of organization and control, these giants are essentially collectivistic, fascist states, with self-elected and self-perpetuating officers and directors, quite like the Russian politiboro in this respect. Their control extends directly over production, over tens of thousands of small supplying manufacturers and subcontractors, and over thousands of distributors and dealers. Indirectly, the control of these giant corporations influences legislation through paid lobbies in state capitals and Washington, and it is seen and felt in the magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations, all dependent upon these giants and their associates for their existence" (George Seldes, "Postscript: NAM and the John Birch Society," in Never Tire of Protesting, Lyle Stuart, 1968, p. 124).

    The ranking corporations were unified by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Robert Welch had been an officer of NAM. This front and related organizations didn't score too badly in their lobbying efforts in a sample year:

                                                        WON    LOST    PERCENT

  NAM                                                    6          0        1,000

  Committee for Constitutional

Government    7          1          .875

  U.S. Chamber of Commerce                6          2          .750

    Liberal lobbying groups didn't fare so well. The American Federation of Labor won three lobbying campaigns and lost seven. The League of Women Voters was successful in one attempt to see legislation passed, but lost four. The Farmers' Union was 1-in-8. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, 1-in-5 (Seldes, pp. 124-125, from a Congressional Quarterly scorecard). Seldes observed that NAM, "the richest and most powerful lobby in the nation, got all the laws it sponsored passed by Congress." The Committee for Constitutional Government, "called 'America's No. 1 fascist organization' by Congressman Wright Patman, won seven in eight that it sponsored" (p. 125). Clearly, favoritism at the legislative level favored the right-wing corporate fronts and not the dreaded left.

    The Birch Society was an arm of NAM and its constituent corporations: General Motors, DuPont, Sunoco, U.S. Steel, and so on. "Another organization," Seldes wrote, "apparently founded with the intention of the Birch Society to unite reaction in a vast and powerful political weapon, calls itself Americans for Constitutional Action and unites NAM leaders, the owners of the Reader's Digest, and Birchites; it is reaction's answer to Americans for Democratic Action" (p. 121).

    Reader's Digest?  The "funny little magazine" dredges up another directorate often linked to such groups - the CIA. In the Eisenhower period, propagandists on the Agency payroll were featured on a regular basis in the Digest, including Allen Dulles, Carl Rowan, James Burnham, Brian Crozier and Stewart Alsop. The magazine remains a glib tool of CIA propaganda.

    Another is the National Review, in the early days indistinguishable from Birch Society propaganda. It was edited by William F. Buckley, a close friend of Welch's. In the first issue, released on November 19, 1955, Buckley printed a "Publisher's Statement" in which he  declared war on "the Liberals who run the country," echoing the rhetoric of the Birch Society. The Review, Buckley boasted, "stands athwart history, yelling Stop!"

    In March, 1956, John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote: "Last November, newstands throughout the country offered the first issue of a new magazine, National Review, which described itself as 'frankly conservative.'" But the magazine's first half-dozen issues made it clear that the Review "was an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism ... [and] like most of the extremist little magazines, it seems to be aimed at an audience of True Believers." NR's readership were "emotional people who throw themselves frantically into a cause often to make up for some kind of frustration in their private lives. They form the hard core of many religious, nationalist and revolutionary movements: they have great capacity, in Hoffer's words, for 'enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance ... blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.' They are the opposite of conservatives" (William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right, William Morrow, 1984, pp. 47-48).

    Dwight MacDonald, a staff writer for the New Yorker, opined, "NR seems worth examining as a cultural phenomenon: the MaCarthy nationalists - they call themselves conservative, but that is surely a misnomer - have never before made so heroic an effort to be intellectually articulate. Here are the ideas, here is the style of the lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated ... who responded to Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Senator McCarthy.... These are men from underground, the intellectually underprivileged who feel themselves excluded from a world they believe is ruled by liberals (or eggheads, the terms are, significantly, interchangeable in NR)."

    William F. Buckley advertised himself as an independent thinker, journalist and publisher. But documents declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board have debunked his profiling. In Watergate "Plumber" Howard Hunt's Office of Security file, Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee found a number of documents concerning William F. Buckley. He was not merely a CIA agent. Buckley was a ranking officer, stationed for a spell in Mexico City to direct covert operations. Thereafter, Buckley attempted to conceal his CIA rank with Hunt's assistance. Documents subpeoned by Congress note that some articles published by the National Review were in fact written by the CIA's E. Howard Hunt (for instance, a review of The Invisible Government, by David Wise, a book highly critical of the Agency). When Buckley left the CIA to publish National Review, he maintained a subdued relationship with Hunt. (Jim DiEugenio, "Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa," Probe, January-February 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2).

    Buckley also distanced himself publicly from Robert Welch in the April 21, 1961 issue of the Review. There was growing interest in the Birch Society, Buckley claimed, because "the Liberals, and to the extent their programs coincide, the Communists, feel threatened by the revived opposition. Accordingly they have taken hold of a vulnerable organization and labored to transform it into a national menace." It could be argued that the Society itself had something to do with its rep, that the left did not have to "labor" too strenuously, after all. Buckley himself admitted in his next breath that the Birch Society was "an organization of men and women devoted to militant political activity."

    "I myself have known Robert Welch since 1952," he acknowledged. "I have read all his books, and most of his articles and editorials. He bought stock and debentures in National Review in its early years (less than one percent of our original capital). We have exchanged over a dozen letters, and spoken from the same platform on two occasions. I have always admired his personal courage and devotion to the cause."

    But, Buckley wrote, he had to part with Welch's conclusion that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a "willing agent of the Soviet Union," though Buckley believed "most definitely" that the "Communist conspiracy" was a "deadly serious matter." In the future, he hoped that the Birch Society "thrives," so long as "it resists such false assumptions as that a man's subjective motives can automatically be deduced from the objective consequences of his acts."

Coup Plots

    Buckley hoped to salvage the organization's political usefulness to the fascist cause by plotting to separate his "old friend" Welch from the Birch Society. George Seldes notes that Welch's "paranoid and idiotic libels" of President Eisenhower caused a stir in the Republican Party: "It resulted in an attempt to separate Welch from Birch and set Welch adrift. Editor William Buckley of the National Review, and a highly popular Birch radio orator, Fulton Lewis, Jr. (who outdid all the Birchites by favoring lynching, not merely indicting, the chief justice), joined in a suggestion that Welch resign and thus purge the John Birch Society, which would then continue in their favor. They did not succeed" (Seldes, Never Tire of Protesting, p. 220).

    Welch was not one to forget a minor slight like a coup attempt. He'd been betrayed by the Skull-and-Bones CIA Yalie, and he was bitter. His affairs were tangled up with Buckley's, however, and the connection went far beyond a minor stock holding. Welch had influence at Young Americans for Freedom, founded in September 1960. YAF was a fascist front crawling with Birchers. It also served as an enclave for incoming Nazi spies arriving from Munich, Germany (Dick Russell,The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992).

    And it's leadership was loyal to William F. Buckley. In the summer of 1961, Robert Welch enlisted the aid of Nelson Rockefeller (in Birch lore, the country's most powerful closet "Communist") and launched a counter-coup of the student organization. Together, William Rusher recalls, an incredible, unlikely alliance, "Welch and Rockefeller, in league, through their youthful agents, [attempted] to wrest control of the national board of YAF from the friends of National Review!"  In the end, the fanatical Birch faction was outvoted and the Buckley crowd remained in control of the radical right student union (Rusher, pp 115-116).

    Birchers have never been content to sit idly by, swapping tales of phantom communist conspiracies. They took an active hand to throttle the amoral, anti-capitalist "imperialists" threatening to bury God's chosen people. (Never mind that the U.S. has interfered in the politics of every country on earth, installed fascist dictators in most and often assassinated any leaders who rejected the American corporate model.)

    General Edwin A. Walker resigned from the Army in November1961 after he was chastised by the Pentagon for distributing Birch Society propaganda to his troops. He was temporarily relieved of command, pending an investigation. Walker - a Bircher, also the head of Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture, a group with chapters in Bonn, Germany established by a Nazi - ultimately buffooned his way into a number of footnotes in Camelot history. Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly attempted to kill him, and the general once made a bid for governor but finished last in the 1962 Democratic runoff. Dick Russell recalls, "Late in September, 1962, the general made headlines around the world. James Meredith was seeking to become the first black ever admitted to the University of Mississippi. It was a landmark moment in the fight against racial segregation. Meredith's entry was mandated by a federal court order, and when Mississippi governor Ross Barnett set out to block it, Kennedy ordered National Guardsmen deployed on Meredith's behalf. That was when General Walker called for ten thousand civilians to march on Oxford, Mississippi, in opposition. Walker was on the scene when rioting erupted against four hundred federal marshals escorting Meredith onto the campus." Two people were killed in the melee, and 70 were wounded. The next morning, "Walker was arrested by federal authorities on four counts, including insurrection, and flown for psychiatric observation to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri." The Liberty Lobby, another fascist front, hastened to General Walker's defense, and blamed the Kennedys for waging a campaign against Walker to "reduce his prestige" and "asset value to the anti-Communist cause" (p. 309).

    Back in 1957, General Walker made the cover of Time magazine and was actually credited with furthering the cause of racial integration after he led federal troops integrating the schools in Little Rock, Ark. Actually, Gen. Walker led the troops only after President Eisenhower refused his resignation, historian Don E. Carleton, author of Red Scare, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "He did not want to carry out that order," Mr. Carleton said. "He did not believe in racial integration" (General Walker obituary, AP release, November 2, 1993).

    Walker flew the U.S. flag upside down to express his rage over the perceived "communist" leanings of Kennedy and other government officials, according to Darwin Payne, a former Dallas newspaper reporter. "He was not a good speaker. He was a poor campaigner and finished last in a field of six [in the gubernatorial race], which was a surprise because he had so many ardent followers in the right wing," Mr. Payne says (Walker obituary).

    General Walker loudly declared himself a martyr in the war against creeping communism. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1962, he testified that the "Conspiracy" was, in the words of columnist Jack Anderson, "clearing the way for world communism by systematically slandering and discrediting its effective opponents. The cast of victims of this 'hidden policy' ran to thousands ... and he undertook to name the brightest of the fallen: General Douglas MacArthur, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Senator Joseph McCarthy, General George Patton, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas. Walker's litany of martyrs was standard among the 'anti-communist' right; it could have been liften intact from the speeches of Senator Joseph McCarthy or Gerald L.K. Smith a decade earlier, just as it would be reproduced a decade later in the pamphlets on the fanatical fringe, except that in the latter case the roster of unheeded prophets would be updated by the addition of Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Michael Feighan of Ohio (Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker, Random House, 1979, pp. 100-101).

    Liberals, even within the Republican Pary, were targeted by the Birch Society. Thomas Kuchel, U.S. senator for 16 years and the last major liberal Republican to hold office in California, was one of them. Kuchel expressed particular pride in his support of civil rights bills for enfranchisement of blacks and desegregation of public facilities under the Johnson administration. In 1994, the Los Angeles Times reported that Kuchel "said with characteristic disdain, the main feature of 'right wing Republicans,' as he understood them, 'was militant anti-Communism.' 'They seemed convinced we were about to be invaded by the Communists.' Mr. Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right to his response to a surge of mail he got from members of the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. Kennedy became president. 'I got thousands of letters telling me that Chinese Communists were in Mexico preparing to invade California,' he recalled. After checking with military authorities, Mr. Kuchel wrote a short form letter in response: 'We have no evidence of Communists gathering in Mexico, Chinese or otherwise.' Shortly thereafter, Mr. Kuchel learned that he was being labeled a 'Comsymp,' a term he had not heard of until that time. 'I got a little tee'd off, and prepared a carefully researched speech critical of the John Birch Society and that kind of mentality,' he remembered. 'I kicked them around, and they never forgave me'" (Kuchel obituary, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1994, ).

    An editorial writer for the Times Record News in Witchita Falls followed the political machinations of the Birch Society from an early age ("A Society of Hate," Oct. 25, 1998), and observed that JBS founder Robert Welch "was not in government but despised most of those inside it, was never stopped, and his influence grew even as McCarthy's bulb dimmed and died out."

    Birchers in Texas were politically hyperactive in those days, gained a foothold in local politics, "and that's how I know they were an ornery bunch. The first person I actually came to know as a Bircher was a kid I'd gone through school with who showed up one day outside the schoolhouse with the trunk of his car loaded down with boxes of paperback books. He was standing there with the trunk lid up handing out free books to anybody who'd take one. I could kick myself now for not taking one then because it would be interesting to have it just to show my kids what mean times those were. If you think the Starr Report made President Clinton look bad, you should've seen this book. The name of the book was A Texan Looks at Lyndon. I came to know quite a number of Birchers in various contexts, some through church, some through groups my parents socialized with, some through my job as a journalist, but I didn't know them as Birchers until I started connecting the dots.

    "They were a sneaky bunch, and mean, and at one time they ran the government in my hometown, and used their offices to preach against communism and socialism as though evil was right there at the city limits threatening to come in and take over. I never ran across a communist or socialist back then, so maybe the Birchers were successful. I dunno. A little later, they tried to take over the entire Republican Party in the county where I lived by putting stealth candidates on the ballot for every position at the last minute. I guess they knew so much about communist infiltration that they'd become experts at it. The ones I knew were a humorless bunch, sullen, suspicious and stiff-necked. They saw America going straight to hell right before their eyes, and they resented the fact that so few heeded their doomsday predictions."

    An exception to the public apathy that met Welch's cultic bund was William Kintner, a former CIA officer who castigated critics of the extreme right in the the May, 1962 issue of Reader's Digest. Kintner maintained that the "campaign" waged against radical right havens like the John Birch Society began when "dossiers in Moscow's espionage headquarters were combed for the names of unsuspecting persons in the United States who might do the Kremlin's work." Anyone maligning the home corporate-military state was therefore a suspected Soviet agent hawking "disinformation."

"Hey, Hey, JFK - How Many Birchers

Gunned You Down Today?"

    But the Birch Society's ambitions went far beyond control of small-town politics. Members taking objection to Kennedy's Communist "appeasement" policies went so far as to plot the overthrow of the government.

    In 1962, Dallas officials of the John Birch Society attended a meeting with H.L Hunt, General Edwin Walker, Robert Morris (leader of the Defenders of American Liberty, president of Plato University in New Jersey and former chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee), and Larrie Schmidt, a veteran of two tours of Army duty in Munich who idolized Hermann Goering. Back home, Schmidt, his head wheeling with Bircher propaganda disseminated by General Walker back in Germany, took a position at United Press International. He had made plans while stationed in the Rhineland to start an organization he called CUSA, short for "Conservatism U.S.A."

    By the summer of 1962, Schmidt organized a platoon of zealots from the Military Police and Counter-Intelligence Corps. Look magazine (January 26, 1965) reported that Schmidt "trained a small, disciplined band of soldier-conspirators to follow him stateside and do, he hoped, 'whatever is necessary to accomplish our goal.'" Schmidt's coup plan called for infiltrating conservative organization around the country, and marshalling  them to overthrow of the Kennedy government. The core of this seditious secret army was to be the first organization drawn into Schmidt's plan - Young Americans for Freedom, the Birch Society offshoot that boasted some 50,000 members - by arrangement with Heidelberg-born Major General Charles Willoughby, true name Weidenbach, a YAF founder, alleged by Dick Russell to be one of the central participants of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    The coup plan was exposed when Warren Commission investigators happened upon Schmidt's role in the purchase of a newspaper ad framed with a thick, black border that ran in the Dallas Morning News the morning Kennedy was shot, pronouncing the president guilty of treason for alleged diplomatic dalliances with the Russians (Russell, pp. 320-24).

    The name Kennedy irritated the colons of good Birchers everywhere. Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors' Guild and FBI snitch, under secret contract with MCA management, emerging political star in Hollywood, was closer to the mark. After the 1964 presidential election, Democratic Party officials crafted a plan to take on right-wing extremists in the public arena, including one of Reagan's support groups, Citizens for Constitutional Action a "conservative" grassroots organization that had backed Goldwater in his presidential run and thereby splinter the Republicans.

    As it happened, both Goldwater and the John Birch Society received lavish support from J. Howard Pew, owner of the Sun Oil Company (Colby and Dennett, The Will Be Done, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 453).

    The Republicans countered with measures tailored to ensure party unity. Reagan was cautioned not to allow himself to be defined as either a moderate or conservative. "During one secret strategy meeting," Curt Gentry (in The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California Putnam's, 1968) wrote, "John Rousselot, national public relations director of the John Birch Society, approached Stuart Spencer with a coldly pragmatic offer: the society would be glad to endorse Reagan or denounce him, whichever would help most" (p. 125). When Reagan was sworn in as governor of California on January 2, 1967, he was congratulated by Robert Welch himself. Welch proudly proclaimed that the Birch Society was, "in large part," deserving of credit for Reagan's electoral victory.

    "We had chosen California as a state in which to concentrate, practically since the beginning," Welch said. "As a rule, about fifteen percent of the total field staff we could afford, and hence at least fifteen percent of our total membership has been in California" (Gentry, p. 285).

    The political ascent of Ronald Reagan occurred in the Society's halcyon period, before public opinion forced conservative politicians to distance themselves from Welch's hyper-vigilant Commie hunters. But the Birch Society remained symbiotic with the very corporate-military elite it denounced. The Editorial Advisory Committee of Welch's American Opinion magazine claimed four past presidents of the signally fascistic National Association of Manufacturers. Other editorial advisors: General A.C. Wedemeyer from the Pentagon's War Plans Division under the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Colonel Laurence Bunker, formerly the ranking aide-de-camp to General Douglas MacArthur; and the Honorable Spruille Braden, a shoe-in for "Insider" as former undersecretary of state (Mike Newberry, The Yahoos, Marzani & Munsell, 1964, p. 21).

    The Birch Society identified the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) as the beating heart of the world Marxist conspiracy. Ironic, again, that many of the leaders of the JBS also sat on the CFR, according to Who's Who, including William Grede, founder of the Birch Society National Council, director of the 7th Federal Reserve Bank, an arm of the much despised CFR; William Benton McMillan, the first Life Member of the Birch Society and ramrod of the St. Louis Committee of the CFR; Robert Waring Stoddard, a JBS Council member and chairman of the Board of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a newspaper that employed editors belonging to the local committee of the JBS National Council. Braden was a fixture of the CFR, sat on the Council and was a director of the W. Averell Harriman Securities Corporation.

The John Birch Salon

"I've always been opposed to the secret government." John F. Kennedy, 1958

    JB Society leader Thomas Anderson, a hardened advocate of racial segregation, gave the game away when he whined in Straight Talk: "Invariably, hiding behind the sanctimonious cries of 'freedom of the press,' and 'academic freedom' are defenders of Alger Hiss, Fifth Amendment addicts, attackers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, people who urged barring Mein Kampf from distribution. In short, the enemies are: Criminals, Socialists and Communists"

    Mein Kampf? How did Hitler become a cause celebré?

    Of critical importance to the anti-communist wars of the Birch Society was Welch's relationship with Dr. J.B. Matthews, former chief investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Joseph McCarthy announced that he held a list of Soviet agents "in my hands," he referred to one of Matthew' s compilations. When McCarthy  fell into disrepute, J.B. strolled off into the gloaming, taking his files on known "communist subversives" with him, moved on to become Robert Welch's aide-de-camp. "My opinion of various characters," Welch wrote in his Blue Book of the Birch Society, "formed entirely independently, has [proven] to coincide with the opinion of J.B. Matthews." Welch boasted that he had "a fairly sensitive and accurate nose" for rooting out agents of the communist underground.

    Dr, Matthews pushed the number of "agents," "subversives" and "travellers" among the nation's clergymen in Birch Society files from 1,000 to 7,000 names. America's parishes evidently swarmed with spies and dupes of "The Conspiracy." In July 1961, the Birch Society Bulletin claimed that there were no less than "300,000 to 500,000 Communists in the United States" (Newberry, p. 89). Welch and Matthews dreamed of assembling files on every one of them.

    The American Opinion reading room was the place to learn all about these subversives, an alternate universe of right-wing briefings devoid of recognizable reality. Medford Evans, formerly editor of the National Review and the Birch Society's Texas coordinator, published a critical tour-de-force in Human Events magazine (January 26, 1957), a CIA-subsidized publication: "WHY I AM AN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL." Evans once served under Admiral Lewis Strauss at the Atomic Energy Commission. The dossiers of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller were cleared by the AEC's proud "anti-intellectual" chief of security (Newberry, p. 138).

    In the halcyon days, Welch's Society was allied with William Regnery, whose name appears on American Security Council (ASC) incorporation papers. The ASC was a domestic covert operations arm of the military-corporate complex, closely aligned with the JBS, Libery Lobby and other sons of the fascist revolution. Regnery and a pair of pre-war America First isolationists began the Human Events radio program and the Regnery publishing firm in the mid-1950s. The first two books published by Regnery were critical of the Nuremberg Trials, and the third found fault with allied bombing campaigns during WW II.

    In 1954, Regnery turned out a couple of tracts for the John Birch Society. The nascent publishing concern also printed up William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, subtitled, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. "In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books," SpritOne Information Services comments, "it is interesting to note that Regnery Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The reader is reminded to remember [the] point ... concerning the CIA and its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery, along with Bunker Hunt, funded Western Goals." Western Goals was organized by the John Birch Society.

    In 1986, President Ronald Reagan "appointed Alfred Regnery to help dismantle the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice. In the 1990s, [Regnery] has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears (I would use the word 'books' but that would be a lie by any measure) attacking President Clinton. [A] direct linkage between the past pro-Nazi groups of the 1930s and today's right wing has been fully established" (http://www. spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930s.htm).

    Gary Allen, one of the foremost propagandists in the Birch pantheon, was the author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a "'76 Press" product, a Birch Society bible and stunning success that has sold over four million copies, according to a publisher's blurb. Picture, if you will, the nation's corporate elite driving for a "Great Merger" with the Soviet Kremlin, poisoning the entire world with Communism. This is among the central themes of The Rockefeller File (1976), Allen's critique of the most powerful family in the world, the dreaded CFR and United World Federalists the One World people. At first glance, Allen's books may appear a confused clot of paranoid political fantasies. He claims that the Carnegie and Rockefeller money machines have "jumped into the financing of education and the social sciences with both Left feet" - as though these foundations traveled with Fidel Castro, when in fact they have proven time and again to serve as funding conduits of the CIA, an agency with interests that do not exactly correspond with socialism. The result, Allen laments, has been "a sharp Socialist-Fascist turn" (p. 45). Decipher this one, and you have clambered onto the eerie, fog-bound island of ultra-conservative conspiracy theories, teeming with nationalistic puffery and Bible-thumping "moral" sentiment.  The Union Theological Seminary, the reader learns, turns out armies of "Christian-Communists." Dan Smoot, an infamous fascist organizer, "scholar," a former FBI agent, was, from Allen's perspective, a heroic David who stood his ground against the wicked Environmental Protection Agency (p. 142). The New York Times, per Allen, is a clearinghouse of left-wing mind control (p. 66).

    Gary Allen's oblique reasoning was often identical to Adolph Hitler's anti-democratic tirades. "The present democracy of the West," wrote Germany's Fuhrer, "is the forerunner of Marxism which would be unthinkable without it. It is democracy alone which furnishes this universal plague the soil in which it spreads."

    How many communists plagued the soil of democracy? The John Birch Society Bulletin on July 1961 let on that there were "not more than a million allies, dupes and sympathizers." Welch proposed compiling a list of these internal saboteurs, "the most complete and most accurate files in America on the leading Comsymps, Socialists and liberals" (Newberry, pp. 89-90), presaging the Western Goals database of known leftists.

    Another scholar of the extreme right who fed Birch Society anti-communist hysteria was Antony Sutton, author of National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, and a series of chapbooks on Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity. Antony Sutton was once employed as a research fellow at the arch-conservative Hoover Institute. To this day, he publishes in The New American, a Birch Society publication. He also turned out books for the "'76 Press," a fascist-right small press that featured the "America First"-style manipulations of W. Cleon Skousen, the former FBI agent and author of The Naked Capitalist, a revival of Carroll Qugley's views of worldwide economic subversion by British elitists. Skousen was the chief of police in Salt Lake City until the Mayor, a Bircher himself, dismissed him in 1960, explaining that the outgoing chief was "an incipient Hitler" (Group Research Reports, 1980, Washington, D.C., Group Research, Inc., p. 20). Skousen had no qualms about publishing in the Sun Myung Moon organizations American Freedom Journal, despite his "America for Americans" posturing. Other "'76 Press" writers included  the vigorously anti-EPA Phyllis Schlafly - who, in 1960, hotly denied that she was a member of the Birch Society ... after Welch announced that she was "one of our most loyal members" (Carol Felsenthal, Phyllis Schlafly, Doubleday, 1981, p. xviii), the founder of the Eagle Forum. Then there was nuclear strategist Admiral Chester Ward, a former law school professor, architect and Naval Judge Advocate, commended by President Eisenhower for his courageous opposition to "the Communist conspiracy." (Felsenthal, p. 221).

    Antony Sutton has always been very concerned about who is funding who - yet it doesn't appear to sink in that the Birch Society is a front organization organized and funded with seed money from the same domestic fascists who supported Hitler before WW II, the same propaganda front that claimed the Rockefellers and Morgans to be closet "communists" and frightened the religion out of its many followers am pong the Boobocracy by claiming there is a massive conspiracy afoot to turn the U.S. into a Lenin-style Superstate.

    Sutton's approach to conspiracy genera was spliced with the anti-communist venom of Robert Welch and his theory of the "Hegelian Dialectic," the time-tested strategy of left-right tensions. Sutton's racial views were certainly curious for one who wore his patriotism on his sleeve. He was an advocate of separation between the races in South Africa. His passages on the CFR and Illuminati flirt with anti-Semitism and echo the fiercely anti-communist sentiments of Skousen, Ward, Allen, Dan Smoot and other proponents of the fascist right. Sutton, who publishes a newsletter, The Future Technology Intelligence Report, contends that "possible advanced alien technology" has been reverse-engineered and is squandered by the federal government. (The "reverse engineering of ET technology" schtick was whistled up by Phillip Corso in the 1960s. Corso was a charter member, under Charles Willoughby, the aforementioned YAF co-founder, of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta in Pennsylvania, a conspiratorial fraternal order patterned after the military order of the Vatican.)

        Guy Bannister, a Birch Society pamphleteer, was Lee Harvey Oswald's handler at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Bannister employed an investigator, Jack S. Martin, a fascist co-conspirator with his boss and Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach (formerly General MacArthur's intelligence chief in Korea), a core strategist in the Kennedy assassination, according to Mae Brussell, Dick Russell and others. Bannister was a drunkard, a former FBI agent and Naval Intelligence officer. He published a racist newsletter. He choreographed the activities of a group of anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He died nine months after the murder of John Kennedy.

    Jim Garrison investigated Oswald's connection to Bannister and CIA pilot David Ferrie. The devout, alcoholic anti-communist had Oswald passing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers on street corners.

    What would Bannister and his fellow Birchers say if they could speak openly, sans the Jeffersonian platitudes and geopolitical shaggy-dog  tales? In a privately-published paper on Charles Willoughby-Weidenbach, "Looking for 'Hate' in all the 'Right' Places," political researcher William Morris McLoughlin can't resist speaking for the Birchers: "We have been sitting on our hands and 'gnawing the rug' since 1945, when, as far as we are concerned, World War III actually began, with the murder of our hero, John Birch in Manchuria, China" The war was waged "entirely by members of various national and international right-wing, militantly extremist groups still united under the auspices and control of the World Anti-Communist League. Its U.S. affiliates include the U.S. Council for World Freedom and the American Security Council, part of the Liberty Lobby, as well as other organizations," including the Birch Society.

    The JBS waged its grass-roots, populist approach to psychological warfare with much scape-goating. In The Radical Right (Random House, 1967), Epstein and Arnold offer that at the 1965 convention of the Christian Crusade, another fascist front, General Walker, "in speaking of the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin, urged his listeners not to forget that Ruby's name was Rubenstein, and they can't change that fact no matter how often they refer to him as Ruby."

    Overall, Robert Welch tried to keep the race question out of the discussion. He insisted that the enemy was the left, not the Jews. Nevertheless, there was no holding back the anti-semitism that many Birchers, cryptically or not, felt the need to convey. There was Florida Bircher Bernard "Ben" Klassen, author of The White Man's Bible. And there was William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, who cut his ideological teeth as a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society. Pierce left the Birch Society to shift the thrust of his "research" to the "international Jewish conspiracy," the very fountainhead, he maintained, of communist subversion, the true Insiders behind the Insiders. (Pierce, "Enemies on the Right," National Vanguard Magazine, August 1996).

    Pierce: "One thing I am grateful to the Birch Society for is that it directed me to a number of books on Communism, and from those books I learned enough about the nature and background of Communism that I knew I wanted to learn much more. That was really the beginning of my education: the start of my quest for understanding about history, race, politics, and, in fact, nearly everything except the physics and mathematics to which I had devoted myself until that time. The half-dozen or so other members of the chapter seemed to be decent enough, if not very stimulating, fellows. The term that best characterizes them is 'middle class.' They were pretty much the sort one can meet in any American Legion hall, except they were a little more intense - especially when talking about the Communist Conspiracy, which was practically the only thing they talked about."

    The world certainly seemed to be going to the dogs. Thanks so much, communist conspirators.

    General Albert Wedemeyer, a guest on the Manion Forum, a radio program hosted by Clarence Manion of the Birch Society's National Council, claimed the seeds for the advancing Red Tide were planted when Roosevelt entered the war against the Axis: "The Soviet colossus would not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war - at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other." (A realistic expectation? One side, perhaps the Germans, would have prevailed, or so some pre-war "isolationists" hoped.) "But Franklin D. Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy, was as successful as any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had re-elected him only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war" ("Historical News and Comment," Journal of Historical Review, undated, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 495-499).

    But a social backlash against the antics of the Society's"Yahoos" was mounting. In 1965, a group of moderate Republican governors met with the Party's coordinating committee to urge a statement denouncing the John Birch Society. On December 24, the New York Times reported that the committee voted in the interest of party unity to adopt a "diplomatic resolution." The GOP would "reject membership in any radical or extremist organization ... which seeks to undermine the basic principals of American freedom and constitutional government." Former House Representative John Rousselot, a Christian Scientist - also the John Birch Society's national director of public relations - told the press that the resolution meant communists and the KKK would be denied access to the Republican Party - but not members of the Birch Society.

    The GOP, after all, had scores of Birchers in its ranks, and many of them were "high-minded" loyalists to the Party. Why, the JB Society bestowed awards on policemen who acted heroically in the line of duty. This endeared police officers around the country to the front organization. A reporter in New York noticed that most of those attending one Birch Society rally sported "Police Benevolent Association" badges. Well-known law enforcement officials were drawn to Society-sponsored media events, including L.A. Police Chief Willam Parker, who turned up for an interview on the Manion Forum. In 1966, Sheriff James Clark, a Bircher who found fame for his resistance to the civil rights movement - was voted president of the national sheriff's organization by the rank and file. (Seymour-Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 317-18).

    Not publicized were the lives they led behind the hoopla. General Walker, one of the most visible of Birchers, kept up his relationship with Nazi Gerhard Frey back in Germany. Walker phoned Frey's newspaper after Oswald was identified as the poor marksman who fired four shots through his window. Frey was the publisher of the Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung. Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany mentions that Frey's weekly newspaper "has become a central organ of all ultra-right neo-fascist forces in West Germany and defames each and every movement advocating a realistic policy. Thus von der Heydte, SS man and parachute officer of the nazi Wehrmacht, called for long sentences of penal servitude for 'renunciation politicians,' meaning those forces striving for normal relations with the neighboring peoples in the east and south-east of Europe. This paper advocates with peculiar zeal a general amnesty for nazi and war criminals."

    Frey's sheet applauded the acquittal of Erich Deppner, an SS storm trooper who ordered the murder of 65 Russian prisoners, a "turning point in the trials of war criminals" (Brown Book, p. 338-39).

    Another prominent Bircher with a secret life was Edward Hunter, the CIA mind control operative who coined the word "brainwashing" back in 1950. The word quickly, John Marks observed in The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, "became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines." Hunter, an OSS veteran and CIA propagandist employed as a "journalist," wrote scores of books and articles on the emerging science of mind manipulation. His many readers responded with outrage at the communist menace he exposed in his articles, and its insidious mind control tactics. The enemy had developed methods "to put a man's mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue," Hunter reported, "what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator" (p. 125-26). The country's elected representatives had no choice but to allow the CIA to conduct its own inhumane experiments on unconsenting human subjects.

    But there was no brainwash like the Birch brainwash.

    In 1962, Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government exposed as fronts for international Bolshevism a number of policy groups. Democracy was teetering. Smoot had unearthed the enemies in our midst: the Committee for Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council (formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory Council and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot, incidentally, reported to FBI headquarters in Washington before he was bitten by the bug to publish his neo-fascist newsletter, The Dan Smoot Report. "Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government," he wrote, "are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship under the control of the Kremlin" (Political Research Associates).

    The rabble rousing of Welch, Manion, Smoot and other Birch Society celebrities was understandably disturbing to some of the political targets of the abuse.

    President John Kennedy responded to the noisy extremists of the Birch Society in an address delivered at a fund-raising dinner hosted by the Democratic Party at the Hollywood Paladium on November 18, 1961. "In recent months," Kennedy said, "I have spoken many times about how difficult and dangerous a period it is through which we move. I would like to take this opportunity to say a word about the American spirit in this time of trial. In the most critical periods of out nation's history, there have been those on the fringes of out society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat." Political extremists, he said, sought the easy explanation for every national crisis and ignored political complexities. A downturn in the econmy "could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants." Wars are orchestrated by "international bankers." China ended trade relations with the world not as a result of internal conflicts, but due to "treason in high places." With their rhetoric, "these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant facts or unresolved problems."

    Cold War is oppressive, Kennedy acknowledged, and "the discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for 'a man on horseback' because they do not trust the people."

    The extreme right equated the Democratic Party with "the welfare state," said Kennedy. They object, "quite rightly, to politics intruding on the military - but they are anxious for the military to engage in politics." He urged his supporters, "Let us not heed these counsels of fear and suspicion.... Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence rather than crusades of suspicion" (Entire speech published verbatim in Rusher, pp. 121-123).

    In 1965, a Republican leader told the Arizona Republic that eighty percent of all Birch Society members were "dedicated, patriotic and frightened Americans. More than 19 percent are nuts whose brains and judgment are warped. And the remaining people frighten me to death."

    Many conservative Americans found the "crusade of suspicion" irresistible. Most Birch Society members, about 60,000 all told, lived in cozy suburbs in the south and southwest (Rusher, p, 118).

    The Phoenix chapter of the Society was founded in 1960, and six more cropped up within two years. By 1965, there were 100 chapters in the state and some 2,000 members. Most of them lived in the suburbs around Phoenix.

    They came in all ages, but one of the youngest and most receptive to the call was young Robbie Jay Matthews of Phoenix, Arizona, a prototypical middle-class American kid who, as an adult, went on to muster a bund he called The Order, the neo-nazi cell that murdered radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.

    Twenty years before, on  October 25, 1964, Una Matthews, his mother, drew Robbie's attention to a tabloid insert in the Arizona Republic entitled, The John Birch Society: A Report. In The Silent Brotherhood (Signet, 1989), Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt describe the momentous day that Robbie Matthews, age 12,  became a fascist: "Una flipped through the magazine's pages, each marked 'advertisement' at the top.... The article described how the society was composed of local chapters with ten to twenty members, usually formed by someone in the neighborhood who was concerned about communism. A full-time coordinator gave assistance and direction to the chapters."

    "This group really wants to do something about it," Una Matthews told her son, who took the magazine to his room and studied it thoroughly. "He didn't understand everything, but he understood enough to become increasingly alarmed. These people he'd been hearing about, these Russian communists, wanted to take over the world." Young Matthews dwelt on the implications. He feared for his family. Reading: "How are we reacting to the realities of our world? What do we think of the steady gain of communism - of the millions killed, tortured and enslaved by this criminal conspiracy? Do we still laugh at Kruschev's claim that our children will live under communism? Do we shrug off Cuba? Will we shrug off Mexico? Do we watch with curiosity? De we pull down the curtains on these disturbing thoughts?" Robbie Matthews, a future "man on horseback," clipped the coupon and sent the Birch Society $5.00 for a copy of Robert Welch's Blue Book, the group's manifesto.

    "No more," Flynn and Gerhardt write, "would the world be just what he could see up and down West Lawrence Lane..." (p. 29-30).

=-=-=-=-=

[Lee Forman]

Mae Brussel...

I find the amazing coincidence of Ruby's location, his shot to the gut, his own comments concerning a frame, and all of his activities in the 48 hours before his termination of Oswald very interesting....there is plenty to substantiate the fact that Ruby knew Oswald prior to the assassination...or is there?

- lee

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%...0Interview.html

C.D.: On numerous occasions you refer to the Buckley school of conservatives and his youth wing, Young Americans for Freedom, as connected to CIA/ruling class dirty tricks and even the Kennedy Assassination. Few conspiracy buffs would dispute the CIA-Buckley-Establishment connection. Of course, Buckley is death on conspiracy theory, which fails. His favorite target is "paranoids."

  What do you think of the conspiracy-minded right such as the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society? No doubt you differ with their theories, but do you think they are largely sincere? Or are they black propaganda outlets for the Establishment? Or like many other organizations are they simply infiltrated and used from time to time in specific black propaganda campaigns? In one of your tapes you seemed to imply that George Schuler's American Opinion attack on Malcolm X contained outright lies and was timed to coincide with Malcolm's assassination. Comments?

    M.B.: William Buckley's favorite target may be paranoids. Paranoia is a psychological diagnosis applied to a disease of the mind. Buckley is hardly any psychiatrist. He is a useful media showcase and propaganda machine.

  When Buckley states his opinions in writing or on the air, he never prefaces remarks or articles by providing facts about his CIA days with E. Howard Hunt. Few people know that Buckley's family fortune came from Pantipec Oil Company. E. Howard Hunt and George DeMohrenschildt, Oswald's CIA baby-sitter, both worked under Warren Smith. Smith was President of Buckley's Pantipec Oil.

  Buckley not only worked with E. Howard Hunt in the CIA, but formed the notorious YAF with Douglass Caddy, co-worker in the CIA office of Mullen and Co. of Watergate fame.

  Members of the YAF were brought from U.S. Military Intelligence in Germany to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in the fall of 1962. Their object was to infiltrate and take over this conveniently formed new organization. Orders went from Larry Schmidt, first to arrive, that all members had to be in Dallas before JFK arrived ... for their briefings and roles to be played. There is more to the Buckley-CIA-YAF-Caddy connections than time allows here.

  Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society accumulate interesting facts. Their numbers are correct, but the conclusions can't be proven and are in error.

  Jimmy Carter sent a message into the new spacecraft. He wrote that "we human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization."

  The Birch Society and Liberty Lobby would claim this is proof of "one world" conspiracy of communism and the communists are winning their goals. On the other hand, my assessment forces me to believe the Bormann Brotherhood exists. Hitler's goal to rule the world through satellites and weapons is working. We are moving into the Nazification of planet earth.

  Carter's Human Rights issue is a sham. He scolds the USSR. We support and fund South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Korea, Nicaragua, Iran, feudal Middle-East countries with no trials and much torture.

  George Schuler's attack upon Malcolm X, published in American Opinion, Feb. 1973, argues that it would be better to memorialize Benedict Arnold, a known traitor, than Malcolm X.

  Malcolm X was never a traitor to the USA.

  Schuler's put down on Malcolm begins by stating Malcolm X was once a pimp, dope peddler, ex-convict who served ten years for robbery.

  He fails to mention the murder of Malcolm's father, the causes of his hatred and poverty, the reasons blacks get into crime. Schuler doesn't praise Malcolm X for changing his ways, for his eloquent self-education, for his published lectures and writings, for his ability to raise himself above the gutter to become an inspiration for many people.

  White racists use Black fools and Jewish apologists for much of their dirty work.

  The anti-semitic YAF - John Birch Society wanted to place an ad, "Wanted for Treason," with a black border, into the newspapers the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Members of the Birch Society paid for the ad. Neo-Nazi Christians wrote the ad. Whose name was at the bottom, in the newspaper Nov. 22, 1963? Jew boy Bernard Weissman. Why his name? Weissman testified before the Warren Commission that they wanted his name "because he was Jewish." Why did they need a Jewish name identified with the death of JFK? Because another Jew, Jack Rubenstein (Ruby), who always worked with the oil millionaire anti-Semites, and wanted their approval, was also going to be utilized to silence the patsy. No other members of the YAF were asked to come before the Warren Commission. Why not?

[Tim Gratz]

There was a book widely distributed during 1964 attacking the policies of the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. It was called "None Dare Call It Treason." The title came from an old English saying(?). (I forget the author; must be early onset of Alzheimer's). Interestingly, as I am sure you recall, Kevin Costner used the quotation in his (Garrison's) closing argument in the movie "JFK":

Treason doth never prosper.

Why?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

(It was close to that anyway.)

Also re the politics of the early 1960s it was, I recall, 1963 when Buckley wrote the John Birch Society out of the "legitimate" conservative movement.

Edited June 2, 2005 by Tim Gratz