Kennedys and King Test host626

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  • Does Paul Street get paid for this junk?

    Does Paul Street get paid for this junk?

    I really hope the answer to the question posed by this article’s title is no. Why? Because Street’s latest exercise in fruitiness is nothing but a recycling of two previous columns he wrote. His current article, which was supposed to be a salute to the memory of Martin Luther King, is really no such thing. It is actually a cheapening of King’s memory, because Street chose to elevate King at the same time that he denigrates President Kennedy. But beyond that, the article is ironically titled, “Against False Conflation: JFK, MLK and the Triple Evils”, since Street himself is guilty of conflating one column he did in January on King with another he did in February on Kennedy. The latter was posted at Truthdig; the former at Counterpunch. What he does in his current effort at the latter site is largely a cut-and-paste job of the two articles. Which is what I mean about hoping he does not get paid for this stuff.

    I demolished his February piece on Kennedy at length already. (See Paul Street Meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington for the ugly details) But what he does now is make believe that demolition did not happen, and he simply modifies it slightly to serve as the first part of his worthless essay. So if he is getting paid, it’s easy money.

    When I heard of what he had done, I emailed Counterpunch and asked if I could reply on site. After four days I received no reply. Therefore, I will reply here again. And to place Street on warning: whenever I hear about more of his nonsensical writing on the subject, I will reply in the future. Especially since his scholarship is so bad that this is like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, Kennedys and King may end up with a special section called “Street is a Dead End”.

    As I stated, Street slightly modified the first part of his hatchet job on President Kennedy. He opens his article by aseerting that he does not pretend to know the full stories behind who killed Kennedy or King. But he cannot help but list the lone gunman option first. Anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject would howl with laughter at anyone who would proffer that option today. That Street leaves it open tells us a lot about the argument he wishes to make. For if he did admit that JFK was killed by a high-level plot, it would tend to undermine his nonsensical thesis.

    This is especially true in light of the fact that so many of President Kennedy’s policies were altered and then reversed after his death. For example, there were no American combat troops in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed. By the end of 1965, not only were there 175,000 combat troops in theater, but also Rolling Thunder—the greatest air bombardment campaign in history—was operating over North Vietnam.   We can make other comparisons to the same effect from the scholarly literature that Street refuses to consult. For example, by reading Richard Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa, one can see that a very similar trend followed in Congo. By reading Lisa Pease’s essay about the giant conglomerate Freeport Sulphur, one can see the same trend line in Indonesia. (See JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur) By reading just a few pages from Donald Gibson’s masterful volume, Battling Wall Street, one can see that it occurred in the Dominican Republic as well. (See pages, 76-79) By reading Robert Rakove’s fine overview of Kennedy’s revolutionary foreign policy, one can see that the same thing happened in the Middle East, where Kennedy favored Gamel Abdel Nasser. After his death, Johnson and Nixon moved back to favoring Iran and Saudi Arabia, with disastrous results. (See Kennedy, Johnson and the Non Aligned World.) The story of Africa outside the Congo also followed a similar plot line. And the reader can see that by reading Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans.

    What is remarkable about Street’s articles is that there is no evidence at all in any of them that he read any of this material. Consequently, in addition to the ignorance he shows on the subject, there is also a tinge of arrogance involved. Does he think that since he knows better, somehow he is above reading the latest scholarship on the subject? Well, that is one way that he can keep his screeds coming, isn’t it?

    The other point that he implies with his opening is that the assassinations of the Sixties are not really linked in any way. Again, this is quite a difficult thesis to swallow. Lisa Pease and I wrote a 600-page book on that very subject called The Assassinations. There, with rather intricate and up-to-date evidence, we tried to show how the four major assassinations of the decade—President Kennedy, Malcolm X, King, Robert Kennedy—all shared similar characteristics in both their outlines and design, and in the cover-ups afterwards. We also offered a final essay in which we tried to show that it was the cumulative effect of those murders that brought us to the election of 1968: the coming of Richard Nixon and the rise of the hard right to power—a phenomenon that drastically altered the social and economic landscape of this country, and from which it may never recover. One only needs to look at what happened after Nixon left office: how Jerry Ford allowed Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to bring the Committee on the Present Danger into the White House and do battle with the CIA over their estimate of the Soviet Threat, an unprecedented event. The people they brought in—Paul Nitze, Paul Wolfowitz—thought as Rumsfeld and Cheney did: namely, that Henry Kissinger, Nixon, and Alexander Haig were too moderate. (See Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis.)  

    That remarkable, little noted occasion had two effects. First, it gave birth to the neoconservative movement, and its later cast of characters, e.g., Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle. Second, it was the final burial of Kennedy’s progressive, visionary foreign policy. And I do not just mean his attempt at détente with Cuba and the USSR. I also mean his attempt to mold a policy concerning the Third World which was not bound to Cold War ideology, but which was characterized instead by an effort to understand and ameliorate the problems of nations coming out of the debilitating state of European colonialism.

    Indonesia and Congo offer the two most notable examples. And if Street had done a little bit of reading on the subject he would have known better. For as Susan Williams wrote in her study of the murder of Dag Hammarskjold, Harry Truman made a curious comment when he heard about the UN Secretary General’s death. He said, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice, I said ‘When they killed him.’.” (Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold?, p. 232) Why on earth did Truman say this? We did not learn why until Australian scholar Greg Poulgrain published another book Street has never read.   It is called The Incubus of Intervention. In examining how Kennedy’s Indonesian policy was opposed by Allen Dulles, the author talked to George Ivan Smith, a close friend and colleague of Hammarskjold’s at the United Nations. Smith revealed that Hammarskjold and Kennedy were secretly cooperating not just on the Congo, but on the problem of Dutch occupation of West Irian, which Indonesian leader Achmed Sukarno felt should be a part of Indonesia. Smith added that Kennedy had let former Democratic president Truman in on that cooperation. That is why Truman made the comment he did. (Poulgrain, pp. 77-78. For a fuller discussion of the Hammarskjold/Kennedy nexus, see Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite)

    What is so remarkable—in fact, admirable—about this revelation is this: Kennedy kept his pledge to Hammarskjold even after the UN Secretary General was killed! As anyone who reads Mahoney’s book, or Lisa Pease’s essay, or Poulgrain’s book will see, Kennedy was diligent throughout his abbreviated term on both fronts. He personally visited the United Nations on two occasions to ensure that the UN would not forget what Hammarskjold was doing in Congo after he died. And Kennedy allowed American troops into battle to stop the secession of the Katanga province, a move sponsored by Belgium and, to a lesser extent, by England. (See Desperate Measures in the Congo)

    The same was true of Indonesia. Kennedy stuck by Sukarno until the end. He engineered the ceding of West Irian to Indonesia under the negotiated guidance of his brother Robert. President Kennedy had also arranged a state visit to Jakarta in 1964, in part to stave off the confrontation between Sukarno and the United Kingdom over the creation of the Malaysia federation. When Sukarno wanted to expel foreign corporations, Kennedy negotiated new agreements with them so that Indonesia would benefit from the profit split, which JFK requested be 60/40 in Indonesia’s favor. After Sukarno was overthrown, that split was 90/10 in favor of the companies. (Poulgrain, p. 242) Without Kennedy, Sukarno lasted less than two years. President Johnson now backed Malaysia in the dispute with Sukarno, and consequently, Sukarno withdrew from the United Nations. As Lisa Pease notes in her above-referenced article, President Johnson altered Kennedy’s policy towards Sukarno very quickly, and within 12 months the CIA started to plot his overthrow.

    These are just two examples. But they typify President Kennedy’s overall foreign policy. If Street can show me another president since him who did these kinds of things in two separate instances—that is, attempt to foster a revolutionary, nationalist government against European imperialists, and work with the United Nations to do so—I would very much like to hear about them.

    Ignoring the above two cases, Street brings up Vietnam in relation to the issue of Kennedy and the Third World. Here Street says that there has been since 1991 an ongoing debate on whether Kennedy was going to withdraw. He states that the debate was between Oliver Stone and Jamie Galbraith on one side, and Noam Chomsky and Rick Perlstein on the other. He then claims that, somehow, the latter two writers have won that debate. First off, Chomsky has not done any new work on Vietnam since before 1991. But secondly, other authors have done new and important work that is based on new material. Real historians like Howard Jones, David Welch and David Kaiser have uncovered new evidence to make the original argument, first offered by John Newman in 1992, even stronger. For Street to even bring up Perlstein shows just how threadbare he is. For Perlstein did nothing but reiterate Chomsky’s dated, musty and unconvincing polemics. To note just one difference in the quality of scholarship: Welch offered up declassified tapes of Lyndon Johnson actually admitting that he knew Kennedy was withdrawing from Indochina and thus had to cover up the fact he was breaking with that policy. (Welch, Virtual JFK, pp. 304-14) I ask the reader, how much more proof does one need? Well, how about Assistant Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric revealing that his boss Robert McNamara told him that Kennedy had given him orders to wind down the war? (Welch, p. 371) Is Street, who was not there, going to say he knows better than Johnson and Gilpatric, who were in the room?

    This relates to the overall comparison of King with the Kennedys. As anyone who studies American history understands, after the Civil War, the states of the former confederacy passed local and state laws which created the conditions of segregation throughout the southeast: from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. No one wanted to challenge these laws out of fear of violent retribution from white terrorist groups, but also because of the political price that was going to be exacted. The most that any president did was Harry Truman, who decided to integrate the armed forces. Which really did not cost him much politically, since it was invisible stateside.

    From the beginning, the Kennedys decided that they were going to take the issue on, no matter what the price. They decided they were going to use the Brown vs. Board decision as a legal basis to break down the structure of segregation. Kennedy announced this before he was elected. And he stated he was prepared to lose every southern state at the Democratic Convention because of that stand. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) Which, of course, completely contradicts Street’s dictum that the Kennedys were constricted on civil rights because of votes in the South.

    But prior to that, during the debate over the 1957 civil rights act, Kennedy stressed the prime role of Title 3 in the bill. That clause allowed the Attorney General to enter into a state to enforce school desegregation. When Kennedy, in no uncertain terms, came out for Title 3, he began to lose support in the South. It got worse when he made a speech in Jackson, Mississippi—let me repeat: Jackson, Mississippi—where he reiterated that he supported the Brown vs. Board decision as the law of the land. (Golden, p. 95) Again, this is before he entered the White House.

    It did not change once he was elected. Kennedy had his civil rights advisor Harris Wofford draft a long memorandum on how to strategically attack the segregation problem. Wofford advised that the president use a series of executive actions to forge a path and build momentum until it was possible to pass a bill over a filibuster in the Senate. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 47) To anyone who studies Kennedy’s presidency, it is common knowledge that this memorandum furnished the design of his plan to attack the bastions of southern racism.

    His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, understood this out of the gate. To the Kennedys, civil rights were simply a matter of doing the right thing. As RFK said, “it was the thing that should be done.” (Robert Kennedy in his Own Words, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffrey Schulman, p. 105) The Attorney General announced this in public at his famous Law Day speech at the University of Georgia in May of 1961. In other words, three months after the inauguration, RFK went into the Deep South and said he was going to support Brown vs. Board in the courts. Does Street think this helped him get votes for his brother in the South?

    Quite the contrary. But, as many have noted, what these pronouncements did was provide a catalyst for the civil rights movement. They finally had someone in the White House who was on their side. This sparked King and his allies to incite even larger displays of civil disobedience. As Bobby Kennedy noted later, the emerging images and films of Bull Connor’s actions to stamp out the Birmingham demonstration were the impetus that made his civil rights bill possible. JFK used to joke about it by calling it ‘Bull Connor’s Bill’. (Guthman and Schulman, p. 171) It was that, plus Kennedy’s showdown with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama, that provoked Bobby Kennedy to suggest his brother go on national television and make his famous speech about civil rights. That powerful oration was then followed by the Kennedys helping King arrange the March on Washington in August of 1963. (Bernstein, pp. 103; 114-15) This provided the ballast to start Kennedy’s civil rights bill on its path through Congress.

    One of the most bizarre things Street says in his article is that, somehow, the Kennedys were responsible for things like the killing of civil rights workers in the South. In his mad crusade, is he trying to blame the Kennedys for the rise of the Klan? That began about ninety years before Kennedy entered the White House. Or is Bobby Kennedy to be blamed for J. Edgar Hoover’s lack of rigor in counteracting white racists? As Burke Marshall, who was in charge of the civil rights division at Justice, once noted, it was Bobby Kennedy who had to push Hoover and the FBI into investigating civil rights matters. (Guthman and Schulman, p. 139)

    In his zealous jihad, Street can do what he wants to rewrite history and rearrange the make-up of government bodies. He can blame the whole Reconstruction Era on President Kennedy. He can ignore what Hoover failed to do. He can discount all the previous Attorney Generals before RFK. He can erase the record of all the presidents from Lincoln to Kennedy who did next to nothing on civil rights issues. He can cast a blind eye to the virtual inaction of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon in the six years after Brown vs. Board. But there is one simple truth that no one can deny: the Kennedys did more for civil rights in three years than all the previous 18 presidents did in nearly a century. That is an ineradicable fact.

    And Street’s hero, Martin Luther King, knew it. This is why, in March of 1968, King told his advisors that he would be behind Bobby Kennedy in the election. At this time, both McCarthy and President Johnson were in the race, but RFK had not formally declared. King preferred Bobby Kennedy over McCarthy for the specific reason that Kennedy had a stronger record on civil rights than the Minnesota senator. And he knew Kennedy would withdraw from Vietnam. (Martin Luther King, Jr: The FBI File, edited by Michael Friedly and David Gallen, p. 572)

    But further, as Arthur Schlesinger revealed through Marian Wright, it was Bobby Kennedy who gave King the idea for the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. He suggested it to her, and then she relayed it to King. (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 911-12) So much for Street’s charge that the Kennedys never wanted to redistribute wealth. King very much liked what RFK offered as a candidate. As he told his inner circle, Bobby Kennedy could become an outstanding president and there was no question that King was going to formally endorse him. (Schlesinger, p. 912) But I am sure Street would say: Well, King was wrong about that one. Even though he was there.

    The judging of presidents is a comparative exercise. There is no absolute standard to propose. Mother Theresa, or an equivalent, would not have been a viable candidate. With the declassification process we have had—and which Street is apparently oblivious to—presidents like Johnson and Nixon have looked worse, Nixon much worse. But the more documents we get on JFK, the better his administration appears. Street does not read them, so he does not know. But whether he denies it or not, the bottom line is simple: King was right.

    It’s always nice to be able to hoist a pretentious gasbag on his own petard.

  • Earl Caldwell, lone reporter on scene when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, reflects on murder of civil rights icon

     

  • Noam Chomsky Needs an Intervention

    Noam Chomsky Needs an Intervention

    Does Noam Chomsky have permanent foot-in-mouth disease? It looks like that. In his latest, he almost outdoes himself. Yet his acolytes still print his nonsensical meanderings. The question, as we shall see, is why. On March 22nd, Lynn Parramore at Alternet posted an interview Chomsky had done with her at the blog of the Institute of New Economic Thinking. Apparently neither Parramore nor Alternet believe in fact checking anything before they post it. Since they do not, then we must.

    Parramore asked the professor emeritus about what he sees as continuities in politics and international relations. Citing Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the esteemed linguist said that a general rule would be “the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must.” When asked how he saw the rule being modified, Chomsky immediately started in on something that was false in and of itself and even more false as a mode of historical comparison. And Parramore did not just fail to call him out on anything; she never even asked a clarifying question.

    Chomsky said that there had been “some steps towards imposing constraints and limits on state violence. For the most part, they come from inside.” He then said that if you looked at the actions Kennedy and Johnson carried out in Vietnam, “they were possible because of almost complete lack of public attention.” He then went on to say that it was hard to stage an anti-war demonstration back in 1966 because it would be broken up with the support of the press.

    Where does one begin with such malarkey? First of all, note how the linguist immediately equates what Johnson did in Vietnam with what Kennedy did. Parramore did not ask: But Mr. Chomsky, there were no combat troops in Vietnam under Kennedy, and there was no Operation Rolling Thunder—the greatest air bombing campaign in history—under Kennedy. It was LBJ who instituted both. I, for one, would have liked to hear Chomsky answer that. But it was not to be. In reality, there was not a heck of a lot to protest until after Kennedy was killed.

    In fact, the protests really began in 1964. Maybe Chomsky forgot this, but planning began in March at Yale for demonstrations in May. The New York City socialist journal, The National Guardian, then announced its support for this movement. And in May, there were coordinated demonstrations all across the country including New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin. And, I don’t know how he missed it, but also in Boston. This was two years before Chomsky says it could not be done. That same month, the first draft card burning protest took place in New York City. That fall, Mario Savio began the free speech movement at UC Berkeley. This was a milestone in both campus organization and demonstrations. In December of that year, there was another coordinated series of anti-war demonstrations by several leftist groups. This time they occurred in more than a dozen cities across the country, from San Francisco to, again—need I add—Chomsky’s Boston. Maybe Chomsky was not part of these, and so he thinks they could not have happened without him?

    I won’t even begin to enumerate all the demonstrations that took place in 1965. It would take up too much space. But to name just one, the Students for a Democratic Society sponsored a march in April in Washington DC that had 25,000 participants. It was hosted by journalist I.F. Stone and featured entertainers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Phil Ochs. But the point is made: this is what a poor and slanted historian Chomsky is.

    The reason these demonstrations began to spread that year—and to grow in size and scope—was simple. President Johnson had now openly broken with Kennedy’s policy of no direct American military intervention in Indochina, something that professor James Blight has shown LBJ, in his own words, had been planning to do almost from the week after Kennedy had been killed. (See Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 304-14) This is what most historians call the cause-and-effect view of historical events. Chomsky can avoid it since he pretty much simply denies the events took place. And the questioner lets his adulteration of history slide.

    Chomsky then adds that by 1966, South Vietnam had been pretty much destroyed and the war had spread to other areas of Indochina. Again, to put it mildly, such a general statement is dubious. Operation Rolling Thunder had only been ongoing for a year and those bombing campaigns targeted the North. Further, when the North mounted the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, General Giap’s forces invaded well over thirty cities, all in the South. Therefore, many major population centers were in existence at that time—which was two years beyond when the professor says the country had been pretty much destroyed. What Chomsky is trying to state—that by the first year of Johnson’s escalation the country had been leveled—is pure polemical hyperbole. Which is why polemicists make very bad historians.

    The other part of the statement, that the war had spread to others areas, specifically Cambodia and Laos, is, for Chomsky, relatively accurate. Johnson almost immediately exceeded the limits Kennedy had formed in cross-border intelligence operations. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 447-48) But the actual air strikes against Cambodia and Laos did not begin until mid-December of 1965. These were sporadic in nature, and meant to disrupt supply lines into South Vietnam. Johnson’s Ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, visited Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia in December of 1967 to tell him that America had no desire to run any kind of military operations against Cambodia. (William Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 70) As any serious student of the war in Indochina knows, the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos did not begin in earnest until Richard Nixon was elected president. Within two months of his inauguration, the secret bombing of Cambodia had begun. It would go on for fourteen months. Within a year of its advent, Sihanouk would be deposed. This was the beginning of the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge.

    As the reader can see, Chomsky likes to use a loose form of historical revisionism. He transfers events that took place under LBJ to Kennedy; and those that took place under Nixon to Johnson. His is a kind of “anything goes” philosophy of historical study. Chomsky sticks everything into a blender and he comes out with a milkshake. Unfortunately for him, real historians do not work like this. A large part of what people like David Kaiser and John Newman have done is to draw distinctions so that there can be clear discernment of who was responsible for what.

    From here, Chomsky does something that is bizarre. He says that the Reagan administration tried to duplicate what Kennedy had done in Vietnam by the issuance of a White Paper about Central America. But somehow the White Paper was proven faulty by the Wall Street Journal and therefore there was no invasion of Central America. First of all, Kennedy never issued any “White Paper” about Vietnam. What I think Chomsky is referring to here is the 1961 Taylor/Rostow report which Kennedy used to debate the merits of American involvement in South Vietnam. Kennedy ended up overruling its recommendations. Against the advice of almost all of his advisors, he refused to enter combat troops into Vietnam. (Newman, p. 138) But prior to that, as Gordon Goldstein notes in his book, Lessons in Disaster, Kennedy had rejected at least seven previous attempts to do the same. (See pp. 47-65) At the same time, Kennedy then dispatched John Kenneth Galbraith to Saigon to write a report to counter Taylor/Rostow. That report was then delivered to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in April of 1962. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 132) This constituted the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. That plan culminated the next year with NSAM 263, which ordered the withdrawal of a thousand advisors. (Newman, p. 407) How one can compare a White House-commissioned and -backed public White Paper with a private trip report that the president himself ended up not just rejecting, but countering—this is Chomsky’s secret.

    Unchallenged by Parramore, Chomsky then jumps to the American invasion of Iraq. Here, Chomsky gets even stranger. He actually tries to say that the demonstrations against the Iraq War were successful. No joke. That in some way, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were restrained by these protests. Did Chomsky somehow forget ‘Shock and Awe’, Fallujah, Haditha?

    It’s a little surprising that Chomsky could write such a thing in the wake of two important articles that were just published at Consortium News about the Iraq War. On March 22nd, Nicolas J. S. Davies wrote an important essay which tries to estimate the total casualties that had been sustained by the Iraq War after 15 years. He came to the conclusion that the figure is about 2.4 million. The number is not final since the war is still going on. The invasion caused an explosion of terrorism and the creation of ISIS which demanded a new battle for Mosul. How can this be considered a success for the pre-war demonstrations? As I argued in my four-part review of the Burns-Novick PBS series The Vietnam War, one can make a cogent argument that the massive 1968-69 anti-war demonstrations did help bring an end to the war because, as Jeffrey Kimball has shown, they discouraged Nixon from implementing his plans for a large expansion of the war effort. But this was almost five years after Johnson committed American combat troops. As a point of comparison, there was one anti-war demonstration in 2008, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.

    The other article at Consortium News is by Nat Parry, the son of the site’s late founder Bob Parry. His article tries to measure just how bad the war has been for Iraq. As Parry notes, at the time of the 2003 invasion, “Iraq was a country that had already been devastated by a US-led war a decade earlier and crippling economic sanctions that caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis.” But in addition to forgetting that, Chomsky also managed to forget that on the first day of the war America hurled 400 cruise missiles at Baghdad. On the second day, this was repeated. Then an air bombing campaign ensued which entailed 1,700 air sorties. To accompany the invasion, there were 10,800 cluster bombs dropped. Many of these were fired into urban areas in March and April of 2003. In Bush’s mad attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, four bombs were dropped on a residential restaurant, leaving a 60-foot crater.

    Although the assault was officially over in April of 2003 and President Bush made his Mission Accomplished speech on May 1st, the war against the resistance was just beginning. Then there was also the residue of the illegal weapons that had been used, like phosphorus and depleted uranium. These kinds of weapons, plus the nighttime bombing that the Pentagon and CIA had kept from the press junkets at Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul, hid the fact that, as Parry describes them, those three cities had been largely reduced to rubble. By 2014, a former CIA Director had conceded that the nation of Iraq had basically been destroyed. As Michael Hayden stated, “I think Iraq has pretty much ceased to exist.” Hayden went on to say that it was now broken up into parts, which he did not think could be placed back together again.

    This was not the case with Vietnam. The war ended in 1975 and the country was reunified. Ten years later, Vietnam welcomed American investment. Does anyone think this will happen anywhere in the near future with Iraq? So what was Chomsky talking about with the “success” of those 2003 demonstrations? And the limitations placed on warfare? Can the man be serious?

    As I have pointed out previously, Noam Chomsky is not a historian. He is a propagandist. Historians try to find the truth about an historical event or era by sifting through the facts: documents, exhibits and testimony. They then create a thesis by inductive reasoning from the evidence. Chomsky does not do this. He creates a conclusion first, and then grabs onto anything he can think of to sustain it. Which is why, as I have shown, he is easy to disprove.

    But for me, that is not the worst part. The worst part are the people (like David Barsamian) and the forums (like Democracy Now) that have allowed him to ramble on, with no checks or balances on his blathering. The man needs an intervention, but none of his backers feel strong enough to give him one. Probably because they have been lulled into a zombie-like state by listening too long to his sputtering pontifications.

  • Desperate Measures in the Congo

    Desperate Measures in the Congo

    I

    “The Dark Continent”

    In his sweeping and revolutionary Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the 19th-century Prussian philosopher G. W. F. Hegel detailed a vision of history unfolding through the bold and decisive actions of what he deemed “world historical” personalities. Having seen Napoleon and his ornate retinue of generals parade through his hometown of Jena as a young man, Hegel was impressed by the singular power of individuals to shape history, and eventually developed this notion into his rarefied theory of how unseen forces find their expression in the actions of powerful leaders who themselves—unwittingly or actively—force the grand wheel of history to turn through its great dialectical arc.

    So compelling was this vision to late 19th-century Europeans, who stood at the apex of technological achievement in contrast to the developing world, that even today few realize Hegel’s version of human history is but one narrative in a vast tapestry of explanations as to how societies have organized themselves throughout the centuries. We also forget, at our peril, the pernicious implications of Hegel’s theory concerning non-Europeans, especially the retrograde, even worthless qualities he ascribes to those inhabiting the African continent. As he noted in his series of lectures presented at the University of Berlin from 1822-30, “Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value.” He concludes, after a lengthy digression on cannibalism, polygamy and the perpetual brutality among tribal sub-Saharan African groups, by claiming, “From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been.” (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 98)

    This patriarchal view held by many 19th-century European intellectuals was the cornerstone for the many justifications used to perpetuate the brutal colonization of the African continent. The colorful flags of Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal, England and Spain all shimmered in the hot African breeze at some point, continuously reaffirming from the colonizers’ perspective Hegel’s enduring vision of the infantile and helpless African peoples and their European “civilizers.” In this sense, the abject horror many historians have detailed at length in the Belgian Congo was not an aberration, but was more a crystalline and total distillation of the tenets of European racial subjugation as practiced elsewhere.

    In 1885 King Leopold II effectively declared the entire Congo basin his personal property, akin more to a medieval kingdom than a traditional colonial region like British India, for example, where to some extant the British were compelled to integrate aspects of local culture and politics into their own system. In the Belgian Congo, as Adam Hochschild and others have detailed, unrestrained brutality was normalized to such an extent that one might have forgotten that slavery had been universally abolished decades earlier. Established in 1885 at the Conference of Berlin, the “Free State of Congo” was ostensibly created to enrich the lives of its inhabitants, incapable, as Hegel noted, of managing their own affairs. And yet almost immediately this benevolent charter was reversed, with Leopold II using his mercenary Force Publique to maim, torture, and essentially re-enslave the native Africans of the Free State of Congo. Estimates vary, particularly due to the burning of records by the colonizers, but a conservative figure is that in his twenty-five year reign, nearly ten million Congolese were killed as a result of his policies, representing fifty percent of the 1880 population. During his reign of terror, Leopold and his provincial overseers extracted ivory, rubber, and other rare goods for export to Europe, personally enriching the king to the tune of 220 million francs ($1.1. billion today) by the estimates of the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal. (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 276) Incentivized through a tiered system of profit-maximization, the king’s men were rewarded with bonuses and promotions for resources gathered. Reluctant or underperforming Congolese were subjected to pitiless horrors, including having their limbs hacked off or enduring a hundred lashes of the whip, most of which proved fatal. The Force Publique also kidnapped villagers’ wives, who were frequently beaten and raped, holding them as ransom to induce workers to secure their release through reaching their rubber quotas. Herded like cattle into slave labor camps and paid just enough to purchase subsistence rations from their overlords, they remained powerless to resist Leopold’s private army, cordoned off in their remote Congo basin by armed outposts, attack dogs and a complacent international community at a time when information was the stuff of rogue travelers’ tales and stories told by escaped prisoners, rather than mass media headlines. In the United States, it was the lone voice of an African American military officer, Colonel George Washington Williams, who, having visited the Free State of Congo just years after its creation, felt compelled to openly criticize the regime in the international forums, declaring the Belgian king guilty of crimes against humanity:

    All the crimes perpetrated in the Congo have been done in your name, and you must answer at the bar of Public Sentiment for the misgovernment of a people, whose lives and fortunes were entrusted to you by the august Conference of Berlin, 1884—1885. I now appeal to the Powers which committed this infant State to your Majesty’s charge, and to the great States which gave it international being; and whose majestic law you have scorned and trampled upon, to call and create an International Commission to investigate the charges herein preferred in the name of Humanity, Commerce, Constitutional Government and Christian Civilization. (Washington, “Open Letter to King Leopold of the Congo”, 1890)

    Tales of his terrible and sinister exploits were the stuff of legend, and it was Leopold’s Free State of Congo that inspired author Joseph Conrad to write his famous novella Heart of Darkness, in which a distant and jaded Marlowe tells his shipmates his terrifying story of going up-river into the seething heart of colonial Central Africa. Yet from this tragic past, as the twentieth century dawned and Hegel’s dialectic of history moved the peoples of the world forward in the wake of the Second World War, the powerful and latent forces of human emancipation which had been awaiting their chance to check colonial oppression found their expression in a charismatic Congolese intellectual who intimately understood the powers arrayed against an autonomous Congo.

    II

    A New Hope

    The President observed that in the last twelve months, the world has developed a kind of ferment greater than he could remember in recent times. The Communists are trying to take control of this, and have succeeded to the extent that … in many cases [people] are now saying that the Communists are thinking of the common man while the United States is dedicated to supporting outmoded regimes. (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958—1960, XIV, Document 157.)

    The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) had been founded and led by Patrice Lumumba. Its aim was to seek the Congo’s independence from Belgium. In December of 1959, the MNC won a majority of local elections and participated at a conference in Brussels in late January of 1960. That conference set June 30, 1960 as the date for an independent Congo after national elections for new leadership were held in May. The MNC won the May elections. Lumumba was to be Congo’s first prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu the first president.

    In an impassioned and catalyzing speech to a crowd of thousands of newly liberated Congolese men and women, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s newly elected thirty-five year old prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, captivated his constituents by recounting the significance of what had just been achieved:

    We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us. That was our lot for the eighty years of colonial rule and our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten. We have experienced forced labour in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones.

    Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were “Negroes”. Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as “tu,” not because he was a friend, but because the polite “vous” was reserved for the white man? We have seen our lands seized in the name of ostensibly just laws, which gave recognition only to the right of might. We have not forgotten that the law was never the same for the white and the black, that it was lenient to the ones, and cruel and inhuman to the others.

    We have experienced the atrocious sufferings, being persecuted for political convictions and religious beliefs, and exiled from our native land: our lot was worse than death itself. We have not forgotten that in the cities the mansions were for the whites and the tumbledown huts for the blacks; that a black was not admitted to the cinemas, restaurants and shops set aside for “Europeans”; that a black travelled in the holds, under the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

    Who will ever forget the shootings which killed so many of our brothers, or the cells into which were mercilessly thrown those who no longer wished to submit to the regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation used by the colonialists as a tool of their domination?

    All that, my brothers, brought us untold suffering. But we, who were elected by the votes of your representatives, representatives of the people, to guide our native land, we, who have suffered in body and soul from the colonial oppression, we tell you that henceforth all that is finished with. The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed and our beloved country’s future is now in the hands of its own people.

    Freed from human bondage by a reluctant King Baudouin of Belgium in June of 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo stood poised to capture the imagination of still-colonized and recently decolonized regions throughout the African continent. With Kasavubu as president and Lumumba as prime minister, along with a freely appointed parliamentary body, the Congolese provinces were taking the first decisive steps towards freedom. In the post-Free State of Congo period, stretching from its dissolution in 1908 to the 1960 creation of the Democratic Republic of Congo, although the abject horrors of Leopold II’s slave-labor program had largely subsided, the people of the Congo were still living under the thumb of their European overlords. In this interregnum period, education for black Africans was provided by white Catholic missionaries who proselytized their vision of what good Christians were to endure in the face of hardship. No African living in the Congo during this fifty-year period could vote, and apartheid was the default social framework in which blacks and whites co-existed. For the Congolese, these times were “free” only symbolically.

    But as many have pointed out, most recently John Newman in Countdown to Darkness, Belgium had schemed in advance to make sure that the free state of Congo would have an unsuccessful launch. The mechanism would be fouled to the degree that Belgium would have to retake the country in order to save it from a descent into chaos. As Newman points out, it was not just Belgium, but the USA that was unprepared to accept the success of a newly independent African country, especially one as large and as mineral-rich as Congo. Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, had smeared Lumumba’s character at a May 5, 1960 National Security Council (NSC) meeting. Dulles also suggested that there was “Some possibility that a movement might develop in the rich Katanga area for separation from the Congo.” (Newman, p. 152, all references are to the Kindle version) In other words, the foreign economic mining interests in Congo had planned the Katanga secession before independence day. And Dulles knew about it.

    On the day of Congo’s independence, there was another NSC meeting. This time Dulles was accompanied by Deputy Director Charles Cabell. Cabell now stated that Lumumba’s government would be communist-oriented and that Lumumba had already “solicited communist funds to help him obtain his present political position.” (Newman, p. 155) In other words, the CIA was doing its best to poison Lumumba’s character at the higher levels of governance in Washington.

    Within weeks of Lumumba’s pivotal June 30, 1960 speech, tensions within the Congolese state’s numerous and disparate factions and its multiracial army began to spill over into the general population. In sectors of the Congolese army, many black soldiers sought the removal of white officers, who they viewed as a cruel reminder of the colonial past, and demanded increased pay, commensurate with a professional army defending a newly unified and free nation. Katanga Province soon seceded from the Democratic Republic of Congo, only weeks after its creation, with its leader, Moise Tshombe, painting a picture of Prime Minister Lumumba as a radical. The mineral-rich region in the southeastern reaches of the Congo contained vast stores of precious metals, from copper to gold to the uranium used to build the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan at the end of WWII. Diamonds were also in large supply in Katanga, making it a truly invaluable region in the eyes of the colonizers. Indeed, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, along with Belgian military and intelligence support, began to get its hands dirty in Central African developments. Having sent cash, supplies, and the tacit support of intervention should their anti-Lumumba puppets fail to secure their tenuous hold during the crisis, the Western powers were instrumental in assuring the Democratic Republic of Congo would be stillborn. To tilt the scales even more against Lumumba, all of the country’s gold reserves had been transferred to Brussels prior to freedom day. And Brussels would not allow their transfer to Leopoldville. (Newman, p. 156)

    III

    Hope Dims

    On July 9, 1960 Belgium began to airlift paratroopers into Congo. With the Belgian troops already there, this now amounted to almost four thousand men. The next day, the provisional president of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, requested Belgian troops to restore order. To counter this, Lumumba and Kasavubu requested to meet with Tshombe, but the rebel leader of Katanga refused to let their plane land there. (Newman, p. 157) The Congolese troops now began to open fire on the Belgians and other Europeans. The Belgians returned the fire and shot scores of Congolese. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 36) Lumumba now asked for American help in stopping the insurgency and the attempt by Belgium to reinstate control. Eisenhower turned the request down. (Mahoney, p. 37) On July 13, 1960 Belgian troops occupied the airport at Leopoldville, and shortly after this, Lumumba severed relations with Brussels. One day later, Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations, shepherded through a resolution to send UN troops to the area. Hammarskjold also called on Belgium to remove its forces from the theater. This was the first time the UN had taken on such a mission. Hammarskjold was trying to make good on his intent to make the United Nations a forum where newly liberated countries could let their voices be heard against the established powers of the world.

    But Hammarskjold had the deck stacked against him. The largest mining operation in Congo was Union Minière, a joint Belgian/British enterprise. When the struggle broke out, the Belgians now began to pay business taxes not to Congo, but to Tshombe and Katanga. The Russians had also expressed their disappointment in what Belgium and the United States had and had not done. Dulles used this proclamation to turn the conflict into a Cold War struggle. (Newman, pp. 158-59) Lumumba and Kasavubu did not make things easier for him; they sent Hammarskjold a written ultimatum that demanded the Belgians be removed by July 19th. Furthermore, if this did not occur, they would then turn to the USSR in order to accomplish the task. (See Foreign Relations of the United States, hereafter FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 32) As both Richard Mahoney and John Newman have noted, this demand sent the NSC into overdrive. It sealed the CIA’s objective of turning a nationalist independence movement into a Cold War crucible, and on July 19th, the American ambassador to Belgium sent the following cable to Allen Dulles:

    Lumumba has now maneuvered himself into position of opposition to the West, resistance to United Nations and increasing dependence on Soviet Union … Only prudent therefore, to plan on basis that Lumumba government threatens our vital interests in Congo and Africa generally. A principal objective of our political and diplomatic action must therefore be to destroy Lumumba government as now constituted, but at same time we must find or develop another horse to back which would be acceptable in rest of Africa and defensible against Soviet political attack. (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 136)

    The problem with this cable as sent by diplomat William Burden—a Vanderbilt fortune heir who had bought his way into the State Department—was that almost every statement in it was false. As Mahoney has shown, Lumumba was actually still trying to communicate with the USA at this time. Similarly, he was not resistant to Hammarskjold; he just wanted the UN Chief to perform with alacrity. And he was not dependent on the USSR. But further, his request to Moscow for supplies would have been prevented if the United States had acceded to his earlier cable to Washington. Finally, Lumumba did not constitute any danger to American interests in Congo or Africa. In fact, Burden confabulated the first part of the cable in order to jump to the second part, namely that the USA should now be prepared to take terminal actions against both Lumumba and Congo and should begin to search for a new leader there.

    As Senator John Kennedy once noted, it was this kind of State Department performance—backing the imperial powers while discounting the hopes of the native people—that was ultimately self-defeating, as France had seen at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. There, as Senator Kennedy had said, we had wrongly allied ourselves with “the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire.” (Mahoney, p. 15) This is a major reason why, in 1958, Kennedy purchased one hundred copies of that prophetic novel about Vietnam, The Ugly American, and passed it out to each of his Senate colleagues. But, unfortunately for Lumumba and the Congo, Kennedy was not yet president.

    The Burden communiqué seemed to inspire Dulles to scale even further heights in smearing Lumumba as not just a communist, but in league with Egypt, the USSR and the communist party in Belgium. (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 140). The allegation of Lumumba´s allegiance to Egypt was natural, since the CIA considered Gamel Abdel Nasser too leftist and, according to author William Blum, had contemplated overthrowing him in 1957. Nasser was also a pan-Arabist, and therefore it was claimed that the union of Nasser and Lumumba could unleash a Red Horde across Africa and the Middle East. This was all propaganda. As Jonathan Kwitny later wrote in his seminal essay on Lumumba, there was never any credible evidence that Lumumba was a communist, or that he had any interest in proselytizing that dogma either in Congo or across Africa. (Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 72) But Dulles was not going to let the minor matter of evidence get in his way. At this same NSC meeting of July 21st, he now said that with Lumumba “we were faced with a person who was a Castro or worse.” (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 140) Since President Eisenhower had already approved a plan to overthrow Castro, and Dulles was privy to CIA plots to assassinate him, the CIA Director was now playing his ace in the hole. With that card, Dulles was now clearly in opposition to Hammarskjold.

    In the latter part of July, Lumumba—further contradicting the Burden memo—decided to visit America. He arrived in New York to speak with Hammarskjold, and then went to Washington DC. Eisenhower avoided meeting him there by staying out of town in Newport, Connecticut. Lumumba told Secretary of State Christian Herter that Tshombe did not represent the people of Katanga and that Belgium has essentially stolen Congo’s gold assets and left the country with no treasury. (Newman, p. 218) He therefore requested a loan. Herter dodged all these requests by saying that these would all be considered by Hammarskjold and the USA would have input into these decisions—all the while Dulles, as previously noted, was working at odds with the United Nations.

    Lumumba now expressed disagreement with Hammarskjold over the terms of UN intervention. He demanded that the UN expel all non-African troops and enter Katanga to stop its secession. (Newman, p. 221) If not, then he would turn to the USSR to do so. The Russian aid began arriving just after mid-August. This included military advisors and supplies, by both ship and plane. With this, all hope for Lumumba and Congo’s independence went down the drain. There was now open talk in cables about Congo experiencing a classic communist takeover, and how the United States must “take action to avoid another Cuba”, and how “the commie design now seems suddenly clear.” (Mahoney, p. 40; Newman p. 222)

    All of this culminated in the August 18th NSC meeting. This meeting consisted of advisors like Maurice Stans and Douglas Dillon turning Lumumba into some kind of Red Menace. And this kind of talk eventually got the best of President Eisenhower. As Newman informs us, the turnaround time for NSC steno notes was usually a day. At the most it would extend to 3-4 days. In this case, the transcription took one week. In 1975, fifteen years after the meeting, the transcriber Robert Johnson decided to explain why the draft memo of that meeting took so long. Johnson testified that during the meeting Eisenhower gave an order for the assassination of Lumumba. (Newman, p. 224) After checking with a superior, Johnson decided not to include the order in the transcript. This issue was then followed up on a week later at another meeting. But as Newman has discovered, the Church Committee interview notes of a participant who conveyed Eisenhower’s interest in following up his assassination request with covert action have now disappeared. Luckily, however, Newman copied the notes back in 1994 before they were removed, so we know that after one week to think about it, Eisenhower had not changed his mind on the issue. (Newman, p. 232)

    The day after the August 25th meeting, Allen Dulles composed what can only be called an assassination cable. It reads as follows:

    In high quarters here it is the clear-cut conclusion that if Lumumba continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.

    On the second page of the cable, Dulles authorizes the station chief in Leopoldville to spend up to $100,000 to carry out the operation without consulting headquarters about the specifics. On the same day Dulles sent the cable, Director of Plans Dick Bissell talked to the head of the CIA’s Africa Division. He told Bronson Tweedy to start thinking about “reviewing possibilities, assets, and discussing them with headquarters in detail.” (Newman, pp. 236-240)

    On September 5th, 1960, only months after Lumumba’s grand speech, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kasavubu, dismissed him on Radio Brazzaville, officially of his own volition, but in actuality, with the urging of his CIA and Belgian intelligence handlers. (Stephen Weismann, “Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba’s Murder,” Washington Post 07/21/2002)

    Kasavubu had been a reluctant supporter of Lumumba, and Western strategists were quick to play on his hesitations regarding Congolese independence. For months leading up to this announcement, UN Undersecretary in Charge of General Assembly, Andrew Cordier, later president of Columbia University, had been coaching the Congolese president, and carefully monitoring developments as he prodded him to fire Lumumba. (Carole Collins, “The Cold War Comes to Africa: Cordier and the 1960s Congo Crisis,” Journal of International Affairs, 6/22/1993) After this bold radio dismissal, Cordier ordered U.N. troops into the region, with orders to ostensibly shut down the airport and radio stations in Brazzaville. As Collins notes, however, there was a backhanded motive to this move:

    These actions primarily hurt Lumumba because only Kasavubu enjoyed access to radio facilities in the neighboring state of Brazzaville. Similarly, Kasavubu’s allies were allowed to use the ostensibly closed airport to travel into the Congolese interior to mobilize support for the president while Lumumba’s supporters were grounded. Near the end of his three-week stay in early September, Cordier authorized the United Nations to offer food and pay to the Congolese Army. This action allowed Mobutu—a one-time Lumumba aide who had been appointed chief-of-staff of the army by Kasavubu just days earlier—to win credit for paying the soldiers their past-due salaries, and to pave the way for his coup attempt a few days later. The combination of U.N. and U.S. support was pivotal for Mobutu’s subsequent seizure of power.

    Colonel Joseph Mobutu, another key figure in the tripartite struggle for indigenous Congolese independence, was, like Kasavubu, not altogether enthusiastic about Lumumba’s historic and sweeping proclamations of independence. Now the titular head of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s armed forces, after a recent promotion by Kasavubu, Mobutu was essentially an opportunist from all extant evidence. Carefully monitoring local political developments and the slow but steady marshaling of Western armed forces in the sweltering jungle basin, he hedged his risk and quietly stood poised to make his bold power play. As Brian Urquhart recalls from his station at Leopoldville on the night of Kasavubu’s announcement,

    Mobutu appeared once again at our headquarters, this time in uniform. He said he was tired and nervous and needed a quiet place to relax. Our office was already jammed with jittery suppliants, so I put him in my bedroom. At his request, I lent him a radio, adding half a bottle of whiskey to cheer him up. Some time later, I looked in on our uninvited guest. He seemed to be enjoying the whiskey all right, as Radio Leopoldville continued to play the cha cha cha. But then the music stopped, and a voice was heard to say that he was suspending the president, the prime minister and the parliament and taking over the country.

    ‘C’est moi!’ Mobutu exclaimed, triumphantly pointing to the radio. ‘C’est moi!’

    I don’t know when I have been more irritated. I told Mobutu that if he wanted to make a coup d’état, the place for him was in the streets with his followers, not listening to the radio under false pretenses in someone else’s bedroom. We then threw him out.” (Brian Urquhart, “Mobutu and Tshombe: Two Congolese Rogues,” UN News Character Sketches)

    By the end of September, 1960, Mobutu and his remaining loyal soldiers and officers from the former Belgian Congo Army became the western Congo basin’s de facto functioning political body. This had been done in agreement with the Leopoldville CIA station chief, Larry Devlin. Devlin had also authorized Mobutu to eliminate Lumumba and had guaranteed him a large sum in French francs to do so. (Newman, p. 268) To the east, Lumumba’s deputy, Antoine Gizenga, assumed a provisional role as the leader of the short-lived Stanleyville government. To the south, Tshombe still held onto the Katanga and South Kasai provinces. Patrice Lumumba himself remained under house arrest, having been detained on September 16th by U.N. peacekeeping troops, ostensibly for his own safety.

    But the CIA had still not given up. In September, the Agency had three agents in Congo and their shared mission was to assassinate Lumumba. These were contract assassins QJ/WIN, WIROGUE, and the CIA headquarters chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was to prepare a toxic agent and deliver it to Congo. From there, Devlin was to recruit a Lumumba aide to insert it in the prime minister’s toothpaste. If that failed, Devlin was also trying to recruit an assassin to break into the safe haven the UN had provided for Lumumba and simply shoot him. These were in addition to Devlin’s agreement with Mobutu. Therefore, by the end of September, the CIA had five different methods on hand to kill Lumumba. But at the end of the month, Tweedy cabled Devlin that they must choose a plot that would conceal America’s role. (Newman, p. 268)

    IV

    “Mad Mike”

    To detail the full sweep of the Congo Crisis and its myriad twists and betrayals is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say, after Tshombe’s secession of Katanga province and Mobutu’s and Kasavubu’s betrayals of Lumumba, the prime minister was surrounded by hostile forces, and desperately sought outside help. Among these were the United States, which categorically rejected his pleas, and the Soviet Union, which agreed, at least ideologically, with his fight for freedom. But they were initially reluctant to commit armed forces for fear of escalating the regional conflict into a larger strategic battle with the West.

    President Tshombe, who still held onto Katanga in January 1961, had the most to lose and the likeliest chance of receiving outside help, given his region’s enormous natural resources. One of his initial strategies involved creating a group of 700 to 800 foreign mercenaries, both for personal protection and as a stopgap unit to quell any potential attacks from neighboring provinces on Katanga. Belgians, Rhodesians, South Africans, and French nationals answered the call; for a decent wage, they could partake in a quixotic adventure in the Congo, led by their much-loved and no-nonsense Thomas Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare, a retired WWII captain who promoted himself to major upon answering Tshombe’s call.

    Having served in the Second World War as an infantryman with the Royal Army’s London Rifles, Hoare was a veteran of the North African and Italian theaters of combat. After a brief stint in the peacetime army, he relocated to warmer climates, finally settling down in Durban, South Africa in the 1950s. Moonlighting as a safari guide and a used car salesman, he was looking for something new when he heard from a close friend that Tshombe was looking for mercenaries. Hoare flew to Katanga, and quickly placed an ad in a local newspaper. Within weeks he had mustered a few dozen able-bodied men. Among their colorful ranks were an ex-Wehrmacht soldier who flaunted his iron cross medal on deployments, former British and Australian soldiers from WWII, local Katangese soldiers trying to protect their homesteads and families, members of the former Belgian occupation and security forces, and a few former South African police officers. Hoare was quick to note that his men were seriously lacking in actual battlefield experience, with many faking feats of valor and claiming decorations and accomplishments that, when investigated, more often than not proved fictional. Through a punishing physical training regimen and a cursory demonstration of fundamental battlefield tactics and command protocols, “Mad Mike” whipped his infamous “4 Commando” (later 5 Commando) into basic shape by the early months of 1961, with his headquarters situated in the provincial capital of Elizabethville. He and a former Royal Army officer, Alistair Wicks, each led a company of sixty men, with Hoare in nominal command of the two units. (Mike Hoare, The Road to Katanga: A Congo Mercenary’s Personal Memoir)

    Initially tasked with securing Elizabethville against raiding parties of the local Baluba tribe, Hoare’s account is half Arthur Conan Doyle novel, half military memoir, but always gripping:

    The column had bogged down in the heart of enemy territory. The track had collapsed after days of torrential rains and more than twenty trucks had sunk into the mud up to their axles. We were surrounded by an unseen army of Baluba warriors, a tough and merciless foe. That day we had lost one of my men from a wound inflicted by a poisoned arrow. He had lasted less than sixty minutes and was one of my first casualties. Morale among my Katangese drivers was at rock bottom. My unit, 4 Commando, which was escorting the column, was on edge, several of the men down with malaria, the remainder near exhaustion from lack of sleep. (Hoare, 4)

    Initially tasked with supporting transport columns carrying food and supplies to the beleaguered Belgian security forces fighting in Katanga, Hoare’s 4 Commando eventually earned the trust of the Elizabethville government enough to serve as a small but effective personal army for Tshombe, who funded the adventure through the previously mentioned Union Minière, an enormously rich mining conglomerate based in Katanga. With access to nearly unlimited ammunition, modern Belgian assault rifles and belt-fed machine guns, and a motley assortment of military jeeps and half-ton trucks, Hoare’s group of foreign legionnaires was a truly frightening sight for an indigenous uprising armed with 19th-century shotguns, bows and arrows, and a mystical courage imbued in them by local witch doctors. For many of the Baluba, who were 4 Commando’s principal opponents in the early days of his deployment, a ritual dance, along with the ceremonial drinking of beer and smoking of marijuana, combined with the soothing rhythmic words of their shamans, steeled them against the commandos. Hoare noted that, while the notion that Western bullets passed through the Baluba was obviously absurd, their belief in this was fueled only in part by wishful thinking and mysticism; in previous uprisings before the declaration of Congolese independence, Belgian security forces would often fire blanks into crowds of Balubas who were marshaling to rebel.

    A man of average height and wiry build, with slicked-back blonde hair and sharp features, Thomas Michael Hoare was the spitting image of the great white hunter, which, as mentioned before, he once was. With his decorative beret, rolled up sleeves, and ubiquitous radio receiver in hand, he seemed archaic even in the mid 1960s. And yet this old-fashioned, Rule Britannia mentality was probably what saved him and his men’s lives in the depths of the jungle. Under no illusions regarding the challenges arrayed against him—especially the health risks presented by sustained deployments in the jungle without modern medical facilities—he was equally curious, in that colonial way, about the innate differences between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. While still under the same spell as Hegel, Kipling, Spencer, and other proponents of racial hierarchical thinking, to his credit, “Mad Mike” was more open to the African experience, if solely for practical considerations. Like an integrated unit in Vietnam, or a professional football team whose members must put their differences aside, if only temporarily, 4 Commando ultimately served, like the pirate ships of the 16th Century, as a strange meeting place for people of all walks of life. Hoare exercised executive control over the expedition, and in the case of a man who murdered a young Congolese boy after numerous other infractions, was not averse to summary execution. Another soldier under his command, who had raped and killed a local Katangese woman, was lined up in front of the trucks on the side of a house; Hoare knew the man was a semi-professional soccer player back in Europe, and saw fit to pull out his pistol and personally shoot off both of the man’s big toes.

    To these ends, throughout the early months following Katanga’s secession, Hoare’s motley crew slogged through the rugged Katanga backwoods, driving through monsoon downpours and blistering heat, setting up camp at night in some of the world’s most desolate regions, firing bright green illuminating flares at the sounds of potential raiding parties gathering in the jungle, but more often than not, firing blindly at imagined armies where only wildlife and rustling bush existed. Their first real encounter with the enemy, ironically, was an armed standoff in the village of Nyunga with U.N. peacekeeping troops. Having been placed there at the behest of the Feb. 21, 1961 U.N. Security Council decision to prevent a full-blown Congolese civil war, a detachment of Malayan soldiers with a platoon of armored cars ordered Hoare and his men to stand down. In the night, while the two forces stealthily checked their weapons and sandbagged their positions across the town square, Hoare’s radioman received a report from Albertville HQ that the U.N was very likely going to arrest 4 Commando and intern them in Leopoldville; all Belgian and foreign mercenaries, under the U.N. Security Council’s resolution, were considered hostile combatants. After a brief meeting with the Malayan colonel in charge of the U.N. detachment, Hoare had to think on his feet. He told the officer he would briefly consult with his men and try to forgo the inevitable and likely suicidal shootout with a heavily armed professional army. After walking across the town square and debriefing his men in his makeshift headquarters, seven of which wanted to surrender, he ordered a breakout. Those wishing to avoid capture would cut a mad dash across town as the others approached the checkpoint to surrender. They would scatter and rush through the jungle to a prearranged rendezvous point a few miles away and take it from there. Hoare checked his compass, grabbed his rifle, blew his whistle and they were off.

    V

    Plausible Deniability

    As long as Lumumba stayed in his UN-guarded safe haven he was relatively secure from any attempt by Mobutu to arrest him, for the simple reason that Hammarskjold’s representative would not allow the warrant to be served. Lumumba had survived several futile attempts by the CIA’s Executive Action program to eliminate him. For example, QJWIN and WIROGUE had been recruited through the CIA’s Staff D, which came under the control of William Harvey in 1960. Director of Plans Dick Bissell had himself offered the job of case officer on the operation to at least two agents and they both turned it down. But the second one, Justin O’Donnell, did agree to run an operation to politically neutralize Lumumba. The opportunity came when, under intense lobbying by America and England, the UN decided to seat Kasavubu’s delegation. This occurred just when Lumumba’s following was gaining strength in Congo. So Lumumba decided to arrange his escape to Stanleyville, his political base on the evening of November 27, 1960. (Mahoney, p. 55)

    Devlin now conferred with Mobutu to plot the paths that Lumumba would have to take in order to make it to Stanleyville. The CIA helped Mobutu set up checkpoints along river crossings and to block certain roads. (Mahoney, p. 56) On November 30th, QJ/WIN offered to go to Stanleyville to kill Lumumba himself. But within 24 hours of that offer, Lumumba was captured in the rebel province of Kasai. (Newman, p. 295) Fearing that killing him on their own soil would provoke a full-blown uprising, his captors decided to send him to his certain torture and death at the hands of the rulers of Katanga province. He was moved from a temporary holding barracks in Thysville to Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga, where his previous colonizers, the Belgians, were waiting with their close friend and president, Moise Tshombe. Having contemplated killing him through a tube of poisoned toothpaste only months earlier, the CIA was relieved at news of his capture and subsequent murder, which they helped orchestrate. Indeed, Sydney Gottlieb, the American witch doctor who pioneered many of the Central Intelligence Agency’s lethal potions and covert execution methods for ZR/RIFLE (the codename of the central assassination arm of the CIA), had only weeks earlier flown in from Europe to personally deliver the goods. (NY Times 12/11/2008)

    After a kangaroo court and short military trial which accused him of inciting a revolt, Lumumba, along with his two escaped aides who had all been beaten and sadistically abused throughout the night, was lined up against a tree and shot by a Belgian firing squad. President Tshombe personally oversaw the execution. After killing his two supporters, the Belgians and their Katangese paramilitary officers dumped them in shallow graves, later deciding to disinter them, dissolve their bodies in sulphuric acid, and grind their bones into a fine powder to forever erase them from history. When the sulphuric acid ran out, what was left of the corpses was set afire. (Newman, p. 296) This happened three days before John Kennedy’s inauguration. The news of his death was kept from Kennedy for almost one month. Whether this was by accident or by design, it is a fact that once Kennedy was in office his policy drastically altered Eisenhower’s. And it would have favored Lumumba.

    The murder of Patrice Lumumba made it much easier for a continuation of neocolonial policies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In one fell swoop it laid waste to the nascent progressive hopes of a people essentially freed from over a hundred years of brutal colonial slavery, and paved the way for the rise of figures like Joseph Mobutu, who would later rule the Congo until 1996, becoming a billionaire and a brutal despot. Mobutu was a great friend of Washington, a tremendous ally to the CIA, and the bane of African nationalists seeking the practical, achievable vision of figures like Lumumba, who could have stood as a beacon of hope for a Pan-African unity of purpose against their white European overlords in this time of turmoil and decolonization. With the murder only months later of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold—and Susan Williams’ book proves it was a murder—the last best measures for preventing a downward spiral of the DRC were lost. When his airplane, engulfed in flames, crashed into the jungle outside Ndola airport as he was attempting to land and begin ceasefire talks, one of the few honest statesman from the European power structure who was truly concerned about the fate of the Congo was lost. As Richard Mahoney notes in his fine book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Kennedy made a strong effort to try to keep Congo independent after Hammarskjold’s death. (See further Dodd and Dulles vs Kennedy in Africa) For as Greg Poulgrain revealed in The Incubus of Intervention, Kennedy and Hammarskjold had made a secret alliance to do all they could to keep Congo and Indonesia free from imperialism. Kennedy did his best to maintain that pledge after Hammarskjold was assassinated. (See Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs The Power Elite)

    Epilogue: Why Congo Matters Today

    As Jonathan Kwitny noted in Endless Enemies, after his death Lumumba became a hero in Africa. One could find his name affixed to avenues, schools, squares and parks. As Kwitny wrote: “Lumumba is a hero to Africans not because he promoted socialism, which he didn’t, but because he resisted foreign intervention. He stood up to outsiders, if only by getting himself killed.” (Kwitny, p. 72)

    But there is also a larger, more epochal aspect to what happened to Lumumba and Congo. This has to do with being a historical marker for Africa as it came out of the second Age of Colonialism. Again, Kwitny eloquently summarizes it:

    The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest and the most unnecessary blight on the record of this new era is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their ‘democracy’ from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Kwitny, p. 75)

    One cannot understand why the so-called “Third World” remains just that if one does not confront the very harsh realities of episodes from mid-century U.S. foreign policy like the CIA’s attempts to kill Patrice Lumumba. Though mainstream media outlets eventually admit to our sad and tragic “mistakes” made in the distant past and point to “startling revelations” about this and that player and agency involved, they fail to admit the obvious: The United States, for its entire post-WWII history, up to the publication of this article, has almost entirely suppressed, held-back, or outright destroyed freedom-seeking, nationalistic movements on a global scale. It does this through a variety of means, be they the actual targeted assassination of a movement’s leader, the depreciation of a nation’s currency, the overthrow of a regime through a proxy army or CIA-backed coup, or a traditional military invasion.

    This is a painful but necessary fact for its citizens to internalize, seeing as it runs counter to almost everything we are told about America in school, on the radio, or in the news. It is acceptable to critique the power structure insofar as that critique points to a technical glitch, a rogue personality, or a tactical error, as in the mainstream media´s common admission now that the Iraq War was a “mistake.” There are no mistakes at that level. The mistake was intended to be a mistake. Destabilization of a region, like the Middle East, or in our case, central Africa, is extremely helpful to people who seek to benefit from chaos. It was enormously profitable for mining interests in the Congo that the region fell into a perpetual civil war or under a brutal dictatorship. It was equally lucrative for hundreds of thousands of Indonesians to be slaughtered by Suharto’s death squads, seeing as parts of his nation contained hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of gold veins. It was a strategic victory for nations like Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others on the Project for a New American Century’s list to be decimated since this opened the way for greater geopolitical leverage against other superpowers like Russia and China, while subtly flooding the southern reaches of Europe with refugees, and spawning groups like ISIS and ISIL. What a more honest assessment of U.S. foreign policy would note is that the United States, as Martin Luther King famously noted, still remains the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and yet the average citizen within its borders is blissfully unaware of this fact; and is equally unaware that it was a statement like that which likely got King killed by the very government he sought to change. Like Lumumba, figures like Dr. King, President Kennedy, and Dag Hammarskjold paid the ultimate price for seeking to effect change in the developing world and at home in America’s impoverished communities. And it is this sinister, plausibly deniable ugliness of the United States that is largely to blame.

    Editor’s note: the following feature appeared in 2016, and speaks directly to the theme of the Congo’s (and Africa’s) continuing relevance today.

    How the World Runs on Looting the Congo

    Addendum (05.01.2018)

    A new document courtesy of David Josephs.

    This document indicates just how involved Kennedy was in the colossal Congo crisis. He is actually leading the UN effort, not the other way around. After the murder of Hammarskjold, he appears to have taken over the Secretary General’s initiative there as the United Nations commitment was slackening.

    Or, click here: RIF 176-10036-10001

  • Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed

     

  • Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

    Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

    Was there ever a person who was so hidden from public view in 1963, yet ended up being such a key character in the JFK case than James Angleton? Offhand, the only other character in the saga I can think of to rival him is David Phillips. Which puts Angleton in some rather select company. But what makes the Angelton instance even odder is that, unlike with Phillips, there have been at least three other books based upon Angleton’s career. To my knowledge there has been no biography of Phillips yet published.

    The veil around Jim Angleton began to be dropped in December of 1974. At this time, CIA Director William Colby had decided that Angleton had to go. Since Angleton had been handed carte blanche powers first by CIA Director Allen Dulles, and then by Richard Helms, he was not willing to leave quietly. So Colby had to force him out. He first gave a speech about certain CIA abuses before the Council on Foreign Relations. He then directly leaked details about Angleton’s role in Operation MH Chaos to New York Times reporter Sy Hersh. MH Chaos was a massive program that spied on the political left in the United States for a number of years. Combined with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, they composed a lethal one two punch to dissident groups on issues like civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

    Colby’s leaks to Hersh did the trick and Angleton was forced to resign at the end of 1974. That timing coincided with what some have called the “Season of Inquiry”. This refers to the series of investigations of the CIA, the FBI and the JFK assassination that took place after the exposures of the Watergate scandal. Specifically, these were the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The author of the book under discussion, Jefferson Morley, goes through these to show how Angleton became a star attraction for some public inquiries. Angleton did not handle these proceedings very well, with consequences for his own reputation. As we will see, in the wake of his exposure he made one enigmatic comment that would haunt the literature on the JFK case forever.

    It was these appearances that likely led to the beginning of the literature on the legendary chief of counter-intelligence. Wilderness of Mirrors was a dual biography of both Angleton and William Harvey by newspaper reporter David Martin, published in 1980. Considering the problems with classification, it was a candid and acute portrait for that time period.

    Several years later, two books on Angleton were published in rapid succession. In 1991, Tom Mangold published Cold Warrior. Mangold’s book was a milestone in the field and remains a valuable contribution not just on Angleton but on CIA studies to this day. Somehow, Mangold got several Agency insiders to cooperate with him in a devastating expose of the damage Angleton had wreaked on the Agency and its allies. This was done through his almost pathological allegiance to a man named Anatoliy Golitsyn. Golitsyn was a Russian KGB operative who had been working as a vice counsel in the Helsinki embassy when he decided to defect at Christmas, 1961. He warned that any other defectors who followed would be sent by the KGB to discredit him. He prophesied about the presence of a high-level mole in the American government. He then demanded audiences with the FBI, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president of the United States and intelligence chiefs of foreign countries; most of which he got.

    In two ways, Golitsyn’s overall concept played into the nightmare fears of Western intelligence: first, as to the existence of high-level double agents in their midst; and secondly, regarding Western leaders who were already compromised, e.g., Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the Untied Kingdom. Due to the largesse of Angleton and British MI6, Golitsyn became a millionaire. As for the accuracy of his knowledge of Soviet affairs, he said the Sino-Soviet split was a mirage, that the coming of Gorbachev was really a deception strategy to isolate the USA, and that the whole Perestroika revolution was also a KGB phantasm. He forecast the last two in his books, New Lies for Old (1984) and The Perestroika Deception (1995). Needless to add, in order to buy Golitsyn one had to accept that the rise of Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, and Boris Yeltsin’s use of American economic advisors to administer Milton Friedman economic “shock doctrine” to decimate the Russian economy back to conditions worse than the Great Depression—all of this was somehow a colossal KGB Potemkin Village designed to deceive the West. The question being: Into believing what? That somehow the USSR had not really collapsed? This is how ultimately bereft Golitsyn was, and this was how craven our intelligence chiefs were. They did not just believe him, they made him into a wealthy retiree. Mangold’s book revealed almost all of this. It was shocking to behold.

    A year after Mangold, David Wise published his book Molehunt. The Wise book was kind of a reverse imprint of Mangold. Wise did scores of interviews with the victims of what the folie à deux of Golitsyn/Angleton had done. That is, the careers that were ruined, the reputations that were sullied, the promotions that never came. It got so bad that Congress had to pass a bill to compensate certain victims for the damage done to their careers. In 2008, author Michael Holzman wrote another biography. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Intelligence was a rather sympathetic look at the man and his career. And it attempted to rehabilitate both Angleton and Golitsyn, while trying to contravene William Colby’s dictum about Angleton that, to his knowledge, he had never caught a spy.

    II

    Holzman’s book was published about a decade after the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) had officially closed its doors, which makes it surprising how little information the author used concerning Angleton, the JFK case and Lee Harvey Oswald. After all, John Newman had published his milestone book on that subject, Oswald and the CIA, in 1995. He reissued that volume the same year that Holzman published his. Because he had been an intelligence analyst, Newman understood how to read and then blend together documents into a mural that made previously uncertain events understandable. He did this with the help of the releases of the ARRB.

    There were two areas of Newman’s work that one would think any biographer of Angleton would find of the utmost interest. The first would be how the information on Oswald was entered into CIA files after his defection. The second would be the extraordinary work that was made possible about Oswald in Mexico City after the release of the HSCA’s legendary Lopez Report. Taking up where Holzman dropped the baton, the strength of Jefferson Morley’s book is that it does have a featured focus on this aspect: the Oswald file at CIA and its relation to Angleton. And this is the most valuable part of the book.

    As Morley notes, James Angleton had suzerainty over the Oswald file at CIA for four years. (p. 86. All references are to the Kindle version) Contrary to what the late David Belin said on national television, the contents of that file were never fully revealed to the Warren Commission. And they were obfuscated for the HSCA. The file itself was personally handled by Birch O’Neal, one of the most trusted and most mysterious of the two hundred men and women who worked for Angleton in Counter Intelligence. From day one, O’Neal began to lie about what was in the Oswald file. He told the Bureau that there was nothing there that did not originate with the FBI and State Department. As Morley has noted on his website and in this book, that is simply not true. But further, the ARRB files on O’Neal have been released in heavily redacted form, and three are completely redacted.

    As Morley further explains, the rule inside the Agency was that if three reports came in, a 201 file should be opened on the subject. Yet this rule was not followed with the Oswald file. This exception to protocol allowed the file to be limited in access when it was opened in December of 1959. (Morley, p. 88) It was only when Otto Otepka of the State Department sent the CIA a request on the recent wave of American defectors to the Soviet Union that a 201 file was opened on Oswald.

    If the Warren Commission would actually have had full access to the file, the obvious question would have been: If Otepka had not sent the request, would a 201 file have been opened at all? Otepka’s request was about information on whether the defectors were real or ersatz. When Director of Plans Richard Bissell received it, he sent it to Angleton’s office. These circumstances strongly suggest that there was a false defector program being run by CIA, and that Angleton had a role in it.

    To his credit, Morley also uses some information that was first introduced in the Lopez Report. This was the fact that there were two differing cables sent out of Angleton’s office once CIA got word of Oswald meeting with a man named Valeri Kostikov in Mexico City. One was sent to the Navy, State, and FBI. It had information about Oswald but a wrong physical description of him. The other cable was sent to Mexico City and had a correct description, but it did not include the most recent information that the CIA had on Oswald concerning his activities in New Orleans—for example, that he had been arrested, detained, tried and fined for his pro Castro activities there. (pp. 136-37) This clearly would have been important in evaluating whether or not he posed a potential threat. In other words, if Oswald had been meeting with a Russian diplomat in a nearby third country, and prior to that he had been protesting on the streets of a southern city in favor of Fidel Castro, and was trying to get an in-transit visa through Cuba to Russia, that would seem to be significant information one should pass to the FBI.

    But this cable did not provide the correct description of the man. When the CIA sent up its request, it contained a picture of a man who was not Oswald. He has come to be known as the Mystery Man, although the Lopez Report identifies him as a Russian KGB agent under diplomatic cover. Consequently, that cable described Lee Oswald as a 35 year old with an athletic build and six feet tall. What makes this even more puzzling is that the CIA had accurate info on Oswald as being 24 and 5’ 9”. The other cable was sent to Mexico City and although it was allowed to be disseminated to the FBI there, it did not include the information on Oswald’s return to the USA or his New Orleans hijinks. The Warren Commission only saw one of these two cables and the HSCA only mentioned them in redacted form. (See “Two Misleading CIA Cables about Lee Harvey Oswald”)

    As mentioned by the author, neither Jane Roman nor Bill Hood of the CIA could explain this paradox. (p. 137) As Morley offers: if what Oswald was doing in New Orleans—setting up an FPCC chapter with him as the only member, raising his profile via street theater— was part of an operation, then Mexico City station chief Winston Scott would not need to know about that. (p. 137)

    One week before Kennedy’s murder, on November 15th, Angleton’s office received a full report from Warren DeBrueys of the New Orleans FBI office about Oswald’s activities there. As Morley writes, “If Angleton scanned the first page, he learned that Oswald had gone back to Texas after contacting the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City. Angleton knew Oswald was in Dallas.” (p. 140) In other words, all the information that an intelligence officer needed in order to place Oswald on the Secret Service Security Index was available to Jim Angleton at that time. He did nothing with it.

    III

    But it is actually worse than that. As Morley notes,

    Angleton always sought to give the impression that he knew very little about Oswald before November 22, 1963. … His staff had monitored Oswald’s movements for four years. As the former Marine moved from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas, the Special Investigations Group received reports on him everywhere he went. (p. 140)

    As Newman originally noted, Oswald’s files from Moscow and Minsk should not have gone into the Special Investigation Group (SIG). They should have gone into a file at the Soviet Russia division. (Newman, p. 27) The cumulative effect of Morley’s book is that it makes the case that the idea that Oswald was some kind of sociopath who no one knew anything about in Washington is simply not tenable today. The CIA has hidden its monitoring of Oswald for decades. And it took the JFK Act and its forcible declassification process to reveal its extent.

    Morley quickly moves to some interesting developments that took place within just hours of the assassination. Oswald’s street theater antics in New Orleans now got played up in the media. Ed Butler turned over a tape of Oswald defending the FPCC on a local radio station. The CIA-backed Cuban exile organization, the DRE, were calling reporters to inform them of Oswald’s FPCC activities in the Crescent City. They even published a broadsheet saying Oswald and Castro were the presumed killers of Kennedy. (Morley, p. 145) Of course, Butler and the DRE’s intelligence connections were not exposed at this time, nor did the Warren Commission explore them. To accompany this there is a mysterious message that Richard Helms’ assistant Tom Karamessines wrote to Winston Scott in Mexico City. He told the station chief not to take any action that “could prejudice Cuban responsibility.” (Morley, p. 146)

    Morley has an interesting observation about Kostikov and AM/LASH. Hoover asked Angleton in May of 1963 if Kostikov was part of Department 13, responsible for terrorist activities and murders in the Western Hemisphere. The reply was negative. (Morley, p. 149) Yet this would change six months later. (Newman, p. 419) It would change again, when Angleton testified to the Church Committee. There he said he was not sure. But Morley further reveals that Rolando Cubela, a prospective assassin tasked by the CIA to kill Castro, was also in touch with Kostikov. This was done through Des Fitzgerald who was in charge of Cuban operations in 1963. Fitzgerald probably thought that Cubela may have told Kostikov about the CIA using him. Kostikov then told the Cubans, and Castro may have decided to strike first, using Oswald as a pawn. This may be why Fitzgerald wept when Jack Ruby shot Oswald on television. He reportedly said, “Now, we’ll never know.” (Morley, p. 150)

    The first liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission was a man named John Whitten. But he was rather quickly moved out by Richard Helms and replaced with Angleton. The CIA now adapted a stance of waiting out the Commission. (p. 155) Here, Morley passed up a fine way to exemplify this fact. When Commission lawyer Burt Griffin testified before the HSCA, he revealed that he had sent a request to CIA to send him all the files they had on Jack Ruby and several related persons, like Barney Baker. Two months later, in May of 1964, they still had no reply. So they sent a reminder. They finally got their negative reply in mid-September, when the Commission volumes were in galley proofs. (HSCA Volume XI, p. 286) You can’t wait out a committee any better (or worse) than that can you?

    Continuing with the JFK case, Morley makes a brief mention of the formation of the CIA’s Garrison Group. (p. 192) And he also adds that one of Angleton’s assistants, Raymond Rocca, was a key member. Rocca proclaimed at its first meeting that it appeared that Jim Garrison would be able to convict his indicted suspect Clay Shaw. I wish Morley had made more of this body, because as is evidenced from the declassified files of the ARRB, the CIA itself began to take offensive measures against Garrison at around this time. The convening of this intra-agency group was ordered by Richard Helms. Helms wanted the group to consider the possible implications of the Garrison case before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 270)   Which they did. For instance, Angleton ran name traces on the possible jurors in the Shaw trial. (p. 293)

    As Morley noted in his previous book, Our Man in Mexico, when Winston Scott passed away in 1971, Angleton immediately hightailed it to Mexico City to confront the widow of the CIA station chief. (Morley, p. 213) By using some not so subtle threats about Scott’s death benefits, he essentially emptied the contents of Scott’s safe, which amounted to 3 large cartons and 4 suitcases full of materials. This included a manuscript Scott was laboring on at the time of his death. By all indications, this cache included at least one tape of Oswald in Mexico City.

    The last time Angleton’s proximity to the JFK case came up was near the end of his career. Senator Howard Baker had been on Sam Ervin’s committee investigating Watergate. His minority counsel, Fred Thompson, had uncovered a lot of material about the CIA’s hidden role in that scandal. (See Thompson’s book, At That Point in Time.) This, along with the exposure of MH Chaos in the New York Times, provided much of the impetus for first the Rockefeller Commission, then the Senate Church Committee, and the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives.

    Morley leaves an important point out when he introduces this crucial historical episode, about which there are still documents being withheld from the public. As Daniel Schorr noted, at a closed press briefing in Washington, President Ford was asked why he had stacked the Rockefeller Commission with such conservative stalwarts—e.g., General Lyman Lemnitzer and Governor Ronald Reagan—and appointed Warren Commission lawyer David Belin as chief counsel. Ford replied that there might be some dangerous discoveries ahead. Someone asked him, “Like what?” Ford blurted out, “Like assassinations!” There was no discussion of what assassinations were referred to. However, since the NY Times article was about domestic CIA spying, and both Ford and Belin served on the Warren Commission, Schorr assumed it was about domestic assassinations. But when Schorr went to Bill Colby at CIA, the director did a beautiful bit of ballet on the issue, one that has never been properly appreciated. He told Schorr that Ford must have been talking about foreign plots. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 194)

    This was a masterful stroke by Colby. It was now the CIA plots against Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Achmed Sukarno, and first and foremost Fidel Castro, which took center stage. Because many felt the Rockefeller Commission would be a fig leaf, it was superseded by Senator Frank Church’s and Congressman Otis Pike’s now near-legendary efforts. (For anyone interested in reading up on this fascinating subject, this reviewer recommends Schorr’s Clearing the Air. Schorr ended up being fired by CBS due to the influence of then CIA Director George H. W. Bush.)

    As Morley notes, Angleton made some rather startling comments both in the witness chair and to reporters outside. Some of them follow:

    • “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.”
    • “When I look at the map today and the weakness of this country, that is what shocks me.”
    • “Certain individual rights have to be sacrificed for the national security.” (All quotations from p. 254)

    And, as alluded to above, there was the granddaddy of all Angleton quotes. In reply to a query about the JFK case, Angleton said, “A mansion has many rooms, I was not privy to who struck John.” (p. 249) That particular quote has sent many writers scurrying to understand what on earth Angleton meant by it. Perhaps the best effort in that regard was by Lisa Pease in her two-part essay on the spy chief. Her work benefits from the use of an episode that, for whatever reason, Morley ignored. This was the legal dispute between a periodical called The Spotlight and Howard Hunt, which was chronicled in Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial. As Pease notes, Angleton did all he could to dodge questions about this incriminating episode. It originated over an article in Spotlight about a memo to Richard Helms. Angleton’s memo stated that they had to create an alibi for Howard Hunt being in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (Lane, p. 145)

    Hunt denied that any such thing happened. And he won a lawsuit against Spotlight. But on appeal, that decision was reversed. In his book, Lane shows that, in fact, the CIA had tried to help Hunt in constructing his alibi. And contrary to skeptics, it turned out that Angleton himself had actually shown the memo to journalist Joe Trento. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 195) What is remarkable about this is that the Trento meeting happened in 1978, while the HSCA was ongoing. And Angleton had called Trento to specifically show him the document. As Lisa Pease wrote, the HSCA—through researcher Betsy Wolf—was closing in on Angleton’s association with Oswald through CI/SIG. In her opinion, this memo was meant to send a warning shot across the bow of his cohorts: If I go down, you are coming with me.

    IV

    To his credit, Morley spends quite a few pages on Angleton’s governance of the Israeli desk at CIA. There is little doubt that Angleton was a staunch Zionist who was not at all objective about the Arab-Israeli dispute. (Morley, p. 74) For instance, Angleton did not disseminate the information on the suspected construction of the Israeli atomic reactor at Dimona for U2 over-flights. (p. 92) Angleton leaned even further toward Israel because he suspected a growing alliance between Cairo and Moscow. Morley concluded this section with a good summary of how the Israelis betrayed America by stealing highly enriched uranium for their first bombs from a nuclear plant they purchased as a front near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (See “How Israel Stole the Bomb”)

    My complaint about this section is that Morley does not sketch in how Angleton’s near rabid devotion to Israel was in opposition to President Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East. There were two specific aspects he could have highlighted in this regard. First, once he became president, JFK did all he could to forge an alliance with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt in order to reach out to the moderate Arab states. (Philip Muelhenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 125-27) And he was doing this simply because he felt that what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower had done previously—asking Nasser to join the Baghdad Pact, and cutting off funds for the Aswan Dam—had helped usher Nasser into a relationship with Moscow. An extreme cold warrior like Angleton would not appreciate this kind of diplomatic strophe. The other point that is missing here is that, as Roger Mattson noted in his book Stealing the Atom Bomb, Kennedy was adamant about there being no atomic weapons in the Middle East. (Mattson, pp. 38-40, 256) This was an integral part of his overall policy there in which he tried to be fair and objective to both sides. It would thus appear that Angleton and Kennedy held differing views on this issue. And after Kennedy’s murder, Angleton’s views won out first under President Johnson and then further with Nixon.

    That point branches off into President Kennedy’s foreign policy toward Cuba and the USSR at the time of his death. Morley does some work on Angleton’s influence on Cuba policy as late as May of 1963. But he does not sketch in Kennedy’s policy shift toward Castro that came after the Missile Crisis; nor his attempt at a rapprochement with Khrushchev at that time. Today, all of this seems important in light of the attempts by certain suspect characters—some he has mentioned—to blame the assassination on either Cuba or Russia.

    Also relevant in this regard is the production of the Edward Epstein authored book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, which Morley deals with rather lightly. That book had one of the largest advances for any book ever in the JFK field. Today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, it would be well over a million, closer to two million. According to more than one source, including Carl Oglesby and Jerry Policoff, Angleton was a chief consultant on that project. Released during the proceedings of the HSCA, Epstein ignored all the evidence that showed Oswald was some kind of American intelligence operative. Instead, the book did all it could to insinuate that Oswald was really some kind of Russian agent, perhaps controlled by George DeMohrenschildt, and that Oswald did what he did for either the KGB or Cuban G-2. As Jim Marrs later discovered, Epstein employed a team of researchers. They were instructed to only look at any possible communist associations they could find. As Lisa Pease later discovered, in Epstein’s first edition of his previous book on the JFK case, Inquest, he acknowledged a Mr. R. Rocca, Who she suspected to be Ray Rocca, one of Angleton’s important assistants specializing on the JFK case.

    To me, this area would seem at least as interesting and important as Mary Meyer, which Morley spends about ten pages on. To put it mildly, after doing a lot of research on this issue, I disagree with just about every tenet of his discussion of the matter. And I was more than a bit surprised when Morley even brought in the Tim Leary aspect of this mythology. As I showed, Leary manufactured his relationship with Meyer after the fact in order to sell his book Flashbacks. And if one reads the current scholarship on Kennedy’s foreign policy by authors like Phil Muehlenbeck and Robert Rakove, the idea that Kennedy needed Meyer to advise him on this is risible. (See my review of Mary’s Mosaic for the details)

    Also disturbing in this respect is his use of Mimi Alford and her ludicrous, “Better red than dead” quote she attributed to JFK during the Missile Crisis.  Greg Parker did a very nice exposé of Alford and the man who first surfaced her, Robert Dallek, back in 2012 that unfortunately is not online today. It showed just how dubious she was. But suffice it to say, anyone who reads, for example, The Armageddon Letters—the direct communications between the three leaders—can see how fast and hard Kennedy drew the line. (See the letter on pp. 72-73) The missiles, the bombers and submarines were all leaving and they would be checked as they left. In fact, as Parker pointed out, Kennedy had criticized the “better Red than dead school” less than a year before the crisis during a speech at the University of Washington. But he also criticized those who refuse to negotiate. Kennedy was not going to let the atomic armada stay in Cuba for one simple reason: he suspected that the Russians had done this to barter an exchange for West Berlin. Kennedy resisted that because he saw it as unraveling the Atlantic Alliance. Anyone who has read, for example, The Kennedy Tapes, will understand that. (See, for example, p. 518, where Kennedy himself makes the association.) What Kennedy conceded ultimately was very little, if anything. He made a pledge not to invade Cuba, which he was not going to do anyway; and he silently pulled missiles out of Turkey, which he thought were gone already. They were supposed to have been replaced by Polaris missiles, which they later were. So in his actions here, unlike with the Mimi Alford mythology, Kennedy simply lived up to his 1961 speech. Either Morley has little interest in Kennedy’s foreign policy or he has little knowledge of it.

    The strength of the book lies in the tracing of the Oswald files through the CIA under Angleton’s dominion. No book on Angleton has done this before. And that is certainly a commendable achievement. Hopefully, this will become a staple of future Angleton scholarship, which I think the book is designed to do.

  • Mort Sahl Interview with Elliot Mintz

    Mort Sahl Interview with Elliot Mintz

    Click here for the audio

    (This transcript has been edited for grammar and flow.)

    Elliot Mintz:

    KPFK listener-supported Pacifica Radio Los Angeles. My name is Elliot Mintz. This is Looking Out. Mort, this is just … I can’t tell you what a gas it is to have you here tonight.

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, we moved heaven and earth, Elliot, as you know and the listeners don’t know. There’s an abundance of riches, in addition to … First, I was doing nothing. I don’t know how many of the listeners know that. In addition to doing the show after you and I got together and we decided to do this, then of course, they called from New York and said they had a Johnny Carson show for me in that that way that they have of calling, it always sounds like Operation Headstart. They’re going to help me … Urban renewal. The fact is they have a lot of letters and they can’t hold the audience on a chain that much longer. They want to know if I’m dead or not, so they’re going to import for the show and they want to do it Monday. That would mean, of course, flying in Sunday because you have to report at noon in order to brief the producer.

    So there’s no way to do it. They won’t let you fly in that day because they’re afraid of weather delays. Then they wouldn’t let me … I said, “Well, I have a show to do in Los Angeles on Sunday.”

    And they said, “Cancel it.”

    And I said, “I can’t do that.” And then I said, “I’ll have to cancel this.”

    “Well, you’ve been canceling a lot of shows, you know, that wouldn’t look too good.”

    And then, of course, the singular morality … Then I said, “What about Tuesday?”

    They said, “Well, you couldn’t be on because Bob Hope is on Tuesday and he has a different position than you on Vietnam.” They told me that, so I couldn’t be on with him. And then I finally put it off until Thursday. I’ll be on the Carson show Thursday night for those of you who have a duality of purpose in listening to KPFK and watch NBC. Covering the full spectrum.

    Elliot Mintz:

    I think Jim Garrison once described NBC as the network who believes in the right of the people to know, right?

    Mort Sahl:

    He’s not afraid of them, which is enough in itself. And I spoke with Mark Lane this week who was in New Orleans and I’ll be down there later this week after the New York trip. And, as you know, he has a bribery, public bribery indictment against Walter Sheridan of NBC. Walter Sheridan has a strange history for a broadcaster. As a matter of fact, Bill Stout of CBS once put it this way to me, he said when it came to the Garrison case, NBC News had reported they hired a house detective. They hired one of Robert Kennedy’s lawyers on the Hoffa case to operate there.

    Mort Sahl:

    Yes. That’s who Walter Sheridan is. And he did the Frank McGee show, which was called The Case against Jim Garrison. And he went down there and Garrison has an indictment against him on the basis of trying to bribe Perry Russo; to defect to California where he would not be extradited and to discredit Garrison publicly. And Garrison also charges in that indictment that Sheridan used the phrase, “I will destroy Garrison. I’m here to destroy Garrison.” He used it many times around New Orleans. Now NBC turned that show over to Sheridan not to any of its other reporters. He felt, as he said in Playboy, Garrison that Sheridan had gone too far because they gave him equal time very quickly. They kind of backtracked.

    On the other hand we find Newsweek’s continual bias against Garrison. And I want to tell all the good liberals out there that that’s your journal. Phil Graham, the Washington Post, good social Democrat. Not Time Magazine, not a fascistic magazine, but a good liberal magazine. Newsweek hired Hugh Aynesworth to cover Garrison. They said he’s an outstanding scholar having worked for the Dallas Times Herald, an outstanding scholar. For instance, in his last exchange with Mark Lane in Dallas, he told Mark Lane something to the effect that Warren was not objective about Oswald because both of them were left-wingers, extreme left-wingers.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Wow.

    Mort Sahl:

    So that’s the guy that Newsweek feels is an authority on the case.

    Elliot Mintz:

    I want to begin at the beginning.

    Mort Sahl:

    All right.

    Elliot Mintz:

    And follow this thing very, very closely so we can really understand not only what’s surrounding the suppression of what Jim Garrison was doing in New Orleans, but also what has been done against you personally.

    Now, there was a time that you were appearing in nightclubs and making billions and billions of dollars and selling record albums and you were a comedian and the rest of it, and you didn’t talk about the assassination. Something then happened that obviously was to lead to the change of your entire life. When did it begin for you, Mort? When did you begin to begin to-

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, I began to ask questions about this case. I used to ask them socially and I couldn’t find anybody to answer me, but then I only mixed with liberals, you know. That’s like looking for an honest man and not having a lamp. Then, of course, I ran into … when I had the television show over at Channel 11. We had the … Mark Lane was coming to town. He was originally scheduled on the Joe Pyne Show and some benefactor steered him toward my program instead. And he did cancel the Pyne show and they were furious as well they might be, I suppose, about a commitment. And Mark Lane came on in October of 196-

    Elliot Mintz:

    6.

    Mort Sahl:

    6. Right. He came on with me and he made five appearances. Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Times agree that Rush to Judgment is a national best seller because of California and because of southern California and more specifically because of that program. And yeah, we sold a lot of books. I told people it was most important book in their lifetime. I told Lane when I met him that I thought he was the most important man in the country.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Rush to Judgment?

    Mort Sahl:

    Absolutely. And I think Garrison now has replaced him as the most important man in the country. Mark and I got along very well and the shows were good. We found we didn’t need the, you know, actors or fun and games or anything. We just have to talk and the people cared about it. We really got a storm going and because the people responded, I kept going with it. Then, of course, the KLAC show was in the works and I kept going with that. And when the KLAC show began to roll, of course, I got the first national interview with Garrison. I got 90 minutes on tape with Garrison and Lane, which I paid for my own trip to New Orleans because the station didn’t think it was worth it. After all, it was only a man investigating the murder of the President.

    Elliot Mintz:

    This is radio station KLAC?

    Mort Sahl:

    KLAC. And I went down there and I came back and I played that. Of course, there was great suppression. KTTV, the program director, Jim Gates kept saying to me, “Well, if theatrically …” So he would say he wasn’t suppressing me, it wasn’t a matter of censorship. It was a matter of showmanship and he said, “Theatrically, it’s boring. It just hearing you talk about Kennedy.” And even when I was finally fired at KTTV the first time, which was a year ago December, he came to my house and gave me my notice and said, “Your ratings are very bad and you’re going off.” And instead of leaving well enough alone, he then got nervous and said, “I think it’s because you just talked about the same thing all the time. Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy. We’re sick of hearing about Kennedy.” And I’m excising the profanity.

    You know, as we always say, speak for yourself. I haven’t found too many people in the American electorate who are really sick of talking about Kennedy. I find people who were cowed and who are fearful. Anything that happens other than having your head blown off in Dealey Plaza is somewhat anticlimactic. Sane men have grown insane on this subject. For Robert Vaughn to be quizzed by Senator Robert Kennedy, to be pursued around Senator Kennedy’s mansion, “Why was Mort Sahl fired? Why does he claim he was fired?”

    And for Robert Vaughn to say, “I was fearful of the interrogation, so I said I didn’t know.” And then for Robert Vaughn publicly to declaim , “As a matter of fact Senator Kennedy is a very busy man. He has the world on his shoulders and he doesn’t have time to even know who Mort Sahl is.” I know what makes people move this way, but I have found some continuity of integrity on the part of people in any issue but this issue.

    Now I’m skipping here chronologically, which I don’t mean to do on you, but-

    Elliot Mintz:

    Let me raise a question.

    Mort Sahl:

    Yes.

    Elliot Mintz:

    At its peak, your KLAC telephone talk show and the KTTV television show. What were the ratings like? What was the audience response?

    Mort Sahl:

    The ratings on the television show were good and healthy and I think that it’s important for the audience to know that we presented 30 to 40 minutes of sketches every week and I wrote them and I produced the program myself and I was in the office seven days a week and I did all the monologues in between and I booked the guests and I was on there for two hours. I spent seven days in that office and I made $600 a week gross.

    Now that’s a pretty cheap way to bring the show, which is sold out on sponsorship. No sponsors complained and you must be very guarded about that. When you hear remarks like KLAC made about our biggest goal is to have no sponsors. It has become a device in our society because there is an argument of the new left that capitalism will censure people it sponsors. It very seldom is the sponsors.

    Elliot Mintz:

    How were your sponsors on the program?

    Mort Sahl:

    I never had any trouble in television. We were sold out and they never complained. We even kidded them, especially the used car people. We were sold out. Gates himself said at the end of his show that when he finally discharged me for something he called insubordination, he said, “the ratings were healthy and the show was a good entertaining show, but this guy can’t follow direction”. That said many times, and of course that may be said with a gleam toward heading you off at the pass so that no one else will hire you because it is a limited industry to begin with. Limited in courage, limited in perspective, limited in goals.

    When the radio program was on at the same time, of course, I had Harold Weisberg on, I had Lane on, and we rang up tremendous ratings. Jack Thayer, who was the potentate at KLAC, brought their ratings by in the evening shift at KLAC, had a 17.7 the last time he brought them by, which meant that we passed KHJ. People were really listening. Why were they listening? Because I was talking about their President, whom they love. I was talking about the draft, which is every young man’s stake, and I was talking about where I thought it was at because I was taking their pulse. Now, because, so they … Of course, in the superstate, to paraphrase Garrison, they must drop you for not communicating.

    The fact is they dropped you because you do communicate. That’s the real grind. To reach other people. I was never such an extraordinary man until I became an ordinary man and joined the people. When I began to express really what was on their minds, but I took a different course of action. I took a course of action that satisfied me. Now when they dropped the radio program, they gave me no notice. The night they chose, I said to the audience, “Should I disappear it is not voluntary. I’ll stay here as long as you need me and you want to talk to me. And if I disappear, you must rise as an army. It is non-voluntary.” I played Kennedy’s inauguration, Roosevelt’s inauguration and a Garrison speech for 20 minutes. And the next day I was told not to report. The agency that represented me at that time did not contest this. We’re to gather they’re not interested in money in a capitalistic society?

    Elliot Mintz:

    Which agency was this?

    Mort Sahl:

    Creative Management Associates. They did not rise as an army. In fact, one of the executives up there quoted me a story by Jill Sharing in the [Los Angeles] Free Press. It’s good to know they read the Free Press, isn’t it? It’s amazing, huh? They don’t quote it when it’s not convenient though. It’s got to be the Free Press on their terms.

    Elliot Mintz:

    They’ve got to figure out some way, you know, of bringing it back home on a personal level.

    Mort Sahl:

    That’s right. Document it, bring it back home. Very well put. They dropped the show and somebody … I guess I shouldn’t betray the confidence. Somebody who’s influential here in town said to me, “You’re going to be dropped on television now. The only difference is the first time you were fired,” and a lot of you remember this. When I was fired on television, I talked about it on the radio.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Mort Sahl:

    The station got 31,000 letters and reinstated me. This time-

    Elliot Mintz:

    31,000?

    Mort Sahl:

    31,000 in three days at one source, Jim Gates. I got a couple of thousand myself up in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace and other people at the station got letters. That was the core of them in three days. This time they cut the live show, the radio show.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Mort Sahl:

    And then the television show was controlled by tape. So I immediately received a letter saying, “You’ve been fired on radio. That is regrettable. Do not discuss it on television. If you do, this will be insubordination.” And then I got a series of letters for record that would come every day, special delivery from Jim Gates at KTTV, and they would say, “Do not discuss this.” KLAC maintained that “Mort is gone but anybody’s free to … He has his platform at KTTV”.

    So Mark Lane then directed one of the young men on the Citizens Committee of Inquiry, which I want to talk about later, to call the station and say that it is obvious I’m the only public platform for the district attorney in New Orleans and therefore it is his opinion that that contributed to my being fired. They wouldn’t let the young man on the air. So since they had said I had my own platform on television, I put him on television. So they erased him from the television tape. They sent me another letter and said, “You cannot bring this up. You’re not to discuss the radio station.”

    So I checked with an attorney and the attorney said, “That means that in their interpretation for them to beat you with chains and for you to go on the air and if someone in the audience says, ‘What is that scar?’ And you said, ‘They hit me with a chain,’ that’s termed ‘disparaging’ by them. You have a right to express yourself under an FCC license granted to Channel 11 as long as you don’t disparage them.”

    So I went on the next week and I said, “That tape was erased.” The young man was on there, so they erased that tape.

    And they sent me another letter and they said, “If you mention anyone at this station by name or by title or refer to the fact that you have a radio program, you will be fired.”

    That day I was in the office and Garrison called me from New Orleans and he said, “I have an exclusive for you to break on the air. I have eyewitnesses placing Ruby, Oswald, and Shaw together in Baton Rouge. Eyeball witnesses.”

    So I went on the air and I told that on the air. And I mentioned for about three minutes, about the radio program that I isolated so that if it was cut out they could see the rest of the show, which was funny. It was a good show. Biff Rose was on. Phil Ochs was on. Hamilton Camp, Joyce Jamison. They erased the entire tape and sent me a letter the next morning firing me for insubordination in mid-contract at a time when they owed me $83,000. So that’s a capricious form of behavior you might think for a large organization.

    But they saw fit to do that over this issue. They saw fit not even to call me in, and I want to make a point here that this is not capitalism. You know, “shape up or ship out. This is the way we do things.” This is a different form. No one came to me and said shape up. It was just over. No one spoke to me. Nobody. Just the vast silence.

    Elliot Mintz:

    My guest is Mort Sahl and we’ll continue with much more.

    All right, so here you are at KTTV and KLAC with incredibly high ratings, 31,000 letters received in a period of three days, and having turned Los Angeles on to obviously the most important issue of the day. And you were fired you were through. What was it like after that, Mort. Did you start to go around and look for other jobs right away?

    Mort Sahl:

    See, KTTV, this pending legal action, I’m going to the union for arbitration through AFTRA, which I’m a member and have been for 15 years to settle this. So I’m not saying there’s a correlation between what I said about the assassination and what happened there, but the assassination is not my first experience at twisting the arm of the establishment and it’s not my first experience at being threatened or paying for it. I’m the same guy who was on the cover of Time Magazine August 8, 1960. I’m the same guy who emceed the Academy Awards with Laurence Olivier, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and Tony Randall in 1960. And I’m the same guy that had my own show on NBC a few years ago. I’m the same guy that’s been under contract to all three networks.

    Now, what was the attitude? You know, we have to use a very broad canvas, not a broad brush here, to see what the attitude is here. I am submitted to network shows at the same time because I have a national reputation. When I was submitted to the Dean Martin Show, the agent said, “Oh no, not that guy. Never. Because he’s making speeches and he’s gone crazy on that subject.” I’ve gone crazy. It’s only a couple of years that they were selling Kennedy to me. They thought I was for Stevenson. That’s because I like to know who I’m voting for. And I confess, when I meet a stranger, I don’t condemn them, but I ask who he is before I vote for him. That happened to me repeatedly. And of course, you know, I saw the whole liberal syndrome.

    I tried to call it the way I saw it in Los Angeles and there were many subjects on that program. And while I want to stay with the assassination tonight, I just briefly want to point out that everybody knows who they are and that since god put me into the role of holding the mirror up to Dracula, who knows very well what he looks like anyway. They didn’t stand up to be counted when they were needed. I made the appeal. I stood up there and I said, “You know who you are and you know the fight I’m in. What’s at stake is America.” That’s the reason that when Budd Schulberg went to Watts and sold the television show off it or two of the articles to Playboy, I pointed out that Bud Schulberg knows better. Before he knew the history of the Negro people, he knew the history of the Jewish people, and he knew the history of the Un-American Activities Committee and that we must all face ourselves.

    Now that wasn’t pleasant for everybody, but we have to say it on the air. I talked about all the ex-left in Hollywood and what they have become since they joined the establishment. They haven’t become right, they haven’t become anything. They had become eunuchs and I wanted to remind them and ask them if it was worth the price. Because as Garrison says, in the Faust legend, the price is you. I pointed that out. I pointed out that the country is going down the tube because we’re not … We have no hope. We have no optimism as we had under Kennedy and we’re trying to rationalize the war. I pointed out, as unpopular as it may sound, that there’s a vast store of Jewish people in this city who have turned their back on their commitment, which is survival, who have gone the other way, and who will give Ronald Reagan, a standing ovation in the Hollywood Bowl because he says the right things about Israel.

    Well, I suppose everybody will, including Omar Sharif and Danny Thomas, the only two Arabs in the show business community. But as hard as it is going down, again we have to point out that the Jewish people–and I know some here who even fled from Hitler–come full circle now and not only rationalize the war in Vietnam, but make the same error they made in Germany: that if they have enough money, they will buy out. Garrison is painting a picture of a neo-Nazi group and as Jack Ruby raved on toward the end in the jail: I helped them because it was a money deal, but I see I’m helping people who will burn my people.

    There are Jewish elements, Jewish liberal elements, that turn their back on the President and they know better. And I know some people out here and they’re in this industry and their answer to me is a large blue pencil drawn through my name in case I can get a job. And imagine that all they think they can do to a man in America is take away his right to make a living. In between, of course you’ve got the all the liberals with their knees knocking, looking the other way. I’d tell you something about the issue if I knew anything about it, but I don’t know. Well, I’m sure that they do. In fact, those who are most fearful are those who come up with the worst conjecture. Yes, I found myself completely unemployable. Completely.

    Elliot Mintz:

    You couldn’t get a job anywhere.

    Mort Sahl:

    Yeah, nowhere. You know-

    Elliot Mintz:

    What would happen when your agents would call the nightclubs, TV stations, or-

    Mort Sahl:

    What would happen is – America’s not Germany and it’s not well enough organized. So sometimes guys fall in the trap and a guy would call you and offer you a job on Friday and by the time I get back to him on Tuesday, he would’ve changed in his mind.

    Elliot Mintz:

    What happened in the interim, Mort? Who would make the telephone calls to the booking agents?

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, I did. Then after a while, I didn’t.

    Elliot Mintz:

    No, I mean, who spoke with the booking agents and the people who could give you employment and say, “Don’t touch Sahl?”

    Mort Sahl:

    Oh, you mean from the other end?

    Elliot Mintz:

    Yeah.

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, several people. A vice president of a network here in this city, and there are only three, said to my agent, “If I try to use Mort,” he said, “whom I respect, I’ll lose my job.” That’s a man with seniority I might add at the network.

    Vice president of a leading motion picture and television studio here said, “Don’t ever mention his name in this office.” That offended. That offended by it.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Were they functioning independently, Mort, because of their own hang-ups or with somebody … like who threatened the vice president of the network?

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, you don’t know… It’s hard to be both, as I told you the other night, a corpse and a detective too. 15% of this puzzle is missing because people won’t come out of the bushes and say … They will come out of the shadows and say, “We are conspirators.” I don’t believe that the government calls everybody. I think that people are sufficiently corrupt and enjoy a mutuality of interests that they will behave as they do.

    One of the leading television commentators said to me when I said, “What are you going to do about the Garrison case?”

    He said, “Oh, I’m going to stay away from him.” He told me that openly, but that would be his course. That would be his fearless course of informing the American people of who killed our President.

    The best way, of course, was for everybody to call me paranoiac and to look the other way. And I’ve had some pretty important people tell me that, because what can they do? Can they admit, again, that this is not the best of all possible worlds? Because then they might have to do a patch and we’ll have to do a repair job. But they’re not prepared sufficiently to even sweep the room and take care of it, be custodians of the room hygienically, let alone re-paper the walls and make some improvements on the property. They are all by and large a gutless breed. There are several levels here in Hollywood. There’s the level of “I’m not talented. He’s having bad luck. It might rub off on me and I’ll really be in trouble. I better keep away.” The straight opportunism. But there are some remarks that are hard to answer. There’s Bill Cosby who said, “I have a wife and kids. I can’t be seen with him.”

    Elliot Mintz:

    Wow.

    Mort Sahl:

    How’s that? How’s that? A wife and kids and I addressed my remarks to him one week. I said, “I’d like to know what you’re going to leave your wife and kids. What are you going to leave your kids in America?” We have America. That’s all we have. And the signs are that we are losing her.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mort, what about your friends? What happened with them?

    Mort Sahl:

    My friends?

    Elliot Mintz:

    Your close friends, people who-

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, they vanished. I know they’re around because I go to see them in pictures all the time. But I’m glad that they’re still available to me on film as my memories are treasured.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Really? Was it really like that? I mean, right now-

    Mort Sahl:

    There was a social ostracism. What friends do I have now?

    Elliot Mintz:

    Yeah. How many people could you call now and say, “Hey man, I’d like to get together with you and rap,” you know?

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, you’re the newest. I would say Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Maggie Field and Enrico Banducci at the hungry i.

    Elliot Mintz:

    I’m in pretty good company.

    Mort Sahl:

    Man. I wouldn’t go back for anything. Last week I was here negotiating for something and I had to go out to dinner. It was very interesting. I walked into a restaurant in Beverly Hills and you only have to, you know, take a flight of fancy with me now. You got to remember the breed which I was, I came down the pike and I was a great threat in 1956, ’57 and they denied me and then, of course, I made it stick with the people. So then they tried to absorb you and I was everywhere, you know, and put his footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese. I emceed for television. I’m that guy, I’m the guy, I made pictures and I did television shows and I addressed people at campuses. Okay.

    So I went to the dinner and I walked into a Beverly Hills restaurant and my former manager was there, who still handles the affairs of Peter Lawford. He’s the guy who once threatened me with never working again in America.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Peter Lawford?

    Mort Sahl:

    Both of them. If I didn’t stop kidding President Kennedy. They loved him, you see. They also, these same people, then changed gloves from the left hand to the right hand and see that you continue not to work for asking who killed him. President Kennedy is very lucky that I can be objective, at least his memory is, that I can be objective about it. I didn’t love him so I can give full time to finding out who did him in. Fantastic.

    Elliot Mintz:

    You knew him, didn’t you?

    Mort Sahl:

    Yes, I did. And I wrote for him for 19 months. I said that on KLAC. Senator Kennedy, as I understand it asked Mr. Vaughn if I ever claimed that and Mr. Vaughn said, with the customary courage, “I don’t know what he said.” Well, I said it. In fact, Senator Kennedy’s had the opportunity to ask me. And for those of you who can’t get a framework on this, you must remember that I go into the White House at will. I repeat: at will. I ate with Senator Kennedy last May and I ate with Lyndon Johnson the May before that. I was in Washington for five days in July. I went to the White House. I walked through the gate. They know me, they know me and I refuse to go away. I’m like a very persistent epidemic.

    Now back to the point. So I walked into … Well, it’s interesting in light of having that access and then doing a local television show and having people running for Congress using me in the most opportunistic vein. If nothing else, they should not think that I’m a fool and they should not think I’m ambitious on the level of the House of Representatives. I’ve rejected the best, you know, so if I’m a neurotic, I’m neurotic A1. Zero cool. But anyway, back to back to the … Yeah, and I forgot to mention I used to sit in with Senator Fulbright in the afternoon at will, who I really dig. Although I’m sure that a lot of liberals out there think he’s a racist. That’s their way. At any rate.

    So I walked into Stefanino’s and I walked in with a good guy to talk some business and there sits a Mr. Evans, who doesn’t say anything to me. I’ve openly accused him on the air.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Who is Mr. Evans?

    Mort Sahl:

    Mr. Evans is Mr. Lawford’s manager, used to be my manager.

    Elliot Mintz:

    I see.

    Mort Sahl:

    Confidant to the President at a certain recreational level and who now thinks, “That guy’s killing himself by discussing the subject, the assassination. He’s doing himself in. He’s self-destructive. It’s a terrible thing to watch.” But they watched it every Friday night as long as it was on. He’s sitting in that restaurant. When people came through the door, actors who know me and know him and they refuse to speak to me during the evening. They averted their heads. There’s that much terror. And then a manager came over to me, he used to handle Georgia Harris and he said to me, “Hey, listen, I’m not with the hate group.”

    And I said, “The hate group?”

    She said, “I don’t care what anybody says, I’ll use you. I’m going to do a picture, there might be a part for you. I don’t care what anybody says.” That’s in reference to paranoia.

    The next night I was in a restaurant called Dominic’s to further conduct business, which is great in restaurants. Jim Arness came in, very jovial, good guy, but then he’s a conservative. You have nothing to fear. He couldn’t get near you because he couldn’t find your body beneath the liberals pounding it. There was a George Axelrod, who used to be my friend, who two years ago asked me to direct a film for him. He now says, “You used to be America’s conscience and now you’re America’s insanity.” That’s his reply to my plea to clean up the Kennedy case. Because it started as a toothache. It is now an abscess and eventually the patient is going to die. You have no way to get away from Jack Kennedy. You chose him and you rise with him as the phoenix or you go down in flames with him. Sorry folks. But that’s the deal.

    Now I watched all that last week. Those are all small examples, but they’re the microcosm of the whole thing. The people who are fearful to talk to you, who ask you questions and who run away from you. It goes all the way down to the actors who would run into me in Carl’s Market or the Mayfair on Santa Monica at two in the morning. It was open that late, and they’d say to me, “Hey, what’s with your friend Garrison? He better get his head examined.”

    And I’d say, “In essence, this is what’s with my friend Garrison,” because the Playboy thing was in the works, the interview was coming. I’d say, “The president reached an agreement with the Soviet Union about Cuba among other things. And he’s sent the FBI in to bust the anti-Castro Cuban exile groups’ training. And the next day the CIA gave them a blank check to go ahead and countermand his order. And that conflict is what brought the government down.”

    People say, “You’re preaching rebellion.”

    I say, “We had rebellion. The government was overthrown in Dallas for all we know.”

    And then they run off into the woods and I’ve got them coming and going, man. I got them boxed in both ways. If they accuse Johnson, which a lot of them want to do because they want to help Robert into the chair, then I say, “There’s no evidence connecting Johnson to the case and if there is, why are you nominating him and rationalizing the war in Vietnam?”

    Or then they come up to me and they say, “Well, if all of this is true, aren’t you afraid?”

    And then I say, “No, because a lone gunman did it in Dallas and he’s long gone.”

    I’ve got them coming and going because they have no position. But I tell you that I knew everybody in this town or know just that I don’t see them. And there is no studio open, there is no television, there is just a vast uneasiness because they have to meet you. They have to meet you because the plan isn’t complete. Eventually you’re going to get an invitation to a screening or a premier and you’ve got to meet them in the lobby. And that’s when they got to begin tugging at their collars. When Garrison came out here the last time to set up this thing on Eugene Bradley, everybody thought all he was doing was sitting in the Daisy. That’s what he was doing. I took him into Daisy, and we sat in there and all the actors who said I was crazy, and all the comedians, three or four of them in rebellion could have turned the tide, ran up to me and asked to meet him. They’re all on his side because he’s here.

    Can you imagine what’s going to happen if he wins? I’ll tell you all out there, and you all know who you are, what’s going to happen if he wins. First of all, we’re going to get the country back. I like that part.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Yeah.

    Mort Sahl:

    But there’s going to be a terrible retribution for those of you who denied him and think that your liberal credentials will let you change hats. You know, General Smedley Butler, the Marine Corps, talked about the revolution in Nicaragua. The vast majority of peasants had no political belief and they used to wear … the rebels had a red hatband and the fascists had a blue hatband. And most people who are smart had a hatband that was reversible.

    Garrison has charged that all the attorneys defending all the people in this case are retained by the CIA. And he stands flatly on that charge.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Now the cat defending Edgar Eugene Bradley was a former FBI man wasn’t he?

    Mort Sahl:

    I noticed that. Yeah, yeah, as a matter of fact, I noticed that too. Also the New Orleans States-Item pointed out this week, which our papers missed here, that Dr. McIntyre, Bradley’s associate there, has been active in a draft “J. Edgar Hoover for the Presidency” movement. I haven’t heard anybody bring that up since Walter Winchell. I’d hate to see Hoover step down to the presidency. But you know if that’s the will of the people let it be heard. Anyway, as Garrison always says to Mark Lane, he says, “Your sarcastic remarks about the director have made my job insufferably difficult.” But at any rate-

    Elliot Mintz:

    Let me interrupt for a second.

    Mort Sahl:

    Yeah.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Tell us just about J. Edgar Hoover.

    Mort Sahl:

    Hoover. Well, Hoover’s now 73. The mandatory federal retirement age, I should say, is 70. Johnson waived it for him. Well, of course everybody says … I mean the folklore is that he has so much on everybody that nobody can throw them out. He’s been in office 44 years.

    Elliot Mintz:

    44 years?

    Mort Sahl:

    44 years, which means that he looks upon the President as transient, for one thing, and as Garrison has said “he’s the finest director the Bureau has ever had”, and also the only director that the Bureau has ever had. So that’s fantastic. Of course the Bureau, who Mark Lane says is run, and most people agree, as a Gestapo like organization; because it reflects the views of that one man who runs it and nobody messes with him. No one ever has. All the Attorney Generals walk down the hall to his office. He doesn’t report to them. The only one to tangle with him was Bob Kennedy. That was about the only one.

    Elliot Mintz:

    What is the relationship like between Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover.

    Mort Sahl:

    It isn’t very good. As reported in Look Magazine, when the president was killed, Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy; called him at Hickory Hill and he said, “Your brother’s dead,. He then hung up. Bobby Kennedy wanted to make certain that he realized that he was the boss; which is certainly right along with being Attorney General. By the way, as Garrison’s pointed out. Robert Kennedy had the right to arrest the members of the Warren Commission as accessories after the fact, and ask that they be hanged, which I do not believe he did, although I haven’t gone into the record.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Why? Why is Bobby Kennedy walking around with his mouth shut?

    Mort Sahl:

    I don’t know. There are several answers. One is that, of course, the best source would be him. We would have to ask him. The second is that the elements are so terror ridden that they would kill him if he said anything. The third is that it was a fait accompli and all the people in the government were then told, “It’ll be anarchy. You must go along for the good of your country.” In other words, it’ll bring the country down if they know what happened. Although ironically enough, the way they brought the country up, they brought the country down. We now not only doubt the CIA, we doubt everybody. There are people who say he has a deal with the President to carry on in 1972.

    But I will say that he has an amazing lack of inquiry about this case. When I was interviewed in Washington by Jeremy Campbell for the London Observer, funny how you’re heard in America. I was interviewed in Washington by the London Observer and the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story and ran it on the front page on Sunday. The front page it says, “I know who killed Kennedy says Sahl,”; front page three columns with a photo headline.

    I never heard from Robert Kennedy about that even to admonish me for being irresponsible. Mark Lane has never heard from him, and certainly Garrison has never heard from him. In fact, there’s evidence that he’s tried to bulldoze the Garrison investigation. It was reported to me last May when Robert Kennedy was out here, was a dinner at which were present, Pierre Salinger, Andy Williams, Milton Berle, Robert Vaughn, and Ed Guthman, who used to be an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy. He is now the national editor of the LA Times. And you know their view on Garrison.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Mort Sahl:

    The only time they give up that cartoon section, they let Johnson offer it, is to go after Garrison. Guthman got up and said, “Gee, Mort’s through in the business and it’s a shame. He committed suicide by hanging out with Garrison and Lane.” First of all, I appreciate their concern for the postmortem about me and I appreciate the judgment that I’m through. And I wonder what would make them say that. I wonder why Garrison and Lane would be the enemy. They’re only acting as patriots. They’re proving that they love their president. Not because he’s a dead president. He’s not a remembered president or a spirit in this country.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mort, so you believe Bobby Kennedy right now has a pretty good idea who killed his brother?

    Mort Sahl:

    I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. Garrison has said that there is no way that the President would not know what’s going on here, which is not to say he’s a conspirator. No way. I don’t know how Robert Kennedy, I don’t know what he knows. I have no idea. He’s quite enigmatic about it all.

    Elliot Mintz:

    You believe right now that President Johnson has a pretty good idea who killed Kennedy?

    Mort Sahl:

    President Johnson, of course, he must know. Just from an overlap of information, he must have some information. He must know that Lee Oswald did not do it. He has to know that. In order for this immense cover up to go on. So does the Vice President.

    Elliot Mintz:

    You’re listening to KPFK, listener supported Pacifica Radio, Los Angeles.

    Mort Sahl:

    So we walk up to the house, there’s a tricycle in the driveway, and we knock on a door and Garrison comes to the door in his bathrobe because he had the flu. And I put my hand out, I said, “I just came down to shake your hand.”

    And he said, “I hope you’re going to do more than that.”

    That was the beginning. And we sat down and we talked to him until about 4:00 in the morning, and we talked to him about everything. He’s got a great oratorical style, you know, and he’s a true believer. He really is in the liberal tradition of this country, which some people would call a liberal-conservative tradition, but prizing the individual against federalism. We went there on successive nights and he brought the detectives over to meet us, the guys working, among whom was Bill Gurvich, who later defected. You recall, he made a statement to the press defecting after he left Robert Kennedy’s office.

    Bill Gurvich who said, “Clay Shaw’s being railroaded and Garrison has no case,” was in the office and he told me with great relish how they got Clay Shaw. How Clay Shaw had come in. I asked him to come in and Garrison said, “I’m charging you with conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy,” and Shaw said nothing. The perspiration broke out on his upper lip.

    And he said, “I’d like to go home and consider this.”

    And Garrison said, “I don’t think so.” After looking at Andy Sciambra, his assistant, because he knew that the guy wanted to clean out his apartment, they always know that. So they went to the apartment. Of course they got the whips and chains and the executioner’s gown and the shoes in the shape of coffins, which he said was a Mardi Gras costume. But of course the shoes had never touched the sidewalk. Nothing but a carpeted floor.

    Elliot Mintz:

    The shoes and the shapes of coffins?

    Mort Sahl:

    Of coffins. Then Gurvich told me that he was going to get Sergio Arcacha-Smith, another one of the Cubans who was in Dallas, but Governor Connally had not extradited. He was going to go down there. He said, “If we get the extradition, I want to go get him.” He said with great relish.

    I said, “How much is involved in going into Dallas to bring a guy back?”

    And he said, “There’s nothing involved.” He said, “I go down there and I knock on the door and he comes to the door and I say, “I got you Arcacha.’” And he said, “Then we come back.”

    And I said, “What if he resists?

    He said, “I hope so,” and we all laughed a lot.

    The detectives would come in Garrison’s den, which has a bust of Bertrand Russell up there, which the press doesn’t tell you. The press says to you Garrison has a picture of Napoleon. Yes he does, but he also has a bust of Bertrand Russell. And he quotes from Hamlet a lot. We found out a lot of things about him. We found out that when the Doubleday stores in New Orleans had James Baldwin’s book, Another Country, they censored it on the basis of pornography and were going to close the stores. And they asked the district attorney to prosecute the case. Garrison called the guys that had the store and he said, “What are you going to do? You’re going to fight this?”

    They said, “No, we’ll just pay the fine and reopen.”

    He said, “You can’t do that.”

    And they said, “Why?”

    And he said, “Because next time they’ll burn your books.” And he helped them win, even though he’s a prosecuting attorney.

    So we found out a good deal about him and his character. And the guys were walking in and out, a lot of the guys were voluntary because he only has a staff really of four.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Four people-

    Mort Sahl:

    Yeah, in the office. He’s got the greatest DAs office in the country before this case. I mean, he says he has no gray mice. They’re all lawyers who fight, who are very hard to come by, because if I wanted to name a profession that’s the lowest I would have to say the legal profession.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Why do you say that?

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, they really are the prostitutes of our time because their passion can be purchased. And because the ones I’ve met are all star struck. They talk about the scales of justice, but boy, it’s no accident that she’s blindfolded and that her dress is tattered. They are unbelievable. Anything goes.

    I had a lawyer out here for 10 years when the President was killed. He used to give presents to his clients at the end of the year. I mean, he’d send you a picture or plastic glasses. And when the President was killed, he sent a card out. It said, “Because of our great loss this year, we’re going to send the money to a donation and some of the gift to a clinic for mental health because it was a deranged person that took the life of our President.” Perfect liberalism. All looking the other way.

    There wasn’t one member of the American Bar Association who said anything about defending Lee Harvey Oswald. There wasn’t one member of the American Civil Liberties Union that went in to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. And because, as Garrison said to me in the den that night, we lost an adversary proceeding because the law wasn’t protected by lawmen. Then we not only lost our President, we lost our justice too.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Mort, we come to the point, I guess, in any discussion about this particular subject. The inevitable reality that we must confront ourselves with, however difficult that might be. Who killed John F. Kennedy?

    Mort Sahl:

    Well, as far as we can tell … I must tell you that Garrison has every confidence he’s going into court February 14th, which is a month away. I expect he will. But the scenario points toward a coalition of anti-Castro, Cuban exiles, oil rich psychotics, according to the district attorney in Texas, retired militarists, various voices of the right. That is at an operational level of the conspiracy and at the planning level. The Cubans were a good setup up because they were disenchanted with the Kennedy administration and also they were lawless. You’ve got to remember that these informants who worked for the CIA along the way, if you have government by hoodlum, what are you spawning? Every cop we know in LA has his contacts on Main Street or East 5th Street. He’s got junkies and pimps and peddlers, et cetera. But he knows what they are and he keeps them within perspective to work for the greater good as they say.

    The CIA keeps them on staff for 20 years and gives them a watch at the end of their service and that’s the difference. This undercover thing of doing what you want to, and countermanding orders of the President, and writing blank checks, and not being checked by the Congress, spawns a government by hoodlums. That is not to say that the government subsidized the assassination. We don’t know that and Garrison denies it. I said, “Why do you say ex-CIA men?”

    He says, “Because I can’t conceive of anybody in my government wanting to harm the President.”

    But the point is somewhere along the line we gave up. We gave in when the government said, “We know better what’s good for you than you know for yourself.”

    That’s why the liberalism of today, whether it’s Lawrence Sherman in the 28th District saying, “I’m going into the convention with a B-slate,” or Robert Vaughn saying, “The wars, the aberration of Lyndon Johnson and not Robert Kennedy is puny,” or Carl Reiner saying, “Dick Van Dyke and I are going to host a black tie party at the Daisy for Eugene McCarthy or dissenting Democrats.”

    This is 20 years too late, man. They’ve been drafting people like you for 20 years. So that eventually 435 honorable men in the Congress don’t even object, and nobody votes against the Un-American Activities Committee, and nobody says anything about the war, and nobody says anything about anything, and nobody says anything about murder in the streets. I’ve been crying fascism, fascism. How much success, how heady was the sensation, and how intoxicated with the fascists in this country to get to a point where they thought they could go ahead with this boldest stroke as killing him in the street? Well, obviously what makes them think they can get away with it? The experience of getting away with it over the years! They tend to get power drunk because they’ve been successful. It gets crazier and crazier. They’ve extended fascism without challenge for so long in this country, a generation since 1945, the dark days, this long night started with Roosevelt’s death. You can chart the whole thing and it gets to a point where a whole generation doesn’t know any better.

    Robert Kennedy talks about a massive retaliation and communism and capitalism and vehicular capability. You’re brought up on those terms, man. You can’t even tell when somebody is jiving you anymore because it’s 20 years of madness.

    As much as my Jewish friends aren’t going to like it, the German people weren’t born crazy. They were made so by their government. They were made in the form which is most convenient to that government, which is fascistic, which broke the backs of the unions and used the anti-Semitism as a dodge. Same thing is happening here. They’re trying to drive the American people crazy. I’ll tell you something: I think they’re succeeding. There’s great evidence in the barbarism of day-to-day life and in the lack of direction and the degree of a lack of mental health in this country.

    I’m not suggesting going to a psychiatrist because most of them are sellouts too. Sad to say because they know better, but all they want to do is to repair you and get you back on the line to keep punching out Mustang frames. That’s the trouble.

    Look what you have here. FDR dies. What was the plan? To make Germany an occupied agricultural state. But what happens afterwards? Truman goes into office and he forms the Defense Department, the Marshall Plan, he aids the fascists in the hills of Greece to “stop communism”. He founds the CIA in 1947. He gives J. Edgar Hoover a blank check, and they go ahead with the Un-American Activities Committee and they start the witch-hunts. And McCarthy comes on and bombs and the Japanese people, civilian areas, atomic bombs. And the Korean War, the bold stroke, anti-communism. We will not tolerate it anywhere. The Truman Doctrine outside the Western hemisphere. And Russia and Korea and China and Vietnam and Santa Domingo. You can see it step for step. 22 years of fascism. So that the country becomes a colonial power.

    Now, of course we’re not made for that because that’s not our tradition. So that’s the conflict. That’s why everybody’s hung up. And they say, “Well, why do the kids look so weird?” Because you’re driving their body in one direction, their head is going in another. They’re being pulled apart. We’re not made for it. We weren’t measured for an SS suit. Man, if I was going to form a fascist state, I would go to the Germans. They’re set up for it. It’s like Sinatra told me, “Buy a record company, don’t found one.” He bought one that was set up already.

    You have to be efficient. He had a commitment too, by the way.

    Elliot Mintz:

    Sinatra?

    Mort Sahl:

    I don’t hear from him anymore. I don’t hear from anybody anymore. Where are all of you or don’t you care? Because I don’t know where you’re going live. You only go to make a movie in England for three months. That’s almost closed. Where are you going to go? You can’t hide in Switzerland. You know you are an American. You’re not going to feel that good. Everybody says, “Well, if you’ve got enough money, you’ll feel good anywhere.” It’s really not true. There isn’t anything quite like America, and especially if you’re an American, you’re really going to miss it. I know you take it for granted, but you’re going to miss it. You’re going to miss the sun coming up in the morning. You don’t think so until you’re in the Holocaust and of course it’s too late.

    But to get back to your question, to stop theorizing for awhile, this group of neo-Nazis who have brought us fascism in the name of “National Security”. The facts on who shot the President are in the archives because of national security. Everything is national security. The CIA’s national security. The FBI is national security. And meanwhile you don’t recognize your own country. Look at what we have. Think of America as a body and think of the pressure points in a first aid class. Mark Lane is saying to you, “I’ve got his pulse in the left arm and it has an accelerated pulse.”

    And Jim Garrison has got the right arm and he says it. Mario Savio is up there by his right temple and he says it, and Stokely Carmichael is down by his left ankle and he says it. Adam Powell says it in his own way. Everybody tells him, and [Bob] Dylan tells them and none of these guys know each other. They don’t hang out together, as the saying goes. They say the same thing. They have that in common. The patient has a high fever and an accelerated pulse, and I can’t find anybody who cares about this guy.

    They talk about heart transplants. They don’t care what happened to America. That’s what it’s all about. You don’t have to love your parents. I’m not demanding that. Miss Liberty. What about it? What about the pursuit of the American dream? An awful lot of good men died so that a good many of you can sit out there and think about whether you want to sell out or not.

    I’m worried that it’s too late for you to sell in. That’s what really terrifies me. I don’t know whether we’re over the hill or not. Naturally, I’m going to get up tomorrow and go after it the same way. The bell rings, you come out of your corner swinging because we’ve got to keep trying because this is all we have. But it is evident, you know, nobody has to be naïve about the elements in this country. Why did I indict liberals earlier, the so-called Social Democrats in my routines when I say the far right? Because there aren’t enough evil men in this country. Their army, they are the generals, but the privates in their army, the vast ranks of the unwashed, are the liberals. In other words, evil men can only do evil because of the indifference of good men, to paraphrase a philosopher.

    And that’s what it is. The road to fascism was paved with those liberal bricks. Every young man who was headed for the left was castrated by a good liberal who wants him to fit in. And when you cock a gun and put it at the temple of a liberal, he signs the petition on the right, not on the left. There is no left in America. There is no dissension. A few university professors. How many people came up to you and said, “It’s a terrible thing what happened to Dr. Spock?” They’re just glad it didn’t happen to them. Right? The only reason I’m talking about Vietnam is because we’re talking about Kennedy. I know where they’re at. They have sold us out. That’s really what they’ve done. They’ve sold out a generation. Every time you meet a guy of 40, you have a right to spit in his face because he’s cast a shadow over your future.

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