Government by Contract

© by Linda Minor

An Unbridled Administrator

If Jesse Jones served as the “bridge” between the purposes of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and the source of funds to accomplish those purposes, those allegedly egalitarian purposes quickly disintegrated into a factional grab for government succor—much as a newly born puppies fight amongst themselves in competition for access to their mother’s teats.

The New Deal was merely an updated continuation of the unfinished agenda begun by the previous Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson—interrupted by Republicans Coolidge, Harding and Hoover. An outline of that platform had conveniently been set forth for us in a pathetically-written novel, originally published anonymously shortly before the 1912 election, whose author was revealed in the spring of 1916 to be none other than the mysterious little man from Texas known as Colonel House.

In Philip Dru, Administrator House laid out his plans for an efficiently run new world order—a model for rule by a beneficent executive officer in whose hands power would be centralized. The legislative agenda necessary to accomplish that ideal government was systematically put in place during the Woodrow Wilson administration (1913-1921) through enactment of:

• The Federal Reserve Banking System (Owen-Glass Act, signed December 23, 1913) and

• The progressive federal income tax (Sixteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, ratified February 3, 1913).

The motive behind the Wilson agenda, to control the masses without upsetting the applecart, was reflected on the title page of House’s novel:

"No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property, but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least favored by fortune." —Giuseppe Mazzini[1]

In this paper, we will observe the results of that effort to make the executive branch of government, delineated by the U.S. Constitution to be only one of three co-equal branches of government, into what it is today—a centralized clearinghouse capable of obtaining natural resources and redistributing them by means of an oligarchical administrative system in which a bureaucracy contracts with corporations set up by factions within the financial elite. In another essay, “Rewriting History,” we describe that clearinghouse function using a spider plant metaphor to illustrate how an elected executive government has over time spun off various unelected and unaccountable offshoots, through which it distributes its gathered resources. Ongoing historical research continues to support that metaphor.

The Model

House was assisted in his effort by other behind-the-scenes advisers (in a curtain-behind-the-curtain sleight-of-hand maneuver), the most important of which was the German Jewish banker Paul Warburg. In 1907 Warburg met Senator Nelson Aldrich, who

The Warburgs

visited [Jacob Schiff’s office at] Kuhn, Loeb to ask how the Reichsbank issued treasury bills. Schiff didn’t know and summoned Paul. By the time Aldrich left, an enthusiastic Paul mused,

‘There marches national bank currency and there goes currency reform.' [2]

The distribution clearinghouse Warburg designed, which was modified by Congress before final passage, is comprised of an elite class of bankers who are shareholders of the private centralized banking system granted power in 1913—a class whose ultimate goal is to break free of any legislative or judicial constraints and to govern the country much as Philip Dru was allowed to do in Col. House’s warped imagination.  The bankers operate within twelve separate regions of the country, each of which is governed by a separate governing board. 

Col. House’s challenge after the Act was passed (but before the system was actually operating to its full extent) was beginning to put in place the administrative infrastructure he had laid out in his book. As individuals in power tend to do, he sought expertise for his experiment only from his inner circle of acquaintances.

Click to enlarge; note where Jesse's arms led.

Jesse Jones states in his autobiography that, though he had refused House’s repeated summonses to Washington throughout the Wilson Administration, he finally gave in to the entreaties because his country needed him to help alleviate the symptoms of the depression; Jones thus viewed himself as the ideal administrator. Once Roosevelt replaced him, Jones’ support for the New Deal waned. Nevertheless, once the legislation had been enacted and forced down the throat of the Supreme Court, the enhanced administrative power given the executive branch remained. 

Acting as the financial hub of the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jones distributed “Fifty Billion Dollars,” according to the title of his autobiography, though it has never been clear how that money was created. While Jones was head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), he had the power to dole out or to deny contracts to individuals and corporations in order to keep the masses employed, so as not to be engaged in revolutionary activity against the existing power structure. Upon his return to Houston in 1946, he would not only continue his commercial real estate develop business, but would work through his Houston Endowment Foundation to set up a secret method to finance intelligence operations, as well as to fund political campaigns.[3]

Secret Visionaries

One platform plank remained unfulfilled by the end of Wilson’s term of office. Although it would take another world war to gain approval for that goal—which, incidentally, helped to further the international banking ideal desired by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland—Wilson was still hopeful he could achieve that goal before his term of office ended in 1921. In order to draft a constitution for the League of Nations, Wilson appointed a four-main committee chaired by Col. House and named another man, like Warburg from a German Jewish background, as adviser to the committee. George Louis Beer, whose father Julius Beer lived next door to Swiss-born Meyer Guggenheim and his son William on West 77th Street in New York,[4]  used his knowledge of British imperial and colonial policy to develop a constitution for world government along similar lines.[5] He was chief of the colonial division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and in charge of helping to draft the mandates for the administration of the former German colonies.

The Guggenheims

The Guggenheim family—just as a plant absorbs its required nutrients from the soil—had been instrumental in acquiring for the United States scarce minerals necessary for the nation’s strategic purposes—coinage, weapons manufacturing, etc. Because of the scarcity and the expense in obtaining those minerals, the Guggenheims therefore occupied a powerful position in America at the turn of the century. Having been a member of the Jewish clique which included the Guggenheims as well as an assortment of Jewish bankers in Kuhn, Loeb and other Wall Street firms, George Louis Beer understood the importance of such strategic metals in banking and world trade.[6] His family maintained connections among the Jewish banking community which moved from one nation to the next, setting up centralized banking systems which could act within a global clearinghouse in an attempt to stabilize each nation to maintain control over its currency.[7]

The Texas Network

Like Col. House, Jesse Jones greased a political machine composed of Texans with whom he had been associated in business and banking. It is the network to which they gave power which maintains power today. It is that network that explains who Halliburton is. Without understanding the past, we can never hope to understand the current power structure—how it thinks and how it works.

We can identify the network by its components—the businesses in which its constituents were engaged. The purpose of the “administrator” is to distribute the government’s money to those businesses, assuring the network that it will not need to compete with the same type of businesses not controlled by the network. Since money usually determines the outcomes of elections, the network sets up its own method of bypassing the law in order to funnel money to its candidates.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s primary function under George W. Bush was to distribute contracts to his old employer, Halliburton, as well as to lay the groundwork for the pretext necessary to get the United States involved in a war. Can it really be that simple? The best way to answer that question is to examine and analyze the governing boards of Halliburton throughout its history—a time-consuming process.  In an essay called “The Halliburton Riddle,” we stated:

“Connally, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Armstrong—of those four, three would serve as directors of Halliburton. The fourth, Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense would help George W. Bush engineer the war in Iraq, to Halliburton’s benefit.” 

Thus it was intimated that there is a definite connection between that corporate clique and the policy decisions being made in George W. Bush's White House, and that, to a great degree, those policy decisions are concerned primarily with trade deficits and currency stabilization—issues with which the United States has been dealing throughout its history.

The State of Texas houses one of the twelve district banks that operate the Federal Reserve.  Located in Dallas, it controls all banks in Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Louisiana.  Texans have always resented their subservience to Eastern capital, always searching for a way to avoid having to go to New York or Boston to sell their bonds or issue new corporate stock. When Jesse Jones headed the RFC, he made sure that his friends back home were not neglected, and those friends liked having one of their own as the nation’s chief banker.

Although Jones had, in 1917 been one of the initial incorporators of Houston-based Humble Oil Company (a majority of whose stock was secretly, and illegally, owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey), he sold his stock when began work for the Red Cross at the end of World War I. His co-founders, however, because of Texas’ importance as a resource for petroleum and natural gas, would eventually see themselves in the chairmanship of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

They would also gain access to the board of Houston’s prestigious Rice University, patterned along the lines of Princeton, where Jersey Standard was originally headquartered. The Humble founders would also control a major segment of the beef producing industry—with its King Ranch in South Texas performing a dual function as cattle raiser and oil producer (having leased its land to Humble Oil, which found huge oil fields there).

LBJ

It was, in fact, a scion of the King Ranch—Congressman Richard Mifflin Kleberg—who gave Jesse Jones’ replacement as head of the Texas network his first job in Washington, D.C. in 1932. While young Lyndon Baines Johnson was still learning the ropes as Congressman Kleberg’s aide, Col. House was in New York meeting periodically with FDR. But between 1938 (when Col. House died) and about 1941, control of the Texas network wavered between Jesse Jones and Vice-President John Nance Garner.

Once Garner was replaced as Vice-President by Henry Wallace, both Garner and Jones returned to Texas and began to operate a top-secret network of Texans to counter what they saw as the evil influences of Franklin Roosevelt, who now had no loyalty to the vision of Col. House. Jones’ power within the RFC and the Commerce Department disappeared almost overnight. Garner retired to Uvalde, where he lived until 1967, perhaps mentoring a whole new generation of Democrats with a more conservative focus than FDR. The Texas network came increasingly under the influence of Lyndon Johnson, and it was at that point that George and Herman Brown, founders of Brown & Root as a construction company, began to use Johnson’s inside information and connection to FDR to keep the federal dollars flowing into Texas. After FDR's death in 1945, Johnson made a decision to stay within the Democratic establishment, while other Texas Democrats openly rebelled against the New Deal. FDR's last vice-president came from Missouri, and therefore, when Harry Truman rose to the Presidency, so too did Missouri's influence within the banking establishment rise to some extent—including the influence of St. Louis investment banker G.H. "Bertie" Walker and his son, "Herbie," a grandfather and uncle, respectively, of George H. W. Bush. We will return to this family in the future.

Lyndon Johnson, nevertheless, had a secret tap into the role that had been assigned to Robert Bernerd Anderson, a Texas Republican appointed by Truman to a task even more mysterious than the work engaged in by Col. House. An essay about Anderson, "Tilting at Oil Wells," was posted at other of the blogs written by this author—Where the Gold Is. Anderson possibly did more than any other individual to ensure Texas’ access to mineral resources independent of the Federal Reserve’s New York and Boston districts. He acted as a transition between the old Texas network (which obtained political power through the Democratic Party) and the new Bush network, which led Texas into the Republican Party. Because of what Anderson knew, the Texas network in 1968 turned Republican. Despite what they owed to LBJ (what he helped them do in November 1963), former Governor John Connally organized Democrats for Nixon, and Lyndon knew his time for power was over.

The political machine for which LBJ worked (he only thought he controlled it; whereas, it was the other way round) continues to reside in Texas today, although it is now headed by Republicans rather than Democrats. Thus, it is no mere coincidence that three of the last eight Presidents allegedly “elected” by the people of the United States have claimed Texas as their residence. The disproportionate influence asserted by Texans stems no more from a coincidence than does the fact that the election of 2004 pitted two members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones against each other. Identification of the financial/political network (some have used the term “cabal”) which rose to power in 1963—and which is so reluctant to relinquish that power—is of urgent importance in order to change the paradigm that has taken America ever closer into the grips of globalism.

Just as Brown & Root understood that maintaining political power is a necessary step in order to assure its continued access to government contracts, the contracts themselves helped to determine what policies those politicians, whose power was contingent on continuing to feed contracts to the network which elected them, would pursue. It is a vicious cycle that, in the hands of Texans, always becomes deadly and dangerous.

Endnotes

  1. Philip Dru Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935, originally published anonymously in 1912 by B.W. Huebsch.  The badly written novel was in 1916 disclosed to have been authored by Col. Edward M. House, the man behind Woodrow Wilson’s rise to prominence.   Indicating that his true purpose in creating such an administrative framework within the federal executive branch of government was to keep the peasants happy so as not to upset the existing order, House began his book with a quote from the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom present-day conspiracy theorists have called an Illuminati leader.

  2. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York:  Random House, 1993), 132.  Chernow reveals that Paul Warburg, along with Aldrich, “sneaked off” to Jekyll Island, Georgia late in 1910 to discuss currency reform with other wealthy men from American banking circles.  This meeting was discussed in my essay “Membership by Inheritance Only.”

  3. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977). According to Corson, Jones had been chosen by Colonel House to serve under Major General Ralph H. Van Deman—General Pershing's senior intelligence officer and Chief of Allied Counterintelligence—at the Paris Peace Commission after World War I. Van Deman’s 38-year career in intelligence had taken place long before the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency, or National Security Agency had been created, before any funding mechanism for intelligence operations existed. Corson had lived, worked, and traveled in Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia throughout the cold war years and had fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—retiring as a retired lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps. He had “learned the intricate workings of the intelligence community in a wide variety of field and staff intelligence assignments,” including “Staff Secretary of the President's Special Group (CI) joint DOD-CIA Committee on Counterinsurgency R & D, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense's Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Officer in Charge of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis) Southeast Asia intelligence evaluation program.” Yet, with all that experience, after talking with Van Deman, Corson admitted to being left 

with a conundrum which after 27 years remains unresolved. It involved my stated disbelief that the activities surrounding his card file project could have been carried out without the financial assistance of others. His reply was equally disarming and bemusing. In essence he said, "I have never personally accepted a penny to carry out this work; however, others have had need for funds to do what is necessary" and he asked, "Do you have any quarrel with the idea that private citizens should not make funds available to those able and willing to carry out the work required to keep us free?"  We left it there with his gentle admonition, "Your father understood this and there is no reason you should not." My thoughts jumped to my father's relationship with Jesse Jones and the Houston Endowment, but Van Deman, in a sphinxlike pronouncement said, "Your future lies with those in the active forces, but never fear, there are those in reserve who will help in their own silent ways." (See footnote at pages 104-105.)

  4. The Guggenheims were discussed in Linda Minor, “Who “Created” Condi Rice?” in 2004. As stated in that essay, the Guggenheims had amassed a fortune in lead, copper and silver smelting in Colorado, which “in 1887, led to the formation of the American Smelting & Refining Company (ASARCO) and the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1899 and created the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO).”

  5. In addition to becoming wealthy from importing tobacco, Beer’s studies had been pursued first at Columbia in New York and later in London, where he learned how the British socialists had financed their own welfare scheme, first with Indian opium, and later with gold and diamonds from South Africa.

  6. The Federal Reserve Act’s “chief architect was Paul Warburg of the German and Swiss  banking house who moved to America only nine years earlier. He brought with him all the experience of European central banking. His brother Max Warburg was financial adviser to the Kaiser and later Director of Germany's central bank, The Reichsbank. Paul Warburg’s Wall Street banking operation was a partnership with the Rothschilds in Kuhn Loeb & Co.”  G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, Fourth Edition, 2002).

  7. Julius Beer’s name appeared often in The New York Times in conjunction with names such as Schiff, Guggenheim, Rothschild, Warburg, Lewisohn, Lehman and Loeb—within the context of “Jewish society” and charitable causes of that day.

  7. The first of the three, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered the White House as a result of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 and was elected in 1964. The second was George H.W. Bush, virtual president for much of Reagan’s eight years in the Office, elected in 1988. The third was George W. Bush, who held the job from 2001 through 2008.  We don’t count Gerald Ford as being “elected”; he was appointed to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned and ascended to the Presidency following Richard Nixon’s disgrace. We also use the term “elected” loosely because of disputes surrounding the elections of 2000 and 2004.  

HUSTLERS AND HUCKSTERS

© Linda Minor 2005

“Rove … shares operational and attitudinal roots with Abramoff and the other hustlers in the baby-boomer generation of Republican strategists. Over the years, as Rove has needed to ‘move’ legislation—and make no mistake, he has been the guy guiding that process—he has called on the entire GOP lobbying establishment in D.C. to help. The process of building that machinery began long before Rove came to town with Bush.”

Howard Fineman, Newsweek, January 4, 2006

Today’s Hustlers

Neither Jack Abramoff nor Karl Rove built the political machine whose gears they have been so busily greasing since each of them left the employ of the College Republicans in their respective generations. Merely cogs in that wheel, they have been paid to crank out their own form of propaganda which in turn helps them churn in more of the big bucks that pay for the grease.

As we reported in SRA last April (Killer Political Instincts), “Rove received his political baptism in the last campaign of Senator Bennett”—that is, Wallace Foster Bennett, the conservative Mormon Senator from Utah from 1950 until 1972. Senator Bennett’s wife Frances was the daughter of the wealthiest and most powerful citizen in Utah—Heber J. Grant (1856-1945)—former polygamist, who not only ran the Mormon Church for many years, but also handled many of its massive investments.

When Senator Wallace retired from the Senate to return to Utah, his son Robert Foster Bennett, who had been the political strategist who ran the campaign in which Rove worked, bought an established public relations firm in Washington, D.C.—Robert R. Mullen & Co.—from which he proceeded to assist conservative Republicans in regaining a foothold in the political establishment.

Read Dostoyevsky's novel.

Public relations and propaganda

A study of Robert Mullen’s background offers many clues into the reason Bennett selected this firm to purchase in 1971. Bennett, a Mormon whose maternal grandfather had been the seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, would have been attracted to the firm which handled all public relations in Washington for the Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church.

Mormon Tabernacle

As part of that public relations work, Mullen had in 1966 published under his name a book entitled The Latter Day Saints: The Mormons Yesterday and Today.[1] A New York Times review charged that Mullen was “too obvious about avoiding the ‘back corners’ of Mormonism to put the Gentile reader wholly at ease,” and that he had been “retained by the Church of Latter-Day Saints,” to write the book.

Such a public relations retainer would easily explain Mullen’s “swift passing over of issues that might possibly embarrass the church,” an occurrence “all too evident all too frequently. Even his choice of words to describe the few disedifying incidents he tackles appears to have been made with Madison Avenue forethought.”

The reviewer had implied that, in the words of an old saw: “He who pays the piper picks the tune.” An investigation into why the Mormon leadership in the 1966 era felt a need for Mullen’s propaganda—which involves the gambling industry and the Howard Hughes empire—must be reserved for a separate study. Here we will focus on Robert Mullen—one of yesterday’s hustlers—whose role in setting up the political machinery to which Rove’s first mentor, Robert F. Bennett, became a successor sheds enormous light on how, why and by whom the machinery was built.[2]

Though Mullen’s childhood is murky—according to his obituary he was born in 1909 in Alamagordo, N.M. and attended college in Wisconsin and Colorado—his career as a writer began at Life magazine. Life had been founded by Henry R. Luce in 1923 with the financial assistance of a few Yale classmates (Luce was Skull and Bones 1920) and with free public relations assistance from no less than Edward L. Bernays.[3]

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud.

In business, of course, there is no free lunch. What Bernays would no doubt receive in exchange, in the event the magazine became a success, was access to an apparently independent soapbox which expressed the views of his own public relations clients—companies like Procter & Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Dodge Motors.[4]

Life was managed, after its 1936 inauguration, by Time-Life’s vice-president, Charles Douglas (C.D.) Jackson, who in 1940 became chairman of the innocuous-sounding Council for Democracy—the “prime function” of which, according to Luce’s rival Chicago Tribune, was “to siphon out funds to other organizations for use in propaganda.”[5]

Life's C.D. Jackson

Jackson, therefore, already had a strong background in distorting facts when he became General Eisenhower’s deputy chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch for Ike’s command at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), once the United States entered the war. Headquartered in London, Jackson’s primary assignment was “the touchy project of rousing the conquered people of Europe to active support for D-Day.”[6] Once the war ended, all that changed was his clothing and location; he slipped easily out of his Army uniform back into Luce’s Time-Life-Fortune pro-business propaganda mill.

For Luce and his staff, the war never really began or ended; it was a permanent institution. As early as 1929 Luce “began a propaganda effort to isolate Russia economically.”[7]

Henry Luce

The China-born son of Presbyterian missionaries, Luce encouraged creation of an economic boycott (waged by a unified Business and Church) against the Soviets before they reversed their trend of buying U.S. goods. Warning that state-owned Russian business would copy corporate designs, dishonor American patents, and dump cheaper copies of the American-made machinery throughout America and Europe to destroy western industry, Luce’s publications pumped out a relentless campaign against the actions of the J. P. Morgan-financed companies owned primarily by the clients of Bernays’ public relations rival Ivy Lee. Lee’s clients ranged from the McCormick and Patterson families who controlled International Harvester (the “reaper”) as well as the Chicago Tribune to the Pennsylvania Railroad empire and the corporations and trusts owned by the family of John D. Rockefeller. 

Propaganda and psychological warfare

Luce had already been fighting the cold war for twenty years by the time Jackson was appointed to head the “National Committee for a Free Europe,” a purportedly private organization that sponsored Radio Free Europe.[8] Jackson’s services were also donated to assist in the 1952 campaign of Eisenhower, not only as a speechwriter, but as a key member of the administration’s Psychological Strategy Board. After the election, he was put in charge of “cold war planning,” a not-dissimilar position from the Office of Special Plans, held by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the current Bush administration.

Robert R. Mullen

Robert R. Mullen, not an Ivy Leaguer like his employers, somehow landed a position as an editor in New York before moving to Washington, D.C. during the 1940’s. That connection aided in his selection as director of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) Information Bureau, headed and staffed in large part by former intelligence agents such as E. Howard Hunt, a graduate of Brown University. According to Hunt, he was hired by Mullen upon his retirement from the CIA in 1970 through the CIA’s “placement service,” which told Hunt that Mullen “established and managed a Free Cuba Committee for CIA.”[9]

By 1951 a turf battle ensued over whether the ECA’s informational activities should be separate or transferred to the State Department.[10] Mullen voiced his agency’s ultimately successful position that its 169 “propaganda staff” did not duplicate the efforts of the State Department role of “spreading the American way of life,” and were not redundant.[11]

As the ECA’s director of information, Mullen issued a press release announcing that the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), instituted to help Europe rebuild a peacetime economy after World War II, would refocus its spending to assist Europe and the Far East in withstanding a potential threat from Communists in the Soviet Union. His statement attempted to allay fears about trade deficits:

“Altho [sic] the pumping of additional United States dollars for strategic and other needs will add to the supply of dollars overseas, it is worthy of note that in largest measure these dollars will go to non-European areas. Europe, itself, as it expedites rearmament, will also be spending its capital for materials in Latin America, Africa, southeast Asia, etc. So the need for continued United States dollar aid is expanding rather than diminishing.”[12]

The concern of Mullen (acting as mouthpiece for Luce and Jackson) was clearly aimed at “correcting the central dollar imbalance between Europe and the United States.” He further mollified fears about upsetting the dollar’s trade balance, stating that:

“Funds accumulated by the Marshall plan countries thru the sale of American-given Marshall plan goods to local consumers [counterpart funds] ‘will be available for more direct support of defense efforts…’”[13] (bracketed words as in original; italics added)

What this actually meant was that non-dollar currencies would be used to buy American defense industry products, thus eliminating the need for industries build up during World War II to compete in a peacetime economy.

Propaganda and slush funds

Time magazine analyzed the situation as follows:

“Scenting trouble, ECA quietly abandoned its old first principle, that the Marshall Plan should be used only for peaceful economic recovery of Europe. Henceforth, said Deputy ECAdministrator William Foster, Marshall Plan nations could rearm themselves with their counterpart funds—some $3 billion in their own currencies which they have contributed, and put under U.S. control, to match ECA dollars. With that matter cleared up, the Senate briskly voted ECA its $2.7 billion.”[14] (italics added)

It was with these funds that C. D. Jackson’s allegedly “private” National Committee for Free Europe was incorporated to bombard its targets with the importance of freedom, of the American variety—the freedom to buy goods manufactured in America. Once globalism took hold, however, the location of manufacture became less important than the control of the corporate shares, proving that the aim of American government was not to create jobs for Americans and maintain their “way of life,” but rather to satisfy the demands of corporate shareholders, regardless of where they lived.

To those who mass-produced the flow of propaganda, however, the words they spewed forth was their “way of life”—the only means they knew of earning a livelihood. By June of 1952 Mullen had proved his ability well enough to Jackson to become press secretary for civilian Dwight D. Eisenhower, campaigning for the presidency.[15] The Chicago Tribune recognizing the influence of Bernays’ behind-the-scenes role in Eisenhower’s campaign strategists, reported that Chicago, scene of the 1952 Republican convention, was “awash in the greatest flood of propaganda the country has ever seen,” under a headline proclaiming “Aspirants’ Aids Turn out River of Propaganda.”

One of those aids was Robert Mullen. His name appeared under the subheading “Eisenhower Always Shadowed,” which stated that Mullen was the General’s constant companion on the campaign trail. After the nomination, Mullen—replaced in his role as press secretary by James C. Hagerty, one of New York Governor Thomas Dewey’s inner circle—was rewarded with the title of “executive director of the National Citizens Committee for Educational Television.”[16]

Mullen’s committee then formed a non-profit corporation “to develop and circulate programs for educational television stations” under the title of “Educational TV and Radio Center in Chicago,” and had named the president of the University of Illinois as its chairman. The Ford Foundation donated $1,500,000 (in 1952 dollars, mind you!) through a channel called the “Fund for Adult Education,” designed to equip twenty or thirty educational television stations throughout the nation. Mullen indicated the possibility that up to $5,000,000 in all could be spent.[17]

It is most illuminating to learn that in 1952, the president of the Ford Foundation was none other than Paul G. Hoffman, the first head of the ECA, and one of its directors was Frank Abrams, chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New Jersey. According to the Foundation’s annual report that year:

The foundation is supporting the development of a program with the two-fold objective of increasing man's knowledge about himself and of bringing that knowledge to bear upon critical social problems. The scope of the program includes study of such subjects as political behavior, communication, values and belief, individual development and adjustment, and the processes of social change.[18]

The same report, incidentally, included the name of William J. Casey, identified in 1952 as the president of Business Reports, Inc. Casey was a director of Intercultural Publications, Inc., whose $504,350.00 grant for that year was given to publish a quarterly magazine, Perspectives USA. Time praised the publication’s first issue—the goal of which was “to show people outside the U.S. that ‘Americans can think as well as chew gum,’”[19] a purpose which coincided with Luce’s own objective. Casey has sometimes been thought to have been the creator of the CIA’s “off-the-shelf” corporate proprietaries and money-laundering techniques. But his wartime intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) obviously continued—with his private career as a writer of how-to tax shelter guides being supplemented by counterpart funds funneled through the Ford Foundation.

Mullen, still plying the propaganda trade in 1965, returned to politics to head another committee in charge of the campaign of presidential aspirant former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (then Ambassador to Vietnam) campaign in the Republican primary in which Barry Goldwater would be nominated.[20] By the end of April, Mullen was calling himself the “national coordinator” of the “Draft Lodge Committee,” made up of a group of businessmen determined to block Goldwater’s nomination at any cost. These men did not rule out negotiating with Nelson Rockefeller and begging Eisenhower to indorse Gov. William Scranton at the last moment before the convention in July—all to no avail.

Their attempt to drag Eisenhower into the fray merely angered the retired President, who had already expressed, upon leaving office in 1960 his disdain for the military-industrial complex, and who was shocked to find a group of reporters at his meeting with Lodge. Russell Freeburg of the Chicago Tribune Press Service stated that, when Ike was asked for a comment about his meeting with Lodge, he “whirled around and said tartly: ‘I’d like to know how you knew about it. I’m not going to say anything.’ ”

Freeburg reported that the press had been tipped about the meeting by Robert Mullen.[21] But, as it turned out, Lodge accomplished his desired purpose through Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara—another pro-business product from the Ford Foundation. Time’s March 20, 1964 edition covered McNamara’s third visit to Saigon in five months to consult with the Ambassador — a propaganda piece, appearing just three years before Luce’s death that undoubtedly would have made Henry Luce proud. His mentor Bernays would live until 1995. Bernays’ influence — regrettably — may never die.

Behind the Propaganda - Drugs

Revisionist historians such as Alfred W. McCoy have learned since that time of the desperation of Henry Cabot Lodge to continue the war in Vietnam.[22] Ambassador Lodge in 1965, more than a year after Kennedy's brutal anonymous murder, named as his special assistant in Vietnam former advertising huckster Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, who, according to McCoy:

“quickly learned that his old enemies, the Corsicans, were still in town. During the fighting between the French 2ème Bureau and the CIA back in 1955, the Corsican gangsters had been involved in several attempts on his life…. Lansdale later [after effecting a truce with his enemies] learned that the Corsicans were still heavily involved in the narcotics traffic, but since this was not his responsibility, he took no action…. It is particularly unfortunate that General Lansdale decided to arrange ‘some kind of a truce’ with the Corsicans during the very period when Marseille's heroin laboratories were probably beginning the changeover from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base. In a mid-1971 interview, Lieutenant Colonel [Lucien] Conein said that power brokers in Premier Ky's apparatus contacted the leaders of Saigon's Corsican underworld in 1965-1966 and agreed to let them start making large drug shipments to Europe in exchange for a fixed percentage of the profits. By October 1969 these shipments had become so important to Marseille's heroin laboratories that, according to Conein, there was a summit meeting of Corsican syndicate bosses from around the world at Saigon's Continental Palace Hotel. Syndicate leaders from Marseille, Bangkok, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh flew in for the meeting, which discussed a wide range of international rackets but probably focused on reorganizing the narcotics traffic.”[23]

From McCoy we learn that Lansdale’s Corsicans relate back to that day in 1946 when Thomas E. Dewey signed the order deporting Lucky Luciano back to Italy.[24] Perhaps the original Marshall Plan funds were actually derived through that deal, giving the mobsters a real share in the American syndicate. McCoy relates:

“Although naval intelligence officers called to give evidence at the hearings were extremely vague about what they had promised Luciano in exchange for his services, one naval officer wrote a number of confidential letters on Luciano's behalf that were instrumental in securing his release. Within two years after Luciano returned to Italy, the U.S. government deported over one hundred more mafiosi as well. And with the cooperation of his old friend, Don Calogero, and the help of many of his old followers from New York, Luciano was able to build an awesome international narcotics syndicate soon after his arrival in Italy.”[25]

CIA as Money Launderer - Marshall Plan and Drugs

The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was a transition agency in the last 1930's operating between OSS, which ended in 1939, and the creation of CIA in 1947. Headed by Frank Wisner, the OPC received funding for its covert operations out of Marshall Plan counterpart funds administered by Richard M. Bissell, Jr.[26] Carmel Offie referred to the Marshall Plan as “the slush fund” which the OPC “used everywhere…so there was never any shortage of funds.”[27]

It was exactly within the time frame of the above announcement that counterpart funds in foreign currencies were freed up for the purpose of covert action involving labor unions. President Truman saw the infiltration of Communists into organized labor as a direct threat to American capitalism.[28] The decision to convert the counterpart funds, legally restricted to peaceful purposes, came less than thirteen months after an international conference in New York sponsored by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions—under the sponsorship of socialist/humanist Corliss Lamont (1902-1995), son of then J.P. Morgan & Co. chairman — had been turned into a theatre of the absurd by panicky protestors, referred to as “reactionaries” by less visible opponents who were holed up in the Waldorf Astoria’s bridal suite. Consisting of former Communists and Trotskyists, many of these men and women — self-labeled “intellectuals” — would become “professional” anti-Communists, professional in the sense that their careers would become dependent upon the income the anti- Communist movement would generate.

Out of that 1949 protest movement, staged by those wishy-washy intellectuals (whose philosophical repertoire would alternate in the following decades in accord with whatever tunes those who were paying the pipers would request), would emerge the Congress of Cultural Freedom.

One month later, at its convention in Atlantic City, the American Ladies Garment Workers Union (ALGWU), headed by David Dubinsky — fellow “piper” — passed a resolution which

• called the Communist movement a “criminal conspiracy of espionage, sabotage and subversion, working for and serving the interests of a foreign power which seeks to rob us of our liberties and conquer and enslave us as a nation”; and
• lauded the efforts of Jay Lovestone, secretary of the free trade union committee of the American Federation of Labor.[29]

More than any other issue, it was this fear of labor’s being organized against the interests of the capitalists then in power which most motivated the American government establishment, which merely reflected the elitist views of the mostly Wall Street men then in control of the executive branch of the government. Their response was to wage the first of many American wars against an idea — an ominous, if abstract, philosophy or ideology, rather than a flesh and blood enemy — which threatened to take their wealth and power and transfer it to the undeserving masses.

Therefore, they reasoned, these funds could be spent on education, art, or culture — peaceful propaganda — the underlying motive being the defense of capitalism by proving its cultural superiority to communism, socialism or any other alternative to “democracy,” as it then existed.

Propaganda, by any name or for any motive, is still propaganda. 

ENDNOTES:

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[1] Published by Doubleday.

[2] Other aspects of Karl Rove’s campaign work for Senator Mullen were covered in “A Government Cult.”

[3] W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 55.

[4] See Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for a more extensive discussion of Bernays.

[5] Chicago Daily Tribune, May 13, 1942, pg. 3.

[6] New York Times, February 17, 1953, pg. 16.

[7] Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 90.

[8] Though the organization chart for Radio Free Europe and its affiliated propaganda machinery has been reworked many times, it currently falls under the Board of Governors, the group which also controls the Voice of America, the subject of another SRA focus on propaganda entitled “Engine of Compulsory Conformity?” [soon to be uploaded to this website]. As it happens, the Howard Hughes conglomerates were being revamped by a team of Mormons at approximately the same time Mullen was writing his whitewash of the Mormon Church. And, coincidentally of course, Mullen also handled the public relations for Howard Hughes.

[9] E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1974), 141. JFK 'conspiracy buffs' will recognize this committee as the one named by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade as being the committee for which Lee Harvey Oswald was distributing pamphlets. Wade was immediately corrected by Jack Ruby, who piped up, “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” Ruby was connected to the Hearst chain of newspapers which published the Chicago mob-controlled racing wire. For a history of the competition between Hearst and McCormick, a battle fought by organized crime, see The History of the Race Wire Service by Allan May.

[10] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 26, 1949, pg. 7.

[11] Chicago Daily Tribune, August 8, 1951, pg. A8.

[12] Chicago Daily Tribune, August 10, 1950, pg. 23.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Time, August 7, 1950. William C. Foster had been named as deputy to W. Averell Harriman — both of whom held the rank of Ambassador. The New York Times quoted Foster on April 1, 1949 as follows: “If we are able to rebuild a strong Western Europe, … we add to our own strength by making 270,000,000 people believe as we do in individual freedom. This gives us security against war and continuing and expanding markets.” At pg. 8.

[15] Mullen was involved in an “all-night hassle” over whether to televise Ike’s news conference live.  Apparently Ike’s handlers, afraid of what he might say to the public, lost the battle to members of the White House Correspondent Association who protested the decision against a “live” broadcast — a very new notion in 1952. See Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1952, pg. 1.

[16] Dewey, whose family continued to live in Owosso, Michigan, was likely influenced by the mobsters who controlled that state. The son of the town’s only newspaper publisher, Dewey became U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He prosecuted and convicted Lucky Luciano in 1936, but six years later made a deal, supposedly brokered by Meyer Lansky, to release him to Italy in order to assist the ECA in getting its shipments into European ports, which were threatened by striking labor unions. “In ‘The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,’ Luciano states that Dewey was ‘on the take’ the entire time he was in office, and had paid Dewey $90,000 to help with his presidential campaign in return for his freedom. This, as well as other allegations, ruined Dewey's reputation as a crime buster. He refused to appear at the Kefauver committee to answer for questions regarding Luciano's release and other matters regarding gambling in upstate New York. Dewey was also found to be a major stock holder in Mary Carter Paints, which was a company that backed the building of the Bahamas casino's run by Meyer Lansky. Knowledge of this didn't seem to bother Dewey, but it did his critics. He was called by one as going ‘from racketbuster to racketbacker.’” Quoted from MurderInc.com.

[17] New York Times, December 6, 1952, pg. 23.

[18] Ford Foundation Annual Report 1952, published online.

[19] Time, April 14, 1952.

[20] Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1964, pg. 8.

[21] Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1964, pg. 3.

[22] Alfred W. McCoy et al., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, original edition online, and also available in new edition subtitled CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.

[23]  McCoy, Politics of Heroin, “The Mafia Comes to Asia,” 210-217.

[24] See footnote 16 above. 

[25] McCoy cites as his sources the following:  Norman Lewis, The Honored Society (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), p. 18; and Charles Siragusa, The Trail of the Poppy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 83.

[26] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War:  The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York:  The New Press, 1999), 106.  Bissell, a Yale graduate, although he rejected his selection into Skull and Bones in his class of 1932, was the younger brother of “William Truesdale Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., had put the U.S. insurance industry's inside knowledge of all fire-insured industrial plants at the disposal of government planners during World War I.  The senior Bissell, a powerful Yale alumnus, was also the director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane; there, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society, a major Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA's cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure known as ‘MK-Ultra.’  Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He then joined Harriman's entourage in the U.S. government. Bissell was an economist for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board in 1942-43, while Averell Harriman was the U.S. leader of that board in London.  In 1947 and 1948, Bissell was executive secretary of the ‘Harriman Commission,’' otherwise known as the President's Commission on Foreign Aid. When Harriman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan, Bissell was assistant administrator.  Harriman was director of Mutual Security (1951-53), while Bissell was consultant to the director of Mutual Security 1952.  Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA Director, Bissell was one of his three aides.”  Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), quoted at Bilderberger.org.

[27] Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 71.

[28] The New York Times reported on April 7, 1950 that a European anti-Communist labor leader had been detained by immigration officials from meeting with American labor leaders about methods of combating “Soviet-inspired interference with the flow of Atlantic Pact arms to the Western democracies.”  New York Times, April 7, 1950, pg. 30.  Apparently French labor unions were not enthralled with the idea of the money contracted to be spent for purposes of peace having been appropriated for war materiel in the Pacific—an area where the French maintained colonial interests in the opium trade.

[29] New York Times, May 31, 1950, pg. 21. More will be said in future articles about Jay Lovestone, one of the CIA’s most secret operatives, who, along with Irving Brown, spent untold millions of Marshall Plan counterpart funds fighting Communism.