© 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.
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.
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| Mormon Tabernacle |
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]
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| 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]
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| Life's C.D. Jackson |
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]
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| Henry Luce |
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.
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| 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]
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)
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:
[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.
