Regime Dynamics

The 'Duchess of York Selling access to Prince Andrew

2010-05-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

... a payment of 500,000 pounds ($723,000) "opens doors" to Andrew.

"You send it to the bank account that I tell you to send it to."

"Then that, is then like you open up all the channels whatever you need, whatever you want ... and then you meet Andrew and that's fine. And that's ... when you really open up whatever you want. But then that opens up everything that ever you would ever wish."

In a statement issued Sunday, Ferguson apologized for the incident.

"I very deeply regret the situation and the embarrassment caused," the statement said. "It is true that my financial situation is under stress, however, that is no excuse for a serious lapse in judgment and I am very sorry that this has happened."

–Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York

Full exchange at:

http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/latest-gossip/129980-duchess-york-sells-prince-andrew-500k.html

Paganism and Noblesse Oblige

2008-06-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.cauldronfarm.com/asphodel/articles/paganism_and_noblesse_oblige.html

Or What's with This "Lady" Thing Anyway

Every year, I see more and more people in the pagan community with titles like "Lady Chickenspider" or "LordWolfiepoo", or whatever. According to a British pagan friend of mine, this is strictly an American thing. Over there in the islands, where there are real, actual people with a legal right to the Lord and Lady and Earl and Duchess sort of titles, they don’t have the same kind of fascination that they do over here. On this side of the Atlantic, America’s insistence on equality for all - in the sense that we are a nation of peasants with no nobles - makes nobility seem like tantalizingly forbidden fruit.

I can understand the impulse, just as I can understand the other impulse, however foolish, that keeps us pulling things like our "traditional" robes and clothing and aesthetics out of the European Middle Ages, a time famed for its persecution of anyone not of monotheistic origin. (Let’s get it straight, folks, once and for all; nearly all medieval people were loudly, devoutly, Christian, and highly xenophobic.) Yet even with this in mind, the images still haunt our collective unconscious, where they have taken on a dreamy glow, nothing like the grittiness of their actual era. And it’s not just because far too many of us came out of the SCA, either.

Still, I am made nervous by the idea that anyone can slap on a title of nobility at will like donning a hat. It’s not that I am against using such titles to show honor to someone, but let’s face it: titles that have legal usage today don’t just get slapped on by anyone who feels like it. You can’t call yourself a captain or a lieutenant or a president without being either involved in the military or political system, or being part of an organization that has adopted such ranks and voted you into them. Well, you can, but it’s kind of like calling yourself Napoleon for all the good it does.

And sure, you can get together three or four gullible sycophants and suggest to them that they call you Lady or Emperor or Grand Poobah or whatever, and the pagan community is full of these sorts, but you will not get any respect from anyone outside of that group, especially if it doesn’t look like you actually did anything to get that title besides conning a bunch of gullible friends. I belong to a pagan group of about thirty people, and I hold a leadership position in that group that I was chosen for by those people, and it gives me a title. However, I do not sign my name with that title on any correspondence outside of our own small group; nor do I expect anyone outside of my group to honor me with that title.
At any rate, I hold my title as more than just something I’ve earned. I hold it as something that I’m earning every day, and should I ever cease my efforts, I will become unworthy of it. How does one earn such a title? Well, since what we’re talking about is "reclaiming the spirit" of medieval nobility, while leaving the gritty reality behind, then we must also reclaim the spirit of the concept of noblesse oblige, which is something I think most Americans have a lot of trouble with.

I’m all for reclaiming the spirit of traditions, as long as we are careful to know thoroughly what we are reclaiming, and what we aren’t. Nobility in medieval Europe was, first and foremost, a matter of breeding and bloodlines. In other words, you were a noble through accident of birth, not any personal worth on your part. Sure, some people were given titles for their service to various higher nobles, but those titles were then passed on to their children, who might or might not be the people that you’d want to be in charge of your welfare for even a minute. In many ways, they were no better than peasants, starting border wars with each other, slaughtering serfs, etc. By the time the feudal system was well entrenched, bloodlines had become the mark of nobility, and the people who were in charge weren’t there through competence or ethics. And they were really, really hard to fire. Generally this was done only over a dead body - yours or theirs.

So medieval Europe, in an attempt to "shape up" their accidental leaders, came up with the concept of "noblesse oblige", and tried to guilt-trip European nobility into following it. The concept was sung about by troubadours, written into poetry, and paraded in pageants. (We all know the pressure that media can put on people.) Some nobles strove to uphold it, and some ignored it; since it was hard to fire them, there wasn’t much penalty for dismissing it except for peer pressure.

The concept of noblesse oblige basically goes like this: If you really believe that you are superior to most other people, then you have a responsibility to be a full-time 24/7 role model for them to follow. Your behavior must be as good as you can make it, all times, because you are being Watched. You are not allowed the luxury of acting like a jerk, at all, ever. You can get angry, but you must channel that anger into considered actions that do not have fallout onto the innocent. You must be gracious, even when people are being rude or obnoxious to you, because to stoop to their behavior - even for a moment, even if you think they deserve it - would be unworthy of you, and make you no better than them. Of course, treating the peasants in such a way that makes it clear that you think them inferior - being snooty or haughty - is also classed as bad behavior and is unworthy.

Already, I can hear some people bridling, and I’m not even done describing it yet. Some of you are probably really offended at the idea that one could strongly feel that one is superior to the great mass of people out there. I can see how it’s offensive; I thought that it was offensive for years, and I was ashamed that I felt that way, and no matter what I did I couldn't shake it. It was my secret vice. Embracing noblesse oblige, however, changed everything. It put that vice squarely in the service of humanity, along the same lines that an obsessive-compulsive person learns to channel their urges into helping to better the world. When I embraced this concept, I suddenly had so much more patience with people that had heretofore irritated me. If I could think of rude, obnoxious, weak, or stupid people as "just peasants", and myself as a quiet role model rather than a criticizer (which is bad behavior), then suddenly I could deal with them in a friendly way, with my discipline of graciousness in place. They became noticeably more relaxed around me as well, and my circle of friends grew rather than shrank.
I say "discipline of graciousness" because that’s what it feels like - something that you constantly, consciously work towards on a daily basis, perfecting it until you rot in the ground. It’s not that I can’t gripe or bitch, but I save that for my "peers" - people who are also nobility by my definition, meaning that they also follow the concept of noblesse oblige. (My wife is one, and she is my equal, so we always have someone to bitch to.) Because we are none of us perfect, we can only strive for the goal, and sometimes we fall short, and then we make amends. If the idea of 24/7 public graciousness makes you flinch, then maybe you’re not cut out for the tin hat and you should just stay a peasant, with all the freedom in the world to be rude and nasty, because no one’s stopping you.
Built into the concept of noblesse oblige is the concept of "largesse". If you have "more" of something than most people - be it land, resources, money, patience, sanity, clarity, knowledge, extra food, skills, or whatever, then you are required to share it. The more you have, the more you should be giving. You are judged by your generosity. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you need to empty your house for every homeless person that comes by. When and who and how much to give was already worked out centuries ago.
Your first duty is to the people who owe you fealty. These are the folk who have given you an agreement, either verbal-and-in-the-presence-of-witnesses, or written, to render you certain services, which you can negotiate however you like. For pagan leaders, this would be your immediate group members, who have probably agreed to do *something*, even if it’s only to show up and bring the incense, or whatever. Part of the agreement between a lord and a vassal - meaning someone who "has" and someone who "has not", whatever that might be - is that the lord will give as much of whatever he "has" that he can give without bankrupting himself, and in return the vassal will render other agreed-upon services. (Yes, this does require good rules and negotiating up front, but boundaries are another thing that we as a culture need to work on anyway.) If one party or the other breaks their part of the agreement - i.e. if someone decides they aren’t getting their efforts’ worth in return - then the contract is defaulted on, and must be renegotiated or tossed.
Beyond that, you as a noble are required to give generously to people from whom you get nothing, as charity, again not so much that you bankrupt yourself. (This goes the same whether the commodity is money or time or patience.) Erring on the side of bankruptcy makes you incapable of doing your job. Erring on the side of greed makes you unworthy of your title. You have to decide how much you can give and still have enough for yourself. Remember, you are setting an example - of fair boundaries as well as generosity.
Often, you can tell the real modern nobility by their generosity and graciousness without even trying. Everyone knows someone like this - they’re the ones with a "court" of people, some of them strays that they’ve taken in and succored, some of them folk who are just drawn to their homespace and warmth, be it a grungy apartment in an inner city. Some "nobles" are dead broke and pay their largesse in comfort and advice and hot soup and brake fixing.
The third part of noblesse oblige, beyond graciousness and loyalty, is honor. This is, very simply, walking your talk. Giving one’s word, and then keeping it, gives you personal power. A noble’s word should mean something strong. Don’t give it if you know you can’t keep it. Don’t refrain from giving it just because it’ll be a challenge. If you are forced to break it due to circumstances, do something to make the situation right, immediately. Apologize when you’ve done wrong, the second you see it. That’s hard for everyone, so try apologizing like this: "That was unworthy of me. I am sorry that I slipped, and I will endeavor not to let it happen again." I’ve often judged someone’s nobility by how they apologized.
In the actual medieval era, like today, people did not give themselves legal titles. They were given by either a central authority (king or government) or by the acclaim of the people. Since we pagans have no central authority, the acclaim of the people is our only claim to them. If you want to be honored as a "Lord" or a "Lady" or whatever outside of your own small group - and if you sign your letters or introduce yourself that way, then you’re strongly implying you want acclaim from the rest of us as well - you’d better start following the rules of noblesse oblige, or you won’t be taken seriously.
As for the rest of you, all the folks without titles (or the need for titles), you now know how to judge us properly. Is this person gracious? Are they loyal to their own? Do they give generously, of whatever they have? Do they keep their word, walk their talk? Do they model the behavior that they’d like to see from others, without chiding others on falling short? When you talk to them, do you feel as if you’ve been bathed in a warm spotlight - the King’s or Queen’s aura - or chilled by cold haughtiness? If you wronged them, could you be pretty sure that their response would not be a matter of petty vengeance, but public fairness?
Obviously, since we are not keeping the bloodline and inheritance part of the package, and since we can actually fire our nobility - if only by voting with our feet and walking away, leaving them with an empty title in exile - then everyone with a noble title needs to understand the seriousness of what they’re doing. As Gwydion says in Lloyd Alexander’s "Taran" series of children’s fantasy, "Say not so much ‘royal blood’ as ‘noble worth’."
A title is like an invisible crown. It carries responsibilities - tons of them. Heavy ones. Crowns are a burden, and that burden comes from centuries of archetypal ideals from the collective unconscious. Being "Lady something" forces you into the archetype of nobility whether you like it or not, because it’s a public title, and public titles always come with archetypal baggage and expectations. If you fail at the archetype, you will be perceived as the "other" noble archetype, the "tyrant", which is perilously close to the worst demon in the human mind. In other words, if you’re not up to the weight, don’t put on the trinket.

Aristocracy by Paul Elmer More

2007-01-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

The demagogue paints himself. In a word you may know him by this single trait: he is one who, in the pursuit of the so-called rights of humanity, has a supreme contempt for those

Unconcerning things, matters of fact;

Leaders there will be, as there always have been. Leaders there are now, of each class, and we know their names. We still call the baser sort a demagogue, and his definition is still what it was among those who invented the term: “a flatterer of the people.” Or, if that description seems too vague, you will recognize him as one who unites in himself enormous physical and mental activity, yet who employs these extraordinary talents in no serious way for the comfort and sustenance of the higher life of the imagination, but for running about restlessly and filling the public mind with stentorian alarms. He is one who proclaims ostentatiously that the first aim of government “must always be the possession by the average citizen of the right kind of character,” and then, in his own person, gives an example of identifying character with passion by betraying a friend and malignantly misinterpreting his words, as soon as that friend may be decried for balking the popular will–and balking the path of the decrier’s ambition. He is one who has been honoured as the leader of a great political party, and then, as soon as he is dethroned from its leadership, denounces that same party as the tool of privilege and the source of corruption. He is one who, in proclaiming the principles of this new party, has constantly on his lips the magical word “justice,” which he defines by the specious phrase “equality of opportunity,” yet in the end identifies justice with the removal of all checks from government, to the end that the desire of the majority may be immediately carried out, whether right or wrong. For “it is impossible to invent constitutional devices which will prevent the popular will from being effective for wrong without also preventing it from being effective for right. The only safe course to follow in this great American democracy is to provide for making the popular judgment really effective.”

To this end our exemplary demagogue would take away every obstacle between the opinion of the moment and the enactment of that opinion into law. Hence the initiative and referendum. Above the legislators is the Constitution, devised in order that legislation upon any particular question may be made to conform essentially with what has been laid down on deliberation as the wisest general course of government. It is a cheek upon hasty action, and implies a certain distrust of the popular judgment at any moment when passion or delusion may be at play. Therefore our demagogue will denounce reverence for the Constitution as a fetich. Blithely ignoring the fact that Constitution-making and remaking is one of the pastimes of some States, and that even the Federal Constitution can be amended with none too great difficulty when the opinion of the people is really formed (as in the recent ease of the election of senators), he will earnestly call upon the Constitutional Convention of Ohio “to provide in this Constitution means which will enable the people readily to amend it if at any point it works injustice”; and then, as if that provision were not sufficient to relax its mortmain, he will virtually abrogate its function of imposing any check whatsoever by adding “means which will permit the people themselves by popular vote, after due deliberation and discussion, but finally and without appeal, to settle what the proper construction of any constitutional point is”; and this construction is to be made, not legally, that is by an attempt to get at the actual meaning of the language used, but in accordance with the current notion of what is right.

But the full venom of his attack will be directed against the courts, because in them is impersonated the final sovereignty of unimpassioned judgment over the fluctuations of sentiment, and with it the last check upon the operations of the demagogue. The interpretation of the law in accordance with the conditions of life is to rest with the people. If necessary they are to have the power of recalling the judge who is recalcitrant to their views, and at the least they are to have opportunity to reverse any decision of the courts which seems to them wrong. In this way he thinks to ensure “an independent judiciary”! To enforce the need of the recall, he accuses the courts of “refusing to permit the people of the States to exercise their right as a free people.” Thereupon he cites what he calls a “typical” case in New York, in which the judges declared a workingmen’s compensation act unconstitutional.” In other words, they insisted that the Constitution had permanently cursed our people with impotence to right wrong and had perpetuated a cruel iniquity.” This tirade, followed by the most inflammatory appeals to the emotions, was uttered in 1912, at the very time when he was inveighing against the courts for perpetuating iniquity, the machinery was in train for amending the Constitution, and in less than two years that permanent curse was removed by the passage of a Constitutional law in full favor of the workingman. Such is the despotism of facts. And ever through these vituperative charges runs the high note of flattery: “If the American people are not fit for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants and not the masters of the men whom they themselves put in office.”

The demagogue paints himself. In a word you may know him by this single trait: he is one who, in the pursuit of the so-called rights of humanity, has a supreme contempt for those

Unconcerning things, matters of fact;

one who, by means of an hypnotic loquaciousness, is constantly persuading the people that they have only to follow their first impulsive emotions to be right and safe, and that as a consequence every institution should be swept away which in their wiser, calmer moments they have created as a bulwark against their own more variable nature. To complete the picture we need to contrast with it Burke’s portrait of the men of light and leading, with his sober statement of the law of liberty: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Or we may go further back and look upon Plato’s portrait of the guides who have earned the right to persuade others to temperance by the diligent exercise of that virtue in their own lives.

But the most notable example of demagoguery to-day, is not a man, though he be clothed with thunder, but an institution. There are newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it is effective: always appeal to the emotion of the hour, and present it in terms which will justify its excess. Thus, in times when there is no wave of international envy disturbing the popular mind, our journal will print edifying editorials on brotherly love and laud the people as the great source of peace among nations. But let some racial dispute arise, as in the months preceding our Spanish war or the Italian raid on Africa, and this same journal will day after day use its editorial columns to inflame national hatred–and increase its circulation. On days when no sensational event has occurred, it will indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on the home and on family felicities. Nothing so moral; it will even plead in lacrimose type against the evil of allowing babies to lie in perambulators with their eyes exposed to the sun. But let the popular mind be excited by some crime of lust, and the same journal will forget the sweet obligations of home and wife,–

That silly old morality,
That, as these links were knit, our love should be–

and will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a murderer and his trull as the spiritual history of two young souls finding themselves in the pure air of passion; or some sordid liaison will be virtually lifted above marriage by the terms “affinity” or “heart-wife.” And always, meanwhile, the people are to be soothed out of a sense of responsibility for errors and corruption by the skilfully maintained suggestion of a little group of men, entirely removed from the feelings and motives of ordinary humanity, sitting somewhere in secret conclave, plotting, plotting, to pervert the government. Our public crimes are never our own, but are the result of conspiracy.

___________________

Paul Elmer More (December 12, 1864 – March 9, 1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist.

Military / General - Elite Series Bibliography

2006-06-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

Please find information about the elite leadership of the West in the following posts.

The following series of posts comes from Public Information Research: namebase.org-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Burrows, William E. Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security. New York: Berkley Books, 1988. 406 pages.

William Burrows, who has written about space and aviation for more than two decades, is a professor of journalism and director of the Science and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. The subject matter of this book, particularly where it concerns the capabilities of modern spy satellites, is classified as Sensitive Compartmented Information -- which is higher than Top Secret. But by using open literature, scholarly papers, and interviewing scientists working on similar technology in the private sector, Burrows has put together an informative and readable history of aerial and space reconnaissance.

Modern espionage uses TECHINT (technical intelligence) along with HUMINT (human intelligence). The latter depends on human penetration agents and, with much luck and assuming no counter-penetration, is able to discern the status and intentions of the enemy. TECHINT consists of SIGINT (signals and communications interception) and PHOTINT (imaging intelligence). It is more reliable than HUMINT but can also be expensive. Lyndon Johnson claimed in 1967 that the entire space program could be justified ten times over simply for its contribution to space photography: "Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were building things we didn't need to build."

Fitzgerald, A. Ernest. The Pentagonists: An Insider's View of Waste, Mismanagement, and Fraud in Defense Spending. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 344 pages.

Ernest Fitzgerald is perhaps the most famous whistle-blower in Washington. While employed by the Pentagon as an engineer and cost expert, he testified to Congress in 1968 and 1969 about the concealed cost overruns and the technical problems of the Lockheed C-5A transport plane. He was fired by Nixon for telling the truth, and wrote about it in "The High Priests of Waste" (1972). After a 14-year legal battle against duplicitous Pentagon brass and self-serving executive-branch careerists, a federal judge ruled that the Air Force had to restore Fitzgerald to his former position.

That happened just as the new Reagan administration handed the Pentagon a blank check for bigger and better procurement scandals. Some years later, congressional committees were clucking over $748 pliers and $500 cotter pins, and then they'd walk away from the issue (they knew that congressmen come and go, but Pentagon generals live forever). Fitzgerald's politics are centrist, yet he considers America "the world's largest banana republic." (page 3) "In other banana republics the military comes to power with a sudden coup and the installation of a junta. Here it is different.... America runs on money. And the military has quietly come to vast economic power by taking vast amounts of the federal income for itself." (page 70)

Klare, Michael T. War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. 464 pages.

Klare, Michael T. Supplying Repression: U.S. Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad. Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1977. 72 pages.

Michael Klare is perhaps the only anti-Vietnam War activist who made a career out of researching the U.S. defense establishment. He began with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in the late sixties; we still recommend their 69-page Research Methodology Guide (1970). Ten years later Klare was doing most of his work as a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Even some among the ruling class like his work: he has been on the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and in 1985 received a three-year Ford Foundation grant to direct the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies based at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He also writes for Nation magazine.

"War Without End" is a detailed look at the current state of military planning, from counterinsurgency and social science engineering, to rapid deployment, the electronic battlefield, mercenaries, and foreign police assistance. This book was written three years before the collapse of Saigon, when critics expected that U.S. warmongers would be able to sustain their efforts indefinitely. Twenty years and one Ronald Reagan later, it's clear that we have neither the moral conviction nor the economic resources to pull it off -- at least not until the New World Order gets its act together. Nevertheless, the book remains valuable as a slice of imperial history.

Almost half of "Supplying Repression" contains tables of U.S. aid and corporate sales to foreign countries in the areas of military and police training, narcotics control, and arms transfers, while the remainder of this little book offers further historical details and commentary. "The evidence suggests that our corporations and governmental agencies are deeply involved in the supply of repressive technology and techniques to many of the world's most authoritarian regimes..., [and] the measures adopted by Congress in 1974 to restrict arms and training assistance to foreign police forces have not been successful in cutting off the flow."

McClintock, Michael. Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. 604 pages.

Michael McClintock spent 16 years as a human rights monitor, traveling extensively in Latin America, Thailand, and the Philippines. With 122 pages of end notes, this is something of an academic tome, and it functions as a counterweight to the fascination that some academics have demonstrated for elitist military doctrine. McClintock is always aware that "counterterrorism" is too often another name for torture and assassination, and despite such fancy terms as "psychological warfare," "counterinsurgency," "unconventional warfare," and "low intensity conflict," when you take away the rhetoric there seems to be a problem. For one thing, U.S. special warfare has always been cast in an anti-Communist mode, regardless of whether the "Communist" insurgents had the support of the local population. The techniques have emphasized "fighting fire with fire," with much more emphasis on winning respect out of fear than soliciting popular support out of enlightened self-interest.

McClintock's numerous quotes from military manuals and experts begin to drag after a few hundred pages, but his material on Edward Lansdale, and on President Kennedy's love affair with Special Forces, are almost worth the effort it takes to wade through them.

Mollenhoff, Clark R. The Pentagon. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. 450 pages.

Clark Mollenhoff was a Pulitzer-winning reporter who had been with the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications for seventeen years before writing this book. But a comprehensive study of the Pentagon requires more access than either the General Accounting Office or a slew of Congressional subcommittees has ever been able to muster, and is certainly beyond the means of a mere reporter. Instead Mollenhoff presents 35 short chapters, each of which amounts to a brief but suggestive case study of a different tip of the Pentagon iceberg.

After several short chapters that cover War Department corruption and mismanagement from the Civil War through World War II, he then gets into more current issues with chapter titles that include names such as Howard Hughes, Benny Meyers, Harold Talbott, Robert McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, and Fred Korth. Other chapters concern various weapon systems procurement scandals, the Pentagon's "black" budget, kickbacks for generals disguised as consulting or travel-expense fees, nonprofits such as Aerospace Corporation that contract with the military and suck in huge amounts for questionable expenditures, and the "profit pyramid," where layers of subcontractors each add on their profit margins and pass the bill up to the next level until it finally reaches the Pentagon and the taxpayer.

Perry, Mark. Four Stars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 412 pages.

This is a history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, established in 1947 and consisting of the four-star leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and a chairman and vice chairman. These six men meet three times a week in the Pentagon "tank" where they coordinate the nation's military forces. Each of the four services is in also cross-organized into seven "unified" operational commands that have regional responsibilities and are controlled by a CINC, or commander in chief. And each service also has a civilian secretary, who is responsible for the maintenance of readiness and for waging budget battles in Congress.

The President's formal command authority bypasses the JCS, but in practice his decisions, or those of the Secretary of Defense acting on his behalf, are routed through them on their way to the CINC unified commands.

Inter-service rivalry is one recurring problem within the JCS, but the most serious incident was a conflict between the JCS and civilian leaders. It occurred in August 1967, when the Joint Chiefs threatened to resign over civilian handling of the war in Vietnam. Sixteen years later, with the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, it was clear that the JCS still hadn't achieved their goal of holding civilians accountable for the use of troops abroad.

Pyadyshev, B. The Military-Industrial Complex of the USA. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. 187 pages.

"Who are these civilians who have been appointed to 'control' the generals? They turn out to be arms industry magnates working under Pentagon contracts and making fortunes on the arms drive. Consider the top civilian leaders in the Pentagon under the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson had been president of General Motors, which is not only the world's leading automobile maker, but also one of the Pentagon's major contractors. Roger M. Kyes, a vice-president of General Motors, was Deputy Secretary. Robert T. Stevens, President of Stevens and Company, a leading supplier of military uniforms, was appointed Secretary of the Army. Harold E. Talbott, a member of the board of three corporations working for the Defense Department, became Secretary of the Air Force. Robert B. Anderson, financier and oil tycoon, became Secretary of the Navy, and later Deputy Secretary of Defense.

"The U.S. war machine is run by career military men or men from the arms business. On all major political issues, every U.S. Secretary of Defense has acted hand-in-glove with the chiefs of staff. They have never had -- and could never have had -- any differences on measures to extend military preparations, secure larger appropriations for the needs of war, and condition the population in a militaristic spirit." (pages 22-23)

Rasor, Dina. The Pentagon Underground. New York: Times Books, 1985. 310 pages.

In 1979 Dina Rasor, 23, started a job with the National Taxpayers Union, where she researched cost overrun issues with the Lockheed C-5 transport plane. In early 1981 she struck out on her own with modest funding, and started the Project on Military Procurement. The problems with the M-1 tank were her first project, but coffee brewers for the C-5 that cost $7622 got more attention. She interviewed Pentagon whistle-blowers, received guidance from A. Ernest Fitzgerald, developed numerous contacts in the press, and within a couple of years became one of the most visible people in the country on the topic of waste and fraud in the Pentagon.

The Project on Military Procurement was two people, Rasor and an assistant, working out of a tiny office. It was strictly nonpartisan and nonideological, interested only in better value for the taxpayer and better weapons for the military. The funding came from both libertarian and progressive sources. It helped that Rasor was squeaky clean. All of her research was backed up with unclassified documents -- she wouldn't touch anything that was classified, nor chat with the occasional friendly "diplomat" from the Soviet embassy. Rasor's visibility and professionalism provided an option for frustrated Pentagon workers, by allowing the whistle-blower "underground" to expose waste and fraud without retaliation.

Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. New York: Dell Publishing, 1997. 452 pages.

This is a straightforward history of government interest in remote viewing, a paranormal experiment that the CIA began at the Standard Research Institute in 1972. Military intelligence started their own team at Fort Meade in 1977. Each program involved only a handful of people. When the CIA lost interest, a couple of generals (Edmund R. Thompson and Albert N. Stubblebine), congressmen (Claiborne Pell and Charlie Rose), and a powerful Senate staffer (Richard D'Amato) kept it alive under the Pentagon budget. It ran out of steam due to its own eccentricities, its enemies within the budgetary process, and the Republican victory in 1994.

Remote viewing is neither fraudulent nor silly, but on rare occasions it can lean toward either. More often it is just plain wrong, or distorted by subjective interference. The brass kept worrying about the "giggle factor" should the secret programs be discovered by the press. Stubblebine earned the nickname "General Spoonbender," and his power at the Pentagon soon declined. The remote viewers themselves had unconventional ideas: several were Scientologists, others were into UFO lore, and most took themselves too seriously. The burnout rate was high. It's just as well. When all is said and done, everyone benefits if our ethically-challenged spooks have really given up on this creepy, unpredictable phenomenon.

Simpson, Charles M. III. Inside the Green Berets: The First Thirty Years -- A History of the U.S. Army Special Forces. Foreward by Lt.Gen. William P. Yarborough. Novato CA: Presidio Press, 1983. 231 pages.

From the dust jacket: "Guerrilla warfare, insurgency, counterinsurgency, all come within the circle of their operations. President Kennedy gave a powerful impetus to the growth of Special Forces, but they really came into prominence during the Vietnam War. Their Civic Action programs and "Psy Ops" became well known. Among the less publicized missions of SF have been: an airborne demonstration in Saudi Arabia; a rescue operation of a party of refugees in the Congo during the Leopoldville disturbances in 1960; a basic training program for Ethiopian recruits in 1965; training and assistance missions in nineteen Latin American countries from 1963 to 1970. Colonel Simpson knows the Army. Of his 30 years of service he spent nine with SF."

To the extent that CIA and Special Forces operations in southeast Asia can be considered separately, Simpson sides with the military and is gently critical of the CIA. For outsiders the distinction is less meaningful -- the CIA frequently used Special Forces to solve their manpower shortages, and the lines of command between the CIA, the U.S. ambassador, and the Pentagon are at best confusing. A certain amount of scapegoating was probably well- received in this gung-ho, insider account of the Green Berets, half of which deals with the Vietnam experience.

Vistica, Gregory L. Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone Edition), 1997. 478 pages.

Author Gregory Vistica, a reporter for Newsweek, tells us how the Navy brass really operates in the Pentagon. This book centers on John Lehman, Reagan's secretary of the Navy. Lehman was an egomaniacal infighter who destroyed anything that stood in the way of bigger battleships and bloated budgets. Tough-sounding flyboys such as Lehman were darlings to the fanged neocons who littered the Reagan years. A more sober analysis of the Soviet threat (which was already starting to rust in port), and of new threats from missile technology, might have saved billions. The subtitle for this book should have been, "Boys and Their Toys."

Then there were the scandals and morale problems. Vistica takes us behind the scenes of the Tailhook scandal, the Admiral Boorda suicide, the "Ill Wind" procurement scandal, the John Walker spy case (Walker gave the Soviets access to the Navy's secret communications for more than 17 years), the Iowa battleship explosion and cover-up, and the cruiser Vincennes, which shot down of an Iranian airliner and received combat action ribbons for killing all 290 civilians aboard. You won't find many heros in these pages; this is Reality Check time. It's unfortunate that it takes about two dozen investigative books from excellent journalists to balance out just one fake Tom Clancy thriller. Blame it on Hollywood culture and Pentagon corruption.

Weiner, Tim. Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. New York: Warner Books, 1991. 273 pages.

This book is based on Tim Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. By following the money, Weiner finds appropriations of public dollars for highly-compartmentalized, secret research projects with no accountability to either Congress or the Secretary of Defense. The secret budget has never been published, a violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.

Reagan doubled the Pentagon budget between 1981 and 1985, and by 1991 Bush had increased the "black" portion to 25 percent. Born from the Manhattan Project, described by Weiner as a "mutant chromosome in the American body politic," this secret operation is now a full-blown parallel government.

Weiner shows the secret government at work in diverting funds illegally, creating military units outside the chain of command, conducting covert wars, and transforming Star Wars into a system for the control of space. This book is a solidly-documented description of how the U.S. responded to atomic weapons and the Cold War by giving birth to, nurturing, and ultimately succumbing to a national security state.

-- Lanny Sinkin

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

ABRAMS CREIGHTON W (GEN) ACHESON DEAN G ACKLEY AUTMER JR ADLER ALLAN ROBERT AEROSPACE CORPORATION AFGHANISTAN CIA IN ALDRIDGE EDWARD C JR (PETE) ALEXANDER JOHN B (COL) ALLEN RICHARD VINCENT AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION AMLIE THOMAS S ANDERSON GEORGE W JR (ADM) ARMITAGE RICHARD L ASPIN LES (D-WI) ATWATER FREDERICK HOLMS (SKIP) BAKER BRENT (RADM) BALDWIN HANSON W BANK AARON BECKWITH CHARLES A BELL KEN (LT COL) BISSELL RICHARD MERVIN JR BJELAJAC SLAVKO N BODNER JOHN JR BOEING COMPANY BOHANNAN CHARLES T.R. BOORDA JEREMY MICHAEL (ADM) BOXER BARBARA (D-CA) BRADLEY OMAR N (GEN) BROOKS JACK (D-TX) BROUSSEAU RONALD SR BROWN GEORGE S (GEN) BROWN HAROLD (DEFENSE SEC) BUCHANAN LEONARD (LYN) BUCHANAN PATRICK J BUNDY MCGEORGE BURKE ARLEIGH A (ADM) BUSBY BRIAN (LT COL) BUTTERFIELD ALEXANDER P CAPPUCCI JOSEPH J (GEN) CARLUCCI FRANK CHARLES CARNEY ROBERT B (ADM) CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CARVER RICHARD E CENTER RESEARCH SOCIAL SYSTEMS (CRESS) CENTER STRATEGIC INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CHARYK JOSEPH V CHAUHAN OMPAL CHENEY RICHARD BRUCE CHRISTIANSEN JACK (ADM) CLIFFORD CLARK MCADAMS COCKELL WILLIAM A COLBY WILLIAM EGAN COLLINS JOHN M (COL) COLLINS JOSEPH LAWTON (GEN) COMMITTEE PRESENT DANGER COOPER ROBERT S COUGHLIN PAULA (LT) COWART ROB (CAPT) COX BONNAR (BART) CRANE EDWARD HARRISON III CROW DUWARD L (PETE) CROWE WILLIAM J JR (ADM) CUNNINGHAM RANDY DUKE (R-CA) DAHLGREN ROBIN DALTON JOHN H DAMATO RICHARD DAMES EDWARD A DAVIDSON JAMES DALE DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY DELAUER RICHARD D DELLAFIORA ANGELA DENFELD LOUIS E (ADM) DICKINSON BILL L (R-AL) DINGELL JOHN D (D-MI) DREYER GWEN DRIESSNACK HANS H (WHITEY) DUNCAN DALE C DUNLEAVY RICHARD (VADM) EISENHOWER DWIGHT DAVID ELGIN DUANE ENNEKING TIMOTHY FERTIG WENDELL FITZGERALD A ERNEST FORRESTAL JAMES VINCENT FUND CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT GARFINKEL STEVEN GARRETT H LAWRENCE III GAUVIN FERNAND GAVIN JAMES M (GEN) GELLER URI GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION GETTING IVAN A GILPATRIC ROSWELL L GODEL WILLIAM HERMANN GOLDWATER BARRY MORRIS GORDON TED (RADM) GORMAN PAUL F (GEN) GOTTLIEB SIDNEY GRAFF DALE E GRASSLEY CHARLES E (R-IA) GRAY DAVID W (GEN) GREECE CIA IN GREEN CHRISTOPHER C (KIT) GREENSTREET BOB (CAPT) GRITZ JAMES G (BO) GROVES LESLIE RICHARD (GEN) HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HALPERIN MORTON H HAMMID HELLA HANCOCK ROBERT (OKLAHOMA) HARARY KEITH (BLUE) HAVER RICHARD L HAYS RONALD J (ADM) HAYWARD THOMAS B (ADM) HEALY MICHAEL D.F. (GEN) HEBERT EDWARD (D-LA) HELMS RICHARD MCGARRAH HERBERT JULE HERRICK ROBERT (CMDR) HILSMAN ROGER HOLCOMB M STASER HOLIFIELD CHET HOLLOWAY JAMES L III (ADM) HOVEN PAUL HOWARD DAN (NAVY SEC AIDE) HUGHES AIRCRAFT COMPANY HULTGREEN KARA HUNT JAMES V IKLE FRED CHARLES INGERSOLL BRUCE INMAN BOBBY RAY INTELLIGENCE SUPPORT ACTIVITY INTERNATIONAL POLICE ACADEMY JASON DIVISION JOHNSON HAROLD K (GEN) JOHNSON KELLY (CLARENCE L.) JOHNSON LOUIS ARTHUR JONES DAVID C (GEN) JONES THOMAS VICTOR JONSSON THOMAS (SGT) JULIE LOEBE KAUFMAN RICHARD F KEATING DAVID KEEGAN GEORGE J (GEN) KELLEY PAUL XAVIER KELLY ROBERT (ADM) KELSO FRANK B (VADM) KENNAN GEORGE FROST KENNEDY JOHN FITZGERALD KINCAID GENE KINNARD HARRY KISTIAKOWSKY GEORGE B KLEEMAN HENRY M KOCH NOEL C KOGAN I M KOHN EDWIN (VADM) KOLESNIK KRIS KORB LAWRENCE J KORTH FRED KRESS KEN KUPPERMAN ROBERT H LAIRD MELVIN R LANGFORD GARY LANSDALE EDWARD GEARY LAOS CIA IN LARSON CHARLES ROBERT (ADM) LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY LEHMAN JOHN FRANCIS JR LEMAY CURTIS E (GEN) LEMNITZER LYMAN L (GEN) LEWIS DAVID SLOAN JR LINEBARGER PAUL M.S. LOCKHEED CORPORATION LOFTIS JAMES ROBERT LONGHOFER JAMES E LOVETT ROBERT ABERCROMBIE LUDWIG FREDERICK (CAPT) LUSTIG SCOTT LUTTWAK EDWARD N LYONS JAMES A (ADM) MACARTHUR DOUGLAS (GEN) MAGSAYSAY RAMON MAHAN ALFRED THAYER MANTHORPE WILLIAM H.J. JR MARAGON JOHN MARSH JOHN O JR MARSHALL GEORGE C (GEN) MARTIN DONNA (BARBARA BOXER AIDE) MATHEWS FRANCIS P MAY EDWIN C MCCARTHY JOSEPH R MCCLURE ROBERT A (GEN) MCCONE JOHN ALEX MCCONNELL JOHN P (GEN) MCMAHON JOHN NORMAN MCMONEAGLE JOSEPH MCNAMARA ROBERT STRANGE MENGES CONSTANTINE C MEYER EDWARD C (SHY) MEYERS BENNETT E MILLER PAUL DAVID MINTZ MORTON MOLLENHOFF CLARK MONROE BOB (MONROE INSTITUTE) MONROE INSTITUTE MOORE ROYAL (MAJ GEN) MOORER THOMAS H (ADM) MOORHEAD WILLIAM S MOREHOUSE DAVID MORGAN CHARLES JR MOTT STEWART RAWLINGS MOYERS BILL D NADER RALPH NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE NATIONAL TAXPAYERS UNION NIMITZ CHESTER W (ADM) NITZE PAUL HENRY NORIEGA MANUEL ANTONIO NORTH OLIVER L NORTHROP CORPORATION NUNN SAM (D-GA) OBRIEN WILLIAM V OCONNOR WILLIAM ODOM WILLIAM E OFFICE PUBLIC SAFETY OKEEFE SEAN C OPERATION ILL WIND OPERATION MONGOOSE OPERATION PHOENIX ORR VERNE PACKARD DAVID PADDOCK ALFRED H JR PAISLEY MELVYN R PARFITT COLIN PARIS PAUL PATTON JIM (CAPT) PEREZ LEBRON HECTOR PERRY WILLIAM J POINDEXTER JOHN M POPE BARBARA PRATT WHITNEY COMPANY PRICE PATRICK PROJECT CAMELOT PROJECT MILITARY PROCUREMENT PROXMIRE WILLIAM (D-WI) PRUEHER JOSEPH W (ADM) PUTHOFF HAROLD E (HAL) RADFORD ARTHUR W (ADM) RAND CORPORATION RASOR DINA RAY BILL (CAPT) RECHTIN EBERHARDT RICHARDSON ELLIOT LEE RICKOVER HYMAN G (ADM) RIDGWAY MATTHEW B (GEN) RIGGS ROBERT (CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATOR) RILEY MEL ROCKEFELLER NELSON ALDRICH ROGERS BERNARD W (GEN) ROGERS WILL III (CAPT) ROTH WILLIAM V JR (R-DE) SALYER JIM SAWYER GEORGE A SCHLESINGER JAMES RODNEY SCHOOL AMERICAS SCHROEDER PATRICIA (D-CO) SEAMANS ROBERT C JR SHACKLETON RON SHACKLEY THEODORE GEORGE SHAPIRO SUMNER (RADM) SHULTZ GEORGE PRATT SIKORSKI GERRY SIMPSON CHARLES M III SKANTZE LARRY (GEN) SMITH DENNY (R-OR) SMITH PAUL (CAPT) SNYDER JACK (RADM) SPAATZ CARL (GEN) SPANTON GEORGE SPREY PIERRE M STAIMAN HERMAN STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE STARRETT CHARLES STEVENS ROBERT T STEWART JAKE (LT CDR) STIMSON HENRY LEWIS STIMSON RICHARD STOCKTON PETER D.H. STUBBLEBINE ALBERT N (GEN) SUESSMAN MICHAEL E SULLIVAN LEONARD JR SWANN INGO DOUGLAS SYMINGTON STUART W (D-MO) TAFT WILLIAM HOWARD IV TALBOTT HAROLD E TARG RUSSELL TARUC LUIS TAYLOR MAXWELL D (GEN) TEMPLE RALPH THAILAND CIA IN THAYER PAUL THOMPSON EDMUND R (MAJ GEN) THOMPSON ROBERT G.K. TOWER JOHN GOODWIN (R-TX) TRAIN HARRY D II (ADM) TRENT HARTLEIGH TRINQUIER ROGER TROST CARLISLE A.H. (ADM) TRUMAN HARRY S TSHOMBE MOISE TURNER STANSFIELD TWINING NATHAN F (GEN) VALERIANO NAPOLEON D VANDENBERG HOYT SANFORD (GEN) VANDER SCHAAF DEREK J VANG PAO VESSEY JOHN W JR (GEN) VIETNAM CIA IN VINSON CARL VOLCKMANN RUSSELL W VORONA JACK WALKER JOHN ANTHONY JR WATKINS JAMES D (ADM) WATT MURRAY B (SCOTTY) WEBB JAMES H JR WEINBERGER CASPAR W WELCH LARRY D (GEN) WESTMORELAND WILLIAM C (GEN) WEYAND FREDERICK C (GEN) WHEELER EARLE G (BUZZ) WHITE STEVE (ADM) WHITE THOMAS DRESSER (GEN) WICKHAM JOHN A JR (GEN) WILLIAMS MAC WILSON CHARLES ERWIN (GM & DEFENSE SEC) WYLIE JOHN ARCHIBALD YARBOROUGH WILLIAM P (GEN) YELLOW FRUIT ZABITOSKY FRED ZAWODNY J K ZILL ANNE B ZUMWALT ELMO R JR (ADM)

Elites / Political / Washington

2006-06-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 452 pages.

When the first atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, an elite group of "defense intellectuals" realized that the implications of nuclear strategy were enormous, but also bizarre. It became obvious that given the power of only a few well-placed bombs, even a first strike by one nation would leave sufficient retaliatory power with the other, and would therefore prove suicidal. Thus began the intellectual discipline that produced our cold-war lexicon: missile gaps, megadeaths, deterrence, mutually assured destruction, game theory, and limited conventional warfare as an alternative to nuclear stalemate or destruction.

On the beach in Santa Monica, California, the Air Force contracts began flowing at Rand Corporation in 1948, from which a cult of self-appointed wizards issued forth over the years. All of them were "thinking the unthinkable," trying to second-guess the Soviets. More often than not, they melded esoteric mind games with their egos, as they jockeyed for the attention of Pentagon generals. In the end, the author believes, nothing was accomplished except that both sides now have tens of thousands of warheads instead of dozens or hundreds, and missile technology has vastly improved delivery. In retrospect, it seems that Rand should have spent more effort on disarmament studies -- even if only as a sop to public relations.

Knelman, F.H. America, God and the Bomb: The Legacy of Ronald Reagan. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1987. 478 pages.

F.H. Knelman is a professor of physics and engineering, and has been active in peace and disarmament movements since the late 1950s. This book examines the arms race and Star Wars mongering of the Reagan administration. Since Reagan is mostly the effect, not the cause, Knelman also looks at some cold warriors from think tanks and defense industries. While the roots of the nuclear escalation can be traced to the 1975 founding of the Committee on the Present Danger, by 1984 several secret documents had been leaked that presented our new nuclear strategy. The U.S. under Reagan had adopted an offensive nuclear posture: now planners clearly assumed that a nuclear war was winnable. Then came Star Wars, which made equally insane assumptions about the feasibility of shooting down all offensive missiles.

Reactionary pundits and defense moguls got rich from these assumptions, as they brought us closer to war and created huge budget deficits. Their projections of missile gaps and Soviet intentions, intended to justify this spending, were all massive distortions of the actual situation. Knelman even suspects that the entire U.S. effort might have been a scam, designed to force the Soviets into economic suffocation as they try to keep up. But this probably assumes too much strategic IQ from defense planners; it's more likely a simple case of milking the taxpayer for fun and profit.

Bainerman, Joel. The Crimes of a President: New Revelations on Conspiracy and Cover-Up in the Bush and Reagan Administrations. New York: S.P.I. Books (Shapolsky Publishers), 1992. 324 pages.

If you've been following what investigative journalists have written about George Bush since the early 1980s, then this book will offer few surprises. If you haven't, here is a summary of the circumstantial evidence, as reported by a variety of journalists, showing that Bush was behind many of the secret agendas of the 1980s. This book was hastily produced because the publisher was trying to beat the 1992 election (there is no index and some names are misspelled). Other than that, it is well-written and responsive to the evidence.

The chapters include Bush and the contras, drugs, Quayle's role, Manuel Noriega, October Surprise, the arming of Iraq, the Gander and Pan Am 103 crashes, Bush and Israel, BCCI, Inslaw, the looting of the S & Ls, and the suspicious policies behind the Gulf War. Author Joel Bainerman, a conservative journalist based in Israel who is sincerely alarmed over all this corruption and duplicity, tenuously adopts a larger perspective with a brief concluding chapter on Skull and Bones, the Council on Foreign Relations, Freemasonry, and the New World Order. While this isn't as rigorous as we would wish, at least Bainerman knows that Clinton won't make a difference. This alone suggests that he's closer than most journalists to figuring it all out.

Brownstein, Ronald and Easton, Nina. Reagan's Ruling Class: Portraits of the President's Top One Hundred Officials. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. 760 pages. With an introduction by Ralph Nader.

The authors of this book are staff writers for Ralph Nader, whose Public Interest Research Group provided additional support. Of the 100 officials profiled, 57 agreed to interviews. Each profile includes a photo and averages five or more pages, which is broken down into a description of the responsibilities of the office, general biographical information, major issues surrounding the individual's performance in office so far, and a section detailing data from the individual's financial disclosure form filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

The authors spent a year collecting information, and the first edition went to press in 1982. In other words, this excellent compilation is only able to spotlight the first year of what turned out to be a disastrous twelve years of Republican mischief. As Nader points out, "Over a fourth of the top one hundred Reagan Administration officials have net worths of seven figures, or more.... Little of this wealth was inherited. The nouveau riche status may help to explain the absence of noblesse oblige which has characterized the paternalism of the Old Rich who entered politics." Ten years later the rich are richer, the middle class is poorer, and mainstream journalists are beginning to notice that they missed the biggest story of the 1980s.

Dickson, Paul. Think Tanks. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. 397 pages.

Not long after this book appeared in 1972, it was out of date. The "think tank" phenomenon became much more politicized, beginning in the 1970s and continuing vigorously into the Reagan era, with the establishment of private-sector institutes that pushed a public-policy agenda. Funded by corporations and wealthy conservatives, these became an important part of the so-called New Right. Heritage Foundation is the prime example of this trend, but older conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, also became major players during this period. This book is about an earlier era of American think tanks. The major ones it describes are the Hudson Institute, Institute for Defense Analyses, Arthur D. Little, Inc., Rand Corporation, Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Stanford Research Institute, and the Urban Institute. Some of these thrived on Pentagon contracts, while others specialized in packaging a heady, befuddled, buzz-word futurism. Several of the former were forced by student antiwar protesters to sever their university ties.

The relevance of this book since the decline of big government and the end of the Cold War is even more doubtful. But it remains an excellent history, and gives new meaning to President Eisenhower's warning in his 1961 farewell address that "public policy could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite."

Goulden, Joseph C. The Superlawyers: The Small and Powerful World of the Great Washington Law Firms. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1972. 408 pages.

In 1969, Ralph Nader was a model for public-spirited law students, while Lloyd Cutler represented General Motors in efforts to fight air pollution standards. The staid firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering was picketed by fifteen polite law students from George Washington University on October 9, which resulted in what many believe was the first press release ever issued by a Washington law firm: Cutler accused the students of "McCarthyism" for believing that they had a "divine monopoly on knowing where the public interest lies." Washington law firms thrive on fat fees and behind-the-scenes fixes; they aren't used to public accountability. This book includes one chapter each on Covington and Burling, Clark Clifford, Arnold and Porter, Thomas G. Corcoran, lawyers who deal with regulatory agencies, the firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, lawyer-lobbyists who influence legislation, and the new phenomenon of public interest law.

When Goulden wrote this book he was a liberal who wrote for Harper's, Ramparts, and The Nation, in addition to books on the Tonkin Gulf incident, big business, and philanthropy. During the 1960s he had a solid reputation as an investigative reporter, and later as Washington bureau chief, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then during the 1980s he worked for Accuracy in Media, and became a strong supporter of the U.S. intelligence community.

Green, Mark. Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy. New York: ReganBooks (HarperCollins), 2002. 342 pages.

Mark Green worked with Ralph Nader for ten years in Washington, and then spent twelve years as a public servant in New York City. His first book was "Who Runs Congress" in 1972. In 2001 he ran for mayor of New York, and was leading in the polls. His campaign spent $16 million, which was the third-highest of any non-presidential candidate in the country in 2000-2001. This money came from 14,000 contributors. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg ran against him and spent $74 million of his own money, and bought off the voters with an advertising blitz. You can see from this why Mark Green feels that there is a problem with our political culture in general, and campaign financing in particular.

Green places much of the blame on the Supreme Court for its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision that struck down campaign spending ceilings on the grounds that they restricted free speech. As this book went to press, he saw new hope in the McCain-Feingold law. It passed in 2002 with the help of recent corporate scandals, seven years after it was introduced. Three years later it seems that McCain-Feingold may have been too little and too late. This book is valuable for exposing the depth of the problem, but these days the reforms it recommends seem hopelessly optimistic.

Haas, Lawrence J. The Washington Almanac: A Guide to Federal Policy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992. 653 pages.

This book offers one-page profiles of 355 key Washington players in both the public and private sectors. It is divided into 23 policy areas of about 25 pages each: civil rights, law and order, health, education, housing, business and labor, farmers, the elderly, the poor, states and cities, the budget, taxes, money and the markets, financial services, credit, energy, the environment, infrastructure, science-space-technology, telecommunications, defense, foreign policy, and trade. Each section is preceded by several pages that present a historical perspective on the issues in that area and, within this context, describe how recent legislative initiatives have fared in the Bush administration.

The profiles of individual players are not the usual Who's Who list of achievements and affiliations; they are summaries of that person's concerns and efforts within that particular policy arena. Lawrence J. Haas, who lives in Rockville, Maryland, is a recognized expert on federal policy. He writes for National Journal, and is also the author of "Running on Empty: Bush, Congress, and the Politics of a Bankrupt Government."

Hendrickson, Kenneth E. Jr. and Collins, Michael L., eds. Profiles in Power: Twentieth-Century Texans in Washington. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1993. 326 pages.

This is a collection of essays by thirteen history professors. Each chapter covers a twentieth-century Texan who had a significant career in national politics: Edward M. House, Morris Sheppard, John Nance Garner, Jesse Jones, Tom Connally, Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, Barbara Jordan, John Tower, Jim Wright, Lloyd Bentsen, and George H.W. Bush. It was written for use in undergraduate history courses.

Texas has always presented a curious mixture of provincialism and populism, so it comes as no surprise that some of the contributors to this book have the same problem. For example, the essay on Edward House is fascinating, but makes no mention of his role with respect to the origins of the Council on Foreign Relations, or in providing President Wilson with what amounted to America's first intelligence service. And while corruption is not unheard of in Texas, the word "conspiracy" is of course never used by history professors. On the plus side, some Texans thrived who came from the working class, kept getting elected by the little guys, and were fair and incorruptible. Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House, comes to mind. When he died in 1961, twenty thousand people stood outside the First Baptist Church in Bonham, Texas during his funeral.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Dark Side of Camelot. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 498 pages.

Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist at the top of his profession, spent five years on this book. By tackling the one topic that has benefitted from more spin, puffery, and outright lies than any other, Hersh knew he'd be stepping on toes. The defenders of conventional wisdom pounced -- they had little choice, because by exposing Camelot in interview piled on top of amazing on-the-record interview, Hersh inadvertently puts American journalism in the dock: How is it that so many reporters and so many pundits have been so misleading and incompetent for so many years?

Hersh avoids the assassination, but persuasively shows the two brothers and father as dangerous, corrupt, dishonest, vindictive, and megalomaniacal, with JFK also recklessly dependent on illicit sex and drugs. What all this means today is unexplored by Hersh. It still seems likely that the Mafia, which was clearly double-crossed by the Kennedys, had revenge as the best motive. But Castro and the USSR could have conscientiously acted out of self-defense; the threat to them was objectively that serious. Whoever did it, at least it's easier now to understand the success of the cover-up. To put it bluntly, those insiders who might otherwise have exposed a cover-up, were also in a position to know that JFK was a bigger threat to America than his killers could ever be. They may have simply decided to let it go.

Hershman, D. Jablow, with a preface by Gerald Tolchin, Ph.D. Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson. Fort Lee NJ: Barricade Books, 2002. 358 pages.

D. Jablow Hershman's first book examined the role of manic depression in the lives of geniuses, the second looked at the politics and case histories of Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, and this one is based on her research from 86 books, which is almost everything written about Lyndon Johnson. Her point is that Johnson suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life, and that this is the way to make sense out his policies and behavior. As Professor Gerald Tolchin writes in the preface: "A manic can act impulsively and precipitously with little regard for consequences."

Hershman's research makes a strong case. She extracts anecdotes, conversations, and examples from LBJ's recorded behavior, starting with childhood, and stitches it into an enlightening narrative. The result is a biography of a president unlike any other. It explains why LBJ waged war in Vietnam as soon as JFK, who planned to pull out, was assassinated. It's scary, because today George W. Bush, fortified by religious zeal, is going crazy in Iraq. But Bush clearly wants the oil that America needs to keep its SUVs running, which at least offers hope that Bush, unlike LBJ, may not be clinically unbalanced. Vietnam, by contrast, had nothing the U.S. or LBJ wanted -- it was mainly a matter of Lyndon Johnson's manic depression.

Kessler, Ronald. Inside Congress: The Shocking Scandals, Corruption, and Abuse of Power Behind the Scenes on Capitol Hill. New York: Pocket Books, 1998. 301 pages.

If you sample the international community about which countries are corrupt, from least to most, the U.S. comes in at 17th place, behind most European countries plus Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand. Naturally, this depends on who you ask. Ronald Kessler had the novel idea to ask present and former members of the Capitol Police. This force of 1,076 officers is the property of Congress, and they return the favor for members by running errands, fixing parking tickets, driving them to the airport with sirens blaring, and "unarresting" them if they get nailed for drunk driving.

In addition to stories about drunk Congressmen, sex with secretaries, check-bouncing at the House Bank, money laundering though the House Post Office, and silk-covered office chairs that cost $20,000, Kessler also looks into campaign finance. In the 1960s and 1970s, Capitol Police would search the briefcases of visitors and sometimes find them stuffed with cash. "Let's just say it's campaign funds," they'd agree, and wave them through. Now it's all done legally through PACs, so cash is not required. "We call it the Land of Oz," a high-ranking Capitol Police officer told Kessler. "It's unlike any other place in the world. Congress is just a cesspool. The biggest chunks rise to the top."

Kilian, Michael and Sawislak, Arnold. Who Runs Washington? New York: St.Martin's Press, 1982. 340 pages.

Jack Anderson commented that this book is "perceptive of what Washington is really like and also irreverent enough to puncture a lot of stuffed shirts." Michael Kilian, a Chicago Tribune columnist based in DC, and Arnold Sawislak, a 25-year UPI Washington correspondent, put together this amusing look at the bigwigs in Power City. They approach their subject more as gossip columnists than investigative journalists, and the last 100 pages are of local interest only (sports, museums, the arts, real estate, restaurants), so that leaves about 240 pages of NameBase material. The authors paint with too broad a brush to penetrate very deeply, but it's a worthwhile effort.

The fifteen chapters that interest us are divided into the White House gang, the Hill, courts, spooks, the bureaucracy, regulatory agencies, moneymen, diplomats, influence traders, media, think tanks, press agents, lawyers, high society, and political pros. The first half of each chapter is an overview of the authors' impressions, in which they go out of their way to be witty. We liked the second half of each chapter best. Here they list the top five, ten, or fifteen individuals in that chapter category and dedicate a half page to each individual career.

Lewis, Charles and the Center for Public Integrity. The Buying of the Congress: How Special Interests Have Stolen Your Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Avon Books, 1998. 416 pages.

With ten writers, two editors, and 25 researchers, the Center spent a year interviewing 1,200 people, perusing thousands of campaign-spending reports and other official records, and hanging out on LexisNexis. They wanted to find out which issues Americans care about, what Congress did or did not do with these issues, and how special interests may have influenced the outcome.

The issues are organized as chapter themes: toxic chemicals (methyl bromide), food safety (E. coli and meat inspection), tobacco companies, gun control, drug companies, job safety, airlines, nursing homes, agricultural subsidies, tax breaks for corporations, telecommunications deregulation, and Social Security and Medicare. This is followed by several chapters on big business centralization, free trade and runaway shops, and corporate influence in the courts. An appendix lists 32 leading members of Congress, along with each of their top ten career patrons (corporations and lobbying PACs). It's a depressing picture. The last two sentences of the book read, "Today ... there is no leadership or protest against our subjugation to the powerful economic interests that have captured our Congress and our politics. We are tired, and there is no alternative but to protest."

Lewis, Charles and the Center for Public Integrity. The Buying of the President. New York: Avon Books, 1996. 271 pages.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit watchdog research group located in Washington DC. Its founder and executive director is Charles Lewis, a former producer for CBS's "60 Minutes." While CPI does excellent work, it generally falls within the narrow focus of researching and criticizing the infrastructure of Washington, from party politics to lobbyists to campaign finance. It never seems to occur to CPI that perhaps we're beyond the possibility of political reform, and that it may be time to start looking at Wall Street, or the military-industrial complex, or the structures and personalities behind private-sector global finance and international trade. But then, their grant money would dry up if they were to take such an approach. At PIR we guarantee this.

If you assume that the two political parties are really different, and if voters looked more closely at who's running and showed up to cast their votes then we'd all be better off -- if you believe this in your heart, then this research is important. It has chapters on each of 15 presidential candidates in 1996, summarizing what's available from the public record about their wheeling and dealing during their political careers. But if you have doubts about fine-tuning Washington politics, then this book is merely more evidence that our system is beyond repair.

Lewis, Charles and the Center for Public Integrity. The Buying of the President 2000. New York: Avon Books, 2000. 368 pages.

This is another in a list of books by a Washington nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Public Integrity. Others include a book on the 1996 election, and one on the 1998 congressional election. All examine the role of big money and conflicts of interest in the American political process.

CPI is becoming something of an institution itself. Revenues were $2 million in 1998, and $4 million in 1999. Donors include the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and a couple of Rockefeller foundations (the big three players in the CIA's cold war). They also got money from a contract with CBS ($93,000 in 1999, which CPI considered part of their exempt function and purpose), and from the usual gaggle of alleged good-guy liberals such as Bill Moyers (another former covert operator).

This book has separate chapters on the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Reform Party, Bill Bradley, Albert Gore, Gary Bauer, George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, Steve Forbes, Orrin Hatch, Alan Keyes, John McCain, Dan Quayle, and Patrick Buchanan. If the U.S. electoral process is salvageable, and all that's lacking is critical attention from the U.S. major-media process, then buy this book. Their work is narrow, Washington-centric, and devoid of class consciousness, but it's the only game in that town.

Lewis, Charles and the Center for Public Integrity. The Buying of the President 2004. New York: Perennial (HarperCollins), 2004. 507 pages.

There was one of these in 1996 that was 271 pages, another in 2000 that was 368 pages, and this one is 507 pages. The bloat is mostly because the Center for Public Integrity is assigning more researchers. It may also be true that in every new presidential election, the candidates are more corrupt than the last time, and there's more to write about. This one covers Bush and Cheney, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Richard Gephardt, Bob Graham, John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lieberman, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton. It looks at past scandals, major campaign contributors, and the special interests favored by each candidate.

With the 2000 and 2004 elections the electoral process itself became deeply suspicious. Since this book was published before the 2004 election, all we get is a chapter on the Florida debacle of 2000. In the next edition in 2008 they should take a look at Ohio in 2004, the Electoral College, and who's behind electronic voting.

Will it matter by then? That's the key question one is left with after reading this book with post-2004 hindsight. Does it matter at all, or will any effort to research the electoral process in the expectation of encouraging reform, always end up as too little and too late?

Rampton, Sheldon and Stauber, John. Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2004. 264 pages.

Rampton and Stauber run the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and are best known for previous books criticizing the public relations industry. Here they wade into politics more directly by examining the views and organizational tactics of "movement conservatives." The back cover sums it up: "For the first time since 1932, the Republican Party controls every major institution of the federal government.... The GOP leadership maintains its hold on power through the systemic manipulation of the electoral system, the media, the lobbying establishment, and the political culture at large."

After dozens of pages proving that the right-wing is running the entire show in America, the last chapter concedes that this is partly a victory by default. Liberals are outgunned due to their disorganization, and their inability to match the right-wing's use of information technology and political tactics. We would add that thirty years of "the personal as political" and "identity politics" on the Left have undermined any sense of class identity. It's just possible that the GOP has more real understanding of grassroots sentiment by now than the Democratic Party, at the same time that the GOP's agenda is thoroughly self-serving and anti-populist.

Rampton, Sheldon and Stauber, John. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003. 248 pages.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber work for the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin. This and two previous books by them focus on the public relations aspects of American media. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was planned by PR specialists, as much as by military strategists at the Pentagon. In fact, a select group of neocons, lobbyists, and ideologues, from the think tanks and the first Bush administration, had been working the spin for years.

The invasion was a media event. The Pentagon's "Combat Camera" crew manufactured the Jessica Lynch rescue, while real journalists were carefully "embedded" with American and British troops, and told to clear out of areas where they might have an opportunity to report on the human cost of the invasion. Our major American media only wanted some video of troops on the move -- "soft" images were just fine, and even preferable to coverage that would have been more realistic, but also more controversial. The media became a parody of itself. This abdication of media responsibility is reminiscent of the Tonkin Gulf days of 1964, and may yet turn Iraq into a quagmire of equal proportions. As was the case in Vietnam, perhaps some better coverage will emerge a few years from now, too little and too late.

Sabato, Larry J. and Simpson, Glenn R. Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics. New York: Times Books (Random House), 1996. 430 pages.

After 300 interviews, Larry Sabato, a professor, and Glenn Simpson, a reporter, put together this book about corruption in the U.S. political system. In 1964, 76 percent of Americans polled said that they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right most of the time. By the time this book appeared in 1996, that number had plunged to 19 percent. At the end of the book the authors ask, "Where will we be in ten years if the problems identified in this volume are not addressed?"

This book examines corruption in the electoral process, including dirty tricks, vote fraud, and mass-media spin. It also looks at corruption in Congress -- the abuse of privileges, and our broken campaign-finance system that encourages payoffs by special interests. Today in 2006, everything is worse than ten years ago. There were two presidential elections that many believe were rigged, no one has any respect for our foreign policy, the rich are still getting richer, peak oil is threatening, everyone drives gas-hogging SUVs, climate patterns are changing, and our government is too disorganized to help people in New Orleans. The next version of this book needs a better subtitle. How's this: "The Persistence of Collapse in American Politics."

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Two books in NameBase, "Yankee and Cowboy War" by Carl Oglesby and "Power Shift" by Kirkpatrick Sale, are based on a single premise -- that there has been a more-or-less conscious shift in the source of American ruling-class power during the postwar period. The Southern Rim (roughly the states or portions of states south of a line drawn across the country from North Carolina to just north of San Francisco) is challenging the traditional control of the Eastern Establishment (Chicago, New York, Boston, and points between). Sale uses this hook to analyze economic and electoral changes, while Oglesby develops a rough handle to link the JFK assassination and Watergate. Both books are solid and valuable, although this pet premise isn't necessary to either.

Sale's strength for my purposes is his ability to cram nearly 500 names of contemporary political and economic elites into a coherent narrative, along with useful identifying information on each of them. While there is definitely a shift to the Rim, it may simply be the case that as Dixiecrats find new economic power, they begin to realize that rich folks can get richer by joining the Republican Party. It's fortunate for NameBase that Sale requires 362 pages of hard data to make this point, which I was ready to concede on page one. -- D.Brandt

Smith, Hedrick. The Power Game: How Washington Works. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. 790 pages.

Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith reported from Washington for the New York Times for nearly a decade, and has written two books on Reagan and one on Russia. The Power Game, three months on the NYT bestseller list, is another of the "Washington insider" genre that quashes what some believe to be the popular illusions about how Washington works. But as suggested by his final chapter, "What Is to Be Done?", the problem with insiders is that in the end they like being insiders. They get richer as the system collapses, so their proposals for reform amount only to petty tinkering. Despite the tongue-in-cheek toward Lenin, Smith's worst nightmare is an emerging class consciousness that sees major problems as requiring major solutions. As we slip further downhill, we can expect more books like this to be touted by the major media. Call it a "limited hangout," a form of damage control.

Still, this book is an antidote to those charts on "How a Bill Becomes Law," and is recommended for those who have just graduated from the eighth grade. It covers the obvious bases: lobbying, image manipulation, turf wars, the power of Congressional staff, PAC money, the need to constantly campaign, Pentagon pork projects, foreign policy back channels and shadow policy-making, gridlock and the blame game, influence peddling, the institution of media leaks, and the impact of television. This just in: Little Guy Gets Screwed.

Smith, James A. The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite. New York: The Free Press, 1993. 330 pages. An appendix titled "Think Tank Directory" (pages 270-310) describes 44 think tanks.

This is an objective, scholarly history of the ascending influence of expert opinion and academic elites on American social and foreign policy during the twentieth century. There have been several ideological trends over the years, from the metaphor of preventive medicine, to those of social efficiency, balance, or adjustment. After World War II, the emphasis was on economics, game theory, input-output analysis, pragmatism, evaluation, quantification, and technique. Robert McNamara's whiz kids, many of whom came from the Rand Corporation, personified this trend.

This intellectual fad crashed and burned with the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam. Neo-conservatives stepped into the void and pushed the pendulum back with a return to "values," and the notion that "ideas have consequences." Foundations and corporations pumped money into hands-on Washington think tanks, who then put numerous "experts" on the payroll. The author feels that these have become too politicized, and that "policy research institutions have thought little about broad civic education and more about advising those in the government or gaining attention from the mass media.... The expert class has interposed itself between the average citizen and the deliberations of government." (page 238)

Summers, Anthony. The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. New York: Viking, 2000. 640 pages.

Two excellent previous books by Anthony Summers are indexed in NameBase: "Conspiracy," about the JFK assassination, and "Official and Confidential," about J. Edgar Hoover. This biography of Richard Nixon, based on five years of research and more than a thousand interviews, is an antidote to the undeserved stature that Nixon gained in the years after Watergate. It chronicles the dark side: Nixon's quirky personality and mental instability, his underhanded tactics and lust for intrigue, and his complete disregard for the Constitution.

His relationship with Charles Rebozo is covered very well, and the Howard Hughes connection as well as can be expected. Nixon's early plotting against Castro, while he was vice president under Eisenhower, sets the stage for his later paranoia during Watergate. On Vietnam, rather than getting us out of the war as he promised, Nixon secretly tried to derail Lyndon Johnson's negotiations in 1968, and once in office ended up escalating on one front or another in an attempt to scare the Eastern bloc into thinking that he was out of control and a madman (which, of course, he was). The only thing more pathetic than our nation under Nixon, is the fact that today, for every author like Anthony Summers, there are three or four slobbering, media-anointed wise men who still argue that Nixon was a great man.

Trento, Susan B. The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1992. 430 pages.

After the Gulf War, the media gradually began to realize that at some point in the frenzy of pack journalism, TV talking heads, and op-ed pundits that preceded the war, they had been manipulated. Behind the scenes Kuwait was shaping opinions by greasing the palms of certain Washington public relations firms. One person with both hands out was Robert Keith Gray, the master PR mercenary of the 1980s. Before he started Gray and Company in 1981 he was with Hill and Knowlton; by 1986 he was back after selling out his company to them. But throughout his thirty years in Washington, Robert Gray's style has been consistent -- he parties and charms his way into the power elite, and then sells access to his Rolodex for fees sometimes running into the millions. By doing favors for the CIA and hiring self-styled, free-lance spooks like Neil Livingstone, Gray was even able to extend his influence into Washington's Dark Side.

It doesn't matter who signs the checks. Besides Kuwait, Gray has represented China since 1989, Haiti under Duvalier, supporters of Rev. Moon, the Church of Scientology, BCCI, the late British publisher Robert Maxwell, the Teamsters under Jackie Presser, and the Catholic Bishops Conference in their campaign against abortion. If a book like this had been written in 1980, the mess we're in today would have been predictable.

Winter-Berger, Robert N. The Washington Pay-Off: An Insider's View of Corruption in Government. New York: Dell Publishing, 1972. 336 pages.

Robert Winter-Berger was a Washington lobbyist from 1964-1969, and he got out just in time. The next year his friend Nathan Voloshen, who had underworld connections and was a political fixer for House Speaker John W. McCormack, was indicted along with McCormack's aide Martin Sweig. McCormack faked ignorance and was allowed to resign quietly, while Winter-Berger was mentioned in the press. He had spent five years watching McCormack, Sweig, Voloshen, and many others pass around envelopes filled with cash in exchange for political favors; the indictments reflected only the tip of the iceberg. During those five years, Winter-Berger took notes and was in the habit of saving every scrap of evidence. This name-intensive book is the result.

If bribes, double-dealing, kickbacks, blackmail, and corrupt judges sound like grist for Hollywood, imagine the same thing happening in Capitol Hill offices, day in and day out. Once while Winter-Berger is sitting in McCormack's office, Lyndon Johnson storms in, alternately cursing and crying over his Bobby Baker problems. After a few minutes of this, Johnson finally notices Winter-Berger, and asks McCormack, "Is he all right?" "Yes, he's a close friend of Nat's," replies McCormack. LBJ then gets an idea -- he tells Winter-Berger to take a message to Nat for delivery to Bobby Baker, offering Baker a million dollars to take the rap and keep his mouth shut.

Yakovlev, Nikolai. Washington Silhouettes. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985. 376 pages.

Nikolai Yakovlev is a well-known Soviet historian with over twenty books to his credit, which have sold a total of over five million copies. A number of these have been on U.S. history, including biographies of George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and one tantalizingly titled "They Overstepped the Line" about John and Robert Kennedy. Yakovlev began as an expert on the U.S. at the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1959, but in recent years has concentrated his attention on Soviet history.

"Washington Silhouettes" is a well-informed general survey of U.S. history, from the origins of the Cold War to the election of Ronald Reagan. It is written in a lively, opinionated style which U.S. scholars might dismiss as polemical or even propagandistic, primarily because the New World Order consensus won't allow them to address its content. But Yakovlev uses American sources (NSC memorandums during 1948-1950 were perfectly blunt about plans to conquer the Soviets), and packs every page with fascinating quotes from U.S. elites and other assorted fun facts. Yakovlev's writing is uncommonly literate compared to other Progress Publishers books that were translated from the Russian.

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

ABRECHT GARY L ACHESON DEAN G ADAMS SHERMAN AGNEW SPIRO T ALEXANDER LAMAR AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE ANDERSON JACK (COLUMNIST) ANDREAS DWAYNE ORVILLE ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND COMPANY ARMEY RICHARD K (R-TX) ARNOLD PORTER (LAW FIRM) ASSOCIATION TRIAL LAWYERS AMERICA AUSTERN H THOMAS BAKER BOBBY (ROBERT GENE) BAKER HOWARD H JR (R-TN) BAKER JAMES A III BALDRIGE MALCOLM BALL GEORGE W BANK CREDIT COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL BANZHAF JOHN BARBOUR HALEY BAROODY WILLIAM JOSEPH SR BARTLETT CHARLES L BASSETT JAMES BAUER GARY L BEERS CHARLOTTE BEILENSON ANTHONY C (D-CA) BEN-MENASHE ARI BENTSEN LLOYD M JR (D-TX) BISSELL RICHARD MERVIN JR BLILEY THOMAS JR (R-VA) BOBST ELMER H BOEHNER JOHN A (R-OH) BOGGS THOMAS HALE JR BOLSHAKOV GEORGI N BONO SONNY (R-CA) BRADLEE BENJAMIN C BRADLEY BILL (D-NJ) BRADY LAWRENCE J BRODIE BERNARD BROOKINGS INSTITUTION BROWN HAROLD (DEFENSE SEC) BROWN RONALD HARMON BROWN ROOT COMPANY BRZEZINSKI ZBIGNIEW BUCHANAN BAY BUCHANAN PATRICK J BUCKLEY JAMES LANE BUNDY MCGEORGE BURFORD ANNE M BURKE ARLEIGH A (ADM) BUSH GEORGE H.W. BUSH GEORGE W BUTTERFIELD ALEXANDER P CABLE NEWS NETWORK CALIFANO JOSEPH A JR CAMPBELL W GLENN CARLUCCI FRANK CHARLES CARR BOB (D-MI) CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CASEY WILLIAM JOSEPH CASTRO FIDEL CATO INSTITUTE CENTER PUBLIC INTEGRITY CENTER STRATEGIC INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CENTER STUDY DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS CENTER STUDY RESPONSIVE LAW CHALABI AHMAD CHAMBERS WHITTAKER CHENEY RICHARD BRUCE CHENNAULT ANNA CHAN CHOTINER MURRAY M CHRISTIAN COALITION CLARK WESLEY K (GEN) CLEWS CARTER L CLIFFORD CLARK MCADAMS CLINTON BILL COELHO TONY (D-CA) COLLBOHM FRANK COMMITTEE PRESENT DANGER CONNALLY JOHN BOWDEN (B.1917-02-27) CONNALLY TOM TERRY CORCORAN THOMAS GARDINER COVINGTON BURLING CROSBY JAMES M CURRY DAVID A CUTLER LLOYD N DAMATO ALFONSE M (R-NY) DE LAY TOM D (R-TX) DEAN HOWARD BRUSH III DEAVER MICHAEL K DELAUER RICHARD D DEMUTH CHRISTOPHER C DIEM NGO DINH DINE THOMAS ALAN DINGELL JOHN D (D-MI) DOBRYNIN ANATOLI DOLE ELIZABETH HANFORD DOLE ROBERT J (R-KS) DULLES ALLEN WELSH DULLES JOHN FOSTER EAGLEBURGER LAWRENCE SIDNEY EDWARDS JOHN R (D-NC) EISENHOWER DWIGHT DAVID ELLSBERG DANIEL ENRON CORPORATION ENVIRONMETRICS INC EXNER JUDITH CAMPBELL FALWELL JERRY FARLEY JAMES A FAULKNER SCOT M FEINGOLD RUSSELL D (D-WI) FEULNER EDWIN J JR FITZGERALD JOHN F (HONEY FITZ) FOLEY THOMAS S (D-WA) FORBES MALCOLM S JR FORD FOUNDATION FORD GERALD R FORTAS ABE FOSTER JOHN S JR FOWLER DONALD L FULBRIGHT J WILLIAM FULLER CRAIG L GARMENT LEONARD GARNER JOHN NANCE GATES ROBERT MICHAEL GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION GENERAL ELECTRIC GEPHARDT RICHARD A (D-MO) GIANCANA SAM GILBERT EDWARD M GINGRICH NEWTON L (R-GA) GIULIANI RUDOLPH W GOLDWATER BARRY MORRIS GOODWIN RICHARD N GOPAC GORE ALBERT ARNOLD SR GORE ALBERT JR (D-TN) GOTT JOHN A GRAHAM BOB (D-FL) GRAMM PHIL (R-TX) GRAMM WENDY LEE GRAY CLAYLAND BOYDEN GRAY COMPANY GRAY KENNETH DEFOREST GRAY ROBERT KEITH GREGG DONALD P GUTHRIE RANDOLPH H HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HALDEMAN HARRY ROBBINS HALLIBURTON COMPANY HALPERN SAMUEL HAMILTON LEE H (D-IN) HAMILTON WILLIAM ANTHONY HARKEN ENERGY CORPORATION HARLOW BRYCE NATHANIEL HARRIMAN W AVERELL HARVEY WILLIAM KING HATCH ORRIN G (R-UT) HELMS JESSE A (R-NC) HELMS RICHARD MCGARRAH HERITAGE FOUNDATION HERRERO DE MINON MIGUEL HILL KNOWLTON COMPANY HISS ALGER HITCH CHARLES JOHNSTON HOFFA JIMMY (JAMES RIDDLE) HOOVER INSTITUTION HOOVER J EDGAR HORMATS ROBERT D HORSKY CHARLES HOUSE EDWARD M HUDSON INSTITUTE HUGHES HOWARD R HUMPHREY HUBERT HORATIO HUNT E HOWARD HUTSCHNECKER ARNOLD IKLE FRED CHARLES INSLAW INC INSTITUTE DEFENSE ANALYSES INSTITUTE FUTURE INSTITUTE POLICY STUDIES IRAQI NATIONAL CONGRESS JOHNSON LYNDON BAINES JONES JESSE HOLMAN JORDAN BARBARA CHARLINE KAH GARY KAHN HERMAN KAMPELMAN MAX M KAUFMANN WILLIAM WEED KAYSEN CARL KEATING CHARLES H JR KEFAUVER ESTES (D-TN) KELLOGG FRANCIS L KEMP JACK F KENNAN GEORGE FROST KENNEDY EDWARD M (D-MA) KENNEDY JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY ROBERT FRANCIS KERRY JOHN FORBES (D-MA) KEYES ALAN L KHRUSHCHEV NIKITA KIRKPATRICK JEANE J KISSINGER HENRY A KLEINDIENST RICHARD GORDON KRISTOL IRVING KROCK ARTHUR KUCINICH DENNIS (D-OH) LAKE JAMES H LANSDALE EDWARD GEARY LANSKY MEYER LANTOS TOM (D-CA) LASUEN JOSE RAMON LAUTENBERG FRANK R (D-NJ) LAXALT PAUL D (R-NV) LAY KENNETH LEE LAYLIN JOHN G LEACH JIM A (R-IA) LEHMAN JOHN FRANCIS JR LEMAY CURTIS E (GEN) LEWIS CHARLES (CENTER PUBLIC INTEGRITY) LIEBERMAN JOSEPH I (D-CT) LINCOLN EVELYN LIPPMANN WALTER LITTLE ARTHUR D LIVINGSTONE NEIL C LOTT TRENT (R-MS) LUGAR RICHARD GREEN (R-IN) MACARTHUR DOUGLAS (GEN) MAHEU ROBERT AIME MALCOLM DURIE MANKIEWICZ FRANK MANSFIELD MIKE J (D-MT) MCAULIFFE TERRY (TERENCE) MCCAIN JOHN S III (R-AZ) MCCARTHY JOSEPH R MCCONNELL MITCH JR (R-KY) MCCORMACK JOHN W MCNAMARA ROBERT STRANGE MEESE EDWIN METZENBAUM HOWARD M (D-OH) MILLER JAMES C III MITCHELL JOHN N MITCHELL WESLEY C MORGENTHAU ROBERT MORRIS MOSELEY-BRAUN CAROL (D-IL) MOYERS BILL D MOYNIHAN DANIEL PATRICK (D-NY) MUDGE ROSE GUTHRIE ALEXANDER MURPHY DANIEL J (ADM) NADER RALPH NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION NEW YORK RAND INSTITUTE NEWMAN LARRY NHU NGO DINH NITZE PAUL HENRY NIXON RICHARD MILHOUS NORQUIST GROVER GLENN NORTH OLIVER L OBRIEN LAWRENCE FRANCIS ODONNELL KENNETH P ONEILL THOMAS P JR (TIP) ORFILA ALEJANDRO OWEN ROBERT W PACKWOOD BOB (R-OR) PARK TONGSUN PATMAN WRIGHT (D-TX) PEARSON DREW PECK RAYMOND PELL CLAIBORNE (D-RI) PENN CENTRAL COMPANY PERLE RICHARD N PEROT H ROSS QUAYLE DAN RACICOT MARC RAND CORPORATION RASKIN MARCUS GOODMAN RAYBURN SAM REAGAN RONALD W REBOZO CHARLES G (BEBE) REED RALPH E JR RICHARDSON ELLIOT LEE ROBERTSON PAT (EVANGELIST) RODRIGUEZ FELIX ISMAEL ROMETSCH ELLEN ROOSEVELT FRANKLIN DELANO ROSSELLI JOHN ROSTENKOWSKI DAN (D-IL) ROSTOW EUGENE VICTOR DEBS RUMSFELD DONALD H RUSK DEAN RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION SCHLESINGER ARTHUR MEIER JR SCHLESINGER JAMES RODNEY SCHWARZENEGGER ARNOLD SCHWEIKER RICHARD S (R-PA) SCHWEITZER MITCHELL D SEARS JOHN PATRICK SHARPTON AL SHEPPARD MORRIS SHULTZ GEORGE PRATT SIDEY HUGH SMATHERS GEORGE A SMITH CONRAD ARNHOLT SMITH WILLIAM FRENCH SORENSEN THEODORE C SPALDING CHARLES SPECTER ARLEN (R-PA) STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE STOCKMAN DAVID A STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE SWEIG MARTIN L SYMINGTON STUART W (D-MO) SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION TAYLOR MAXWELL D (GEN) TELLER EDWARD THURMOND STROM (R-SC) TOWER JOHN GOODWIN (R-TX) TRUDEAU PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUMAN HARRY S TUGWELL REXFORD GUY URBAN INSTITUTE VALENTI JACK J VERNEY RUSSELL VIGUERIE RICHARD A VOLOSHEN NATHAN WALLACE GEORGE CORLEY WATT JAMES GAIUS WAXMAN HENRY A (D-CA) WEINBERGER CASPAR W WELS RICHARD WEYRICH PAUL M WHEATON M GENE WHITMAN CHRISTINE TODD WIESNER JEROME B WILLIAMS JOHN J (R-DE) WILSON EDWIN PAUL WILSON PETE (R-CA) WILSON WOODROW WINTER-BERGER ROBERT N WOHLSTETTER ALBERT J WRIGHT JIM (JAMES C JR D-TX) YARBOROUGH RALPH WEBSTER (D-TX)

Elites / Personalities

2006-06-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

Bellett, Gerald. Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes. Ogdensburg NY: Voyageur North America, 1995. 320 pages.

Gerald Bellett is a reporter for the Vancouver Sun in British Columbia. When John Meier, a former aide to Howard Hughes, moved there from the U.S. in the early 1970s, Bellett began writing about Meier's struggle with the White House, the CIA, and the Howard Hughes organization. This is an authorized biography, and while it helps fill in some historical gaps about Watergate and the Hughes-CIA connection, it is still history as told by yet another insider-victim, with possible axes to grind. It's a bit suspicious. Even though he was wheeling and dealing with the spookiest and most duplicitous people on the planet, it seems that for Meier, these were the good old days. There is not a single mea culpa in this entire book.

But another grinding fact is that Meier was a victim of CIA and Canadian collusion to put him behind bars. This included charges of tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and ultimately a charge of murder. He spent five years in prison before prosecutors emptied out their bag of tricks. Meier argues that Watergate was a classic set-up, and it appears that the CIA thought he had a stash of Hughes documents that might prove his point. According to Meier, when he refused to cut a deal with the CIA to produce the documents and keep his mouth shut, his legal problems began.

Burleigh, Nina. A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. 356 pages.

Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964) was from a well-connected family. After Vassar she married Cord Meyer, Jr., who became a top CIA official. Mary's sister married Ben Bradlee in 1955; another classmate from Vassar was Cicely d'Autremont, who married James Angleton. An attractive, free-spirited artist, Mary Meyer was sampling mushrooms with Timothy Leary at Harvard by 1962, and told him that the CIA was interested the potential of LSD for mind control. That year Mary smoked pot with JFK. Then in 1964, she was murdered while walking along the Georgetown towpath. The evidence against the accused was strong but circumstantial, and attorney Dovey Roundtree managed to get Ray Crump acquitted. After the murder Bradlee and Angleton found Mary's diary in her house, whereupon Angleton slithered off into the night with it.

The White House mind-control connection, the unsolved murder, and the diary caper have earned Mary Meyer a solid place in conspiracy folklore. Some aspects of the murder suggest that Crump may have been a fall guy, although this in turn suggests a plot that would have been both elaborate and risky. Crump was involved in a few violent incidents in the years after his acquittal, but knowing this isn't particularly helpful either. In 1997 he wrote the author that he remembered nothing of that day on the towpath, and didn't want to talk about it.

Bird, Kai. The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. 496 pages.

The Bundy brothers were born to rule, and they knew it. From the Boston elite, through Groton, Yale's Skull and Bones, and Harvard, their superiority was widely acknowledged. William Bundy joined the CIA in 1951, worked in senior positions in the Pentagon and State Department during the Vietnam War, and was editor of "Foreign Affairs" at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1972-1984. McGeorge Bundy was a Harvard dean from 1953-1961, a national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1966, and head of the Ford Foundation from 1966-1979. He died in 1996.

Both brothers were cold war liberals, which meant that their foreign policy tended toward imperialism. They knew that it was never a question of dominoes falling, yet the lure of hegemony led them to share much of the responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGeorge also shares responsibility for nearly starting World War III during the Cuban missile crisis. Later, at the Ford Foundation, a limo would pick McGeorge up in the morning, and he'd spend his days giving millions to minority activism centers, women's studies programs, and writing essays in defense of affirmative action, presumably to balkanize and destroy the New Left. When Henry Ford II naively objected and left the board in 1976, Mac Bundy defended himself by telling reporters that the Foundation was "making the world safe for capitalism." He wasn't kidding.

Bird, Kai. The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 800 pages.

John McCloy (1895-1989) is the archetype of twentieth-century power and influence; his wide-ranging activities offer ample evidence for anyone who has ever felt that U.S. policies are designed by and for a tiny Yankee aristocracy. A sampling of his career: assistant secretary of war (1941- 1945), high commissioner of Germany (1949-1952), president of the World Bank (1947-1949), chairman of Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank (1953- 1960), chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1953-1970), chairman of the Ford Foundation (1953-1965), disarmament advisor (1961-1974), Warren Commission appointee, Wall Street attorney for the seven sister big oil companies, and director of numerous corporations. It's almost redundant to add that McCloy was also well-connected to U.S. intelligence agencies.

This first major biography of McCloy was written over a ten-year period. Special emphasis is given to several controversies in his career: the internment of the Japanese in WW2, the decision not to bomb Auschwitz, his clemency for Nazi war criminals, the use of Nazis by U.S. intelligence, and the Warren Commission (nothing new on the WC). The book is based on over a hundred interviews (including nine with McCloy), several hundred Freedom of Information Act requests, McCloy's private papers, and material in numerous archives and libraries.

Cooney, John. The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman. New York: Times Books, 1984. 364 pages.

Author John Cooney interviewed dozens of priests who worked with Cardinal Spellman, many of whom would only speak on background. He also filed the usual FOIA requests with the FBI and State Department. The records of the Archdiocese of New York, where Spellman reigned for 28 years, are closed to researchers, but one priest slipped Cooney a copy of Spellman's diary. This is the first major biography of Spellman (1889-1967), who was a major figure in American politics during the first half of the Cold War.

A consummate politician, Spellman laid low at first and cultivated key people in Rome. After his friend Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939, Spellman was appointed an archbishop. During the war, he travelled to war zones and acted as FDR's secret agent. After the war he allied himself with Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and became a kingmaker in New York City politics. He continued to support U.S. military adventures by visiting the troops, attending Pentagon briefings, discussing strategy with generals, and gathering intelligence for the CIA and State Department. Were it not for Spellman's early (beginning in 1950) efforts to support Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's puppet government might not have emerged. Ultimately the Vatican became wary of Spellman's power. So did antiwar activists, who demonstrated against "Spellman's War" outside his residence and cathedral.

Cummings, Richard. The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream. New York: Grove Press, 1985. 569 pages.

Until his tragic death in 1980, Allard Lowenstein was an ex-congressman from New York who was best known as a pro-civil rights and anti-war "dump Johnson" activist. He gave charismatic speeches to legions of well-scrubbed idealistic white students during the mid-1960s; his basic message was to work within the system rather than subscribe to the politics of alienation and confrontation. This was fine as far as it went. But the evidence shows that until the 1967 National Student Association scandal, which revealed a long history of CIA funding and put Lowenstein on the defensive, he was working for what he might have called the "good-wing" of the CIA. This "good-wing" funded culturally-diverse (and divisive) democratic left movements in the Third World in order to present an alternative to Communist organizing and a politics based on class analysis. Lowenstein spent time in Africa, Spain, and Portugal meeting with various left-wing reformers. Ironically, by 1974 he had become interested in the RFK assassination.

Cummings' biography will be regarded as the seminal work on Lowenstein for years to come. He had access to Lowenstein's papers, spent hundreds of hours in interviews, and demonstrates a broad familiarity with the literature on the CIA. Further revelations that might outdate this monumental effort could come from the CIA's files, but that isn't likely anytime soon.

Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. 532 pages.

On June 5, 1974, Howard Hughes' Hollywood headquarters was burglarized. Over $60,000 and some souvenirs were missing, but the press didn't mention that boxes of secret papers were also taken. It looked like an inside job. A large team of FBI men, CIA agents, and LAPD detectives made no headway in solving the case, and soon it began to look like they preferred to leave it unsolved. Two years later Michael Drosnin, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter, found the person who stole the papers and gained his confidence. Drosnin was given access to 10,000 documents, including more than 3,000 in Hughes' own handwriting. Then he spent seven years authenticating these documents and interviewing hundreds of people.

The result is this highly-credible description of the Hughes empire and its role in American politics. With Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey both accepting money from Hughes, and DNC chairman Larry O'Brien on the Hughes payroll at the time of the Watergate break-in, and the CIA using Hughes for top-secret projects such as the Glomar Explorer, this role was significant. But if it was decisive, it was probably due to serendipity. Hughes was a manipulative megalomaniac, and also a drug addict with a phobia of germs and radiation. It appears, however, that his goals were modest: Howard Hughes desperately wanted the AEC to stop underground nuclear testing in Nevada.

Epstein, Edward Jay. Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. New York: Random House, 1996. 418 pages.

The dust cover shows Edward Jay Epstein sitting at a table with reels of tape in front of him. Like Nixon, Armand Hammer felt the need to secretly chronicle his wheeling and dealing, much of it illegal. But he was rich, and and spent plenty on public relations and self-aggrandizing philanthropy. The obituaries in 1990 spoke of him as a crusader for peace and someone who financed cancer research, even though enough information about Hammer's thuggery was already on the record by then. No question about it, Hammer was ruthless and deceptive. Those who knew lacked the guts to say so until after Hammer's death (except for biographer Steve Weinberg).

Epstein's access to Hammer's tapes, some Soviet intelligence files, and interviews with family and friends, make this biography fairly impressive. The only criticism is that Epstein is still fighting the Cold War, and concentrates too much on Hammer's role as an agent of influence for the Soviets. There were other capitalists, such as Ford and the Rockefellers, who were just as willing to cut deals with bad guys. Rather than concluding that Hammer hoodwinked the West by helping the East, it makes more sense to conclude that the stinking rich are always able transcend international conflicts when it suits their interests. This ought to put a whole new slant on Epstein's politics, but it doesn't.

Finder, Joseph. Red Carpet. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (A New Republic Book), 1983. 372 pages.

This book began in 1981, when author Joseph Finder, a graduate student at Harvard's Russian Research Center, interviewed Armand Hammer, who was then 83 years old. After failing to bribe Finder's faculty advisor at Harvard to stop the project, Hammer tried to buy up as many copies as he could find. After this book was published, two biographies appeared on Hammer that are even more devastating (by Steve Weinberg and Edward Jay Epstein). Since both of these were already indexed in NameBase, this book was mainly of interest for the other aristocrats profiled by the author: W. Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, Donald Kendall, and David Rockefeller.

Finder's point is that when big money was involved, both the U.S. and Russia overlooked their ideological differences, even at the height of the Cold War, and cooperated in the interests of higher profits. The Kremlin has always given distinguished U.S. millionaires access to the inner sanctum. From the other end, no one in Washington tells a Rockefeller or a Harriman what they can and cannot do. (Apparently the Cold War wasn't really a war at all. Sure, the little guy was expected to kill and be killed in Vietnam, and World War III nearly started more than once. And yes, the taxes we paid for all this excitement made the folks behind the U.S. defense industry richer, as the middle class went into decline. But it kept us busy and distracted.)

Harris, David. Dreams Die Hard. New York: St.Martin's/Marek, 1982. 341 pages.

David Harris's affecting memoir of the 60s and their aftermath tracks the lives of three men: Allard Lowenstein, promo man for inside-the-system social change; his protege Dennis Sweeney, who became a civil rights hero, a draft resister, and finally a casualty of the times; and Harris himself, another Lowenstein protege turned charismatic, high-profile resister, jail- bird, and finally disabused mainstream journalist. The human drama centers on Sweeney, who got "freedom burned" in Mississippi, declined from isolation into paranoid schizophrenia -- and in 1980 assassinated his former mentor Lowenstein. By that date, Harris was divorced from Joan Baez ("the first family of the Resistance," they had once styled themselves) and writing for the New York Times Magazine.

Harris's political revelations concern Lowenstein, remembered today (if at all) for starting 1968's "Dump Johnson" movement. But before that, Lowenstein channeled innumerable young men into the civil rights movement and into the liberal National Student Association -- later revealed to be CIA-funded. Harris makes a persuasive case that the complex, brilliant Lowenstein, despite his repeated denials, knew the score. A later book on Lowenstein (The Pied Piper by Richard Cummings) confirms the Harris thesis with solid research. -- Steve Badrich

Hatfield, J.H. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2000. 375 pages.

When this book was published by St.Martin's Press in October 1999, mistakes were made by both St.Martin's and the author. The afterword of this book includes circumstantial evidence, confirmed to the author by three unnamed sources, about Bush's arrest for cocaine possession in 1972, and how daddy got the record expunged after Junior performed community service. St.Martin's chose to sensationalize this tiny portion of an otherwise solid book, and found itself under tremendous pressure as one interview after another was cancelled. Then the author falsely denied to a Dallas reporter that he was the same as one James H. Hatfield, a convicted felon. With Hatfield's continued refusal to name his sources for the Bush cocaine story, this false denial was just the excuse that St.Martin's needed. They promptly took their cue from the other rats in our major media, and abandoned ship. All copies were recalled and burned.

The book itself, however, is responsible, thoroughly-researched, and well-documented, and nothing about the author can change this simple fact. The pressure that St.Martin's felt was entirely political, not legal; their own lawyer, plus an outside firm, had already scrutinized everything. So a "punk" alternative publisher, Soft Skull Press, reprinted it in full with additional material. Sometimes it helps to be too small to crush.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983. 698 pages.

Until this book came out, the only people who had critical words for Henry Kissinger were the right, what was left of the left, and an occasional author such as William Shawcross in 1979 (Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia). Hersh's work is the standard for mainstream Kissinger criticism, against which all other efforts are measured. It includes an entire hamper of laundry: his stranglehold on foreign policy, the wiretaps on reporters, and his policies on Southeast Asia, China, and SALT. Two of the best chapters are on the coup in Chile, which NameBase indexed from their appearance in The Atlantic Monthly in December, 1982.

Hersh has over a dozen journalism prizes and numerous scoops to his credit: the My Lai massacre (1969), the secret bombing of Cambodia (1973), CIA domestic spying (1974), Edwin Wilson and Libya (1981), and Manuel Noriega (1986). In 1972 he began working for the New York Times from Washington. On rare occasions his byline still appears on their front page or in their Sunday magazine, but these days he mostly free-lances.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso, 2001. 159 pages.

Fifteen years ago, before the end of the Cold War and the erosion of national sovereignty, the title of this book would have seemed strange. Then a funny thing happened on the way to globalization -- an emerging international consensus began holding individuals accountable for gross violations of human rights. A judge in Spain goes after Augusto Pinochet in Britain, as Yugoslavians stand trial at a U.N. tribunal in The Hague. Though Kissinger is in little danger, perhaps he thinks twice now about traveling. Soon after this book was published, a French judge sent officials to the Ritz hotel in Paris, where Kissinger was staying, and invited him to appear and answer questions about U.S. involvement in the coup in Chile. Kissinger declined and went on his merry way. But the next time something like this happens, the judge may be even bolder.

Hitchens is an excellent writer and researcher. Various chapters discuss aspects of Kissinger's career in light of commonly-accepted criteria for judging culpability. The book begins in Indochina, and continues with Bangladesh in 1971, Chile in the 1970s, Cyprus in 1974, East Timor in 1975, and the Greek junta that targeted a U.S. activist for assassination. The next time Ted Koppel brown-noses for the good Doctor, remind yourself that the jury is still out on Kissinger's place in history.

Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. 528 pages.

When William F. Buckley, Jr., founded The National Review in 1955, U.S. conservatives were our "stupid party" (as J.S. Mill called England's Tories). Real intellectuals, it seemed then, derived from the New Deal -- or the left. Conservative thinking, such as it was, had mixed and mostly dubious antecedents: e.g., American nativism; pre-"Vatican II" Catholicism; the mystical anticommunism of Whittaker Chambers; or the cultish (as it seemed then) laissez-faire of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

Buckley and his magazine changed all that. John Judis's massive biography details how Buckley helped create conservative readers and institutions (e.g., Young Americans for Freedom) that made politicians like Goldwater and Reagan possible. As a Yalie and a CIA agent, and as the dutiful son of a rich oil wildcatter who was also a devout Catholic, Buckley's own life bridged many of the varieties of conservatism that later would fuse in the Reagan 80s -- and which now may once again be coming apart. Judis's account also suggests (to me, at least) that politics remains for Buckley the intellectual game he first practiced as a brilliant, devout, eager-to-please child on his father's estate.

-- Steve Badrich

Kessler, Ronald. The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi. New York: Warner Books, 1986. 274 pages.

One example of wretched excess in the twentieth century is wheeler- dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He liked to throw extravagant parties for beautiful people and classy prostitutes at one of his twelve fully-staffed residences, on his $70 million yacht, or on one of his three commercial-size airplanes. His wealth, estimated at $4 billion in 1986, came from hefty commissions for arranging deals between U.S. defense contractors and the Saudi royal family. For years our mass media favored him with fawning reports on his lifestyle. Author Ronald Kessler does some of this, but fortunately this book is redeemed with a significant amount of investigative material.

Kessler wrote this at the peak of Khashoggi's career. Soon Khashoggi found himself in the middle of the Iran-contra scandal because of his work with Manucher Ghorbanifar in setting up several of the arms-for-hostages deals. Some of these deals were connected with BCCI, where Khashoggi was a major client. In 1988 he and Imelda Marcos were indicted in Manhattan for helping her late husband hide assets that belonged to the Philippine people. Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland and extradited, but he and Imelda were acquitted in 1990. At last report (March 1992), Khashoggi sold his yacht and creditors impounded his jet. He lives mostly in Spain, is still fighting his legal battles, and was down to his last $54 million.

Kessler, Ronald. The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. New York: Warner Books, 1997. 463 pages.

Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969) made big money by running booze during Prohibition with Frank Costello and other Mafia heavies, and by manipulating Wall Street with insider trading that would be illegal today. Next came $5 million from the movie business, using equally dubious methods, and a new girlfriend, Gloria Swanson. When the 1929 crash arrived, Joe made more money -- he had already sold off most of his holdings, and was selling short on the Street.

His political career began in 1934, when Roosevelt appointed him to head the SEC on the theory that it takes a thief to catch one. In 1938 Joe became U.S. ambassador to Britain, but resigned in 1940 due to his Cliveden Set sympathies for a policy of appeasement toward Hitler. After the war, Joseph Kennedy arranged favorable publicity and purchased votes for his son John. After JFK won in 1960, Joe instructed him to appoint Bobby as attorney general. Judging from this excellent biography, throughout his life Joseph Kennedy was a philanderer, an unprincipled manipulator, and a power-hungry wheeler-dealer, who supervised and financed the careers of his compliant sons. In 1961 he suffered a stroke. For the next eight years, he watched speechlessly from a wheelchair, with questionable comprehension, as one tragedy after another destroyed the dynasty he had created.

Maheu, Robert (with Richard Hack). Next to Hughes. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1993. 358 pages.

There are two reactions when people think of Howard Hughes. The average person thinks of Hollywood, the Spruce Goose, Las Vegas, and an old man who wasted away in a well-guarded suite somewhere, paranoid of germs, who for decades did not show himself to even his closest aides. Others react by thinking of the CIA, Mafia, and Watergate connections, and those spooky Intertel agents. These people tend to be suspicious of all the news stories. Robert Maheu wrote this book for the average person; either he doesn't know all that much or he's still not willing to tell. Maheu, who never saw Hughes, was his Number One wheeler-dealer from the late 1950s until 1970. By that time Hughes' paranoia played into the hands of other aides, who used his isolation to manage the information he received and the documents he signed. They took him out of the country and effectively captured his empire.

Maheu tells about his work for the CIA (he was the CIA-Mafia liaison for the assassination attempts on Castro), and mentions the Hughes cash contributions to Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. His narrative also paints a fascinating picture of how the powerful get things done by dropping a word to various well-placed elites. But in the end Maheu sees himself as just another nice guy who got taken for a ride, and many of his readers will feel that there's still plenty he'd prefer not to share with commoners like us.

Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Chaitkin, Anton. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. 659 pages.

The Lyndon LaRouche organization has a thing about George Bush. One reason is that Bush personifies the sort of Anglo-American, Ivy League elitism -- from "old boy" family connections to "old boy" spook connections -- that has occupied LaRouche for the past two decades. Another is that LaRouche was a federal political prisoner during Bush's tenure, after having been targeted by the feds and railroaded on flimsy evidence. This book, published just before the 1992 election, gets weird at the end (LaRouche claims that Bush's hyperactive thyroid led us into Panama and the Gulf). But the previous 600 pages are a massive compendium of elitist connections not found elsewhere. Though a bit wobbly, perhaps, the book manages to stand on its own, if mainly by default.

It's also fair to ask what makes LaRouche tick. One theory is that he may be secretly sponsored by the Vatican. How else does one explain the tantrums against Freemasonry and secret societies (such as Bush's Skull and Bones), against Anglican apostasy (dope-pushing British imperialism), and against anything that smacks of planned parenthood or population control (the Malthusian activism of the Rockefellers)? When these tirades are occasionally juxtaposed with respectful quotations from His Holiness, it makes us wonder.

Thomas, Evan. The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams -- Ultimate Insider; Legendary Trial Lawyer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. 587 pages.

Edward Bennett Williams (1920-1988) was often described as "the consummate Washington insider who played to win." After battling cancer for eleven years, the obituaries began on page one and his funeral was attended by 2000 mourners. Williams declined invitations from two presidents (Ford and Reagan) to become CIA director, and Lyndon Johnson once asked him to be the mayor of Washington. He was the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, controlled the Washington Redskins for years, sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and was national president of the Knights of Malta since 1984. Williams was best known for his skill as a trial lawyer. His clients included Senator Joseph McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, Adam Clayton Powell, mobster Frank Costello, Sugar Ray Robinson, LBJ aide Bobby Baker, John Connally, the Democratic National Committee, and the Washington Post. Frequently Williams picked up the phone solved his client's problems before they went to trial, and sometimes an exasperated judge would discover that his far-flung law firm represented interests on both sides of a civil case.

Biographer Evan Thomas is the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief at Newsweek magazine. Thomas had access to Williams's papers and the cooperation of his widow.

Wallace, Max. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St.Martin's Press, 2003. 465 pages.

Holocaust researcher Max Wallace takes on American anti-Semitism and the 1930s isolationist movement in this dual biography of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, and concludes that these two "actively chose to impair the Allied war effort, jeopardizing the survival of democratic Europe." The most valuable contribution of this book is its treatment of the role Ford Motor Company played in Germany in the 1930s. In this sense, it follows a line of inquiry that began with "IBM and the Holocaust" (2001) by Edwin Black. The history of Ford Motor Company and IBM in Nazi Germany remains instructive for today's debate over globalization issues.

It is less useful to look at Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh as individuals. Ford was anti-Semitic, mostly during the 1920s and early 1930s, while Lindbergh was isolationist and mildly pro-Nazi until the U.S. declared war on Germany. Isolationism was not extremist -- a Gallup poll conducted on April 26, 1941 found that only 19 percent of Americans supported U.S. entry into the war against Germany and Italy. Until Pearl Harbor, even Roosevelt had never advocated direct intervention in Europe. Lindbergh may have been naive in retrospect, but all he ever did was some public speaking. It seems a bit unfair to lump him in with Henry Ford, whose factories in Germany were churning out troop carriers for the Nazis as late as 1941.

Weinberg, Steve. Armand Hammer: The Untold Story. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989. 501 pages.

This biography of Armand Hammer is one of five, but the first that is unauthorized. Reviewer Anthony Sampson thought even this one was overly kind, but that was before the ever-litigious Hammer filed a nuisance suit in England alleging 173 instances of defamation. Until Hammer died in December 1990, Steve Weinberg -- a journalism professor at the University of Missouri and director of Investigative Reporters and Editors -- was looking at what could have been the most expensive defamation trial in British history.

Hammer's self-celebrated career began at a meeting with Lenin, and blossomed into a long series of insider business deals in the USSR. Soviet documents reveal that he ferried $34,000 from the Soviets to the American Communist Party in 1921. But Hammer wasn't one to let ideology get in the way of business -- in 1976 he pleaded guilty to charges of trying to conceal a $54,000 contribution to Nixon's reelection campaign, and received a tiny fine (and eventually a pardon from George Bush). Hammer's control over his $20 billion Occidental Petroleum was so firm that stockholders complained about picking up the tab for his art collections. Although he was frequently under SEC investigation, his lawyers and connections always came through. Before the "Teflon tycoon" died at age 92, many were beginning to worry that the hyperactive Hammer was not only untouchable, but might even be immortal.

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

ACHESON DEAN G ADENAUER KONRAD AGNEW SPIRO T ALBERT HEINRICH ALLEN RICHARD VINCENT ALSOP JOSEPH WRIGHT AMERICA FIRST COMMITTEE AMERICAN COMMITTEE AFRICA ANDERSON JACK (COLUMNIST) ANGLETON JAMES JESUS ARVAD INGA MARIE ATWATER LEE BABCOCK TIM M BAKER BOBBY (ROBERT GENE) BAKER JAMES A III BALL GEORGE W BALL GERTRUDE BARTLETT CHARLES L BARUCH BERNARD M BAUTZER GREG BEAM JACOB D BEAME ABRAHAM D BELLINO CARMINE SALVATORE BENNETT HARRY BENNETT ROBERT FOSTER (R-UT) BERG SCOTT (A.SCOTT) BIDDLE FRANCIS BISSELL RICHARD MERVIN JR BOYCE BRIAN BOZELL L BRENT JR BRADLEE BENJAMIN C BRADY GENEVIEVE BRASOL BORIS BRENNER MICHAEL BREZHNEV LEONID BRIDGES STYLES (R-NH) BRUK MIKHAIL BRZEZINSKI ZBIGNIEW BUCKLEY JAMES LANE BUCKLEY WILLIAM F JR BULLOCK BOB (TEXAS) BUNDY EMORY BUNDY HARVEY HOLLISTER BUNDY KATHARINE PUTNAM BUNDY MCGEORGE BUNDY WILLIAM PUTNAM BURNHAM JAMES BUSH BARBARA PIERCE BUSH GEORGE H.W. BUSH GEORGE W BUSH JOHN E (JEB) BUSH NEIL MALLON BUSH PRESCOTT SHELDON BYRNES JAMES FRANCIS CALIFANO JOSEPH A JR CAMERON WILLIAM J CARLUCCI FRANK CHARLES CARREL ALEXIS CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CASEY WILLIAM JOSEPH CAVAILLEZ JEAN-PAUL MARIE CHAMBERLAIN NEVILLE CHAMBERS WHITTAKER CHASE MANHATTAN BANK CHERNE LEO CHURCH FRANK FORRESTER (D-ID) CLIFFORD CLARK MCADAMS CLIFFORD GEORGE (D.1985) COFFIN WILLIAM SLOANE COHN ROY MARCUS COLBY WILLIAM EGAN COLSON CHARLES WENDELL CONANT JAMES BRYANT CONGRESS CULTURAL FREEDOM CONNALLY JOHN BOWDEN (B.1917-02-27) COOKE JACK KENT COOPER CHESTER L COPELAND ALAN CORCORAN THOMAS GARDINER COSTELLO FRANK COUGHLIN CHARLES E COUNCIL FOREIGN RELATIONS COUSINS NORMAN CRAIG GREGORY B CRUMP RAYMOND JR CUSHING RICHARD CARDINAL DALITZ MOE B (MORRIS) DANNER RICHARD G DASH SAMUEL DAUTREMONT CICELY DAVIS CHESTER (HOWARD HUGHES AIDE) DE GAULLE CHARLES DEMETRACOPOULOS ELIAS P DENTZER WILLIAM T DES ROSIERS JANET DIEM NGO DINH DIETRICH NOAH DOBRYNIN ANATOLI DOUGLAS LEWIS WILLIAMS SR DOUGLAS WILLIAM O DROSNIN MICHAEL DULLES ALLEN WELSH DULLES JOHN FOSTER DURANTY WALTER DURHAM EARL EAGLEBURGER LAWRENCE SIDNEY EATON CYRUS JR EATON CYRUS SR EDWARDS SHEFFIELD EHRLICHMAN JOHN D ELLSBERG DANIEL FELDMAN MYER (MIKE) FITZGERALD JOHN F (HONEY FITZ) FORD EDSEL FORD FOUNDATION FORD HENRY II FORD HENRY SR FORD MOTOR COMPANY FORRESTAL MICHAEL VINCENT FORTAS ABE FRANKFURTER FELIX FURTSEVA YEKATERINA A GALBRAITH JOHN KENNETH GAY BILL (FRANK WILLIAM GAY) GIANCANA SAM GIBSON HILARY GITLOW BENJAMIN GLENN KAY GOLDFINE BERNARD GOLDWATER BARRY MORRIS GONZALEZ MANUEL G (NORTHROP) GONZALEZ VIRGINO GOODWIN RICHARD N GORE ALBERT ARNOLD SR GRAHAM BILLY (EVANGELIST) GRAHAM KATHARINE GRAHAM PHILIP L GRAVEL MIKE (D-AK) GRAY GORDON GREENSPUN HANK M GREGG DONALD P GRIFFON MIREILLE GROMAN ARTHUR GRUBBS GLEN A HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HALBERSTAM DAVID HALDEMAN HARRY ROBBINS HAMELUCK EDDIE HAMMER ARMAND HAMMER ARMASHA HAMMER FRANCES BARRETT TOLMAN HAMMER HARRY (BROTHER OF ARMAND) HAMMER JULIAN HAMMER JULIUS J HAMMER VICTOR J HANTMAN ALFRED L HARKEN ENERGY CORPORATION HARRIMAN W AVERELL HARRIS DAVID VICTOR HARVARD UNIVERSITY HEARST WILLIAM RANDOLPH SR HELMS RICHARD MCGARRAH HENLEY NADINE HINCKLEY JOHN W JR HITLER ADOLF HODGES LUTHER HARTWELL SR HOFFA JIMMY (JAMES RIDDLE) HOLLIDAY RAYMOND M HOOVER HERBERT SR HOOVER J EDGAR HOUSER GEORGE HUGHES HOWARD R HUMPHREY HUBERT HORATIO HUNDLEY WILLIAM G HUNT E HOWARD HYAMS JOE ICKES HAROLD L (B.1874) INTERTEL IRANI RAY R IRVING CLIFFORD JACKSON CHARLES DOUGLAS JACKSON HENRY MARTIN (SCOOP D-WA) JACOBSEN JAKE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY JOHNSON LYNDON BAINES KARR DAVID KAYSEN CARL KENDALL DONALD MCINTOSH KENDALL WILLMOORE KENNAN GEORGE FROST KENNEDY EDWARD M (D-MA) KENNEDY JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY ROSE KERKORIAN KIRK KHAN YAHYA KHASHOGGI ADNAN KHASHOGGI SORAYA KHAWAGI ABDO KHRUSHCHEV NIKITA KISSINGER HENRY A KOSYGIN ALEXEI KRAVIS HENRY R KROCK ARTHUR KRUPP ALFRIED KUNZ HANS ALBERT KUZNETSOV VASILY V LANDIS JAMES M LAROUCHE LYNDON HERMYLE LAXALT PAUL D (R-NV) LENIN VLADIMIR LIEBOLD ERNEST GUSTAV LIEDTKE J HUGH LIEDTKE WILLIAM C LINDBERGH ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH CHARLES A JR LIPPMANN WALTER LOVESTONE JAY LOVETT ROBERT ABERCROMBIE LOWENSTEIN ALLARD K LUCE CLARE BOOTHE LUCE HENRY ROBINSON LUDWIG DANIEL KEITH MACLEOD MORTON P MAHEU ROBERT AIME MARSHALL GEORGE C (GEN) MARTENS LUDWIG C.A.K. MCCARTHY JOSEPH R MCCLOY JOHN JAY MCCORMACK JOHN W MCCRORY WILLIAM RAYMOND MCINTYRE JAMES FRANCIS CARDINAL MCNAMARA ROBERT STRANGE MEIER JOHN HERBERT MEYER CORD JR MEYER MARY PINCHOT MIKOYAN ANASTAS I MISHELL BORIS MITCHELL JOHN N MITCHELSON MARVIN M MONTINI GIOVANNI (POPE PAUL VI) MORGAN EDWARD PIERPONT MORGENTHAU HENRY M JR MOSES ROBERT MOSS EDWARD K MOYNIHAN DANIEL PATRICK (D-NY) MURDOCK DAVID HOWARD MURPHY RICHARD J NATIONAL REVIEW NATIONAL STUDENT ASSOCIATION NITZE PAUL HENRY NIXON DONALD SR (F.DONALD) NIXON RICHARD MILHOUS NIZER LOUIS NOLAND KENNETH NORIEGA MANUEL ANTONIO NORTH OLIVER L OBRIEN LAWRENCE FRANCIS OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM OCONNELL WILLIAM CARDINAL ONASSIS ARISTOTLE OPPENHEIMER JONATHAN ROBERT PEARSON DREW PEHLE JOHN PEPSICO INTERNATIONAL PETERS JEAN PINCHOT AMOS PINCHOT RUTH PICKERING PINCHOT TONY PIUS XII (POPE) POSNER VICTOR POWELL ADAM CLAYTON QADDAFI MUAMMAR QUAYLE DAN RADFORD CHARLES EDWARD RASKIN MARCUS GOODMAN RAUH JOSEPH L JR REBOZO CHARLES G (BEBE) REINSTEIN BORIS I REUTHER WALTER P RICHARDS ANN W RICHARDSON ELLIOT LEE ROBERTSON ROBBIE ROCKEFELLER DAVID SR ROCKEFELLER NELSON ALDRICH RODRIGUEZ FELIX ISMAEL ROOSEVELT ELEANOR ROOSEVELT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT JAMES ROSSELLI JOHN ROSTOW WALT WHITMAN ROUNDTREE DOVEY ROWE JAMES H JR RUSHER WILLIAM A RUSK DEAN RUSSELL LOUIS JAMES SCHIFF DOROTHY SCHLAMM WILLIAM S SCHLESINGER ARTHUR MEIER JR SCHMIDT ROBERT (FORD-WERKE) SCHRADE PAUL SHAHEEN ROBERT ANDREW SHEEN FULTON J SHELHI OMAR SHULTZ GEORGE PRATT SITTON RAY B SKULL BONES SMITH TRUMAN SORENSEN CHARLES SPELLMAN FRANCIS CARDINAL SPORKIN STANLEY STALIN JOSEF STANS MAURICE H STARR BROADCASTING STIMSON HENRY LEWIS STRAUSS LEWIS L STUDENT NON-VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE SUKARNO PRES. SULLIVAN BRENDAN V JR SUMMA CORPORATION SWANSON GLORIA SWEENEY DENNIS TAYLOR MYRON CHARLES TAYLOR TELFORD THOMAS NORMAN THOMSON JAMES C JR TIGAR MICHAEL E TRADE COUNCIL TRUITT ANNE TRUITT JAMES TRUMAN HARRY S WALKER GEORGE HERBERT JR WALTERS VERNON ANTHONY WATSON W MARVIN WESTPHAL PAT WILLIAMS EDWARD BENNETT WILLIAMSON GEORGE (OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM) WILLS GARRY WOFFORD HARRIS L (D-PA) WORLD BANK WYSHAK ROBERT YARBOROUGH RALPH WEBSTER (D-TX) ZAPATA CORPORATIONS

Elites / Organizations

2006-06-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Bilderberg Group. Meeting Participants. June 3-6, 1999 in Portugal.

The name "Bilderberg" came from the group's first meeting place, the Hotel de Bilderberg of Oosterbeek, Holland, in May 1954. Over the next 47 years the secret meetings have included most of the top ruling-class players from Western Europe and America. Until he was implicated in the Lockheed bribery scandal in 1976, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands served as chairman. By now Bilderberg is a symbol of world management by Atlanticist elites. Some observers, particularly those on the Right, feel that it borders on the conspiratorial, while the Left is primarily interested in its implications for what they call "power structure research." The Bilderberg participants from the U.S. are almost always members of the Council on Foreign Relations, and since 1973 Japanese elites have been brought into the fold through a third overlapping group, the Trilateral Commission.

This list of 111 participants from 24 countries was found on the Web. While discussions during the sessions are not reported publicly, the list of participants is usually available. Those attending are always careful to insist that they participate as individuals and not as representatives of their government. Since top leaders of major countries attend, it appears that this is a convenient fiction designed to sidestep public scrutiny.

Domhoff, G.William. The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975. 116 pages.

While most American sociologists spend their time writing about social stratification and delinquent behavior, there are a handful of scholars who deal seriously with upper-class social and economic power as a phenomenon of contemporary American politics. University of California at Santa Cruz professor G.William Domhoff is one of the more prominent.

The Bohemian Grove is an invitation-only summer camp on 2500 secluded acres 65 miles north of San Francisco, reserved for the richest and most powerful men in America. In 1986 a state appeals court ruled that it cannot refuse to hire women employees. The Grove is owned by the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, virtually all of whose members (Reagan, Bush, Ford, etc.) can be found in Who's Who. Through elaborate stage productions and other entertainment, campers are able to bond with fellow elites. Two other ruling-class watering holes, the Rancheros and the Roundup Riders, are more regional than national in scope but serve the same purpose.

Gill, Stephen. American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 304 pages.

In recent years the guardians of correct thinking on the U.S. left decided that any discussion of transnational elites in connection with high-finance and trade is just another version of those old right-wing conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers. If you suspect that real issues are involved -- particularly now that CFR/Trilateralist/Bilderberger Bill Clinton was slipped into the White House while we weren't looking -- you have to follow the issue by reading right-wing literature.

But there's one progressive scholar who still takes it seriously. Stephen Gill, a professor of political science at York University in Toronto, interviewed 100 of the 325 Trilateral members. Then he applied a thick spread of Gramscian analysis to show that: 1) American power has NOT declined, rather it has just taken on a more internationalist outlook as capital becomes more mobile; 2) transnational capitalists are stronger than ever due to recent political and economic trends as well as the enormous strides in global communications technology; and 3) groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg are consciously co-opting the top intellectuals so that internationalism, free trade, and the New World Order become the correct line for political pundits everywhere. It's worth thinking about the next time you are unemployed.

Millegan, Kris, ed. Fleshing Out Skull & Bones: Investigations Into America's Most Powerful Secret Society. Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2003. 712 pages.

Bonesman John Kerry is running against Bonesman George W. Bush for control of the world -- does this mean anything, or should we write it off as a coincidence? Here is a compilation of articles and chapters from other books, and lists of names and documents, all about that secret Yale society, Skull and Bones. Only 15 are tapped each year on the Yale campus, but it's been happening since 1833. That's enough to send some off to Yale's Sterling Library, to try and figure out who's been running things for the last 100 years. (The membership lists during the last 30 years have not been published, so you can skip the library these days.)

Only six dozen names were plucked out of this book for indexing in NameBase, out of what must be a couple thousand. For one thing, NameBase goes light on pre-World War II history. For another, several chapters are reprints of material already indexed in NameBase. Finally, this work owes its inspiration to Antony Sutton (1925-2002), a conspiracy theorist who was pretty far out. It's the old New World Order thing -- when they aren't secretly funding Nazis, they're busy funding Communists. This big picture is too big for us, which is why we only skimmed this book and plucked out little tidbits here and there.

Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline. Appleton WI: Western Islands, 1988. 264 pages.

This is a John Birch Society publication. In other words, the author takes a worthy notion, supports it with rather good research, and then runs with it for the goalpost on the wrong end of the field. Perloff, who is also a contributing editor for JBS's "The New American," claims to have once been a campus radical, until he realized that leftist students were tools of a very clever Establishment. So far, so good -- a case can be made for this. Perloff makes a stronger case for earlier elitist machinations -- such as those that gave us the Federal Reserve, or that got us into the world wars and Vietnam. But his research starts taking some curious turns in the 1950s -- a decade that started with McCarthy, and ended with the founding of JBS.

The JBS line infects a couple dozen pages in this book, and it can be easily spotted and bracketed, now that the Cold War is over. The weirdness has to do with JBS's theory that CFR elites are really closet communists, and that they are consciously bringing America into decline for the sake of the new world communist order. Oops, fast-forward ten years, when globalism rules while communism is dead. Now it's clear that while communism had its own global ambitions, it was never in cahoots with the globalism practiced by Atlantic elites. If only JBS could find it within themselves to give up the ghost of communism, they might yet have something to contribute.

Roelofs, Joan. Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. 269 pages.

Few American scholars dare admit that capitalism could not survive without the support of the nonprofit sector. It helps to first get tenure, and then approach the topic very cautiously. Joan Roelofs, a political science professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, has broken through to the other side. While Karl Marx criticized the role of bourgeois philanthropy only in passing, due to a lack of evidence, Roelofs starts with the robber barons and continues through the twentieth century. That adds up to a hundred years of heavy evidence.

Beginning with the cold war, American philanthropy branched into foreign policy. The Ford Foundation (and to a lesser extent, Rockefeller and Carnegie) worked very closely with the CIA. Ford funded many leftist minority and special-interest groups during the 1960s, but it was all part of the same grand scheme to promote pluralism as an antidote to class consciousness. McGeorge Bundy, an architect of U.S. policy in Vietnam, became president of Ford Foundation in 1966. In his words, his role was "to make the world safe for capitalism." Now it is 2006, and Russia is finally realizing that they've been raped by capitalists using philanthropy as a cover, and are taking steps to stop it. They should re-read their Marx. While they're at it, they might want to pick up this book as well.

Sanders, Jerry W. Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment. Boston MA: South End Press, 1983. 371 pages.

In April 1982 Ronald Reagan claimed that the Soviet Union had achieved a margin of strategic superiority over the U.S. (not true), and the Pentagon began planning for a protracted nuclear war. Thomas K. Jones, whom Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, told Robert Scheer in 1981 that the U.S. could fully recover from a full-scale war with the Soviets in just two to four years. "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top.... It's the dirt that does it.... If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."

Thinking like this doesn't emerge spontaneously. The Committee on the Present Danger began in 1950 as a bipartisan collection of U.S. elitists organized to promote containment. In 1976 they reorganized in the wake of the "Vietnam syndrome" to promote a strategic build-up. By the end of his presidency, Carter had lost control of foreign policy and had to go along; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was merely a convenient excuse for a policy that was already in place. This book lists over 200 members of CPD and gives a one-line description of who they are.

Shoup, Laurence H. and Minter, William. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977. 334 pages (includes 23 pages of bibliography).

This is the first scholarly study of the CFR, written during a time when Marxian historical sociology was respectable in U.S. academic circles. It looks like we will have a long wait for the next one.

The Council on Foreign Relations has been the most powerful private organization in U.S. foreign policy since it began in 1921. While priding itself on non-partisanship and on recent efforts to recruit minorities, women, and youth (under 35), CFR's 2900 members mainly reflect the resources needed by the ruling class to maintain their power. Don't call them if you want to join; they call you. And don't wait for a call unless you have big money, national security expertise, CIA experience, a political constituency, or clout with the media. CFR publishes the prestigious journal "Foreign Affairs" as well as a number of books and reports. Another major activity is to organize closed meetings for their members with assorted world leaders. Everyone feels free to share views and information about current world events, primarily because CFR has strict confidentiality rules and keeps its records locked up for 25 years.

Trilateral Commission, 1156 Fifteenth Street NW, Washington DC 20005, Tel: 202-467-5410, Fax: 202-467-5415. Home page: www.trilateral.org

List of Members. January, 2005

No one is quite sure why the Trilateral Commission exists, and less clear about what it does, but critics from the lumpen (non-elite) Right as well as the scholarly Left are certain that it's important. If you feel that the Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same party, and that someone else is pulling the strings and laughing all the way to the bank, then Trilateralism is your cup of conspiracy tea. When Reagan pointed out on February 7, 1980 that 19 key members of the Carter administration were Trilateralists, George Bush gingerly dropped his membership. And by 1992 some observers were getting curious about Bill Clinton's membership.

The Commission is an alliance of top political and economic leaders from North America, Japan, and Western Europe. Their aim is to manage global interdependence between these Big Three in a way that allows the rich to stay rich -- probably by discouraging protectionism, nationalism, or any response that would pit the elites of one against the elites of another. The anticipated economic pressures will be deflected downward rather than laterally. Trilateralist Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker put it more bluntly: "The standard [of living] of the average American has to decline."

Trilateral Commission, 345 East 46th Street, Ste 711, New York NY 10017. The Trilateral Commission at 25. Francois Sauzey, ed., 1998. 72 pages.

For this piece of puffery from the Trilateral Commission, fifteen members contribute glowing essays and prudent anecdotes, mostly about each other. David Rockefeller recounts how in the spring of 1972, at that year's Bilderberg meeting in Belgium, he suggested that the Japanese be invited to join. Some Bilderbergers balked, so Rockefeller and Zbig Brzezinski started making their own plans. They brought in George Franklin, who had just retired from his directorship at the Council on Foreign Relations.

First CFR, then Bilderberg, and then the Trilateral Commission -- these folks rule the world, and they all seem to know each other. Jimmy Carter appointed 70 men from CFR, and over 20 from TC, which is one-tenth the size. George Bush was a Trilateralist, and so was Bill Clinton. In 1972, the need to co-opt that emerging global player, Japan, was recognized by Rockefeller; his mission is to keep the world safe for concentrated wealth. C. Fred Bergsten, in another essay, confesses as much: "Japan's dazzling economic progress ... reinforced the need to keep Japan firmly in the anti- Communist camp for Cold War purposes." And Miguel Herrero de Minon speaks of the "cardinal goal" of TC as "the incorporation of Japan's most influential elements into the Atlantic oligarchy." (Of course, 363 media professionals who are CFR members [1997 roster] tell us that there's no ruling class!)

Wormser, Rene A. Foundations: Their Power and Influence. Sevierville TN: Covenant House Books, 1993. 412 pages. First published in 1958 by Devin-Adair Company, New York.

In 1952, Congress commissioned the Cox Committee to investigate U.S. foundations. In 1953 it was the Reece Committee, and the author of this book was its general counsel. Wormser concedes that "the emphasis on a search for organized Communist penetration of foundations absorbed much of the energy of the investigators and detracted somewhat from the efficacy of their general inquiry into 'subversion'" (page 177). He is more interested in an emerging "elite" that has control of gigantic financial resources: "An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value." (page viii)

Forty years later, it's clear that Wormser's concerns over foundations were not misplaced; they still wield enormous political and cultural power. It's also clear that Congress should have worried more about the U.S. secret state than about Communism. The connections between intelligence elites, and the international programs funded by major foundations such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, are quite amazing and deserve their own book.

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

ABSHIRE DAVID MANKER ACHESON DEAN G ACKLEY GARDNER AFRICAN AMERICAN INSTITUTE ALDRICH NELSON W ALLEN GARY ALLISON GRAHAM T JR ALTSCHUL FRANK AMERICAN COUNCIL EDUCATION AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE AMERICAN LABOR EDUCATION SERVICE AMERICAS WATCH COMMITTEE ANDREWS F.EMERSON ARMSTRONG HAMILTON FISH ASPEN INSTITUTE HUMANISTIC STUDIES ATLANTIC COUNCIL ATLANTIC INSTITUTE INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS BAKER JAMES A III BALDWIN HANSON W BALL GEORGE W BARNES HARRY ELMER BARNET RICHARD J BARNETT A DOAK BARRE RAYMOND BARUCH BERNARD M BEARD CHARLES AUSTIN BECHTEL STEPHEN DAVISON SR BELL ELLIOTT V BERGSTEN C FRED BERLE ADOLF A JR BERNHARD PRINCE BERTHOIN GEORGES BILDERBERG GROUP BLUMENTHAL W MICHAEL BOHEMIAN GROVE BOSSARD JAMES H.S. BOWIE ROBERT R BOWLES CHESTER BOWMAN ISAIAH BRADEN SPRUILLE BRANDEIS LOUIS D BRIGGS CHARLES W BROCK WILLIAM E III BROOKINGS INSTITUTION BROWN HAROLD (DEFENSE SEC) BRZEZINSKI ZBIGNIEW BUDENZ LOUIS F BUNDY MCGEORGE BUNDY WILLIAM PUTNAM BURDEN WILLIAM A.M. BURNS ARTHUR F BURNS JAMES MACGREGOR BUSH GEORGE H.W. BUSH PRESCOTT SHELDON BUSINESS COUNCIL (FOUNDED 1933) BUTLER NICHOLAS MURRAY CALLEO DAVID PATRICK CAMPBELL JOHN FRANKLIN CAMPS MIRIAM CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER CARLUCCI FRANK CHARLES CARNEGIE CORPORATION CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT INTERNATIONAL PEACE CARSTENS KARL CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CASEY WILLIAM JOSEPH CASTRO FIDEL CENTER STUDY DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS CHASE MANHATTAN BANK CHASE STUART CHEMICAL BANK CHIANG KAI-SHEK CHURCHILL WINSTON (PM) CLARK EVANS CLAYTON WILLIAM L COHEN BENJAMIN VICTOR COLEGROVE KENNETH COLEMAN WILLIAM T JR COLONNA DI PALIANO GUIDO COMMITTEE PRESENT DANGER CONABLE BARBER B JR (R-NY) CONGRESS CULTURAL FREEDOM CONNALLY JOHN BOWDEN (B.1917-02-27) COOLIDGE ARCHIBALD CARY COOPER RICHARD N COUNCIL FOREIGN RELATIONS COUNTS GEORGE S COX EUGENE E (D-GA) CRAVATH PAUL D CURRIE LAUCHLIN CUTLER LLOYD N DAHRENDORF RALF DALL CURTIS B DAVIGNON ETIENNE DAVIS JOHN WILLIAM (B.1873) DAVIS NORMAN H DE CARMOY HERVE DEAN ARTHUR H DEAN VERA MICHELES DELORS JACQUES DELOUVRIER PAUL DIEBOLD WILLIAM JR DILLON C DOUGLAS DOBELL PETER C DODD NORMAN DOLLARD CHARLES DONOVAN HEDLEY W DOUGLAS LEWIS WILLIAMS SR DOUGLAS WILLIAM O DU PONT COMPANY DUCHENE FRANCOIS DULLES ALLEN WELSH DULLES JOHN FOSTER EARL KEN EISENHOWER DWIGHT DAVID EISLER HANS ETTINGER KARL EXPORT-IMPORT BANK FALK RICHARD A FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM FEIS HERBERT FELDSTEIN MARTIN S FENSTER MARK FINLETTER THOMAS K FIRST NATIONAL CITY BANK FOCH RENE FORD FOUNDATION FORD HENRY II FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE FOSDICK RAYMOND B FOSTER WILLIAM CHAPMAN FOWLER HENRY HAMILL FRANKEL MAX FRANKFURTER FELIX FRANKLIN GEORGE S JR FRASER LEON FREY BRUNO FUND REPUBLIC FUNDING EXCHANGE GAITHER H ROWAN GALBRAITH JOHN KENNETH GARDNER RICHARD N GARLAND FUND GARRIGUES WALKER ANTONIO GAY EDWIN F GENERAL ELECTRIC GOLDBERG ARTHUR JOSEPH GOLDWATER BARRY MORRIS GOTLIEB ALLAN E GRAHAM DONALD EDWARD GRAMSCI ANTONIO GRAVES MORTIMER GRAY GORDON GREYCAS INC GRISWOLD ERWIN N HACKWORTH GREEN H HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HANSEN ALVIN H HARRIMAN W AVERELL HAUGE GABRIEL HAWKINS HARRY C HAYMARKET PEOPLES FUND HAYS WAYNE L (D-OH) HEALD HENRY T HECK CHARLES B HELMS JESSE A (R-NC) HERRERO DE MINON MIGUEL HERRING E PENDLETON HERTER CHRISTIAN ARCHIBALD HISS ALGER HOBBS A H HOFFMAN PAUL GRAY HOLBROOKE RICHARD C.A. HOPKINS HARRY L HOUSE EDWARD M HULL CORDELL (1871-1955) HUNTINGTON SAMUEL PHILLIPS HUTCHINS ROBERT MAYNARD INSTITUTE PACIFIC RELATIONS INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE TELEGRAPH ISERBYT CHARLOTTE THOMSON J.P. MORGAN COMPANY JAKOBSON MAX JESSUP PHILIP C SR JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY JOHNSON ALVIN SAUNDERS JOHNSON JOSEPH E JOHNSON LYNDON BAINES JOSEPHS DEVEREUX C KADAR BELA KAISER KARL KENNAN GEORGE FROST KENNEDY JOHN FITZGERALD KEPPEL FREDERICK P KINSEY ALFRED C KIRK GRAYSON L KIRKLAND LANE KISSINGER HENRY A KOBAYASHI YOTARO KOCH ARNOLD T KOHNSTAMM MAX KRAFT JOSEPH LAIDLER HARRY W LAMBSDORFF OTTO GRAF LAMONT THOMAS W LASKI HAROLD J LASSWELL HAROLD D LATTIMORE OWEN LAWRENCE DAVID (B.1888) LE COMPTE KARL M (R-IA) LEAGUE INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY LEFFINGWELL RUSSELL C LEWIS FLORA LINDBERGH CHARLES A SR (R-MN) LINDEMAN EDUARD CHARLES LODGE HENRY CABOT LORD WINSTON LOVETT ROBERT ABERCROMBIE LUCE HENRY ROBINSON MACARTHUR DOUGLAS (GEN) MACDONALD DWIGHT MACLAURY BRUCE K MALLORY WALTER H MANNING BAYLESS MARSHALL GEORGE C (GEN) MARSHALL PLAN MAY GEORGE O MCCLOY JOHN JAY MCCONE JOHN ALEX MCCRACKEN PAUL W MCDONALD LAWRENCE PATTON MCNAMARA ROBERT STRANGE MERRIAM CHARLES E MIYAZAWA KIICHI MOBIL CORPORATION MOLEY RAYMOND MONDALE WALTER F MORGAN JOHN PIERPONT (1837-1913) MORGENTHAU HENRY M JR MOSELY PHILIP E MOSKIN J ROBERT MUSHAKOJI KINHIDE MYRDAL GUNNAR NATIONAL ENDOWMENT DEMOCRACY NITZE PAUL HENRY NIXON RICHARD MILHOUS NYE JOSEPH SAMUEL JR OGATA SADAKO OKITA SABURO OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE OSBORN FREDERICK HENRY OWEN DAVID (LORD) OWEN HENRY DAVID PACKARD DAVID PASVOLSKY LEO PERKINS JAMES ALFRED PETERSON PETER G PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION PUTNAM ROBERT D PYE LUCIAN W QUIGLEY CARROLL RAND CORPORATION RARICK JOHN R REAGAN RONALD W REECE BRAZILLA CARROLL (R-TN) REECE COMMITTEE REED PHILIP D REISCHAUER EDWIN OLDFATHER REVAY PAUL RICHARDSON ELLIOT LEE RIEFLER WINFIELD W ROCKEFELLER BROTHERS FUND ROCKEFELLER DAVID SR ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION ROCKEFELLER JOHN D SR ROCKEFELLER NELSON ALDRICH ROOSA ROBERT V ROOSEVELT EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT FRANKLIN DELANO ROSTOW EUGENE VICTOR DEBS ROSTOW WALT WHITMAN ROWE DAVID NELSON RUGG HAROLD RUSK DEAN RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION SARGENT AARON SAUZEY FRANCOIS SCHIFF JACOB SCHLESINGER ARTHUR MEIER JR SCRANTON WILLIAM W SEAL BARRY SHARP MITCHELL SHEPARDSON WHITNEY H SHULTZ GEORGE PRATT SHULZINGER ROBERT D SKULL BONES SMITH GERARD C SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL SOMOZA DEBAYLE ANASTASIO SOROKIN PITIRIM A SOROS GEORGE SPEIER HANS SPOFFORD CHARLES MERVILLE STALIN JOSEF STIMSON HENRY LEWIS STOUFFER SAMUEL A STRANGE SUSAN SUTTON ANTONY C TAFT ROBERT A JR TAYLOR MAXWELL D (GEN) TAYLOR MYRON CHARLES THOMSON CLIFTON SAMUEL TREZISE PHILIP HAROLD TRILATERAL COMMISSION TRUMAN HARRY S TWENTIETH CENTURY FUND UNION BANKING CORPORATION UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION USHIBA NOBUHIKO VAN DER PIJL KEES VANCE CYRUS ROBERTS VINER JACOB VOLCKER PAUL ADOLPH WARBURG PAUL MORITZ WARD CHESTER N (ADM) WARNKE PAUL C WATANABE TAKESHI WEINBERGER CASPAR W WELCH ROBERT H.W. WELLES SUMNER WHITE HARRY DEXTER WHYTE WILLIAM HOLLINGSWORTH WILSON CARROLL L WILSON WOODROW WORLD BANK WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION WORMSER RENE A WRISTON HENRY MERRITT YAMAMOTO TADASHI YOUNG DONALD (SSRC) YOUNG OWEN D

Elites / General

2006-06-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

Domhoff, G.William. The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. 367 pages.

Domhoff, G.William. Who Rules America? Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. 184 pages.

Higher Circles makes a convincing case that elites run foreign policy and shape social legislation through various devices from think tanks to interlocking directorates, while the CIA molds the public consciousness by financing institutions, infiltrating labor unions, and buying opinion- makers. The book is name-intensive and full of concrete examples and statistics. The final chapter presents a solid critique of the pluralists -- the academic mandarins whose job it was to justify the status quo during the 1960s. Twenty years later, when it became their job to justify increasing poverty and homelessness, they gave up on pluralism and started debating "trickle-down" economics. Meanwhile, professors got tenure and the rich got richer.

"Who Rules America?" was Domhoff's first attempt to show that a ruling class dominates American political life. The chapter titles include "The American Upper Class," "The Control of the Corporate Economy," The Shaping of the American Polity," "The Control of the Federal Government," "The Military, the CIA, and the FBI," "Control of State and Local Governments," and "Is the American Upper Class a Governing Class?" One method he uses to make his case is to cross Social Register listings with those of elite foundations, lobby groups, big business, and government policy-makers. This and "Higher Circles" are his two best books.

Dye, Thomas R. Who's Running America? -- The Reagan Years. 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. 285 pages.

One of the debates in American sociology is between the "pluralist" and "elitist" schools of thought. While both agree that America is not ruled by the masses, the pluralists see this as benign in a society that is more open than most. For the pluralist, the elites maintain an equilibrium of competing interests, and the little guy can make himself felt when he wants to by joining an interest group. Thomas Dye, on the other hand, feels that this competition is more apparent than real.

In 1972 Dye's graduate students at Florida State University began collecting data on some 5,000 elite positions, which by this third edition had expanded to 7,000. His technique, which depends on a definition of "elite" as a person with institutional affiliations, is to study these positions at the upper end of the corporate sector (industrial, utilities, banks, insurance, investments), the public interest sector (media, education, foundations, law, civic and cultural organizations), and the governmental sector (legislative, executive, judicial, military). The persons occupying these positions are noted, and the fact that they frequently hold several of these positions simultaneously is further evidence of a concentration of power at the top. In the course of making his argument, Dye names certain individuals and lists their affiliations.

Hersh, Burton. The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992. 536 pages.

Ten years of work, hundreds of interviews, and access to numerous library collections have produced this narrative of CIA history, from its emergence out of William Donovan's OSS to its first publicized failure at the Bay of Pigs. While this book is name-intensive and rich in anecdotal detail, several figures reappear frequently as they weave in and out of this somewhat scattered narrative. These include Donovan, the Dulles brothers with their Nazi connections, William C. Bullitt, Reinhard Gehlen, Frank Wisner, and Carmel Offie.

Hersh's writing style is different -- a bit haughty (or even elitist), but seldom boring. His view of the CIA's self-anointed Ivy Leaguers playing in their international sandbox, while the effects of their work are best described with Cold War body counts, is basically critical. However, one cannot shake the suspicion that Hersh's objections are based more on closet envy than on ethical considerations. This book is well- received among Hersh's colleagues in the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, most of whom would like nothing better than to return to the glory days before all of the embarrassing revelations and congressional oversight. If a book can be judged by its fans, then perhaps Hersh's critical style ought to be a bit more direct.

Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. 398 pages.

Oxford-educated Christopher Hitchens still has his British accent, but he lives in Washington DC, and doesn't get a chance to use it while writing columns for The Nation and Vanity Fair. It's just as well; he seems a bit uncomfortable with it. In this book he shows how, ever since U.S. imperialism began in 1898, it has been the British tail wagging the American dogs of war. In their scholarship, language, manners, ethnicity, and taste, privileged Americans frequently aspire to be British. This identity problem has placed American economic and military power in the service of British efforts to maintain some semblance of empire.

Half of this book belongs back at Oxford, as Hitchens' literary allusions are poor grist for the NameBase mill. It gets better starting with chapter ten: there's one on the special relationship between British and U.S. intelligence, another on U.S. foreign policy and the British connection since World War II, and then a chapter that briefly traces the Rhodes-Chatham House-Ditchley Park-Council on Foreign Relations tradition of elitist salon think-tanking with its dense Anglo-American cross-connects. What's missing is a discussion of Anglophobic conspiracy theory in America that would help us decide whether right-wing American patriots are just crazy, or could they be trying to tell us something?

Odendahl, Teresa. Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite. New York: Basic Books, 1990. 299 pages.

Professor Teresa Odendahl is an anthropologist and a consultant to nonprofit organizations, who has contributed to two other scholarly books on private foundations. For this book she interviewed 140 millionaire philanthropists, and surveyed 100 foundation staff members and 70 personal advisors to the wealthy. Her conclusion is that "contemporary American philanthropy is a system of 'generosity' by which the wealthy exercise social control and help themselves more than they do others" (p.245). Odendahl recommends a restructuring of the philanthropic and tax systems, and greater accountability in the nonprofit sector.

Perhaps due to her ease of access, Odendahl devotes more space to liberal, feminist, and progressive funders than to the conservatives who bankrolled the ideological right during the Reagan years. Her conclusions are all the more stunning because of this, for she cannot be accused of hiding a partisan political bias behind her detached academic methodology. This is a sober, mature, skeptical look at the ethnography of isolated, upper-class elites, both liberal and conservative, who use philanthropy to extend their personal control and protect their wealth, and have convinced the rest of us that we should be grateful.

Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment. New York: Books in Focus, 1981. 354 pages.

Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) taught history at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service since 1941. This book was written in 1949 and covers the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups, a secret Oxford-related cabal that had tremendous influence in British foreign policy from the time that Cecil Rhodes began funding it at the turn of the century. In 1919 the Council on Foreign Relations became the American branch of the Round Table. Quigley is better known for "Tragedy and Hope" (1966), which reaffirms his earlier suspicions (he says he had access to the Round Table's secret archives), but lacks the rich detail of the earlier work. Quigley basically agreed with the goals of these high-minded internationalists, but disliked their inherited wealth and power, their methods, and particularly their secrecy.

Quigley became a darling of the anti-internationalist Right in the U.S., from Cleon Skousen (The Naked Capitalist, 1970) through Pat Robertson (The New World Order, 1991). Then to top it off, Bill Clinton mentioned Quigley as his mentor in his nomination acceptance speech on July 16, 1992. Clinton studied under Quigley at Georgetown in the middle 1960s, and then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Now he's a member of CFR, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg, and many of his appointees are from the same Rhodes-CFR-Trilateral circles. We don't know what this means, if anything.

Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. New York: MacMillan Company, 1966. 1348 pages.

Tragedy and Hope is a diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural history of the world, dealing mainly with the years from about 1900 to 1950. Quigley was professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, where he was best known for his rigorous undergraduate teaching. His credentials as a historian were excellent, and he was well-connected with the Washington elite. But Quigley is something of an embarrassment to those elites, because he called it the way he saw it. Since they cannot match his breadth and depth, nor duplicate his archival research, Quigley is usually criticized for not using footnotes. It won't wash -- the quality of his scholarship is evident on every one of these 1300 pages.

The embarrassment has to do with the fact that Quigley believed in the relevance of secret history -- the machinations of powerful personalities, the role of international finance and banking (following the money), the importance of covert action and diplomacy, and the collusion of Anglo- American elites. Although his prose is too subdued and well-crafted to label him a conspiracy theorist, Quigley has admirers on both the Right and Left who study him for this very reason. His appeal is universal: a rare combination of range, competence, and integrity in a tricky profession.

Sargent, Porter. What Makes Lives. From "A Handbook of Private Schools," 24th edition. Boston: self-published, 1940. 230 pages.

This item was reprinted by Dale Wharton, who found a microfilm copy in the New York Public Library after an 18-month search. His interest was sparked by a three-page quotation from Sargent in a 1947 book by George Seldes. These pages recounted the repression of independent American journalism by corporate interests, in particular by the House of Morgan.

Porter Sargent (1872-1951) was an eclectic scholar and educator who published a survey of private schools beginning in 1914. He used the preface to his "Handbook" to comment on topics of the day. Sargent was shaken by the ease with which the U.S. became entangled in the first world war, and in 1940 saw the same thing happening again. (Before Pearl Harbor, isolationism was a respectable opinion in America.) Moreover, some social critics were tracking the emerging science of propaganda, and noticed how its techniques were increasingly used by governments (in this case, the British-Morgan nexus) to shape popular opinion. Sargent's interest began after Senator Gerald Nye read portions of a book by Sidney Rogerson, "Propaganda in the Next War," into the Congressional Record, "telling how Britain might seduce the U.S. into the coming war against Germany.... Porter Sargent had 10,000 reprints made, [and] sent them, with a one-page mimeograph of his own observations, to his mailing list of educators." (Time magazine, 1939-12-25)

Seldes, George. One Thousand Americans. New York: Boni & Gaer, 1947. 312 pages.

George Seldes (1890-1995) covered the Spanish Civil War from Madrid for the New York Post, and from 1940 to 1950 he edited the weekly newsletter "In Fact." A free-lance muckraker for most of his career, Seldes retired in 1950 but was rediscovered in the 1980s; his autobiography "Witness to a Century" was published in 1987 and became a bestseller. With more than a dozen books to his credit, Seldes is considered by progressives as one of the century's leading anti-fascists. In addition to tracking the extreme Right, Seldes also tracked corporations and big money, and their power and influence in the American press. (Regrettably, this aspect of his research is no longer important to the Left, which for the past two decades has concentrated more on identity politics and multiculturalism.)

This 1947 book is dense with the names of major American power brokers, including interests such as J.P. Morgan and groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers. One 80-page section on the magazine press deals with both the Henry Luce and Morgan empires. Throughout this book, Seldes connects the interlocking dots between owners, directors, and their handmaidens within the political process. "These one thousand Americans are interested in property rights, rather than the general welfare," and have the power to "maintain the status quo system or to move backward."

Silk, Leonard and Silk, Mark. The American Establishment. New York: Avon Books (Discus), 1981. 351 pages.

Leonard Silk is a member of the establishment: editorial board of the New York Times, former Business Week editor, Brookings Institution senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations member, former presidential advisor, former Salzburg Seminar visiting professor, etc. When he teams up with his son Mark (a teaching fellow at Harvard) and confesses that there is indeed an American Establishment, it's not easy to dismiss them as conspiracy buffs. "We see the American Establishment as a churchlike institution which seeks to play a mediating role between the competing forces in our society. As such, it is mildly reformist and ultimately conservative."

Those looking for hard research will be disappointed. The authors prefer a loose commentary interspersed with anecdotes, and deal only with institutions familiar to them: Harvard (pages 21-65), New York Times (pages 66-103), Ford Foundation (pages 125-152), Brookings Institution (pages 153-182), Council on Foreign Relations (pages 183-225), and some big business organizations. In the final analysis, father and son are glad the Establishment exists, but "we think that it works best as a truly secret organization, secret even from its own membership." To paraphrase: "Yes, there's a priesthood that calls the shots, but it hasn't gone to their heads so we should all be grateful and wish them well."

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

ABSHAGEN KARL H ACHESON DEAN G ADENAUER KONRAD AIKEN GEORGE D (R-VT) ALCOA INC ALDRICH WINTHROP WILLIAMS ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS AMERICAN ACTION INC AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION AMERICAN TELEPHONE TELEGRAPH AMERY LEOPOLD AMORY ROBERT JR ANACONDA ANDERSON ROBERT BERNERD ANGLETON JAMES JESUS ANNENBERG WALTER HUBERT ARBENZ GUZMAN JACOBO ARMSTRONG HAMILTON FISH ARNOLD THURMAN ASQUITH HERBERT HENRY ASTOR WALDORF (LORD) AYDELOTTE FRANK BAILEY ABE BAKER JOHN ALEXANDER BALFOUR ARTHUR J BALL GEORGE W BARNES HARRY ELMER BARNES TRACY BASS FAMILY BASS SID RICHARDSON BEIT ALFRED BENTLEY ELIZABETH BENTON WILLIAM (D-CT) BERLE ADOLF A JR BISSELL RICHARD MERVIN JR BLACK EUGENE ROBERT BOHLEN CHARLES E (CHIP) BRAND ROBERT HENRY (LORD) BRETT REGINALD BALIOL BROOKINGS INSTITUTION BROWN IRVING JOSEPH BRUCE DAVID K.E. BRZEZINSKI ZBIGNIEW BUCHAN JOHN BUCKLEY WILLIAM F JR BULLITT WILLIAM CHRISTIAN BUNDY MCGEORGE BUNDY WILLIAM PUTNAM BURNHAM JAMES BUSH GEORGE H.W. BUSH VANNEVAR BUSINESS COUNCIL (FOUNDED 1933) BUSINESS ROUNDTABLE BUTLER SMEDLEY DARLINGTON BYROM FLETCHER L CARNEGIE ANDREW CARNEGIE CORPORATION CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CARY FRANK T CASTILLO ARMAS CARLOS (PRES) CASTRO FIDEL CECIL ROBERT (LORD) CHAMBERLAIN NEVILLE CHIANG KAI-SHEK CHURCHILL WINSTON (PM) CLAY LUCIUS D (GEN) CLAYTON WILLIAM L CLIFFORD CLARK MCADAMS CLINE RAY STEINER CLOSE UPTON COMMITTEE CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CONANT JAMES BRYANT CORCORAN THOMAS GARDINER COUNCIL FOREIGN RELATIONS COUPLAND REGINALD CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY CURTIS LIONEL CURZON GEORGE N (LORD) DABERNON LORD DAVIS H.W.C. DAVIS JOHN WILLIAM (B.1873) DAVISON HENRY POMEROY (HARRY) DAWSON GEOFFREY DE BUTTS JOHN D DE GAULLE CHARLES DEAN ARTHUR H DETERDING HENRI DILLON C DOUGLAS DITCHLEY PARK DOLLFUSS ENGELBERT DONOVAN WILLIAM JOSEPH DOVE JOHN DOWNES DONALD CHASE DRAPER WILLIAM H JR DU PONT COMPANY DU PONT LAMMOT DULLES ALLEN WELSH DULLES CLOVER (JEBSEN) DULLES JOHN FOSTER DUNCAN PATRICK (SIR) EDEN ANTHONY EINSTEIN ALBERT EISENHOWER DWIGHT DAVID FARBEN I.G. COMPANY FEETHAM RICHARD FERMI ENRICO FIDDES GEORGE VANDELEUR FIELD FREDERICK VANDERBILT FIELD NOEL HAVILLAND FISHER H.A.L. FORD FOUNDATION FORD HENRY II FORRESTAL JAMES VINCENT FREE EUROPE COMMITTEE FULLER WALTER DEANE GANDHI MOHANDAS K GANNETT FRANK E GARDNER JOHN WILLIAM GARRETT EDMUND GARVIN CLIFTON C JR GARY TRACY DUVIVIER GEHLEN REINHARD GELB LESLIE H GENERAL MOTORS CORPORATION GILPATRIC ROSWELL L GISEVIUS HANS BERND GRACEY DOUGLAS D GRAHAM KATHARINE GREENE JEROME DAVIS GREY ALBERT GRIGG EDWARD WILLIAM MACKAY GROVES LESLIE RICHARD (GEN) HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HALIFAX LORD HANEY ALBERT R HANKEY MAURICE PASCAL ALERS HARRIMAN W AVERELL HART MERWIN K HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVEY WILLIAM KING HAVILAND H FIELD HAYMARKET PEOPLES FUND HEARST CORPORATION HENDERSON LOY WESLEY HILLS CARLA ANDERSON HITLER ADOLF HOFFMAN PAUL GRAY HOLCOMB FRANKLIN PORTEOUS HOOVER HERBERT SR HOOVER J EDGAR HOUSE EDWARD M HUMPHREY GEORGE M (TREASURY SEC) HURLEY PATRICK JAY (GEN) INSTITUTE PACIFIC RELATIONS J.P. MORGAN COMPANY JACKSON CHARLES DOUGLAS JACKSON WILLIAM HARDING JOYCE ROBERT P KENNAN GEORGE FROST KERR PHILIP H KHRUSHCHEV NIKITA KIRKPATRICK LYMAN BICKFORD JR KISSINGER HENRY A KNOX FRANK C KOLBE FRITZ KRAFT JOSEPH LA FOLLETTE ROBERT M JR LAMONT THOMAS W LANGER WILLIAM LEONARD LASSWELL HAROLD D LATTIMORE OWEN LAVAL PIERRE LEAGUE NATIONS LEFFINGWELL RUSSELL C LEHMAN HERBERT H LINDBERGH CHARLES A JR LINDSAY FRANKLIN ANTHONY LIPPMANN WALTER LLOYD GEORGE DAVID (PM) LONDON TIMES NEWSPAPER LONG BASIL KELLETT LOVESTONE JAY LOVETT ROBERT ABERCROMBIE LUCE HENRY ROBINSON LUGARD FREDERICK (LORD) LUND ROBERT L MACARTHUR DOUGLAS (GEN) MACGUIRE GERALD G MACMILLAN HAROLD MALCOLM DOUGAL ORME MALENKOV GEORGI M MARRIS ADAM D MARRIS WILLIAM S MCCARGAR JAMES MCCARTHY JOSEPH R MCCLOY JOHN JAY MCCORMICK ROBERT R (COL) MCDOWELL ROBERT MCNAMARA ROBERT STRANGE MELLON ANDREW W MELLON FAMILY MELLON FOUNDATION MELLON PAUL W MESTON JAMES S (LORD) MILNER ALFRED (LORD) MONTANA POWER COMPANY MORGAN JOHN PIERPONT (1837-1913) MORROW DWIGHT WHITNEY MOYNIHAN DANIEL PATRICK (D-NY) MUNDT KARL E (R-SD) MURPHY GRAYSON M.P. MURPHY ROBERT DANIEL MUSSOLINI BENITO NASSER GAMAL ABDEL NATIONAL ASSOCIATION MANUFACTURERS NATIONAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION NEUSTADT RICHARD E NEW REPUBLIC MAGAZINE NEW YORK TIMES NITZE PAUL HENRY NIXON RICHARD MILHOUS NORMAN MONTAGU COLLET NORTHCLIFFE LORD NYE GERALD P (R-ND) OAKES JOHN BERTRAM OFFIE CARMEL OPPENHEIMER JONATHAN ROBERT ORMSBY-GORE W.G.A. OXFORD COLLEGES PACKARD DAVID PAGE WALTER HINES PARKER GILBERT PARKIN GEORGE R PEARSON NORMAN HOLMES PEGLER WESTBROOK PETAIN HENRI-PHILIPPE PETERSON H.C. (AUTHOR) PETERSON PETER G PETTENGILL SAMUEL PEURIFOY JOHN EMIL PEW FAMILY PEW JOSEPH NEWTON JR PHILLIPS DAVID ATLEE POOLE DEWITT CLINTON QUINN WILLIAM W RADIO FREE EUROPE RAND CORPORATION RASKOB JOHN J READERS DIGEST REAGAN RONALD W RHODES CECIL JOHN RHODES TRUST ROBERTS GLYN ROCKEFELLER DAVID SR ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION ROCKEFELLER JOHN D SR ROCKEFELLER NELSON ALDRICH ROGERSON SIDNEY ROGGE O JOHN ROMAN HOWARD EDGAR ROOSA ROBERT V ROOSEVELT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT KERMIT (KIM) ROOSEVELT THEODORE (PRES) ROOT ELIHU JR ROSTOW WALT WHITMAN ROTHSCHILD FAMILY ROTHSCHILD LORD ROUND TABLE (BRITAIN) ROYAL INSTITUTE INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS RUML BEARDSLEY RUSK DEAN SALISBURY LORD SARGENT PORTER SATURDAY EVENING POST SCHACHT HJALMAR HORACE GREELEY SCHRODER BANK SELBORNE LORD SEYMOUR CHARLES WHITNEY SHAPIRO IRVING SAUL SHAW FLORA SHEPARDSON WHITNEY H SIBERT EDWIN LUTHER SICHEL PETER M.F. SILK LEONARD S SIMON WILLIAM EDWARD SLOAN ALFRED P JR SMITH GERALD L.K. 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The Ancient Regime by Hippolyte A. Taine

2006-05-10T23:07:00.000-07:00















The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1


PREFACE.

BOOK FIRST.   The Structure of the Ancient Society.

CHAPTER I.  The Origin of Privileges.

CHAPTER II.  The Privileged Classes.

CHAPTER III.  Local Services Due by the Privileged Classes.

CHAPTER IV.  Public services due by the privileged classes.


BOOK SECOND.   Habits and Characters.

CHAPTER I.  Social Habits.

CHAPTER II.  Drawing room Life .

CHAPTER III.  Disadvantages of this Drawing room Life.


BOOK THIRD.   The Spirit and the Doctrine.

CHAPTER I.  Scientific Acquisition.

CHAPTER II.  The Classic Spirit, the Second Element.

CHAPTER III.  Combination of the two elements.

CHAPTER IV.  Organizing the Future Society.


BOOK FOURTH.  The Propagation of the Doctrine.

CHAPTER I.  Success in France.

CHAPTER II.  The French Public.

CHAPTER III.  The Middle Class.


BOOK FIFTH.  The People

CHAPTER I.  Hardships.

CHAPTER II.  Taxation the principal cause of misery.

CHAPTER III.  Intellectual state of the people.

CHAPTER IV.  The Armed Forces.

CHAPTER V.  Summary.





INTRODUCTION

Why should we fetch Taine's work up from its dusty box in the
basement of the national library? First of all because his realistic
views of our human nature, of our civilization and of socialism as
well as his dark premonitions of the 20th century were proven correct.
Secondly because we may today with more accuracy call his work:

"The Origins of Popular Democracy and of Communism."

His lucid analysis of the current ideology remains as interesting
or perhaps even more interesting than when it was written especially
because we cannot accuse him of being part in our current political
and ideological struggle.

Even though I found him wise, even though he confirmed my own
impressions from a rich and varied life, even though I considered that
our children and the people at large should benefit from his insights
into the innermost recesses of the political Man, I still felt it
would be best to find out why his work had been put on the index by
the French and largely forgotten by the Anglo-Saxon world.  So I
consulted a contemporary French authority, Jean-Fran�ois Revel who
mentions Taine works in his book, "La Connaissance Inutile." (Paris
1988).  Revel notes that a socialist historian, Alphonse Aulard
methodically and dishonestly attacked "Les Origines..", and that
Aulard was specially recruited by the University of Sorbonne for this
purpose.  Aulard pretended that Taine was a poor historian by finding a
number of errors in Taine's work.  This was done, says Revel, because
the 'Left' came to see Taine's work as "a vile counter-revolutionary
weapon." The French historian Augustin Cochin proved, however, that
Aulard and not Taine had made the errors but by that time Taine had
been defamed and his works removed from the shelves of the French
universities.

Now Taine was not a professional historian.  Perhaps this was as
well since most professional historians, even when conscientious and
accurate, rarely are in a position to be independent.  They generally
work for a university, for a national public or for the ministry of
education and their books, once approved, may gain a considerable
income once millions of pupils are compelled to acquire these.

Taine initially became famous, not as a professional historian but
as a literary critic and journalist.  His fame allowed him to sell his
books and articles and make a comfortable living without cow-towing to
any government or university.  He wrote as he saw fit, truthfully, even
though it might displease a number of powerful persons.

Taine did not pretend to be a regular historian, but rather someone
enquiring into the history of Public Authorities and their supporters.
Through his comments he appears not only as a decent person but also
as a psychologist and seer.  He describes mankind, as I know it from my
life in institutions, at sea and abroad in a large international
organization.  He describes mankind as it was, as it was seen by Darwin
in 'THE EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTIONS IN MAN AND ANIMALS.  Taine described
the human being as he was and is and had the courage to tell the
French about themselves, their ancient rulers, and the men of the
Revolution, even if it went against the favorable opinion so many of
his countrymen had of this terrible period.  His understanding of our
evolution, of mankind and of the evolution of society did not find
favor with men who believed that they in the socialist ideology had
found the solution to all social ills.  Only recently has science begun
to return to Darwin in order to rediscover the human being as Taine
knew him.  You can find Taine's views of humanity confirmed in Robert
Wright's book 'THE MORAL ANIMAL.' (Why we are the way we are.)

Taine had full access to the files of the French National archives
and these and other original documents.  Taine had received a French
classical education and, being foremost among many brilliant men, had
a capacity for study and work which we no longer demand from our
young.  He accepted Man and society, as they appeared to him, he
described his findings without compassion for the hang-ups of his
prejudiced countrymen.  He described Man as a gregarious animal living
for a brief spell in a remote corner of space, whose different
cultures and nations had evolved haphazardly in time, carried along by
forces and events exceeding our comprehension, blindly following their
innate drives.  These drives were followed with cunning but rarely with
far-sighted wisdom.  Taine, the prophet, has more than ever something
to tell us.  He warned his countrymen against themselves, their
humanity, and hence against their fears, anxieties, greed, ambitions,
conceit and excessive imagination.  His remarks and judgments exhort us
to be responsible, modest and kind and to select wise and modest
leaders.  He warns us against young hungry men's natural desire to mass
behind a tribune and follow him onwards, they hope, along the high
road to excitement, fame, power and riches.  He warns us against our
readiness to believe in myth and metaphysics, demonstrating how Man
will believe anything, even the most mystical or incomprehensible
religion or ideology, provided it is preached by his leaders.  History,
as seen by Taine, is one long series of such adventures and horrors
and nowhere was this more evident than in France before, during and
after the Revolution in 1789.

Taine became, upon reading 'On the Origins of the Species' a
convinced Darwinian and was, the year after Darwin, honored by the
University of Oxford with the title of doctor honoris causa in jure
civili for his 'History of English Literature'.  Taine was not a
methodical ideologist creating a system.  He did not defend any
particular creed or current.  He was considered some kind of positivist
but he did not consider himself as belonging to any particular school.

The 6 volumes of "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine" appeared
one after the other in Paris between 1875 and 1893.  They were
translated into English and published in New York soon afterwards.
They were also translated into German.  Taine's direct views displeased
many in France, as the Royalists, the bonapartist and the Socialists
felt hurt.  Still, the first edition of Volume II of "LE R�GIME
MODERNE" published by Hachette in 1894 indicated that "L'ANCIEN
REGIME" at that time had been printed in 18 editions, "LA R�VOLUTION"
volume I in 17 editions, volume II in 16 editions and volume III in 13
editions.  "LE R�GIME MODERNE" volume I had been printed in only 8
editions.  Photographic reprints appeared in the US in 1932 and 1962.

Taine's description and analysis of events in France between 1750
and 1870 are, as you will see colorful, lucid, and sometimes intense.
His style might today appear dated since he writes in rather long
sentences, using parables to drive his points firmly home.  His books
were widely read in academic circles and therefore influenced a great
many political students in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Lenin, who came to Paris around 1906, might well have profited by
Taine's analysis.  Hitler is also likely to have profited by his
insights.  Lenin was like so many other socialists of his day a great
admirer of Robespierre and his party and would undoubtedly have tried
to find out how Robespierre got into power and why he lost his hold on
France the way he did.  Part of Taine's art was to place himself into
the place of the different people and parties who took part in the
great events.  When pretends to speak for the Jacobins, it so
convincingly done, that it is hard to know whether he speaks on
'their' behalf or whether he is, in fact, quoting one of them.

Taine, like the Napoleon he described, believed that in order to
understand people you are aided if you try to imagine yourself in
their place.  This procedure, as well as his painstaking research, make
his descriptions of the violent events of the past ring true.

Taine knew and described the evil inherent in human nature and in
the crowd.  His warnings and explanations did not prevent Europe from
repeating the mistakes of the past.  The 20th century saw a replay of
the French Revolution repeated in all its horror when Lenin, Mao,
Hoxa, and Pol Pot followed the its script and when Stalin and Hitler
made good use of Napoleon's example.

Taine irritated the elite of the 3rd French republic as well as
everyone who believed in the popular democracy based on one person one
vote.  You can understand when you read the following preface which was
actually placed in front of "The Revolution" volume II.  Since it
clarifies Taine's aims and justifications, I have moved and placed it
below.

Not long before his death Taine, sensing that his wisdom and deep
insights into human nature and events, no longer interested the �lite,
remarked to a friend that "the scientific truth about the human animal
is perhaps unacceptable except for a very few".[1] Now, 100 years
later, after a century of ideological wars between ambitious men, I am
afraid that the situation remains unchanged.  Mankind remains reluctant
to face the realities of our uncontrolled existence! A few men begin,
however, to share my misgivings about the future of a system which has
completely given up the respect for wisdom and experience preferring a
system of elaborate human rights and new morals.  There is reason to
recall Macchiavelli's words:

"In times of difficulty men of merit are sought after, but in easy
times it is not men of merit,  but such as have riches and powerful
relations, that are most in favor."

And let me to quote the Greek historian Polybius' observations[2]
about the cyclic evolution of the Greek city states:

".  .  .  What then are the beginnings I speak of and what is the
first origin of political societies? When owing to floods, famines,
failure of crops or other such causes there occurs such a destruction
of the human race as tradition tells us has more than once happened,
and as we must believe will often happen again, all arts and crafts
perishing at the same time, when in the course of time, when springing
from the survivors as from seeds men have again increased in numbers
and just like other animals form herds  -  it being a matter of course
that they too should herd together with those of their kind owing to
their natural weakness  -  it is a necessary consequence that the man
who excels in bodily strength and in courage will lead and rule over
the rest.  We observe and should regard as a most genuine work of
nature this very phenomenon in the case of the other animals which act
purely by instinct and among who the strongest are always indisputable
the masters  -  I speak of bulls, boars, cocks, and the like.  It is
probable then that at the beginning men lived thus, herding together
like animals and following the lead of the strongest and bravest, the
ruler's strength being here the sole limit to his power and the name
we should give his rule being monarchy.

But when in time feelings of sociability and companionship begin to
grow in such gatherings of men, then kingship has truck root; and the
notions of goodness, justice, and their opposites begin to arise in
men.

6.  The manner in which these notions come into being is as follows.
Men being all naturally inclined to sexual intercourse, and the
consequence this being the birth of children, whenever one of those
who have been reared does not on growing up show gratitude to those
who reared him or defend them, but on the contrary takes to speaking
ill of them or ill-treating them, it is evident that he will displease
and offend those who have been familiar with his parents and have
witnessed the care and pains they spent on attending to and feeding
their children.  For seeing that men are distinguished from the other
animals possessing the faculty of reason, it is obviously improbable
that such a difference of conduct should escape them, as it escapes
the other animals: they will notice the thing and be displeased at
what is going on, looking to the future and reflecting that they may
all meet with the same treatment.  Again when a man who has been helped
or succored when in danger by another does not show gratitude to his
preserver, but even goes to the length of attempting to do him injury,
it is clear that those who become aware of it will naturally be
displeased and offended by such conduct, sharing the resentment of
their injured neighbor and imagining themselves in the same situation.
From all this there arises in everyone a notion of the meaning and
theory of duty, which is the beginning and end of justice.  Similarly,
again, when any man is foremost in defending his fellows from danger,
and braves and awaits the onslaught of the most powerful beasts, it is
natural that he should receive marks of favor and honor from the
people, while the man who acts in the opposite manner will meet with
reprobation and dislike.  From this again some idea of what is base and
what is noble and of what constitutes the difference is likely to
arise among the people; and noble conduct will be admired and imitated
because advantageous, while base conduct will be avoided.  Now when the
leading and most powerful man among people always throws the weight of
his authority the side of the notions on such matters which generally
prevail, and when in the opinion of his subjects he apportions rewards
and penalties according to desert, they yield obedience to him no
longer because they fear his force, but rather because their judgment
approves him; and they join in maintaining his rule even if he is
quite enfeebled by age, defending him with one consent and battling
against those who conspire to overthrow his rule.  Thus by insensible
degrees the monarch becomes a king, ferocity and force having yielded
the supremacy to reason.



7.  Thus is formed naturally among men the first notion of goodness
and justice, and their opposites; this is the beginning and birth of
true kingship.  For the people maintain the supreme power not only in
the hands of these men themselves, but in those of their descendants,
from the conviction that those born from and reared by such men will
also have principles like to theirs.  And if they ever are displeased
with the descendants, they now choose their kings and rulers no longer
for their bodily strength and brute courage, but for the excellency of
their judgment and reasoning powers, as they have gained experience
from actual facts of the difference between the one class of qualities
and the other.  In old times, then, those who had once been chosen to
the royal office continued to hold it until they grew old, fortifying
and enclosing fine strongholds with walls and acquiring lands, in the
one case for the sake of the security of their subjects and in the
other to provide them with abundance of the necessities of life.  And
while pursuing these aims, they were exempt from all vituperation or
jealousy, as neither in their dress nor in their food and drink did
they make any great distinction, but lived very much like everyone
else, not keeping apart from the people.  But when they received the
office by hereditary succession and found their safety now provided
for, and more than sufficient provision of food, they gave way to
their appetites owing to this superabundance, and came to think that
the rulers must be distinguished from their subjects by a peculiar
dress, that there should be a peculiar luxury and variety in the
dressing and serving of their viands, and that they should meet with
no denial in the pursuit of their amours, however lawless.  These
habits having given rise in the one case to envy and offence and in
the other to an outburst of hatred and passionate resentment, the
kingship changed into a tyranny; the first steps towards its overthrow
were taken by the subjects, and conspiracies began to be formed.  These
conspiracies were not the work of the worst men, but of the noblest,
most high-spirited, and most courageous, because such men are least
able to brook the insolence of princes.

8.  The people now having got leaders, would combine with them
against the ruling powers for the reasons I stated above; king-ship
and monarchy would be utterly abolished, and in their place
aristocracy would begin to grow.  For the commons, as if bound to pay
at once their debt of gratitude to the abolishers of monarchy, would
make them their leaders and entrust their destinies to them.  At first
these chiefs gladly assumed this charge and regarded nothing as of
greater importance than the common interest, administering the private
and public affairs of the people with paternal solicitude.  But here
again when children inherited this position of authority from their
fathers, having no experience of misfortune and none at all of civil
equality and liberty of speech, and having been brought up from the
cradle amid the evidences of the power and high position of their
fathers, they abandoned themselves some to greed of gain and
unscrupulous money-making, others to indulgence in wine and the
convivial excess which accompanies it, and others again to the
violation of women and the rape of boys; and thus converting the
aristocracy info an oligarchy aroused in the people feelings similar
to those of which I just spoke, and in consequence met with the same
disastrous end as the tyrant.

9.  For whenever anyone who has noticed the jealousy and hatred with
which they are regarded by the citizens, has the courage to speak or
act against the chiefs of the state he has the whole mass of the
people ready to back him.  Next, when they have either killed or
banished the oligarchs, they no longer venture to set a king over
them, as they still remember with terror the injustice they suffered
from the former ones, nor can they entrust the government with
confidence to a select few, with the evidence before them of their
recent error in doing so.  Thus the only hope still surviving
unimpaired is in themselves, and to this they resort, making the state
a democracy instead of an oligarchy and assuming the responsibility
for the conduct of affairs.  Then as long as some of those survive who
experienced the evils of oligarchical dominion, they are well pleased
with the present form of government, and set a high value on equality
and freedom of speech.  But when a new generation arises and the
democracy falls into the hands of the grandchildren of its founders,
they have become so accustomed to freedom and equality that they no
longer value them, and begin to aim at pre-eminence; and it is chiefly
those of ample fortune who fall into this error.  So when they begin to
lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own
good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the
people in every possible way.  And hence when by their foolish thirst
for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for
gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is
abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence.  For the
people, having grown accustomed feed at the expense of others and to
depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they
find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of
office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting
their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate
again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch.

Such is the cycle of political revolution, the course pointed by
nature in which constitutions change, disappear, and finally return to
the point from which they started.  Anyone who clearly perceives this
may indeed in speaking of the future of any state be wrong in his
estimate of the time the process will take, but if his judgment is not
tainted by animosity or jealousy, he will very seldom be mistaken to
the stage of growth or decline it has reached, and as to the form into
which it will change.  And especially in the case of the Roman state
will this method enable us to arrive at a knowledge of its formation,
growth, and greatest perfection, and likewise of the change for the
worse which is sure follow some day.  For, as I said, this state, more
than any other, has been formed and has grown naturally, and will
undergo a natural decline and change to its contrary.  The reader will
be able to judge of the truth of this from the subsequent parts this
work."

The modern reader may think that all this is irrelevant to him,
that the natural sciences will solve all his problems.  He would be
wise to recall that the great Roman republic in which Polybius lived
more than [22]00 years ago, did indeed become transformed into tyranny
and, in the end, into anarchy and oblivion.  No wonder that the makers
of the American constitution keenly studied Polybius.  Not only has
Taine's comments and factual description of the cyclic French
political history much to teach us about ourselves and the dangers
which lie ahead, but it also shows us the origins and weakness of our
political theories.  It is obvious that should ask ourselves the
question of where, in the political evolution we are now? Are we still
ruled by the corrupt oligarchs or have we reached the stage where the
people has become used to be fed on the property of others? If so
dissolution and anarchy is just around the corner.

"The Revolution, Vol.  II, 8th ed.

Svend Rom.  Hendaye, France.  February 2000.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
Preface:

In this volume, as in those preceding it and in those to come,
there will be found only the history of Public Authorities.  Others
will write that of diplomacy, of war, of the finances, of the Church;
my subject is a limited one.  To my great regret, however, this new
part fills an entire volume; and the last part, on the revolutionary
government, will be as long.

I have again to regret the dissatisfaction I foresee this work will
cause to many of my countrymen.  My excuse is, that almost all of them,
more fortunate than myself, have political principles which serve them
in forming their judgments of the past.  I had none; if indeed, I had
any motive in undertaking this work, it was to seek for political
principles.  Thus far I have attained to scarcely more than one; and
this is so simple that will seem puerile, and that I hardly dare
express it.  Nevertheless I have adhered to it, and in what the reader
is about to peruse my judgments are all derived from that; its truth
is the measure of theirs.  It consists wholly in this observation: that


HUMAN SOCIETY, ESPECIALLY A MODERN SOCIETY, IS A VAST AND
COMPLICATED THING.


Hence the difficulty in knowing and comprehending it.  For the same
reason it is not easy to handle the subject well.  It follows that a
cultivated mind is much better able to do this than an uncultivated
mind, and a man specially qualified than one who is not.  From these
two last truths flow many other consequences, which, if the reader
deigns to reflect on them, he will have no trouble in defining.

Paris 1881.



Notes:


[1] Page XLVI of the Introduction to the Edition by Robert Lafont
in 1986 by "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine".

[2] From "HISTORIES", BOOK VI.  3.  3-4.  1  FROM LOEB'S CLASSICAL
LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS.


THE ANCIENT REGIME

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR:

ON POLITICAL IGNORANCE AND WISDOM.

In 1849, being twenty-one years of age, and an elector, I was very
much puzzled, for I had to nominate fifteen or twenty deputies, and,
moreover, according to French custom, I had not only to determine what
candidate I would vote for, but what theory I should adopt.  I had to
choose between a royalist or a republican, a democrat or a
conservative, a socialist or a bonapartist; as I was neither one nor
the other, nor even anything, I often envied those around me who were
so fortunate as to have arrived at definite conclusions.  After
listening to various doctrines, I acknowledged that there undoubtedly
was something wrong with my head.  The motives that influenced others
did not influence me; I could not comprehend how, in political
matters, a man could be governed by preferences.  My assertive
countrymen planned a constitution just like a house, according to the
latest, simplest, and most attractive plan; and there were several
under consideration - the mansion of a marquis, the house of a common
citizen, the tenement of a laborer, the barracks of a soldier, the
kibbutz of a socialist, and even the camp of savages.  Each claimed
that his was "the true habitation for Man, the only one in which a
sensible person could live." In my opinion, the argument was weak;
personal taste could not be valid for everyone.  It seemed to me that a
house should not be built for the architect alone, or for itself, but
for the owner who was to live in it.  Referring to the owner for his
advice, that is submitting to the French people the plans of its
future habitation, would evidently be either for show or just to
deceive them; since the question, obviously, was put in such a manner
that it provided the answer in advance.  Besides, had the people been
allowed to reply in all liberty, their response was in any case not of
much value since France was scarcely more competent than I was; the
combined ignorance of ten millions is not the equivalent of one man's
wisdom.  A people may be consulted and, in an extreme case, may declare
what form of government it would like best, but not that which it most
needs.  Nothing but experience can determine this; it must have time to
ascertain whether the political structure is convenient, substantial,
able to withstand inclemency, and adapted to customs, habits,
occupations, characters, peculiarities and caprices.  For example, the
one we have tried has never satisfied us; we have during eighty years
demolished it thirteen times, each time setting it up anew, and always
in vain, for never have we found one that suited us.  If other nations
have been more fortunate, or if various political structures abroad
have proved stable and enduring, it is because these have been erected
in a special way.  Founded on some primitive, massive pile, supported
by an old central edifice, often restored but always preserved,
gradually enlarged, and, after numerous trials and additions, they
have been adapted to the wants of its occupants.  It is well to admit,
perhaps, that there is no other way of erecting a permanent building.
Never has one been put up instantaneously, after an entirely new
design, and according to the measurements of pure Reason.  A sudden
contrivance of a new, suitable, and enduring constitution is an
enterprise beyond the forces of the human mind.

In any event, I came to the conclusion that if we should ever
discover the one we need it would not be through some fashionable
theory.  The point is, if it exists, to discover it, and not to put it
to a vote.  To do that would not only be pretentious it would be
useless; history and nature will do it for us; it is for us to adapt
ourselves to them, as it is certain they will accommodate themselves
to us.  The social and political mold, into which a nation may enter
and remain, is not subject to its will, but determined by its
character and its past.  It is essential that, even in its least
traits, it should be shaped on the living material to which it is
applied; otherwise it will burst and fall to pieces.  Hence, if we
should succeed in finding ours, it will only be through a study of
ourselves, while the more we understand exactly what we are, the more
certainly shall we distinguish what best suits us.  We ought,
therefore, to reverse the ordinary methods, and form some conception
of the nation before formulating its constitution.  Doubtless the first
operation is much more tedious and difficult than the second.  How much
time, how much study, how many observations rectified one by the
other, how many researches in the past and the present, over all the
domains of thought and of action, what manifold and age-long labors
before we can obtain an accurate and complete idea of a great people.
A people which has lived a people's age, and which still lives! But it
is the only way to avoid the unsound construction based on a
meaningless planning.  I promised myself that, for my own part, if I
should some day undertake to form a political opinion, it would be
only after having studied France.

What is contemporary France?

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