American Pravda: Our Deadly World of Post-War Politics
Although
my main academic focus was theoretical physics, I always had a very
strong interest in history as well, especially that of the Classical
Era. Trying to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of
source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and
contradictory was a challenging intellectual exercise, testing my
analytical ability. I believe I even contributed meaningfully to the
field, including a short 1985 article in The Journal of Hellenic Studies that sifted the ancient sources to conclude that Alexander the Great had younger brothers whom he murdered when he came to the throne.
However,
I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one
thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts
were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my
introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any
original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.
Also,
the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with
Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or
falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths
of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history
was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional
events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own
lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon
under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from
office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so
clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our
American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media
policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.
In
hindsight I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of
Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if
most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained
blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the
governance of their own society.
Since
my knowledge of American history ran no deeper than my basic textbooks
and mainstream newspapers and magazines, the last decade or so has been a
journey of discovery for me, and often a shocking one. I came of age
many years after the Communist spy scares of the 1950s had faded into
dim memory, and based on what I read, I always thought the whole matter
more amusing than anything else. It seemed that about the only
significant “Red” ever caught, who may or may not have been innocent,
was some obscure individual bearing the unlikely name of “Alger Hiss,”
and as late as the 1980s, his children still fiercely proclaimed his
complete innocence in the pages of the New York Times.
Although I thought he was probably guilty, it also seemed clear that the
methods adopted by his persecutors such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard
Nixon had actually done far more damage to our country during the
unfortunate era named for the former figure.
During
the 1990s, I occasionally read reviews of new books based on the Venona
Papers—decrypted Soviet cables finally declassified—and they seemed to
suggest that the Communist spy ring had both been real and far more
extensive than I had imagined. But those events of a half-century
earlier were hardly uppermost in my mind, and anyway other historians
still fought a rear-guard battle in the newspapers, arguing that many of
the Venona texts were fraudulent. So I gave the matter little thought.
Only in the last dozen years, as my content-archiving project made me aware of the 1940s purge of some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals,
and I began considering their books and articles, did I begin to
realize the massive import of the Soviet cables. I soon read three or
four of the Venona books and was very impressed by their objective and
meticulous scholarly analysis, which convinced me of their conclusions.
And the implications were quite remarkable, actually far understated
in most of the articles that I had read.
Consider,
for example, the name Harry Dexter White, surely unknown to all but the
thinnest sliver of present-day Americans, and proven by the Venona
Papers to have been a Soviet agent. During the 1940s, his official
position was merely one of several assistant secretaries of the
Treasury, serving under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an influential member of
Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. But Morgenthau was actually a
gentleman-farmer, almost entirely ignorant of finance, who had gotten
his position partly by being FDR’s neighbor, and according to numerous
sources, White actually ran the Treasury Department under his titular
authority. Thus, in 1944 it was White who negotiated with John Maynard
Keynes—Britain’s most towering economist—to lay the basis for the the
Bretton Woods Agreement, the IMF, and the rest of the West’s post-war
economic institutions.
Moreover,
by the end of the war, White had managed to extend the power of the
Treasury—and therefore his own area of control—deep into what would
normally be handled by the Department of State, especially regarding
policies pertaining to the defeated German foe. His handiwork notably
included the infamous “Morgenthau Plan,” proposing the complete
dismantling of the huge industrial base at the heart of Europe, and its
conversion into an agricultural region, automatically implying the
elimination of most of Germany’s population, whether by starvation or
exodus. And although that proposal was officially abandoned under
massive protest by the allied leadership, books by many post-war
observers such as Freda Utley have argued that it was partially
implemented in actuality, with millions of German civilians perishing
from hunger, sickness, and other consequences of extreme deprivation.
At
the time, some observers believed that White’s attempt to eradicate much
of prostrate Germany’s surviving population was vindictively motivated
by his own Jewish background. But William Henry Chamberlin,
long one of America’s most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists,
strongly suspected that the plan was a deeply cynical one, intended to
inflict such enormous misery upon those Germans living under Western
occupation that popular sentiment would automatically shift in a
strongly pro-Soviet direction, allowing Stalin to gain the upper hand in
Central Europe, and many subsequent historians have come to similar
conclusions.
Even
more remarkably, White managed to have a full set of the plates used to
print Allied occupation currency shipped to the Soviets, allowing them
to produce an unlimited quantity of paper marks recognized as valid by
Western governments, thus allowing the USSR to finance its post-war
occupation of half of Europe on the backs of the American taxpayer.
Eventually
suspicion of White’s true loyalties led to his abrupt resignation as
the first U.S. Director of the IMF in 1947, and in 1948 he was called to
testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he
denied all accusations, he was scheduled for additional testimony, with
the intent of eventually prosecuting him for perjury and then using the
threat of a long prison sentence to force him to reveal the other
members of his espionage network. However, almost immediately after his
initial meeting with the Committee, he supposedly suffered a couple of
sudden heart attacks and died at age 55, though apparently no direct
autopsy was performed on his corpse.
Soon
afterward other Soviet spies also began departing this world at unripe
ages within a short period of time. Two months after White’s demise,
accused Soviet spy W. Marvin Smith was found dead at age 53 in the
stairwell of the Justice building, having fallen five stories, and sixty
days after that, Laurence Duggan, another agent of very considerable
importance, lost his life at age 43 following a fall from the 16th floor
of an office building in New York City. So many other untimely deaths
of individuals of a similar background occurred during this general
period that in 1951 the staunchly right-wing Chicago Tribune ran an entire article
noting this rather suspicious pattern. But while I don’t doubt that
the plentiful anti-Communist activists of that period exchanged dark
interpretations of so many coincidental fatalities, I am not aware that
such “conspiracy theories” were ever taken seriously by the more
respectable mainstream media, and certainly no hint of this reached any
of the standard history textbooks that constituted my primary knowledge
of that period.
Sometimes
rank newcomers to a given field will notice patterns less apparent to
those long familiar with the topic, more easily discerning the forest
amid the trees. My own very superficial knowledge of 20th century
American history burdened me with fewer preconceived notions of the
pattern of those times, and the substantial body-count of accused Soviet
spies during the late 1940s gradually made me wonder about other sudden
fatalities during that same era.
As an example, I came across Target Patton by Robert K. Wilcox, providing some very strong evidence
that the 1948 fatal car crash that claimed the life of Gen. George S.
Patton was not accidental, but was instead an assassination by America’s
own OSS, fore-runner of the CIA, which was then also heavily
infiltrated by Soviet agents. Unlike the above deaths, which were
merely highly suspicious in their timing and concentrated sequence, in
the case of Patton the evidence was considerably stronger, even
including the eventual public confession decades later of the OSS
assassin responsible, with his claims supported by the contents of his
personal diary.
At
the time of his death, Patton was America’s highest-ranking military
officer stationed on the European continent and certainly one of our
most famous war-heroes. But he had bitterly clashed with his civilian
and military superiors over American policy towards the Soviets, whom he
viewed with intense hostility. He died the day before he was scheduled
to return home to America, there planning to resign his commission and
begin a major national speaking-tour denouncing our political leadership
and demanding a military confrontation with the USSR. Prior to
stumbling across the book in question, which had been totally ignored by
the entire American media, I had never encountered a hint of anything
untoward regarding Patton’s death, nor had I been aware of the political
plans he had formulated prior to his sudden fatal accident.
Once a possible pattern has been observed, accumulating additional
pieces becomes a much more natural process. A year or so after
encountering the strongly substantiated claims of Patton’s
assassination, I happened to read Desperate Deception by Thomas
E. Mahl, a mainstream historian, whose book was released by a
specialized military affairs publishing house. This fascinating account
documented the long-hidden early 1940s campaign by British intelligence agents
to remove all domestic political obstacles to America’s entry into
World War II. A crucial aspect of that project involved the successful
attempt to manipulate the Republican Convention of 1940 into selecting
as its presidential standard-bearer an obscure individual named Wendell
Wilkie, who had never previously held political office and moreover had
been a committed lifelong Democrat. Wilkie’s great value was that he
shared Roosevelt’s support for military intervention in the ongoing
European conflict, though this was contrary to virtually the entire base
of his own newly-joined party. Ensuring that both presidential
candidates shared those similar positions prevented the race from
becoming an referendum on that issue, in which up to 80% of the American
public seems to have been on the other side.
Wilkie’s
nomination was surely one of the strangest occurrences in American
political history, and the path to his improbable nomination was paved
by quite a number of odd and suspicious events, most notably the
extremely fortuitous sudden collapse and death of the Republican
convention manager, a key Wilkie opponent, which Mahl regards as highly
suspicious.
Wilkie
went on to suffer a landslide defeat at Roosevelt’s hands in November,
but quickly reconciled with his erstwhile opponent, and was sent abroad
on a number of important political missions. Future historians would
surely have been fascinated to learn some of the internal details of how
British intelligence operatives had managed to “parachute” an obscure
lifelong Democrat into leading the top of the Republican ticket in 1940,
thereby fatefully ensuring American entry into World War II. But
unfortunately all of Wilkie’s personal knowledge of such momentous
events was forever lost to posterity when he suddenly took ill and died
of a heart attack—or according to Wikipedia 15 consecutive heart
attacks—on October 8, 1944 at the age of 52.
One
of the most powerful political figures of Roosevelt’s dozen years in
office was his close aide Harry Hopkins, who actually moved into the
White House in 1940 and remained a permanent resident for nearly the
next four years. Although Hopkins hardly bore an exalted title, being
an administrator of various New Deal programs and later serving as
Commerce Secretary, he was frequently referred to as “the Deputy
President” and certainly carried more weight than any of FDR’s vice
presidents or Cabinet members, generally being regarded as the second
most powerful political figure in the country.
Hopkins,
a former social worker and political activist, was decidedly on the
left, having his roots in a New York City progressive tradition that
shaded into socialism, while being very strongly pro-Soviet in his
foreign policy views. There are some indications in the Venona Papers
that he may even have actually been a Soviet agent, and Herbert
Romerstein and Eric Breindel took that position in their book The Venona Secrets, but John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the leading Venona scholars, doubted this likelihood based on technical arguments.
In
the last year or so of Roosevelt’s life, his relations with Hopkins had
frayed, and when FDR died in April 1945, thereby elevating Harry S.
Truman to the presidency, Hopkins’ remaining influence disappeared.
Having spent so many years at the absolute center of American power,
Hopkins planned to publish his personal memoirs of the momentous events
he had witnessed during the years of the Great Depression and the Second
World War, but he suddenly took ill and died in early 1946, age 55,
surviving his longtime political partner FDR by only eight months.
According to the authoritative references provided in his Wikipedia entry,
the cause of death was stomach cancer. Or malnutrition related to
digestive problems. Or liver failure due to hepatitis or cirrhosis. Or
perhaps hemochromatosis. Although Hopkins had been in poor health for
many years, questions do arise when the death of America’s second most
powerful political figure is ascribed to a wide variety of somewhat
different causes.
The
particular timing of events may sometimes exert a outsize influence on
historical trajectories. Consider the figure of Henry Wallace, probably
still dimly remembered as a leading leftwing Democrat of the 1930s and
1940s. Wallace had been something of a Midwestern wonder-boy in
farming innovation and was brought into FDR’s first Cabinet in 1933 as
Secretary of Agriculture. By all accounts, Wallace was an absolutely
100% true-blue American patriot, with no hint of any nefarious activity
appearing in the Venona Papers. But as is sometimes the case with
technical experts, he seems to have been remarkably naive outside his
main field of knowledge, notably in his extreme religious mysticism and
more importantly in his politics, with many of those closest to him
being proven Soviet agents, who presumably regarded him as the ideal
front-man for their own political intrigues.
From
George Washington onward, no American president had ever run for a
third consecutive term, and when FDR suddenly decided to take this step
during 1940, partly using the ongoing war in Europe as an excuse, many
prominent figures in the Democratic Party launched a political
rebellion, including his own two-time Vice President John Nance Garner,
who had been a former Democratic Speaker of the House, and James Farley,
the powerful party leader who had originally helped elevate Roosevelt
to the presidency. FDR selected Wallace as his third-term Vice
President, perhaps as a means of gaining support from the powerful
pro-Soviet faction among the Democrats. But as a consequence, even as
FDR’s health steadily deteriorated during the four years that followed,
an individual whose most trusted advisors were agents of Stalin remained
just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.
Under
the strong pressure of Democratic Party leaders, Wallace was replaced
on the ticket at the July 1944 Democratic Convention, and Harry S.
Truman succeeded to the presidency when FDR died in April of the
following year. But if Wallace had not been replaced or if Roosevelt
had died a year earlier, the consequences for the country would surely
have been enormous. According to later statements, a Wallace Administration
would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State, Harry
Dexter White at the helm of the Treasury, and presumably various other
outright Soviet agents occupying all the key nodes at the top of the
American federal government. One might jokingly speculate whether the
Rosenbergs—later executed for treason—would have been placed in charge
of our nuclear weapons development program.
As
it happens, Roosevelt lived until 1945, and instead of running the
American government, Dugan and White both died quite suddenly within a
few months of each other after they came under suspicion in 1948. But
the tendrils of Soviet control during the early 1940s ran remarkably
deep.
As a
striking example, Soviet agents became aware of the Venona decryption
project in 1944, and soon afterward a directive came down from the White
House ordering the project abandoned and the records of Soviet
espionage destroyed. The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us
to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the
military officer in charge risked a court-martial by simply ignoring
that explicit Presidential order.
In
the wake of the Venona Papers, publicly released a quarter century ago
and today accepted by almost everyone, it seems undeniable that during
the early 1940s America’s national government came within a
hairsbreadth—or rather a heartbeat—of falling under the control of a
tight network of Soviet agents. Yet I have only very rarely seen this
simple fact emphasized in any book or article, even though this surely
helps explain the ideological roots of the “anti-Communist paranoia”
that became such a powerful political force by the early 1950s.
Obviously,
Communism had very shallow roots in American society, and any
Soviet-dominated Wallace Administration established in 1943 or 1944
probably would sooner or later have been swept from power, perhaps by
America’s first military coup. But given FDR’s fragile health, this
momentous possibility should certainly be regularly mentioned in
discussions of that era.
If
important historical matters are excluded from the media, a younger
generation of scholars may never encounter them, and even with the best
of intentions the historiography they eventually produce may contain
enormous lacunae. Consider, for example, the prize-winning volumes of
political history that Rick Perlstein has produced since 2001, tracing
the rise of American conservatism from prior to Goldwater down to the
rise of Reagan in the 1970s. The series has justly earned widespread
acclaim for its enormous attention to detail, but according to the
indexes, the combined total of nearly 2,400 pages contains merely two
glancing and totally dismissive mentions of Harry Dexter White at the
very beginning of the first volume, and no entry whatsoever for Laurence
Duggan, or even more shockingly, “Venona.” I’ve sometimes joked that
writing a history of post-war American conservatism without focusing on
such crucial factors is like writing a history of America’s involvement
in World War II without mentioning Pearl Harbor.
Sometimes
our standard history textbooks provide two seemingly unrelated stories,
which become far more important only once we discover that they are
actually parts of a single connected whole. The strange death of James
Forrestal certainly falls into this category.
During
the 1930s Forrestal had reached the pinacle of Wall Street, serving as
CEO of Dillon, Read, one of the most prestigious investment banks. With
World War II looming, Roosevelt drew him into government service in
1940, partly because his strong Republican credentials helped emphasize
the bipartisan nature of the war effort, and he soon became
Undersecretary of the Navy. Upon the death of his elderly superior in
1944, Forrestal was elevated to the Cabinet as Navy Secretary, and after
the contentious battle over the reorganization of our military
departments, he became America’s first Secretary of Defense in 1947,
holding authority over the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Along
with Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall, Forrestal probably ranked
as the most influential member of Truman’s Cabinet. However, just a few
months after Truman’s 1948 reelection, we are told that Forrestal
became paranoid and depressed, resigned his powerful position, and weeks
later committed suicide by jumping from an 18th story window at
Bethesda Naval Hospital. Knowing almost nothing about Forrestal or his
background, I always nodded my head over this odd historical event.
Meanwhile,
an entirely different page or chapter of my history textbooks usually
carried the dramatic story of the bitter political conflict that wracked
the Truman Administration over the recognition of the State of Israel,
which had taken place the previous year. I read that George Marshall
argued such a step would be totally disastrous for American interests by
potentially alienating many hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims,
who held the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East, and felt so
strongly about the matter that he threatened to resign. However,
Truman, heavily influenced by the personal lobbying of his old Jewish
haberdashery business partner Eddie Jacobson, ultimately decided upon
recognition, and Marshall stayed in the government.
However,
almost a decade ago, I somehow stumbled across an interesting book by
Alan Hart, a journalist and author who had served as a longtime BBC
Middle East Correspondent, in which I discovered that these two
different stories were part of a seamless whole. By his account,
although Marshall had indeed strongly opposed recognition of Israel, it
had actually been Forrestal who spearheaded that effort in Truman’s
Cabinet and was most identified with that position, resulting in
numerous harsh attacks in the media and his later departure from the
Truman Cabinet. Hart also raised very considerable doubts about whether
Forrestal’s subsequent death had actually been suicide, citing an
obscure website for a detailed analysis of that last issue.
It
is a commonplace that the Internet has democratized the distribution of
information, allowing those who create knowledge to connect with those
who consume it without the need for a gate-keeping intermediary. I have
encountered few better examples of the unleashed potential of this new
system than “Who Killed Forrestal?”,
an exhaustive analysis by a certain David Martin, who describes himself
as an economist and political blogger. Running many tens of thousands
of words, his series of articles on the fate of America’s first
Secretary of Defense provides an exhaustive discussion of all the source
materials, including the small handful of published books describing
Forrestal’s life and strange death, supplemented by contemporaneous
newspaper articles and numerous relevant government documents obtained
by personal FOIA requests. The verdict of murder followed by a massive
governmental cover-up seems solidly established.
As
mentioned, Forrestal’s role as the Truman Administration’s principal
opponent of Israel’s creation had made him the subject of an almost
unprecedented campaign of personal media vilification in both print and
radio, spearheaded by the country’s two most powerful columnists of the
right and the left, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, only the former
being Jewish, but both heavily connected with the ADL and extremely
pro-Zionist, with their attacks and accusations even continuing after
his resignation and death.
Once
we move past the wild exaggerations of Forrestal’s alleged
psychological problems promoted by these very hostile media pundits and
their many allies, much of Forrestal’s supposed paranoia apparently
consisted of his belief that he was being followed around Washington,
D.C., his phones may have been tapped, and his life might be in danger
at the hands of Zionist agents. And perhaps such concerns were not so
entirely unreasonable given certain contemporaneous events.
Lord
Moyne, the British Secretary for the Middle East, had been assassinated
in 1944 and UN Middle East Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte had
suffered the same fate in 1948. Declassified British documents eventually revealed
an assassination plot against Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that same
year, and Margaret Truman’s memoirs mention a failed assassination
attempt against her own father in 1947. Zionist factions were
responsible for all of these incidents. Indeed, State Department
official Robert Lovett, a relatively minor and low-profile opponent of
Zionist interests, reported receiving numerous threatening phone calls
late at night around the same time, which greatly concerned him. Martin
also cites subsequent books by Zionist partisans who boasted of the
effective use their side had made of blackmail, apparently obtained by
wire-tapping, to ensure sufficient political support for Israel’s
creation.
Meanwhile,
behind the scenes, powerful financial forces may have been gathering to
ensure that President Truman ignored the unified recommendations of all
his diplomatic and national security advisors. Years later, both Gore Vidal and Alexander Cockburn
would separately report that it eventually became common knowledge in
DC political circles that during the desperate days of Truman’s underdog
1948 reelection campaign, he had secretly accepted a cash payment of $2
million from wealthy Zionists in exchange for recognizing Israel, a sum
perhaps comparable to $20 million or more in present-day dollars.
Republican
Thomas Dewey had been heavily favored to win the 1948 presidential
election, and after Truman’s surprising upset, Forrestal’s political
position was certainly not helped when Pearson claimed in a newspaper
column that Forrestal had secretly met with Dewey during the campaign,
making arrangements to be kept on in a Dewey Administration.
Suffering
political defeat regarding Middle East policy and facing ceaseless
media attacks, Forrestal resigned his Cabinet post under pressure.
Almost immediately afterwards, he was checked into the Bethesda Naval
Hospital for observation, supposedly suffering from severe fatigue and
exhaustion, and he remained there for seven weeks, with his access to
visitors sharply restricted. He was finally scheduled to be released on
May 22, 1949, but just hours before his brother Henry came to pick him
up, his body was found below the window of his 18th floor room, with a
knotted cord wound tightly around his neck. Based upon an official
press release, the newspapers all reported his unfortunate suicide,
suggesting that he had first tried to hang himself, but failing that
approach, had leapt out his window instead. A half page of copied Greek
verse was found in his room, and in the heydey of Freudian
psychoanalyical thinking, this was regarded as the subconscious trigger
for his sudden death impulse, being treated as almost the equivalent of
an actual suicide note. My own history textbooks simplified this
complex story to merely say “suicide,” which is what I read and never
questioned.
Martin
raises numerous very serious doubts with this official verdict. Among
other things, published interviews with Forrestal’s surviving brother
and friends reveal that none of them believed Forrestal had taken his
own life, and that they had all been prevented from seeing him until
near the very end of his entire period of confinement. Indeed, the
brother recounted that just the day before, Forrestal had been in fine
spirits, saying that upon his release, he planned to use some of his
very considerable personal wealth to buy a newspaper and begin revealing
to the American people many of the suppressed facts concerning
America’s entry into World War II, of which he had direct knowledge,
supplemented by the extremely extensive personal diary that he had kept
for many years. Upon Forrestal’s confinement, that diary, running
thousands of pages, had been seized by the government, and after his
death was apparently published only in heavily edited and expurgated
form, though it nonetheless still became a historical sensation.
The
government documents unearthed by Martin raise additional doubts about
the story presented in all the standard history books. Forrestal’s
medical files seem to lack any official autopsy report, there is visible
evidence of broken glass in his room, suggesting a violent struggle,
and most remarkably, the page of copied Greek verse—always cited as the
main indication of Forrestal’s final suicidal intent—was actually not
written in Forrestal’s own hand.
Aside
from newspaper accounts and government documents, much of Martin’s
analysis, including the extensive personal interviews of Forrestal’s
friends and relatives, is based upon a short book entitled The Death of James Forrestal,
published in 1966 by one Cornell Simpson, almost certainly a pseudonym.
Simpson states that his investigative research had been conducted just
a few years after Forrestal’s death and although his book was
originally scheduled for release his publisher grew concerned over the
extremely controversial nature of the material included and cancelled
the project. According to Simpson, years later he decided to take his
unchanged manuscript off the shelf and have it published by Western
Islands press, which turns out to have been an imprint of the John Birch
Society, the notoriously conspiratorial rightwing organization then
near the height of its national influence. For these reasons, certain
aspects of the book are of considerable interest even beyond the
contents directly relating to Forrestal.
The
first part of the book consists of a detailed presentation of the
actual evidence regarding Forrestal’s highly suspicious death, including
the numerous interviews with his friends and relatives, while the
second portion focuses on the nefarious plots of the world-wide
Communist movement, a Birch Society staple. Allegedly, Forrestal’s
staunch anti-Communism had been what targeted him for destruction by
Communist agents, and there is virtually no reference to any controversy
regarding his enormous public battle over Israel’s establishment,
although that was certainly the primary factor behind his political
downfall. Martin notes these strange inconsistencies, and even wonders
whether certain aspects of the book and its release may have been
intended to deflect attention from this Zionist dimension towards some
nefarious Communist plot.
Consider,
for example, David Niles, whose name has lapsed into total obscurity,
but who had been one of the very few senior FDR aides retained by his
successor, and according to observers, Niles eventually became one of
the most powerful figures behind the scenes of the Truman
Administration. Various accounts suggest he played a leading role in
Forrestal’s removal, and Simpson’s book supports this, suggesting that
he was Communist agent of some sort. However, although the Venona
Papers reveal that Niles had sometimes cooperated with Soviet agents in
their espionage activities, he apparently did so either for money or for
some other considerations, and was certainly not part of their own
intelligence network. Instead, both Martin and Hart provide an enormous
amount of evidence that Niles’s loyalty was overwhelmingly to Zionism,
and indeed by 1950 his espionage activities on behalf of Israel became
so extremely blatant that Gen. Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, threatened to immediately resign unless Niles was
fired, forcing Truman’s hand.
Classics
Professor Revilo Oliver, for decades a very influential figure in far
right circles, had been a founding member of the John Birth Society and
editor of its magazine, but angrily resigned in 1966, claiming that its
leader Robert Welch, Jr. had accepted an offer of heavy financial
support in return for focusing solely upon Communist misdeeds and
scrupulously avoiding any discussion of Jewish or Zionist activities.
Based on the evidence, that accusation appears to have considerable
merit, with the JBS leadership soon treating indications of
“anti-Semitism” as grounds for immediate expulsion. Major Communist
political influence had largely disappeared in America by the late
1940s, while Jewish and pro-Israel influence grew enormously from the
early 1960s onward, and by focusing almost exclusively upon the former
and totally avoiding the latter, the JBS organization increasingly
presented a totally delusional view of American politics, which surely
contributed to its eventual decline into complete irrelevance.
Among
those who grow skeptical of establishment media verdicts, there is a
natural tendency to become overly suspicious, and see conspiracies and
cover-ups where none exist. The sudden death of a prominent political
figure may be blamed on foul-play even when the causes were entirely
natural or accidental. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But when a
sufficient number of such persons die within a sufficiently short period
of years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that at least some of
those deaths were not for the reasons long believed, the burden of proof
begins to shift.
Excluding
the much larger number of less notable fatalities, here is a short list
of six prominent Americans whose untimely passing during 1944-1949
surely evoked considerable relief within various organizations known for
their ruthless tactics:
- Wendell Wilkie, lifelong Democrat nominated for President by the Republicans in 1940, Died October 8, 1944, Age 52, Heart attack.
- Gen. George Patton, highest-ranking American military officer in Europe, Died December 21, 1945, Age 60, Car accident.
- Harry Hopkins, FDR’s “Deputy President,” Died January 29, 1946, Age 55, Various possible causes.
- Harry Dexter White, Soviet agent who ran the Treasury under FDR, Died August 16, 1948, Age 55, Heart attack.
- Laurence Duggan, Soviet agent, Prospective Secretary of State under Henry Wallace, Died December 20, 1948, Age 43, Fall from 16th story window.
- James Forrestal, former Secretary of Defense, Died May 22, 1949, Age 57, Fall from 18th story window.
I do
not think that any similar sort of list of comparable individuals
during that same time period could be produced for Britain, France, the
USSR, or China. In one of the James Bond films, Agent 007 states his
opinion that “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is
enemy action.” And I think these six examples over just a few years
should be enough to raise the eyebrows of even the most cautious and
skeptical.
Foreign
leaders outraged over America’s destructive international blundering
have sometimes described our country as possessing physical might of
enormous power, but having a ruling political elite so ignorant,
gullible, and incompetent that it easily falls under the sway of
unscrupulous foreign powers. We are a nation with the body of a
dinosaur but controlled by the brain of a flea.
The
post-war era of the 1940s surely marked an important peak of America’s
military and economic power. Yet there seems considerable evidence that
during those same years, a varied mix of Soviet, British, and Zionist
assassins may have freely walked our soil, striking down those whom they
regarded as obstacles to their national interests.
Meanwhile, nearly
all Americans remained blissfully unaware of these momentous
developments, being lulled to sleep by “Our American Pravda.”
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