The Fool on a Hill: A Stroll in My Vertical Neighborhood
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round
That about sums up my daily walks on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill. (There’s a Beatles tune for every occasion.) It’s not that I’ve become a guru, like the Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi, who briefly bedazzled John and George (who then both took wicked revenge on the giggling spiritual leader). But my head is constantly spinning around ever since my stroke in 2017, and my vision is off-kilter too. So taking an afternoon spin around my steep neighborhood is always a crazy kind of trek, and today it had me singing about that other fool on a hill.
My life is a daily strain. Who’s isn’t? Despite my “deficits” (I love those accounting terms), I still count myself lucky to be alive. So much has happened in my life in the past three-and-a-half years. So many wonderful (and occasionally terrifying) events in the lives of family and friends — not to mention America at large. I’m here, I’m alive — in fact I feel more fully alive than I was before my medical catastrophe.
It’s true, I can’t hop in a car (or plane) and take off somewhere fun or exotic. My physical damage (and the pandemic) has made me more house-bound. And so my neighborhood has become my domain. From the top of Bernal Heights, I can see the world (or at least most of my city). I contain multitudes, and so does my limited empire. Increasingly bold coyotes, dog wranglers herding packs of canines, young women with crowns of curls speaking a language I’ve never heard before, techies talking a language I wish I’d never understood, dancers rehearsing their spins and leaps.
And now, as I near 70, it’s time to reinvent myself, again. Am I retired? Not quite. I have one last history book coming out in June — another hill I’d have struggled to climb without the help of two co-authors, my sister Margaret Talbot and my brother-in-law Arthur Allen. By the Light of Burning Dreams should have been a casualty of my stroke — a bolt that struck my head just as I was about to start writing. Instead it will soon be published — a final statement on my activist generation and how we tried to move history forward.
Changing America — this beautiful, this monstrous beast of a country. For most of my life, it was something I thought we could actually accomplish — and we did, in ways major and minor we did. But we radicals never took power. Some will read our book and conclude it’s a good thing we didn’t. Perhaps, in some cases, we weren’t ready to lead. But we were never allowed the chance — even our best and brightest, like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Seale, Bella Abzug, Tom Hayden, Fred Hampton, Shirley Chisholm. They never allowed these brave, visionary men and women to get close to the pinnacle of power. (Or when they briefly did, they violently removed them.)
Now we have a president who doesn’t just imitate our rhetoric. He actually seems to be trying to put our ideas (some of them) into action. (I would love to talk again with Tom, to hear the reaction of the Port Huron Statement author to President Biden’s Congressional address.) And so maybe, in our graying dotage, the beast is shuffling slowly in the right direction again.
What do I wish for my sons and their anxious generation? A sense of the euphoria we once felt, long ago, when we thought we could bend the U.S. Empire to our will. Failing that, I wish them the serenity I feel every day when I walk upon my hill. The spring flowers are blooming, the coyotes are running free. We’re alive in the world. And we can still imagine a better world.
Biden’s New Deal
In his State of the Union speech (I know — we’re not supposed to call it that, but whatever), President Joe Biden not only sought to bury the sneering chimera of Trump. but also the charming ghoulishness of Reagan. “Trickle down economics has never worked.” Biden declared. “It’s time to grow the economy from the ground and middle up.” It was the most unabashedly populist presidential address to Congress since FDR, and the long list of left-wing goals that he ticked off had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren jumping to their feet, along with other members of the Capitol Hill progressive caucus. Biden spoke softly for the most part, but his speech had the chamber rocking, even though his audience was Covid-limited to 200 legislators and dignitaries.
Can President Biden and his Democratic vanguard push through his ambitious agenda while he still holds a (slim) advantage in Congress? He certainly seems to have the mojo — and the public opinion polls — to do it. And the Republican opposition seems weirdly distracted and divided, still haunted by that ghost of Trump.
So go, Joe, go — you have nothing to lose but the chains of the past, with all those failed presidencies and American carnage (yes, that’s what it is — but Trump only made it worse). Maybe it’s his advanced age; maybe it’s his Irish Catholic soul; maybe it’s all the personal loss he’s suffered; maybe it’s the bitter lessons of the Obama years. But whatever it is, Old Joe seems like the great progressive hope these days. Whether America is really the great nation and the American people the grand visionaries he keeps calling us is a very different question. But we’ll soon find out whether democracy or autocracy — the great battle that Biden illuminated in his speech — will triumph.
Our Joe Manchin Problem: Time to Play Hardball
Let’s put aside for now that little West Virginia has no business in a democracy having the same number of senators as New York or Texas or California. Let’s just focus on Joe Manchin, the nominally Democratic senator from that small state who not only ardently defends the undemocratic nature of the Senate, but has become the key factor in President Joe Biden’s ambitious plans to revitalize America. .. or not. After much hemming and hawing, Manchin went along with Biden’s big pandemic relief bill — why he kept the nation in suspense when his own suffering state desperately needed the cash infusion is a question still worth pursuing. But now Manchin is doubling down on his role as Senate decider-in-chief, proclaiming he prefers the much smaller Republican infrastructure bill to Biden’s massive renewal plan, which incorporates climate retooling, job retraining and social justice reforms. Manchin also has made clear that he loves the filibuster — the Senate device also beloved by Mitch McConnell and all legislative defenders of elite interests.
So Joe Manchin, as a key Senate vote, is a problem. A big problem if America is to truly enter the 21st Century. And here’s what the Biden administration needs to do. Get rough. I don’t mean the kindly, old president himself — his poll numbers are sky high, in part because of his ambitious program but also because he is seen as a genial uniter. But Biden needs a pit bull. JFK had his brother, the “ruthless” Bobby Kennedy. LBJ was a pit bull himself. Clinton had Carville — and Hillary. Obama had Rahm Emanuel — for awhile. After Emanuel left the White House, Obama couldn’t even strong-arm aging Ruth Bader Ginsburg off the Supreme Court bench when the Democrats still controlled the Senate.
Now Biden needs some muscle. And Ron Klain doesn’t cut it. Biden’s chief of staff is too nice of a guy. Biden needs someone to play hardball with Joe Manchin. He needs someone who can sit down with the senator from little West Virginia and explain to him the facts of life.
OK, senator, what do you want? What does your state need? The Biden team can do this the easy way — or the hard way. If Manchin needs a little tougher approach, you can always escalate. I hear you had a little problem with your taxes…. or that young girl in Charleston… if you’re in a jam, maybe we can help you.
That’s called politics. It’s never been pretty, but that’s the way it’s played. The Democrats too often forget the basics of the game. But it’s time to relearn.
And now it’s time for me to play a little hardball… If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly hooked on my daily scribblings, and you should help keep me going. Please donate $25 today to the David Talbot Show — or $50 if you’re flush.
How to Inject Some Life Into the Oscars
Yes, god help me, I’ll be watching the Oscars show on Sunday evening. I’ve watched every year since I was a kid — it was a family ritual in my Hollywood home. And, like millions of other movie fans, I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with the annual spectacle as the years have gone by. (Academy Awards viewership has plummeted in recent years.) There were no screen masterpieces released in 2020 to propel an audience spike — no Godfather or Do the Right Thing or Lawrence of Arabia or On the Waterfront. I saw most of this year’s nominated films — and other than the execrable The Trial of the Chicago Seven (memo to Aaron Sorkin: there were EIGHT defendants — you left out the Black guy in your title) and the dull-as-dishwater Mank, the other films were all uniformly fine. They all had the same somber and sensitive tone, which I suppose was appropriate for movies made during the last gasp of Trump and released during a plague year.
So if the movies themselves can’t juice up the Oscars ceremony on Sunday, the show’s producers will have to rely on reimagining the festivities. Supposedly that’s what they’re going to do — but I doubt they actually will. What do I think would make the Academy Awards compelling again? I’m glad you asked (because the producers didn’t).
Here’s my short list of new rules that would breathe some life into what has sadly become a flat and formulaic event. The first one is for Oscar victors, the rest are for the Academy and the show’s producers:
Make victory speeches snappier! If you’re not planning on a wardrobe malfunction or a drunken rant, then please deliver a short, lively speech if you’re lucky enough to win a gold statuette. No one wants to hear your laundry list of agents, producers, therapists, dog groomers etc. Thank four and no more. I used to think political statements livened up the proceedings, but now they sound like they’ve been scripted by talent managers. (Mark Ruffalo’s recent long-winded sermons were the last straw for me.) Say something witty about the movie you worked on (politics is allowed if the film was actually political — but keep it succinct). If you need guidance, watch video of Brits accepting awards — like the short, smart speeches by Daniel Day-Lewis (NOT the sloppy ones by Olivia Coleman).
Don’t show the trailers from nominated movies — show actual scenes from the films, as was done in the old pre-marketing days.
Show more cinema magic, like filmed tributes to legendary stars and directors and composers.
Cast your hosts. You’re Hollywood — you should know how to pick your leading players for the evening. They should be amusing and sophisticated. (I realize you don’t have a lot to pick from these days, but try).
Throw your net wider for nominations. I know, I know — you’re all about diversity these days. But why did even the “Black movies” have the same conventional feeling as the rest of the Oscar pack? Yes, Judas and the Black Messiah dug deeper into America’s dark 1960s history than The Trial of the Chicago Seven. But Daniel Kaluuya was a weak choice for the charismatic Fred Hampton. (I mean I love my Brits, but we can’t cast them in every American role.)
A final (personal) squawk — Composer Emil Mosseri should have been nominated last year for his glorious score for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His nomination for this year’s Minari felt like a belated consolation prize, which the Academy does too often. In fact, this is the kind of “little” film that too often get overlooked by the Oscars. (And yes, The Last Black Man was directed by my son Joe Talbot— but I’m still being objective.)
Time to Turn Up the Heat on Climate Criminals
President Joe Biden’s vow to slash global-warming pollution by at least half by the end of the decade is very encouraging – especially after four years of Trumpian climate denial. But watching the Greta Thunberg special on PBS last night was a grim reminder of how daunting a task the world now faces, as glaciers melt, sea levels rise to flood levels, the oceans grow more acidic, forests and entire towns are torched by wildfires, freak storms devastate major cities, and on and on. Even the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – two defiant bulwarks of climate denial – had to duly applaud Biden’s climate battle cry yesterday at a global Zoom summit.
But there are still major obstacles to Biden’s transformative plan to save the planet. And, as usual with anything good and essential, the opposition begins with Mitch McConnell and his Republican Senate cabal. McConnell has already denounced Biden’s sweeping climate plan, charging that it amounts to surrender to China, which “shamelessly” keeps spewing greenhouse gas emissions. Put aside the fact that China’s leaders have also vowed to phase out coal burning and other major sources of global warming. McConnell denouncing China is rich. His wife, Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, is practically a Politburo member of the Chinese Communist Party, along with other members of her family, whose wealth comes from a shipping giant with close ties to the Chinese dictatorship. McConnell and Chao are among those who should be investigated for collusion with Beijing as well as climate obstructionism.
And speaking of climate criminals, it’s also time to prosecute Michael Wirth, the CEO of Chevron Corp., the second largest oil corporation in the U.S. and a former Trump supporter and major climate denier. Wirth’s Chevron is compounding its global crimes by leading a major lobbying effort in Washington to block sanctions against the military thugs who took over Myanmar in a bloody coup. The vicious Myanmar junta is propped up by millions of dollars in taxes and fees paid by Chevron, which pumps oil out of a large field in that benighted country. In the first three months of this year, Chevron has paid over $2 million for a lobby campaign on behalf of Myanmar’s bloody dictators, who have killed more than 700 men, women and children so far as they try to consolidate their power. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged U.S. corporations to stop colluding with Myanmar’s corrupt military, but Chevron has rebuffed all human rights appeals.
Wirth is the same California-based CEO who last year bemoaned the state’s utility blackouts and yearned for the economic stability of Texas. In his speech before a Houston business group, Wirth failed to mention Chevron’s own responsibility for the climate-driven wildfires that have devastated California. And, of course, not long after Wirth sang the praises of Texas, Houston itself was reduced to Third World status by a freak winter storm.
It’s time to criminalize men like Mitch McConnell and Michael Wirth. Either they go, or the planet does.
Driving While Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s reaction to the Derek Chuavin verdict was utterly predictable. He blamed Black Lives Matter, claiming that the jury had caved to the racial justice movement. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, cops still are killing nonwhite people because… they feel like it.
Let’s just stay it: Tucker Carlson is a weenie. He’s always ben a weenie. A spoiled, rightwing brat who was given a seat at the big people’s table on Fox News after Bill O’Reilly finally got bounced for molesting the help — and little Tucker finally got all grown up and stuff and got rid of his bowtie. A WEENIE, in Carlson’s case, stands for White Extremely Entitled Nudnik (or Neo-Nazi, depending on his rant of the evening).
Carlson needs to get out of his posh bubble now and then. He needs a lesson about real life. He needs to be pulled over for a routine traffic violation by trigger-itchy Black cops. Police officers who regard him as suspicious, even dangerous — who think he fits the profile of an armed white nationalist (they’d be right in that conclusion). Then we’ll see how knee-jerk Carlson remains in defense of the police. After he’s been dragged from his luxury automobile, feels the business end of a police baton, has guns pointed at his head, is slapped in handcuffs and pinned face down to the ground.
I’m ready for the next step in the education of a weenie.
Bleeding America
I wanted to celebrate the historic conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd. I wanted to sing the praises of President Joe Biden and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for showing that authority can do the right thing. I wanted to join the chorus who cheered for teenager Darnella Frazier and the “bouquet” of brave Minneapolis witnesses who recorded Floyd’s horrific murder and tried to stop his police executioners and refused to let the Minneapolis Police Department cover up another murder. And I wanted to honor the 12 men and women on the jury — six white, six nonwhite — who performed a “deep service,” returning a guilty verdict on all three counts, instead of letting even one holdout force a hung jury, which is what many observers of the Chauvin trial expected. Yes, I wanted to celebrate all this — the saving of America’s soul, which is not being too dramatic, considering what was at stake in this most publicized of all police violence trials.
And then the cops killed another Black person — this time a teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio named Ma’Khia Bryant. And the body of Daunte Wright — killed by another cop during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis during the Chauvin trial — is not even cold yet.
And so, even as Derek Chauvin was led out of courtroom in handcuffs, we still can’t breathe, waiting for a cop somewhere in America to shoot and kill another African American citizen for no good reason.
“We don’t get to celebrate nothing,” said KC Traynor, one of the demonstrators who gathered outside the Columbus Police Department last night. “In the end, you know what, you can’t be Black.”
Message to right-wing cancel culture: “Shut your mouth”
“ Respect the chair, and shut your mouth.” That’s what Rep. Maxine Waters, the feisty, 82-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles, told Trumpian loudmouth Rep. Jim Jordan when he tried disrupting Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before her Congressional committee. Now House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Georgia nutjob Marilyn Taylor-Greene want to shut up Waters, urging Congressional punishment for Waters’s forthright remarks about police violence. As Minneapolis and the rest of America poised for the verdict in the police murder of George Floyd, Waters urged a Brooklyn Center audience to keep up the political pressure for police reform. Incendiary stuff. Right out of the Constitution. McCarthy and his wacky colleague tried comparing Waters’s rhetoric to Trump’s, when he whipped up a crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6. But sorry, Republican cancel czars, that’s apples and oranges.
Look, in these fractious times, there’s a lot of loose speech on the left and mostly the right that should be countered by facts — and in extreme cases by the law. But Maxine Waters urging the community to stay vigilant for justice as police violence continues unabated? That’s perfectly legitimate speech — even as Minneapolis clenches for the verdict.
Rep. Maxine Waters at protest against police brutality in suburban Minneapolis
It’s Spring… You’re Still Alive… Turn It Up
All around the world, people are dying from war and Covid and starvation. In America, we arm mass murderers with military weapons. But if you’re reading this, you’re still alive. So celebrate your resilient mortality. Here’s what I’m playing — loudly — this week to ward off the demons. To welcome the cherry blossoms and tulips and wild roses that are bursting forth all around me, heedless of the world’s violence. So dance your asses off, readers, while you still can.
Greta Van Fleet — Never heard of these three brothers (and a childhood friend drummer ) from small-town Michigan until a few days ago. Now I can’t stop playing “Heat Above,” the anthemic track from their new LP. I missed the band’s big debut last year on Saturday Night Live. And I missed all the hate-talk from critics… Lead singer Josh Kiszka sounds like the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury or a young Robert Plant. So? He’s short and gender-mysterious. So? I like the way that Greta Van Fleet things big — their sound is operatic. In a time of small-minded thinking and narrow marketing formulas, the Kiszka brothers reach for the heavens. The three brothers were raised by two bohemian parents, who encouraged them to dig through their eclectic record collection (Fairport Convention, Donovan, yes!) and library (Sartre and Nietzsche, oh my) — and most important — didn’t hover over them constantly.
Watch Greta Van Fleet’s “Heat Above” video. It’s loony and gorgeous. It will make you laugh and shake and feel again. If you like rock ‘n’ roll. Remember rock ‘n‘ roll? The song is also about something. Do you remember that, too? War and fire are consuming the earth, wails Riszka. But “Heat Above” lauds a peaceful army marching across the land. We do not fight for war/ But to save the lives of those who do so.
Here’s the rest of my playlist — a lucky dozen of the month:
“Quit Your Day Job” Rebecka Reinhard
“I Will Be Gone” Emily Rodgers
“All Bets Aside” Pageants
“Popshop” Courting
“Sunrise” (Live ) Norah Jones
“C’mon Be Cool” Fanclubwallet
“Californian Soil” London Grammar
“Kora” Ballake Sissoko
“Lady Rain” Roger Fahkr
“Place Names” Nick Waterhouse
“Howl” The Bones of JR Jones
“ Better Things to Do” Zoe Fitzgerald Carter
The Knife Edge of Samantha (Soft) Power
Samantha Power is an imperialist with a human face. She gets passionately angry, she sheds tears. She expresses the deepest regrets when U.S. power claims innocent lives abroad. But she knows who’s innocent, and who’s not. That was her prerogative as one of President Obama’s top national security advisors. In the Obama administration, Power could always be counted on to urge military intervention – in Libya, Syria, wherever she thought that U.S. might made right.
And now in the Biden administration, the president has named Samantha Power to oversee U.S.A.I.D. She is still a consummate imperialist – articulate, worldly, a relentless advocate for the U.S. as global watchdog, But now she will be in charge of the country’s “soft power” – foreign aid (with strings), diplomacy, cultural missions (propaganda). She’s always been a spokeswoman for empire with a human face. But now Power gets to wield the carrot instead of the stick.
“It’s not like U.S.A.I.D. is going to invade somebody,” remarked Gayle Smith, who ran the aid agency for President Obama and has also been retooled for the Biden administration.
But those of us who are veterans of the Vietnam antiwar movement remember the dark side of A.I.D. While U.S. soldiers were shooting and napalming Vietnamese, the aid agency was trying to win their hearts and minds. The propaganda efforts of U.S.A.I.D. were the flip side of the imperial coin. There was always a sinister symmetry between A.I.D. and the CIA.
In the topsy-turvy world of Washington politics, Senator Rand Paul – the libertarian nutjob from Kentucky – is what passes for a man of conscience, at least when it comes to America’s overseas follies. During Power’s Senate confirmation hearings last month, Paul grilled her about her past affection for U.S. military exploits. Wasn’t there a contradiction between Samantha Power the humanitarian and Samantha Power the imperialist? “If you’re talking about humanitarianism,” the senator pointed out, aside from natural causes “wars are the number one cause of famine around the world. Are you willing to admit that the Libyan and Syrian interventions you advocated for were mistakes?”
But Power batted away Paul’s efforts to re-set her. She saw nothing wrong with her military interventionism under Obama. And to bipartisan cheers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Power made clear that she will use her soft power perch at U.S.A.I.D. to target China, framing that rising power’s global reach as a growing threat to America’s, well, global reach.
Rising to the flag-waving occasion before the Senate committee, Power roundly condemned China’s “coercive and predatory approach, which is so transactional” in its dealings with developing countries that ultimately become dependent on Beijing through what Power snortingly referred to as “debt-trap diplomacy.” Hmm, reminds me of another superpower.
I’m all for President Biden finally declaring an end to America’s 20-year Afghanistan expedition, which the press likes to call our country’s longest war. (Memo to news desks: Afghanistan is the longest OVERSEAS war. The longest war fought by the U.S. government was actually the 100-year crusade to exterminate Native peoples.)
But while ending the endless war in Afghanistan, President Biden is also making clear that the U.S. will maintain its permanent war status. Our enemies are now China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Biden’s intelligence apparatus just announced. And Samantha Power’s soft power will be part of the U.S. arsenal.
When it comes to U.S. imperial policy, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Samantha Power will wield her soft stick on the National Security Council
Climate News Is a Crime Beat, Not Just an “Emergency”
I’m all for the urgent new message from Covering Climate Now (CCNow), the media lobbying group: “the emergency is now” and news organizations need to cover the galloping crisis with increased urgency. (The front page of my hometown San Francisco Chronicle reports today that California’s drought has grown so severe that the looming fire season promises to be a nightmare.) The new message by CCNow (whose executive director is my friend Mark Hertsgaard) was signed by the Guardian, Scientific American, Al-Jazeera and other organizations (but glaringly not by big corporate outlets like the New York Times, CBS, CNN or the Wall Street Journal). I know that CCNow is focused heavily on getting these big news organizations to feel the heat. But I think that climate activists need to go beyond the red alert stage and push the media to start covering the climate meltdown as a crime beat.
Burn, baby, burn: Fossil fuel profiteers should be treated as terrorists
We need to start naming the men (almost always men) who are responsible for raising the planet’s temperature and wreaking deadly environmental havoc. Who are these energy industry CEOs, corporate propagandists and lobbyists, government officials, political leaders? Name them and cover them like the social pariahs they are. Every time these men block legislation to counter the climate emergency, every time they disseminate false information about the fossil fuel industry, every time they deny any connection between their catastrophic capitalism and the freak storms, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and unseasonably strange weather that increasingly bedevil the world… this is when the news media must tell the truth and treat these men as what they are. Criminals on a world-wide scale. Guilty of major crimes against nature and humanity.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods: This primary offender raked in over $16 million last year
Covering climate destruction and loss of life is no longer just a scientific story. It’s a crime beat. And until our society begins criminalizing these rapidly proliferating assaults, these powerful men will continue operating like ruthless gangsters. We need to lock them up, before we all burn in hell.
Bring out your dead: An Extinction Rebellion protest
The Dark Alliance Between the CIA and the Media
Gary Webb, the brashly independent investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News, famously fell afoul of the CIA and the elite press after writing “Dark Alliance,” the 1996 expose of how Nicaragua’s Contra rebels helped finance their dirty war in the Reagan era by cocaine trafficking in U.S. inner cities – while their CIA backers conveniently looked the other way. At first lionized as a brave truth-teller – particularly in Black communities that were most hard hit by the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s – Webb was soon torn apart by the PR-sensitive CIA and its accomplices at the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Webb and his editors made some minor errors – as all investigative reporters do. Like Watergate heroes Woodward and Bernstein, they are generally able to refine their work as they pursue their prey along the investigative trail. But under ferocious attack from their big media competitors, the Mercury quickly folded and made Webb a scapegoat. With his career in ruins, Webb ended up killing himself in 2004.
This sad story came back to me this weekend when I screened Kill the Messenger the dramatic film about Webb, for my son Nat, who was outraged by the corporate media’s role in Webb’s destruction. Meanwhile I made my own link between the CIA’s targeting of Webb and the FBI’s role in Ernest Hemingway’s mental dissolution (see below).
As Nicholas Schou told The Intercept back in 2014, soon before the film about Webb was released, “Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have. He was never able to recover from that.”
The CIA, added Schou, “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility. They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas. They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded.”
I feel some residual guilt of my own about Webb’s professional and emotional decline. I was running Salon at the time – and looking back years later, I felt I should’ve hired Webb. Maybe my life raft would’ve saved him.
After Webb’s death, I did the next best thing I could think of – I hired Nick Schou to write Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, one of the titles in the Hot Books investigative series I was editing at the time for independent publisher Skyhorse. Schou had written the book on which Kill the Messenger was based. It was hard to find a Washington-savvy journalist to do Spooked. All the reporters on the national security beat whom I could think of were too, well, spooked to take on the CIA.
But Schou knew something about the dark labyrinth of national security and how its tentacles reached into newsrooms and studios. And, like Webb himself, he worked for a West Coast newspaper that was off the radar of Langley – the OC (Orange County) Weekly. Schou now works for a Santa Barbara newspaper.
As the Webb tragedy starkly demonstrated, the top national security reporters for the leading newspapers are embedded in the intelligence complex. These reporters are all beholden to the CIA, NSA, FBI etc. for access and even legitimacy. (And some are even secret intelligence assets.) When a journalist with stubborn integrity does emerge on this beat, they are soon forced out – as James Risen was at the New York Times in 2017, after years of butting heads with his editors and publisher over his aggressive coverage of surveillance of U.S. citizens and other dicey subjects. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Risen now works as a national security reporter for The Intercept.
These days you can energetically report on racial injustice, the climate emergency, voting rights, the immigration crisis, right-wing thuggery, gun industry lobbying, labor rights and a vast array of other burning domestic topics. Even the conservative, Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is trying to be more woke on these issues. But national security? Forget about it. It’s still the black hole down which the elite media throws the likes of Gary Webb and Julian Assange.
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Ken Burns, the JFK Library and the Pretty Packaging of American History
What the hell is wrong with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum? Operated by a federal agency -- the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – the JFK Library is aimed more at covering up the truth about the Kennedy presidency than revealing it. The latest JFK Library whitewash is tied to the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary series about Ernest Hemingway, which aired this week on PBS. I liked the televised biography enough to watch all six hours of it, particularly admiring the insights into Hemingway’s literary innovations by fellow writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Tobias Wolff and Edna O’Brien. But Burns (sponsored by the Bank of America and a host of PBS corporate underwriters) has an institutional talent for packaging American history in intriguing (to a point) but ultimately safe ways. The Burns-Novick Hemingway series was another good example of this canned Americana.
Where, for instance, was the explosive material about the FBI’s long surveillance of Hemingway, which ran for decades, until he finally took his own life in 1961? The FBI’s top commissar, J. Edgar Hoover, became suspicious of Hemingway’s anti-Franco writing and fundraising during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s — and Hemingway latter extended his anti-fascist activism through World War II, even attempting to set up a spy network to catch Nazi agents called the Crook Factory.
During the Cold War, Hoover’s FBI continued snooping on Hemingway because of his growing sympathies for Fidel Castro’s revolution. (Hemingway said the revolution “was the best thing that ever happened to Cuba.”) The great writer, who lived outside Havana in a manor he called Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), met the revolutionary leader only once, at a 1960 fishing competition. But that was enough for secret policeman Hoover to conclude that Hemingway was a dangerous Fidelista.
The Burn-Novick documentary presents Hemingway in his final years descending into a well of mental and physical anguish before finally making his inevitable rendezvous with death at his own hand. It’s true that Hemingway was always haunted by death – particularly after the suicide of his father – and struggled with alcoholism and other demons for most of his life. But his final suffering was undeniably aggravated by the relentless snooping of FBI agents – deepening fears of surveillance that Burns and Novick simply dismiss as the feverish paranoia of a man descending into madness.
Near the end of their epic biography, the filmmakers do put A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s friend and travel companion, on camera. Before he died, Hotchner wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, stating he believed that the FBI's surveillance "substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide,” and adding that he had "regretfully misjudged" his friend's fear of the security organization. None of this is in PBS’s Hemingway.
Now back to the JFK Library. Through a quirk, many of the Hemingway papers are housed there. I know from personal experience, researching both Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard, in which I made the case that Allen Dulles’s CIA carried out the assassination of JFK and its coverup, that the library’s directors stand in the way of researchers who are exploring uncomfortable historical truths. And so, once again, we have the JFK Library merrily promoting the Burns-Novick documentary of Hemingway, giving the filmmakers a platform to honor winners of the PEN/Hemingway Awards. Instead, the JFK Library should be filling in the gaps of the documentary, examining why the FBI considered Hemingway a national security threat and discussing the over 100 pages of FBI surveillance documents on the writer. But like Ken Burns, the JFK Library exists mainly to sugarcoat history not expose its disturbing truths.
One final howl about the JFK Library. Its curators just announced this year’s winner of the Profile in Courage Award. What brave freedom fighter did the library choose to honor after this year of living dangerously? None other than Senator Mitt Romney, because he voted to impeach Donald Trump. Romney also embarrassingly groveled before Trump in an unsuccessful effort to be named his secretary of state. And he voted against President Biden’s pandemic relief bill and opposed Biden’s efforts to expand Obamacare (despite his own extensive public health program when he was Massachusetts governor), raise the minimum wage to $15, rebuild U.S. infrastructure to join the 21st Century, protect voting rights for Black Americans, and other progressive initiatives.
This…this is the winner of the 2021 Profile in Courage Award? John F. Kennedy is again spinning in his Arlington grave because of the useful idiots at the JFK Library.
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Know Hope — And Demand Freedom for Navalny and Assange
“Know Hope.” That’s the graffiti spraypainted on some scruffy steps in my neighborhood. (And no, they weren’t written there by the millionaire Israeli street artist of the same name.) The words are scrawled in a way they can be easily overlooked, but they make me smile when I descend unsteadily on my cane.
We were devoid of hope throughout the Trump regime. And Obama (and Bansky) tried to market it during his presidency. But now hope feels like a long gulp of spring water after a throat-parching drought.
I argue with a young radical I know about Biden. He feels guilty about voting for him. Maybe Americans needed to feel even more immiserated under Trump before they finally took revolutionary action. No, I tell him – in my experience, despair only leads to more despair. People take action when they sense there is possibility.
In my aging lefty estimation, President Biden is better than I expected – more ambitious in his domestic goals and more defiant of Republican opposition than President Obama. Biden’s surprising expansiveness allows radicals and progressives to think bigger.
And when it comes to national security and foreign policy, the U.S. DOES need to think bigger – much bigger. Our government remains mired in Cold War think – endless wars against endless enemies, a grossly bloated military budget, and a dangerous global policing mentality.
Take the case of Julian Assange. Two years after being dragged out of the Ecuador Embassy in London, the Wikileaks critic of U.S. empire is still rotting in a British high-security prison. And even worse, the Biden administration is appealing the ruling of a UK magistrate that prevented Assange from being extradited to the U.S. (because our prisons are widely regarded as inhumane).
Meanwhile, the Western press is celebrating Russian dissident Alexei Navalny as a hero. He is and so are his supporters – like Anastasia Vasilyeva, the doctor just arrested outside of his bleak dungeon for speaking out about his deteriorating medical condition.
But so is Julian Assange. The continued incarceration of these two political prisoners reveals the continuing moral bankruptcy of the East and the West.
Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva being arrested outside of Alexei Navalny’s prison
Yes, the Pope should publicly demand the freeing of both Assange and Navalny, as their supporters have recently urged. But more important, we need mass movements on their behalf.
Know hope. We feel it now. And we need to demand more. We need to free our heroes.
The Five Nonfiction Masterpieces That Changed My Life (Plus a Bonus)
I’m reading (belatedly) Say Nothing, Patrick Raddan Keefe’s 2019 epic narrative about the Irish Troubles, and halfway through the book I’m utterly gobsmacked. As an Irish-American, I’ve long taken an interest in the bloody turmoil of my native land, was deeply moved by the films In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and The Crying Game. But I’ve never read anything as intricately plotted, emotionally intense and compulsively page-turning on the subject as Say Nothing.
It got me thinking. What are the other deeply researched and brilliantly written nonfiction books on BIG subjects? I’m not talking about exceptional memoirs or essay collections or investigative treatises – those books belong in entirely different categories. Think instead about the ambitious works of nonfiction narrative that are as complex, haunting and revealing as the best modern fiction you’ve read – or better.
Here’s my short, randomly-ordered, admittedly off-the-top of my head list. What are YOUR selections?
· Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. By Patrick Radden Keefe
Say Nothing: IRA militant Dolours Price
· The Best and the Brightest (about the architects of the Vietnam War). By David Halberstam
· And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic. By Randy Shilts
And the Band Played On: San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1970s
· How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. By Sarah Bakewell
· The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. By Philippe Sands
The Ratline: Otto Wachter and son
OK, and no false modesty here, I must add:
· The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. By David Talbot
I aimed at changing readers’ perceptions of power, politics and the U.S. nation state. And I wrote it with the dreamlike sorcery of a movie. That’s what these other nonfiction masterpieces did to me, for me – changed me forever.
The Devil’s Chessboard: President Kennedy and nemesis Gen. Curtis LeMay
Now Hear This — Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s “Waterlines”
Don’t you love it when songs suddenly uplift you? That’s the feeling I had with the very first song on Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s new LP, “Waterlines.” The song is called “Better Things to Do” and right away it establishes the beautiful melancholy of this extraordinary new album. Carter is steeped in the folk-rock-country music of the 1970s, when she grew up, and her new album has the heart-tugging, tightly produced feel of Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Randy Newman, Lowell George and Little Feat and the other great LPs of that decade.
In her liner notes, Carter ( who’s also a fine writer) comments that the album was mostly recorded (at legendary Fantasy Studios in Berkeley) in the “before times” when musicians could actually crowd into recording rooms. After we descended into the long plague year, we’re now emerging in a new era filled with “hope and sanity and expectation,” she writes, and a few of the songs on “Waterlines” are indeed playful and funky. But even though Carter wrote the songs on her new album before the pandemic, “Waterlines” somehow captures the strange mood of the time — somber, bittersweet, soulful. Like the opening tune, the LP seems mostly a reckoning with the past with all its lost joys and sorrows. The requiem feeling is perhaps even stronger because Fantasy, where a stellar group of studio musicians came together for Carter, has since shut down.
But if music like the songs on “Waterlines” can make you weep, it also makes you feel more alive. I’ve played the LP all the way through several times now — and when was the last time you listened to an album as an album?
OK, now time for full disclosure. I know Carter, I count her as a friend. I’ve watched her play live (in those good old days). In fact, she once took out her guitar after a little dinner party at my house and treated us to a few tunes (including John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.”) But I would never sing the praises of a friend’s LP, film or book unless I genuinely was moved to do so.
When you hear something as beautiful as this album, you just feel lucky that you know the artist. Do yourself a favor and listen for yourself.
Zoe Fitzgerald Carter
Good Friday and the Salvation of America
It was truly a Good Friday. Major League Baseball joined the corporate exodus from Georgia to protest state Republicans’ legislative attack on voting rights (are you listening Texas, Florida, Arizona etc?) America passed the 100 million mark in Covid vaccinations, nearly 40 precent of the eligible adult population, with authorities widening the net to all adults and adolescents in coming weeks. And perhaps most important, Lt. Richard Zimmerman – the longest serving officer in the Minneapolis Police Department—testified that Derek Chauvin’s brutal treatment of George Floyd was “uncalled for.” Since police almost always close ranks in cases like this, Zimmerman’s frank testimony was “extraordinary” in the words of the New York Times correspondents covering the trial. The Minneapolis police chief -- who has called the killing of Floyd “murder”-- is expected to go even further on the witness stand.
The George Floyd trial is as an accounting for America’s soul as well as a reckoning for Chauvin. Will the country finally declare that the police war on Black citizens must come to an end? The street protests that swept the nation after Floyd’s shocking killing last year did feel like a turning point, that enough people were finally so disgusted by the rampant violence against African Americans to truly change policing in the U.S. It wasn’t just Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who recorded the suffocation of Floyd, who was traumatized by his murder – it was all Americans with a heart and soul.
So we’ll now see whether at long last America has a sense of decency. Will the honest testimony of Chauvin’s colleagues and eyewitnesses lead to his conviction?
The meaning of “Good Friday” puzzles many people, even devout Christians. What’s so good about the day when Jesus was horribly executed by officials of the Roman Empire? “Good” in this historical context meant “holy,” scholars will tell you. The suffering and death of Christ was meant to save humankind. And the martyrdom of George Floyd is another test of our nation’s soul.
Watergate: The Myth and Reality
Following the death earlier this week of neofascist militant G. Gordon Liddy, the independent British scholar John Simkin emailed his backgrounder on Watergate to a group of Kennedy researchers. I find Simkin’s primer on the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon to be one of the most insightful commentaries I’ve read on the subject. So I’m posting Simkin’s analysis, which he originally published on his educational web site, for all interested readers:
Richard Nixon believed that Watergate was a conspiracy organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to remove him from power. It is one of the few things that I think Nixon was right about. It is not a coincidence that all those involved in Watergate were either officers or assets of the intelligence services - McCord and Liddy (FBI) - McCord, Hunt, Barker, Gonzalez and Martinez (CIA).
Before he became president, Nixon received information from a source within the intelligence services that both the CIA and the FBI were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its cover-up. Nixon told his key aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman about this as early as 1969. Nixon said that he would use this information to exert pressure on these organizations. (1)
Nixon also decided to create his own intelligence agency. After his election he appointed Jack Caulfield, as Staff Assistant to the President. In March 1969, Caulfield met with Anthony Ulasewicz, a former member of the NYPD's Bureau of Special Service and Investigation. "Caulfield outlined the big secret. He said the White House wanted to set up its own investigative resource which would be quite separate from the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service... The new administration, Caulfield said, was finding government intelligence methods to be deficient... Caulfield claimed that Ehrlichman, Nixon's Counsel at the White House, had assigned him to check out what it would cost to set up an off the books, secret intelligence operation." (2)
Nixon had been told the Bay of Pigs operation held the key to understanding the assassination. Haldeman claims in his book The Ends of Power (1978): "Ehrlichman had found himself in the middle of this feud as far back as 1969, immediately after Nixon assumed office. Nixon had called Ehrlichman into his office and said he wanted all the facts and documents the CIA had on the Bay of Pigs, a complete report on the whole project. About six months after that 1969 conversations, Ehrlichman had stopped in my office. 'Those bastards in Langley are holding back something. They just dig in their heels and say the President can't have it. Period. Imagine that! The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document relating to a military operation, and the spooks say he can't have it.' ". (3)
Although he had his own secret intelligence operation (Operation Sandwedge) Nixon still wanted to get more control over the intelligence services. In 1970 Nixon commissioned one of his aides, Tom Charles Huston, the former leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, to write a report on how the different agencies could work together against the threat from the "New Left". Huston's 43-page document called for six activities, some of which were clearly illegal. They included electronic surveillance of persons and groups "who pose a major threat to internal security"; monitoring of American citizens by international communications facilities; the relaxation of restrictions on the covert opening of mail by federal agents; surreptitious entries and burglaries to gain information on the groups and the recruitment of more campus informants. The most controversial aspect of the recommendations was the creation of a new interagency intelligence command responsible for internal security. (4)
The Huston Plan was presented at a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover (FBI), Richard Helms (CIA), Lieutenant General Donald V. Bennett (Defense Intelligence Agency) and Noel Gayler (National Security Agency) in early June 1970. Hoover and Helms saw this as an attempt by Nixon to gain more control over their agencies. In his memoirs Nixon argued that "Hoover's dissent... was primarily a case of his inability to overcome his natural resistance to cooperating with the CIA or the other intelligence agencies... I knew that if Hoover had decided not to cooperate, it would matter little what I decided or approved... On July 28, five days later, before the plan could be implemented, I withdrew my approval." (5)
On 17th June, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord were arrested at 2.30 am during a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon afterwards E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy were also arrested. John Dean, counsel to the president, reported to H. R. Haldeman that the FBI believed that the Watergate break-in was a CIA operation: "The FBI is convinced it’s the CIA. McCord and the Cubans are all ex-CIA people. Practically everyone who went in there was connected to the agency. And now the FBI finds a Mexican bank involved which also sounds like the CIA." Dean added that L. Patrick Gray (acting FBI director) was "looking for a way out of this mess" and suggested that he should ask Vernon Walters (Deputy Director of CIA) to "turn off" the investigation in Mexico. (7)
John Dean contacted Jack Caulfield to discover what had happened. He confirmed that G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had been involved in the operation. Jeb Magruder, special assistant to the president, then rang Dean on behalf of John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General. "Listen, John, this is all that dumb... Liddy's fault. He blew it. The stupid bastard. He should have never used McCord. He never told us he was using McCord. It was stupid. The mess is all his fault." When Dean contacted Liddy he admitted organizing the break-in but claimed that E. Howard Hunt "was the guy who got me the Cubans." (8)
Dean managed to persuade Gray, the acting FBI director, to take part in the cover up by destroying documents in Hunt's White House safe. This included notebooks that Hunt had used as an operational diary during his CIA years. "These reportedly contained the names of CIA agents and officers, their telephone numbers, code words and operational details that collectively amounted to a diary of E. Howard Hunt's clandestine career" and details of CIA's illegal activities during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. (9)
Nixon told H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, before their meeting with Richard Helms, the director of CIA, on 23rd June 1972, that they should insist on talking about the involvement of Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation as a lever to get the CIA to help in the cover-up. "Hunt... will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of things... tell them we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further... Tell them it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA." (10)
In his account of the meeting, The Ends of Power (1978) Haldeman claimed that after Helms refused to help with the cover-up he "played Nixon's trump card". Haldeman said: "The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." In response to this: "Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, 'The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.' Silence. I just sat there, I was absolutely shocked by Helm's violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?" (11)
This account, published in 1978, proved to be very embarrassing for Helms. When he wrote his own interpretation of the meeting in 2003 he admitted that Haldeman raised the issue of the Bay of Pigs, but denied that he got angry with him and said "I did not shout in the White House, and cannot even remember ever having shouted in my own office." Helms claims all he said was "The Bay of Pigs hasn't got a damned thing to do with this. And, what's more, there's nothing about the Bay of Pigs that's not already in the public domain." (12)
The best person to know the connection between the Bay of Pigs and Watergate Scandal was E. Howard Hunt as he was involved in both events. He remained silent although his wife Dorothy Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. On 8th December, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had a meeting with Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick, Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: "Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative." (13)
As Peter Dale Scott pointed out: "Of the more than a dozen suspicious deaths in the case of Watergate... perhaps the most significant death was that of Dorothy Hunt in the crash of United Air Lines in December 1972. The crash was investigated for possible sabotage by both the FBI and a congressional committee, but sabotage was never proven. Nevertheless, some people assumed that Dorothy Hunt was murdered (along with the dozens of others in the plane)... Howard Hunt, who dropped all further demands on the White House and agreed to plead guilty (to the Watergate burglary in January 1973)." (14)
Hunt died of pneumonia on 23rd January, 2007. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published a few months later. In the book he admitted being paid "hush money" to keep quiet about what he knew about the background details of Watergate. He also felt guilty that he received $250,000 as a result of his wife’s death: "She waved, I waved back, and she entered the doors of the airline ticket office. Once inside, she did her shopping, and, apparently as an afterthought, she bought $250,000 in accident insurance from an airport vending machine." However, he did not believe his wife had been murdered. (15)
Despite attempts to hide the connections between the Nixon administration and Watergate break-in, most of the details reached the public domain and Nixon was forced to resign and several of his close associates were sent to prison. This was mainly due to articles written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward later revealed that on 19th June 1972 he telephoned a man who he called "an old friend" for information about the burglars. This man, who Woodward claims was a high-ranking federal employee, was willing to help him as long as he was never named as a source. Instead he became known as Deep Throat. (16)
Most of the information that brought down Nixon came from Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein refused to identify their source but in May 2005 a lawyer working for Mark Felt, the former Associate Director of the FBI, told Vanity Fair magazine that his client was Deep Throat. On 3rd June 2005, Bob Woodward wrote an article in The Guardian confirming that Felt was Deep Throat and that he had provided him with important information during the Watergate investigation. (17)
Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post at the time of Watergate, also said that Felt was Deep Throat. However, Carl Bernstein was quick to add that Felt was only one of several important sources. Bernstein is clearly right about this. Some of the information leaked to the journalists could only have come from someone in the higher echelons of the CIA. Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) also believes that Deep Throat was a former senior official of the CIA. Her candidate is Richard Ober, who worked under James Jesus Angleton at the CIA. Ober, as head of Operation CHAOS (domestic espionage project targeting the American people from 1967 to 1974 whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements), was given an office in the White House and worked closely with Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman during this period. (18)
The claims that Davis became even more convincing when the book was originally published in 1979, Katharine Graham (probably under instructions from the CIA) persuaded the publishers William Jovanovich, to pulp the 20,000 printed copies of the book. It was not only revealing Ober as one of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sources that got her into trouble. It was also the fact that she exposed Ben Bradlee as a CIA asset as far back as 1952 when he was serving as a press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. (19) Bradlee was also a childhood friend of Richard Helms and was at Harvard with Ober. Both men left in 1944 to serve in the war: Ober (Office of Strategic Services) and Bradlee (Office of Naval Intelligence). (20)
In their autobiographies both Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt say they are puzzled by Nixon's belief that the CIA, the Bay of Pigs Operation and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy were in some way connected. It has to be remembered that Nixon first made this claim in 1969, three years before Watergate. It was a time when few JFK researchers were making this link. This only became mainstream conspiracy thinking after the publication of The Last Investigation in 1993. The book's author, Gaeton Fonzi, the staff investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, pointed out, this was not just about recruiting angry Cubans from the failed operation, but the way Kennedy reacted to the disaster by threatening to "splinter" the CIA into "a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". (21)
There are two important questions that need to be asked about the Watergate break-in. The first is what were the motives behind the break-in. As Richard Helms later pointed out in his autobiography: "Press reports soon indicated that Hunt and McCord and their confederates were attempting to photograph files, bug the telephones, and arrange electronic monitoring of the Democratic Committee. I could not understand why anyone would think there was anything to be gained from such a half-baked and technically difficult operation that would possibly warrant the risks involved." (22)
Helms is correct, the operation does not make any sense at all. The second question is even more important. Why was it done so badly? The operation involved several people who had carried out other successful intelligence operations. It was also in direct contrast to other Nixon dirty tricks campaigns. Why did the burglars leave so many clues behind that made it inevitable that they would be caught and at the same time provide links to the Nixon administration? Why did James W. McCord at the preliminary hearing confess to being a former member of the CIA? Bob Woodward admits that this was the reason why he decided this was an important story. (23)
Here is a list of some of the mistakes they made in the Watergate operation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon:
(1) The money to pay for the Watergate operation came from CREEP. It would have been possible to have found a way of transferring this money to the Watergate burglars without it being traceable back to CREEP. For example, see how Anthony Ulasewicz got his money from Nixon. As counsel for the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, G. Gordon Liddy, acquired two cheques that amounted to $114,000. This money came from an illegal U.S. corporate contribution laundered in Mexico and Dwayne Andreas, a Democrat who was a secret Nixon supporter. Liddy handed these cheques to E. Howard Hunt. He then gave these cheques to Bernard L. Barker who paid them into his own bank account. In this way it was possible to link Nixon with a Watergate burglar.
(2) On 22nd May, 1972, James W. McCord booked Alfred C. Baldwin and himself into the Howard Johnson Motor Inn opposite the Watergate building (room 419). The room was booked in the name of McCord’s company. During his stay in this room Baldwin made several long-distance phone calls to his parents. This information was later used during the trial of the Watergate burglars.
(3) On the eve of the first Watergate break-in the team had a meeting in the Howard Johnson Motor Inn’s Continental Room. The booking was made on the stationary of a Miami firm that included Bernard L. Barker among its directors. Again, this was easily traceable.
(4) In the first Watergate break-in the target was Larry O'Brien’s office. In fact, they actually entered the office of R. Spencer Oliver, the chairman of the association of Democratic state chairman. Two bugs were placed in two phones in order to record the telephone conversations of O’Brien. In fact, O’Brien never used this office telephone.
(5) E. Howard Hunt was in charge of photographing documents found in the DNC offices. The two rolls of film were supposed to be developed by a friend of James McCord. This did not happen and eventually Hunt took the film to Miami for Bernard Barker to deal with. Barker had them developed by Rich’s Camera Shop. Once again the conspirators were providing evidence of being involved in the Watergate break-in.
(6) The developed prints showed gloved hands holding them down and a shag rug in the background. There was no shag rug in the DNC offices. Therefore it seems the Democratic Party documents must have been taken away from the office to be photographed. McCord later claimed that he cannot remember details of the photographing of the documents. Liddy and Jeb Magruder saw them before being put in John Mitchell’s desk (they were shredded during the cover-up operation).
(7) After the break-in Alfred Baldwin and James McCord moved to room 723 of the Howard Johnson Motor Inn in order to get a better view of the DNC offices. It became Baldwin’s job to eavesdrop the phone calls. Over the next 20 days Baldwin listened to over 200 phone calls. These were not recorded. Baldwin made notes and typed up summaries. Nor did Baldwin listen to all phone calls coming in. For example, he took his meals outside his room. Any phone calls taking place at this time would have been missed.
(8) It soon became clear that the bug on one of the phones installed by McCord was not working. As a result of the defective bug, McCord decided that they would have to break-in to the Watergate office. He also heard that a representative of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War had a desk at the DNC. McCord argued that it was worth going in to see what they could discover about the anti-war activists. Liddy later claimed that the real reason for the second break-in was “to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him.”
(9) Liddy drove his distinctive Buick-powered green Jeep into Washington on the night of the second Watergate break-in. He was stopped by a policeman after jumping a yellow light. He was let off with a warning. He parked his car right outside the Watergate building.
(10) The burglars then met up in room 214 before the break-in. Liddy gave each man between $200 and $800 in $100 bills with serial numbers close in sequence. McCord gave out six walkie-talkies. Two of these did not work (dead batteries).
(11) McCord taped the 6th, 8th and 9th floor stairwell doors and the garage level door. Later it was reported that the tape on the garage - level lock was gone. Hunt argued that a guard must have done this and suggested the operation should be aborted. Liddy and McCord argued that the operation must continue. McCord then went back an re-taped the garage-level door. Later the police pointed out that there was no need to tape the door as it opened from that side without a key. The tape served only as a sign to the police that there had been a break-in.
(12) McCord later claimed that after the break-in he removed the tape on all the doors. This was not true and soon after midnight the security guard, Frank Wills, discovered that several doors had been taped to stay unlocked. He told his superior about this but it was not until 1.47 a.m. that he notified the police.
(13) The burglars heard footsteps coming up the stairwell. Bernard Barker turned off the walkie-talkie (it was making a slight noise). Alfred Baldwin was watching events from his hotel room. When he saw the police walking up the stairwell steps he radioed a warning. However, as the walkie-talkie was turned off, the burglars remained unaware of the arrival of the police.
(14) When arrested Bernard Barker had his hotel key in his pocket (314). This enabled the police to find traceable material in Barker’s hotel room.
(15) When Hunt and Liddy realized that the burglars had been arrested, they attempted to remove traceable material from their hotel room (214). However, they left a briefcase containing $4,600. The money was in hundred dollar bills in sequential serial numbers that linked to the money found on the Watergate burglars.
(16) When Hunt arrived at Baldwin’s hotel room he made a phone call to Douglas Caddy, a lawyer who had worked with him at Mullen Company (a CIA front organization). Baldwin heard him discussing money, bail and bonds.
(17) Hunt told Baldwin to load McCord’s van with the listening post equipment and the Gemstone file and drive it to McCord’s house in Rockville. Surprisingly, the FBI did not order a search of McCord’s home and so they did not discover the contents of the van.
(18) It was vitally important to get McCord’s release from prison before it was discovered his links with the CIA. However, Hunt or Liddy made no attempt to contact people like Mitchell who could have organized this via Robert Mardian or Richard Kleindienst. Hunt later blamed Liddy for this as he assumed he would have phoned the White House or the Justice Department who would in turn have contacted the D.C. police chief in order to get the men released.
(19) Hunt went to his White House office where he placed a collection of incriminating materials (McCord’s electronic gear, address books, notebooks, etc.) in his safe. The safe also contained a revolver and documents on Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Kennedy and State Department memos. Hunt once again phoned Caddy from his office.
(20) Liddy eventually contacts Magruder via the White House switchboard. This was later used to link Liddy and Magruder to the break-in.
(21) Later that day Jeb Magruder told Hugh Sloan, the FCRP treasurer, that: “Our boys got caught last night. It was my mistake and I used someone from here, something I told them I’d never do.”
(22) Police took an address book from Bernard Barker. It contained the notation “WH HH” and Howard Hunt’s telephone number.
(23) Police took an address book from Eugenio Martinez. It contained the notation “H. Hunt WH” and Howard Hunt’s telephone number. He also had cheque for $6.36 signed by E. Howard Hunt.
(24) Alfred Baldwin told his story to a lawyer called John Cassidento, a strong supporter of the Democratic Party. He did not tell the authorities but did pass this information onto Larry O’Brien. The Democrats now knew that people like E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy were involved in the Watergate break-in.
References
(1) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 49
(2) Anthony Ulasewicz, The President's Private Eye (1990) page 177
(3) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 49
(4) Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (1984) page 99
(5) Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978) page 474
(7) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 54
(8) John Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (1976) pages 92-97
(9) Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (1984) page 225
(10) Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978) page 474
(10) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) pages 640-641
(12) Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (2003) pages 8-10
(13) Sherman Skolnick, The Secret History of Airplane Sabotage (8th June, 2001)
(14) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) page 306
(15) E.Howard Hunt, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond (2007) page 264
(16) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men (1974) pages 71-74
(17) Bob Woodward, The Guardian (3rd June, 2005)
(18) Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979) pages 266-267
(19) Deborah Davis, interviewed by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press (1992)
(20) Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979) page 225
(21) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) page 44
(22) Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (2003) pages 7-8
(23) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men (1974) page 18
Roast in Hell, G. Gordon Liddy, Dark Foe of Democracy
He lived long enough to become a perversely beloved American character, sharing a stage at one point with onetime target Timothy Leary, the LSD guru, and hosting his own right-wing radio show. But G. Gordon Liddy, who died on Tuesday, was not just a “dirty trickster” for President Richard Nixon and “mastermind” of the Watergate break-in. He was a thug, a deep-state gargoyle. And I’m glad that I lived long enough to spit (metaphorically) on his grave.
Among the many felonies that Liddy proposed or actually carried out was an assassination plot against syndicated Washington columnist Jack Anderson, who was seen as a security threat by the Nixon administration (which meant Nixon and his men didn’t like the scoops that Anderson was publishing). Liddy seriously proposed that he and his fellow hit men kill the journalist with a drug overdose or by engineering a car crash. Liddy confessed the planned murder – which was rejected as too extreme even by Nixon’s standards – in a face-to-face meeting with Anderson that was filmed for a 1991 CNBC show.
Anderson escaped unscathed during Nixon’s reign of terror. But how many others fell victim to Liddy and other Nixon henchmen? Dorothy Hunt – the wife of CIA spook and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt – was among those who died mysterious deaths during these dark times, killed in a 1972 plane crash along with a CBS newswoman who was working with her on a Watergate tell-all.
And Jacobin magazine just ran a lengthy report on the 1969 assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton based on over 400 newly obtained pages of secret FBI documents. According to Jacobin, the FBI and Nixon officials were alarmed by young, charismatic Hampton’s efforts at uniting radical groups across racial lines. It’s important to fully understand the covert violence against radical leaders and others who were deemed national security threats in the 1960s and ‘70s, Jacobin stated, because “a fuller understanding of this thinking and methodology matters for a new left aiming to avoid the bureau’s efforts at disruption in the twenty-first century.”
I’ve been making this case for many years now. The assassination of Hampton, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and many other known and unknown government targets is not only of historical importance. Full disclosure about these traumatic events will also protect future progressive leaders.
Power always resents dissent. It always acts to silence oppositional figures seen as threats. It always seeks to cloak its violence in darkness. So I’m not one of those who note the passing of G. Gordon Liddy with an ironic chuckle. He was a vicious enemy of American democracy – and he had a lot more official stature and muscle than the violent protesters who overran the Capitol on January 6.
So roast in hell, G. Gordon Liddy. Enjoy your eternal barbecue.
Liddy took aim at American democracy
Joe Biden’s Big (But Not Big Enough) Bet on America
Can America join the modern world, rebuilding its decaying bridges and highways and creating a climate-crisis infrastructure of electric car stations and renewable energy facilities – while energizing a diverse, unionized workforce as the “backbone” of national prosperity? Joe Biden’s $2 trillion plan is truly transformative. And, of course, the Republican Party and its corporate masters have already denounced the plan, since it would be subsidized by a partial rollback of the huge Trump corporate tax cut. Republicans have already formed a group called the Coalition to Protect American Workers to fight Biden’s Build Back Better bill. (Don’t you love the Republican use of Orwellian language? They’re always naming things the exact opposite of what they truly are – in this case an organization to protect the wealthiest Americans.)
In our new Alice in Wonderland world, Washington Democrats have actually grown spines. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer -- who used to slink through Capitol halls with a “kick me” sign on his back affixed by slithery Mitch McConnell – is already exploring the same fast-track reconciliation process used to pass Biden’s big Covid relief bill without a single Republican vote. Go, Chuck, go.
When Washington Democrats act boldly, you know the country is in desperate shape. Everything is broken, and we’re woefully unprepared for the stormy future. Even corporate America knows we urgently need to upgrade our 1950s-era infrastructure – with business executives themselves as primary benefactors. They just don’t want to pay for this big investment in our future. But fuck the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce. For too long their members have been looting the national treasury. Now it’s payback time.
As progressive members of Congress have pointed out, Biden’s $2 trillion price tag – as breathtaking as it sounds to the Mitch McConnell crowd – is actually far too low. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laid out a persuasive case for much higher pubic investment on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, calling for $10 trillion in spending over the next 10 years. As AOC pointed out, Biden’s current Build Back Better bill includes $40 billion for public housing renewal across the nation after years of Republican defunding – but New York City’s decrepit public housing alone requires that amount.
So, yes, if America is truly to join the modern world, Joe Biden’s bill is a great beginning. But it’s only a beginning.
