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 soc
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 agentsto 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
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.
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.
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 an 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.
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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.”
Reprinted with permission
from The
Unz Review.
Ron
Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for
the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is
also the founder of RonUnz.org
Copyright
© 2019 The Unz
Review
