1 DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER OF THE FB(P)I
BLACKMAILER-IN-CHIEF
1905
The Department of Justice created a Bureau of Criminal Identification as a centralized reference collection for the fingerprints of American citizens.2 FBI
The United States Military Academy had always been merely an engineering school. Late in this year, wrestling and boxing were added to its curriculum to satisfy President Theodore Roosevelt. The Point’s wrestling coach from 1906 until 1942 would be one-eyed Tom Jenkins, a former national champion from Cleveland whose motto was “There ain’t no hold that can’t be broke.”
1907
The Hoover vacuum cleaner and Maytag washer were introduced.
1. The Federal Bureau of Persecution through “Investigation.” 2. No standard would ever be developed as to precisely how many points of similarity a crime scene fingerprint needs to possess, in order to constitute “a positive match” with a fingerprint from this file. Some investigators would require 18 points of similarity, some as few as 8 — it appears that this has come to depend entirely upon how identified an individual investigator is, with the incarceration of the guilty as opposed to the freedom of the innocent, and with how apt that expert is at approximating an attitude of sincerity while on the witness stand. If, some fine day, someone accuses you of having been in a place where you have never been, and of having done something that you know you would never do, please do not take this personally — it’s just our system. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1921
August 22, Monday: With the return of the country to “normalcy” under President Warren G. Harding, the federal Bureau of Investigation returned to its pre-WWI role of fighting the few federal crimes. The years until 1933 would be sometimes referred to as “the lawless years” due to the ill-advised Prohibition, which had made it illegal to sell or import intoxicating beverages, and due to the public disregard for this new Constitutional amendment — which had granted to gangsters a steady stream of income, and had granted to the federal government a continuous self-legitimation as “fighting the bad guys.” Because this ignoring of Prohibition amounted to an economic crime, it was the Department of the Treasury rather than the Department of Justice, that had jurisdiction. When the federal Bureau of Investigation, as part of the Department of Justice, went to investigate the economic activities of Al Capone, therefore, they would seek him as a “fugitive federal witness,” and when it very belatedly and reluctantly moved to control race lynchings sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, it needed to resort to the Mann Act to take out Louisiana’s hot-blooded “Imperial Kleagle.” A new federal Bureau of Investigation Director, William J. Burns, who had previously run his own detective agency, would appoint a 26-year-old graduate of George Washington University Law School, J. Edgar Hoover, as Assistant Director. Hoover had been working at the Department of Justice since 1917, where he had made a name for himself as the head of the enemy alien operations of WWI and as the leader of the investigation of suspected anarchists and communists in the General Intelligence Division under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. FBI
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(Jesus had tried in the Sermon on the Mount to advise us not to trust the agenda of “resisting evil,” a righteous cause, and we had, of course, ignored him. What J. Edgar was all about, of course, was the resisting of evil, a righteous cause — those evil enemy aliens among us, who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic anarchists who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic communists who needed to be persecuted, and homosexuals, and black-hearted men like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., et cetera ad infinitum. Who would have supposed at the time, that this former head of a private detective agency, in appointing this clean-cut, well-educated young man in a suit –a force for decency– was appointing someone who was going to disgrace our nation and get a federal building named after him?)
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1924
May 10, Saturday: Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone selected J. Edgar Hoover to be Acting Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation, headquartered in Washington DC. When Hoover took over, the Bureau had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents who worked out of field offices in nine cities. By the end of the year, Hoover would be Director. By the end of the decade, there would be approximately 30 field offices, with Divisional headquarters in New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Portland.
(Jesus had tried in the Sermon on the Mount to advise us not to trust the agenda of “resisting evil,” a righteous cause, and we had, of course, ignored him. What J. Edgar was all about all along, of course, was the resisting of evil, a righteous cause — those evil enemy aliens among us, who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic anarchists who needed to be persecuted, those evil domestic communists who needed to be persecuted, and homosexuals, and black-hearted men like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., et cetera ad infinitum. Who would have supposed at the time, that this former head of a private detective agency, in appointing this clean-cut, well-educated young man in a suit –a force for decency– was appointing someone who was going to disgrace our nation and get a federal building named after him?) FBI
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May 21, Wednesday: In what will become one of the most celebrated crimes of the century, two teenagers from well- to-do families, Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr., 19, and Richard A. Loeb, 18, already college graduates, abducted 14-year-old Bobby Franks off a Chicago street and killed him, taking his body to a marshland where they poured hydrochloric acid over it and then stuffed it in a drainage pipe. Their intent was to commit the “perfect crime.” That evening they called the Franks family to inform them that their son had been kidnapped, demanding a ransom.
May 22, Thursday: As Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb attempted to hatch their ransom scheme, the body of their victim Bobby Franks was discovered. Leopold’s glasses were found at the scene and the two were taken into custody by Chicago police.
The Concerto for piano and winds by Igor Stravinsky was performed publicly for the initial time, at the Paris Opéra, with the composer himself at the keyboard. Although at the beginning of the largo movement conductor Serge Koussevitzky needed to hum the first few bars to the composer, who had forgotten them, the work was a triumphant success.
1928
January 1, Sunday: Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover established a formal training course for new Agents consisting of a 2-month initial assignment to the Washington Field Office, and indicated that only new Agents between 25 and 35 years of age would be hired. He returned to the earlier preference for Special Agents with law or accounting experience. FBI
1933
During this year 42 black Americans would be offed by white lynch mobs. The federal government, including the FBI, would do absolutely nothing about this because our president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a Democrat. It was an uneasy alliance between “liberal” Northern Democrats and “conservative” Southern Democrats that, election after election, would be keeping him in power. For him to support anti-lynching legislation would be for him to split his support base, which was made up in roughly equal parts of white Northerners who did not much care what was happening to black Americans down south, and white Southerners who cared not at all that bad things would occasionally happen to the “uppity” among their black neighbors. (How do we know this? –We know this because FDR himself clearly explained his situation to the NAACP’s Walter White: saving the lives of these black men would cost him more, in terms of support, than their lives were worth to him.)
John R. Kellam attended a long lecture by the new Director of the federal Bureau of Investigation, later to become known as the FBI, named J. Edgar Hoover, and was for the time being suitably impressed: He was full of what a wonderful organization that was and he was seeing to it that it was increasing in efficiency and effectiveness, catching only the bad guys, only doing that when their evidence was straight and true and sufficient for “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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convictions. If you were innocent, you’d welcome the FBI coming to ask about anything. If you were guilty, you’d better not see the FBI.
John would have occasion, later in life, to adjust this favorable first impression: All that good first impression was blown away in January 1945, during my own trial in Toledo federal district court without benefit of in-court counsel and representation, when two of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI operatives would easily resort to entirely unnecessary lies in order to “prove” all but one of my character witnesses wrong about my reasons for claiming to be a conscientious objector.
1936
May 24, Sunday: Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were notified that authority to investigate “foreign” associations inside the United States of America, to discover possible subversiveness, had been granted to Director J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a breakfast meeting, and then confirmed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Gosh, what an excellent license!
1941
December 7 (7:40AM Honolulu time; December 8th in Tokyo), Sunday, a day that shall live in infamy: Admiral Husband Kimmel was giving his sailors one last weekend of liberty so they would have a chance to say farewell to their loved ones, and his fleet was all prepared to steam out of Pearl Harbor on Monday, December 8th, to seek a showdown Trafalgar-like battle with the Japanese fleet, destroying its offensive capabilities. The admiral’s battle plan was 113 pages long and had already been approved by Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations.
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But that’s not what happened, is it? The Japanese were a day ahead of us. (I’m reminded of the time one of our draught horses was sick. Grandpa had a piece of water hose from an old washing machine, hanging out in the barn for just such purposes, and so, to get his horse to take its medicine, he shoved the hose down the horse’s throat and poured the medicine down the hose. However, he hadn’t gotten that hose far enough down the horse’s throat –so the medicine wouldn’t go down –so he put his lips to the end of the hose, and went to blow the medicine down the hose. Well, I’ll never forget this until the day I die — that horse blew first.)
Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, and attacked Great Britain, invading Siam and Malaya and occupying the International Settlement at Shanghai. A sneak attack! (Well, but although the Japanese naval forces did not go ashore and take possession of the Kota Baharu airport until later in the day, they actually began to shell the Malayan coast at Kota Baharu and at Singora and Pattani, Thailand an hour and a half prior to the first activity at Pearl Harbor — which is strange behavior indeed for someone who is attempting to sneak up on your in your slumbers!) Soon a Japanese reply rejecting the United States note of November 26th would be delivered at Washington DC, and Japan would declare a state of war with the United States and Great Britain. Later in the day, the Netherlands East Indies, Costa Rica, Guatamala, and Canada would declare war against Japan. I was on my way to one of the Young Friends’ meetings Sunday evening at about seven o’clock when the news of Pearl Harbor came over my car radio. Only a few others arriving there had heard it. JOHN R. KELLAM
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Japanese carrier-based horizontal bombers, dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters totaling 360 aircraft from naval Striking Force under Vice Admiral C. Nagumo heavily attacked ships of the United States Pacific Fleet and military installations at Pearl Harbor and other places on Oahu. Four battleships, 1 minelayer, and 1 target ship were sunk; 4 battleships, 3 cruisers, 3 destroyers, 1 seaplane tender, and 1 repair ship were damaged. Navy Yard and Naval Base, Pearl Harbor; Naval Air Station, Ford Island; Naval Patrol Plane Station, Kaneohe; Marine Corps airfield, Ewa; Army airfields Hickam, Wheeler, and Bellows were damaged; 188 Naval and Army aircraft were destroyed.
Killed or missing: • Navy...... 2,004 • Marine Corps... 108 • Army...... 222
Wounded: • Navy...... 912 • Marine Corps.... 75 • Army...... 360
[Personnel casualty statistics for the Pearl Harbor attack have been revised several times after evaluation of new data. The figures presented here were compiled in 1955 from official sources.]
Japanese losses: •5 kaiten suicide submarines • 28 aircraft • fewer than 100 men
Two Japanese destroyers shelled Midway Island. Japanese airplanes bombed Singapore, killing 63. Then bombs began to fall in Manila and other targets on Luzon and Davao in the Philippines as well as Guam, Wake Island, Midway, and Hong Kong. Japanese troops took possession of Shanghai, including the buildings of the United States garrison.
United States naval vessels sunk by air attack, Pearl Harbor: [All ships sunk, except Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah, would subsequently be raised, repaired, and returned to service.] • Battleship Oklahoma (BB-37). • Battleship Arizona (BB-39). • Battleship California (BB-44). • Battleship West Virginia (BB-48). • Minelayer Ogala (CM-4). • Target ship Utah (AG-16).
United States naval vessels damaged, Pearl Harbor: • Battleship Nevada (BB-36). • Battleship Pennsylvania (BB-38). • Battleship Tennessee (BB-43). • Battleship Maryland (BB-46). •Light cruiser Raleigh (CL-7). •Light cruiser Honolulu (CL-48). •Light cruiser Helena (CL-50).
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• Destroyer Cassin (DD-372). • Destroyer Shaw (DD-373). • Destroyer Downes (DD-375). • Seaplane tender Curtiss (AV-4). • Repair ship Vestal (AR-4).
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Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered existing FBI war plans put into effect and Attorney General Francis Biddle authorized the Bureau to act against dangerous enemy aliens. Local police, in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, began to round up the Issei leadership of Japanese-American communities both in Hawaii and on the mainland (in today’s publicity documents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation unapologetically refers to these community leaders as having amounted to “previously identified aliens who threatened national security,” quote unquote).
By 6:30AM the following morning, 736 Issei would be in custody; and within 48 hours, the number would have risen to 1,291. Caught by surprise for the most part, these men would be held with no formal charges and family members would be unable to visit them. Most would spend the war years in enemy-alien internment
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camps run by the Justice Department.
Within 72 hours the Agents would be working a 24-hour day, at the job of rounding up Americans to take them to detention camps. They would take a total of 3,846 citizens into custody as enemy aliens. Any radio capable of short-wave reception would be seized as an obvious weapon of war, as well as any weapons of any kind, their ammo — and, the records assert, dynamite. (Was some farmer blasting out the stumps in his pasture?)
A message was sent from the Japanese Consul in Budapest to Tokyo: “On the 6th, the American Minister presented to the Government of this country a British Government communique to the effect that a state of war would break out on the 7th.” The communique was the December 5th War Alert from the British Admiralty, which has since disappeared. This triple-priority alert was delivered to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally. The Mid-East British Air Marshall informed Colonel Bonner Fellers on Saturday that he had received a secret signal that in 24 hours America was coming into the war. Winston Churchill would summarize the message in GRAND ALLIANCE (page 601) as listing the two fleets attacking British targets and “Other Japanese fleets ... also at sea on other tasks” (there were three other Japanese fleets also at sea on these other tasks — those sailing toward Guam, toward the Philippines, and toward Hawaii).
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Führer Adolf Hitler issued his Night and Fog decree.
Very early on this morning, two US Marines, an emergency special detail, were stationed outside the door of the Japanese Naval Attache. Why, was there something special going on?
At 9:30AM Washington time, Stark’s aides were begging him to send a warning to Hawaii — but he wouldn’t.
At 10AM Washington time, Commander-in-Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt read the 14th part of the decoded Japanese diplomatic declaration of war.
At 10:30AM Washington time, Bratton informed Marshall that he had a most important message (the 15th part of the decoded Japanese diplomatic declaration of war) and would bring it to Marshall’s quarters, but Marshall responded that he would take it at his office.
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At 11AM Washington time, Commander-in-Chief Roosevelt read the 15th part of the decoded Japanese diplomatic declaration of war, the part setting the time for the declaration of war to be delivered to the State Department as 1PM — which was about dawn Pearl Harbor time.
At 11:15AM Washington time, Navy Secretary Knox was given the 15th part of the decoded Japanese diplomatic declaration of war –the part setting the time for the declaration of war to be delivered to the State Department as 1PM, which was about dawn Pearl Harbor time– with this note from the Office of Naval Intelligence: “This means a sunrise attack on Pearl Harbor today.” Naval Intelligence also transmitted this prediction to Hull and about eight others, including the White House.
Who would have thought they’d sneak up on us? At 11:25AM Washington time, according to Bratton, Marshall reached his office. Marshall’s story, later, would be that he had been out riding horses that morning — but this cover story would be directly contradicted by the testimony of Harrison, McCollum, and Deane. We know that Marshall perjured himself, because he also testified that he had never received the prior 13 parts of the decoded Japanese diplomatic declaration of war, and yet we know by his own account that he had read those first 13 parts by 10PM the previous night. Marshall was in no hurry. He read and he re-read all of the 10-minute-long 14-part message (some parts he went over several times), taking more than an hour. Then he refused to use the scrambler phone on his desk, and also refused to send out a warning to Hawaii by the fast, more secure Navy system. Instead, three times he sent Bratton to inquire how long it would take to send out his watered-down warning. When informed that this would require 30 or 40 minutes by Army radio (meaning that his warning couldn’t reach Pearl Harbor before the 1PM Washington-time deadline), he seemed satisfied. The warning would be sent out through commercial channels, without any priority identification, and although this message would reach all its other addressees, such as the Philippines and Canal Zone, in a timely manner, at Hawaii it would arrive six hours too late — which, of course, was what was intended.
At 6:30AM an American destroyer collided with a Japanese minisubmarine within the harbor area.
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At 7:55AM, Hawaii time: “AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT DRILL.”
The battleships USS Arizona and USS Oklahoma were sunk at anchor, killing 1,177 on the one and 415 on the other. Two other battleships, the USS West Virginia (105 killed) and the USS Tennessee, were damaged and 196 Navy and 65 Army Air Force planes destroyed. A total of 2,341 servicemen and 68 civilians died that day and there were 1,178 wounded. 15 Navy men would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, 10 posthumously. We were able to shoot down only 29 of the Japanese aircraft.
At 1:50PM Washington time, Harry Hopkins, the only person with Commander-in-Chief Roosevelt when he received the phonecall from Knox that gave him the news of the attack, would write in his memoirs that the Commander-in-Chief had been unsurprised, and that he had expressed “great relief,” quote unquote. When Eleanor Roosevelt would write about the day that shall go down in infamy, on page 233 of her THIS IREMEMBER, what she would recollect was that upon Japan’s attack her husband became “in a way more serene.”
At 3:00PM Washington time, as Harry Hopkins would later recall, “The (war cabinet) conference met in not too tense an atmosphere because I think that all of us believed that in the last analysis the enemy was Hitler ... and that Japan had given us an opportunity.”
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That afternoon the Chief of Naval Operations communicated:
EXECUTE UNRESTRICTED AIR AND SUBMARINE WARFARE AGAINST JAPAN
A full nine hours after the “surprise attack” at Pearl Harbor, General Douglas MacArthur’s entire air force would get caught by surprise, and wiped out, in the Philippines. The general’s reaction to the news of Pearl Harbor was strange, for a commander who under normal circumstances prided himself upon being supremely effective. Instead of being on the scene and making necessary preparations, he locked himself in his room all morning, refusing to meet with General Brereton, his air commander, and refusing to engage the Japanese
forces on Taiwan. Instead the military record of commands issued reveals that MacArthur issued a series of three conflicting orders, that ensured that his planes were on the ground most of the morning. He kept himself informed of the radar tracking of the Japanese planes as they approached, at 140 miles distance, at 100, at 80, at 60, and even at 20 miles distance, and then issued the last order of this series — obviously in order to ensure that his planes were on the ground where they could be destroyed. We would lose half of all the heavy bombers we had in the world. He could only have been acting under orders, since after doing this he retained his command, escaped any reprimand, and got his fourth star, along with, shortly after, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Obviously, it was important that on this day the Japanese succeed in destroying all the capability of our Pacific forces to respond immediately to the attack, putting them in the position of waiting for resupply of war materiel.
At 8:30PM Washington time, the President was commenting to his cabinet, “We have reason to believe that the Germans have told the Japanese that if Japan declares war, they will too. In other words, a declaration of war by Japan automatically brings....” (At this point he was interrupted, and we can only wonder what he had had on his mind to say. ;-)
By 9:30PM Washington time, the FBI was in war mode, on a 24-hour schedule. (It would need to augment its Agent force with National Academy graduates who took only an abbreviated training course. As a result, the
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total number of agency employees would rise from 7,400 to over 13,000, of whom approximately 4,000 would be Agents, by the end of 1943.)
At midnight, Washington time, Commander-in-Chief Roosevelt met with CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, who found him calm. After going over the latest from Pearl Harbor, the President inquired: “Did this surprise you?” Murrow said it had. Roosevelt then, cryptically, went “Maybe you think it didn’t surprise us?”
The Washington conspirators had produced war, exactly as they desired. WORLD WAR II
Why would we have been surprised? Our military men do study the history of warfare, and they knew perfectly well that the Japanese had, once before, initiated a war with this precisely sort of successful surprise assault upon a fleet:
By means of a surprise attack of undeclared war, the Japanese destroyed a Russian naval group at Port Arthur, and invaded Korea. (Battle of Port Arthur, Russo-Japanese war. Heads up, this is an alert of things to come. Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it — and things that happen the first time as tragedy, tend to happen the second time as farce. :-)
Due to the circumstances of betrayal by their Commander in Chief, the US Marine detachments stationed at Tientsin and Beijing were of course obliged to surrender to the Japanese. Shine, Empire Powerful and armed, neutral in the midst of madness, we might have held the whole world’s balance and stood Like a mountain in a wind. We were misled and took sides. We have chosen to share the crime and the punishment. Perhaps justly, being part of Europe. Three thousand miles of ocean would hardly wash out the stains Of all that mish-mash, blood, language, religion, snobbery. Three thousand miles in a ship would not make Americans. I have often in weak moments thought of this people as something higher than the natural run of the earth. I was quite wrong; we are lower. We are the people who hope to win wars with money as we win elections. Hate no one. Roosevelt’s intentions were good, and Hitler is a patriot. They 18 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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have split the planet into two mill-stones That will grind small and bloody; but still let us keep some dignity, these days are tragic, and fight without hating. It is war, and no man can see an end of it. We must put freedom away and stiffen into bitter empire. All Europe was hardly worth the precarious freedom of one of our states: what will her ashes fetch? If I were hunting in the Ventana canyons again with my strong sons, and to sleep under stars, I should be happy again. It is not time for happiness. Happy the blind, the witless, the dead. Now, thoroughly compromised, we aim at world rule, like Assyria, Rome, Britain, Germany, to inherit those hoards Of guilt and doom. I am American, what can I say but again, “Shine, perishing republic?” ... Shine, empire.
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— Robinson Jeffers
As the Red Army attacked Tikhvin, near Leningrad, the Germans retired to defensive positions before Moscow on a line Kursk-Orel-Medyn-Rzhev.
Areas ceded by Finland to the USSR on March 12, 1940 were reintegrated into Finland.
Thomas Merton, who had “lost interest in the Quakers,” would attempt to enlist in the military after the attack at Pearl Harbor only to find himself rejected on account of bad teeth. (A few days after this rejection, he would wind up at the gate of the Cisterian Order of the Strict Observance at Gethsemani, Kentucky. He had been glad to become an American because this was the land of Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, and would claim that he was going into the silent service there in Kentucky in 1941 for the same reason that Thoreau had gone in 1845 to the shore of Walden Pond: “to front only the essential facts of life.”)3
More than 34,000,000 male United States citizens would be registered for the military draft. Of those 34 million, an estimated 72,000 would apply for conscientious objector status. Approximately 6,000 of those 72,000 applicants for “CO” status would, like Friend John R. Kellam, be imprisoned. Considering that warfare was not a proper path toward peace was going to constitute a sacrifice — your local draft board made up of your fellow citizens was going to ensure that there would be severe consequences, that this was an attitude that was going to generate not only persistent accusations of cowardice but also as great as possible a level of personal unsafety.
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1947
The New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends expressed concern that the Moses Brown School and the Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, although supposedly, nominally, they were under its care, were racist establishments that were not in fact extending this Quaker educational opportunity to “children of all races.” By the mid-1950s, most Friends schools in the East had admitted at least a few African American students, and in some cases a substantial number had gained admittance. In 1958 Friends Select and Westtown were the two Friends Schools with the most African American students. Friends in New England, however, appear to have lagged behind. In 1947 New England Yearly Meeting expressed its concern that Moses Brown and Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, two schools under the yearly meeting’s care, should include “children of all races in their school family”; six years later another minute suggested that the schools were then ready to do so. Still, in 1957 the yearly meeting continued to question whether Friends and their schools were “clear of discrimination.” Ten years late the meeting created a seventeen- member committee, including heads of the yearly meeting’s schools, to further “the meeting’s concern to meet the needs of more students from disadvantaged and minority groups” and to raise funds for scholarships. By the 1960s several African Americans had been admitted to Moses Brown School.4
3. As a result of Roosevelt’s trick to get us into war, 2,403 American lives were lost at Pearl Harbor, and 1,178 Americans received nonfatal wounds, inclusive of our civilian casualties.
Eighteen of our ships were sunk or seriously damaged, including 5 battleships — we visit the USS Arizona today, with waving flags, to restore our patriotism. Of our aircraft, 188 were destroyed and 162 damaged. Out of their raiding force of 31 ships and 353 raiding planes, which in this way “achieved complete surprise,” the Japanese lost only 64 men, 29 planes, and 5 kaiten suicide submarines. The Commander-in-Chief’s trick to get us into war has recently been justified by certain historians, on the grounds of necessity: their argument is that we needed to get involved in this war but the American public was, unfortunately, reluctant, and thus we needed to be persuaded by being tricked in some manner. What these historians have missed is that the President had succeeded in two linked objectives rather than one objective on this day: not only had he obtained a morally righteous position by way of a “sneak attack” posturing, but also he had obtained, through the cooperation of General Douglas MacArthur, adequate destruction of our ability to respond in the Pacific to ensure that, as he desired, Japan would be forced to take a back seat and wait to be destroyed until after our VE-day victory over Germany (“...in the last analysis the enemy was Hitler...”). 4. Page 332 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 21 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Former war prisoner and convicted felon John R. Kellam was accepted as worker for the American Friends Service Committee –which was queerly unprejudiced against him5 although they were well aware of his record of draft dodging– in a project called PennCraft:
I had been working for the American Friends Service Committee in its subsidiary called Friends Service, Incorporated, helping coal miners who wanted to build their own homes in their spare time, when they were only partly employed and had been completely unemployed earlier when their fathers built a group of stone houses in the farm adjoining the one that I had gone out to manage. I had only eight homesteaders building their houses, homesteading families. There were fifty in the original group, six and a half times as many. It was a place called PennCraft. I worked at PennCraft for subsistence wages and I did truck driving, materials delivering, building techniques teaching, technical and administrative accounting, and later on some land subdivision surveying. I was accounting for dollars spent on materials and manhours of labor that were exchanged by the various homesteaders working on each others houses at times, keeping two sets of books. Manhours and dollars. The capital for that whole project had been originally contributed by the owners of the big idle coal mines and the mine workers union. They put in equal amounts and the Service Committee made this project out of it where the miners borrowed the cost of the materials, did their own labor, built their own houses and paid off for the materials over time on a contract per deed basis and eventually when they made their last payment, we delivered their deed, meaning that they were the sole owners of the property that they had created. Well, fresh out of prison, after a very short time with the National Council for Prevention of War, I was told that the Friends Service Committee was looking for a new project manager at PennCraft. They had a young fellow just starting who within 5. This was a special year for the American Friends Service Committee. Not only were they receiving Friend John as an employee, but also they were receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. ALFRED NOBEL 22 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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two or three weeks felt overwhelmed by his job so much that even with just a suitcase to carry, leaving a small trunkfull of stuff behind, he went out on the highway and hitchhiked all the way to his home in Minnesota, without notice to anybody. He was made almost sick by his job because it was just too much. I had more technical information about building included in my architectural training, even though I had never had any responsibility on a building job. The only practical experience I had ever had was from climbing all over new construction and watching the workmen, talking with them and seeing how they did things. This, along with talking sometime with the designing architect, was the only practical supplement to my theoretical design, mathematics and mechanical studies in college. Anyway, I went to PennCraft knowing that this other fellow had left that way. When they hired me, they got in contact with him and said that his successor had been acquired and would show up at a certain date. Would he, therefore, knowing that he would not be expected to continue, with that assurance, would he then be willing to come back for a week or two and help to break me in to the job? I would be otherwise just as ignorant of what I was facing as he had been. With his help, I would be more likely to be able to continue for as long as needed at PennCraft. So he did come back and, incidentally, he did pick up his trunk! He stayed with me for just one week. It was the minimum time that he’d had to promise! Maybe ten days, maybe two weeks, but he wasn’t sure of that. So I had to learn as fast as possible how to pick up his loose ends. I found, just as he had been, as soon as I realized what was pending, what was facing me, I felt as if I was forty days behind in my work on the first day! He had had that same feeling, so I wondered whether I would really be able to stick to it. But then I had my whole family out there so I had to stick with it no matter how difficult it was. Also I knew that I could go through a difficult experience. There was an FBI man who came to PennCraft where I was working later on after I had been out of prison a couple of years. He showed his badge and I recognized FBI on it and he asked me if we could talk in some place that wasn’t as open as at this barn where some fellow homesteaders were using materials and equipment. So we went up to the house. On the way I told him that with respect to his own official duties there was nothing I could say that could help him. The only thing that I could think of to say that would be constructive and helpful was that I felt he would be a lot happier if he would quit that kind of a job and get into something useful where he wouldn’t be adversarial with people, or bothering them as they were trying to live their lives, as if they were criminals. It seemed to me that he would be much better off in any other kind of occupation. I said, “Weren’t you ever interested in something else almost as much as you are in this?” “I’d studied a while for the ministry.” “Oh, that would have been wonderful! Why settle for so much less?” Maybe he wasn’t too good at it! According to the congregation! Anyway, as an official of the FBI, ever since I became aware of how outrageously the FBI could go astray from the truth, under “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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oath, in court, to lie about a defendant, there hasn’t been an FBI man since that has been worth the time of day off my watch. But as a person, I said, “I respect you and I wish you could have a happier life than you could possibly have had with this job.”
I still didn’t know the worst about J. Edgar Hoover. When the whole press of the country acknowledges the sort of a defective guy he was, even in that position, and how he had lists of enemies and people he’d like to find a way of putting in jail, without caring in advance what they might have done that was contrary to law, I couldn’t have respect for that kind of official so corrupted. Hoover wasn’t so much of a misfit during the war as he was in peacetime, because the first casualty of war is the truth. One of the best tools in warfare is deception. You’re trying to deceive the enemy even if it means deceiving your friends first, having them unwittingly tell the enemy things that are not so.
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1953
November 17, Tuesday: Sakari Severi Tuomioja replaced Urho Kekkonen as prime minister of Finland.
US Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and provided a view of the case of the economist Harry Dexter White differing from that being offered by Former President Harry S Truman. The Subcommittee indicated that it would expand its investigation to include eight associates of this economist. UNAMERICANISM
1954
May 4, Tuesday: Viet Minh forces reached to within 500 meters of the French command headquarters at Dien Bien Phu.
In the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy produced a 1951 letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the head of Army Intelligence naming 35 employees at Fort Monmouth as subversives. The witness, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, had never seen that communication.
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1955
October 27, Thursday: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with the concurrence of the Attorney General of the United States of America, authorized official cooperation with reporter Don Whitehead as he authored THE FBI STORY. The book would become a bestseller and would then be made into a movie, in 1959, starring Jimmy Stewart as one dedicated, handsome, well-mannered, intelligent FBI Agent.
1957
April 12, Friday: 18 leading West German nuclear physicists indicated that they were unwilling to take part in the “production, testing or even use” of atomic weapons by the West German army. Among the signatories were Werner Heissenberg, Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, and Max Born.
Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Internal Security subcommittee, claimed there to have been “a sound reason” for publishing the name of E. Herbert Norman (who had committed suicide on April 4th), as an alleged communist. He declined to explain what that reason was but alleged that he had verified his “facts” with the FBI (Director J. Edgar Hoover would promptly deny that any such service had been provided by his agency). UNAMERICANISM
Argentine police arrested about 380 communists, including the entire central committee of the Communist Party.
Symphony no.4 by Wallingford Riegger was performed for the initial time, at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
November 14, Thursday: New York State Trooper Edgar Croswell uncovered a conference of mobsters bosses from various states who had gathered on the estate of Joseph Barbara in Apalachin, New York. Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI instituted the Top Hoodlum program to develop information about prominent criminal leaders and their activities. The US Congress strengthened federal racketeering and gambling statutes. When mob insider Joseph Valachi began to sing, the public learned firsthand of the American Mafia.
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1961
August 28, Monday: A Most Wanted Bulletin would be promulgated in Charlotte, North Carolina, signed of course by none other than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, charging Robert F. Williams with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution on a charge of “kidnapping.”
BLACKMAILER-IN-CHIEF It is not clear that there was ever any basis for such an accusation — when eventually the fugitive would be taken into custody and extradited, the authorities would immediately desist from such a prosecution. The accused would nevertheless for an extended duration be forced to flee, first to Canada, then to Mexico, then to Cuba, where he would make regular radio addresses on “Radio Free Dixie” (a station enabled by Dr. Fidel Castro), and issue a newspaper, The Crusader. During this period in Cuba, also, he would be writing NEGROES WITH GUNS.
1962
August 7, Tuesday: When President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 177 to enhance the government’s foreign police-training program, Director J. Edgar Hoover agreed to accept up to 20 foreign police officers into each session of the FBI National Academy.
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September: I (Austin Meredith) had received orders to become the officer in command of a Nike antiaircraft installation at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.6 During that summer my wife María de los Angeles García Meredith and I had traveled across country in our black Volkswagen bug from my Marine Officer Training on the East Coast to my first duty station, Alameda Naval Air Station on a flat island in San Francisco Bay. When I had arrived and reported for duty, the bird colonel in command of the Naval Air Intelligence Training Center there had gone hyperbolic. He didn’t like my physical appearance. The first thing he did was order ordered this newly minted Marine 2d Lieutenant onto a diet, and the base doctor prescribed amphetamines to help me lose weight. But the thing was, I was not overweight — in fact I had just completed the Marine basic training and was in the best shape I have ever been in, in my entire freaking life! It quickly became clear that my first commanding officer wasn’t going to be able to make my “fat ass” go away by ordering it to go away — because my buttocks simply had no fat on them, their offensiveness being a mere matter of their protruding to the rear due to my spine twisted in lordosis. I had to have those bulging muscles in my hips, along with the bulging muscles in
6. Nowadays such Nike installations are considered of historical interest:
COLD WAR MUSEUM INTERNSHIP The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), a unit of the National Park Service, is preserving and restoring the last intact Nike missile site in the United States. Located at Fort Barry, in the Marin Headlands, Nike Site SF-88L is the last remnant of the Cold War preserved and open to the public. Golden Gate is seeking a dynamic, full-time intern to work on an exciting preservation opportunity to assist in museum accountability, resource management, and interpretation projects at the site. The park has acquired obsolete –and now extremely rare– Nike missiles, computers, and other accouterments worth in excess of $30 million. RESPONSIBILITIES: Cataloging some of the more unique objects in any museum collection. Assisting in rehabilitating the site to working condition. Documenting progress. Assisting in interpretation of the site. Working with a cadre of dedicated volunteers. QUALIFICATIONS: Knowledge of museum cataloging requirements. Familiarity with computer cataloging programs (the NPS uses a system called ANCS+, a Windows-based program customized from RE:Discovery). Knowledge of American military history and material culture, particularly of the post- WWII era. Ability to work with a variety of people. TERMS: Full or Part-Time; 5-10 months; Tuesday-Saturday. Out-of-pocket expenses ($15/day) and housing may be available for full-time positions. The GGNRA and the Parks Association are committed to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies regarding employees and volunteers. (An interesting factoid about our national condition is that such “equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies regarding employees and volunteers” still would allow them to refuse to employ a deformed person for such public work.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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my calves, along with my flat feet, in order to be able to stand upright.
[This isn’t to indicate that this was the first experience of its kind, for as you know I only became a Marine officer in the first place through the intercession of the Surgeon General of the Navy, over their dead body so to speak — this was merely the first experience of persecution of my physical deformity which would involve that phenomenon of the J. Edgar Hoover/Joseph McCarthy cold-war years which is now known as harassment- by-investigation.]
“Lists of the disloyal have been compiled!” — Roman Senator Crassus, played by Sir Lawrence Olivier in the 1961 Hollywood movie “Spartacus”
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THE STALKER
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Here is an illustration from a medical textbook, showing “exaggerated lumbar curve” as typical of lordosis:
What the medical textbook fails to point out is that this exaggerated lumbar curve, when it is not disabling, produces enormous muscular masses in the buttocks and calves as the growing body struggles to accommodate itself. And, of course, the medical textbook also fails to point out –it isn’t any of a medical doctor’s concern, as doctors treat illnesses rather than the effects of illnesses– that the primary liability for the patient is that these exaggerated muscular masses result in the most extreme social discrimination. ASSLEY
So what happened was that when it became obvious that this pseudo-diet with amphetamines was not going to cure the perception problem, my company CO (my direct commanding officer, this bird colonel school commander’s captain subordinate) engaged me in a casual, “friendly” conversation before class, in their air- intelligence school library. He drew out of me, in the course of this conversation, the attitude that it had been a singular mistake, that we had acquired the Panama Canal in the 19th Century in the manner in which we did, and that, in order now to get out of this embarrassment in the best manner possible, I supposed, we ought to turn the protection of the Canal Zone over to an organization which we could dominate, upon which we could rely — the Organization of American States. In that way, I suggested to him in this casual conversation, we might be able to transform what had always been a propaganda disaster into something of a triumph of diplomacy. Of course, if we did this we would no longer be able to run our “School of the Americas” there, our training station at which we have been for many decades teaching fascistic South American and Central American military officers such as Manuel Noriega how to torture the citizens of their countries. –And, that Canal Zone army base would no longer be available as a cushy just-before-retirement command slot for aging American generals.
[Sucker that I was, I didn’t realize until it was too late that this company CO was just buttering me up, merely pretending to be interested in having kill-time casual conversation with me — that actually what he was doing was searching for something on which the command could so to speak hang its hat.]
So my new CO ran off to tattle to the bird colonel school commandant, and then I was called into his command office and found myself once again being accused of treason. Soon I was being interrogated by an Agent of the Oakland office of the FBI.7
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The school’s Commanding Officer banished me to temporary duty at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay while he fired off a top-secret telegram to Headquarters Marine Corps, “8th and I” in Washington DC (a telegram which is classified TOP SECRET to this day) saying that he would not tolerate a Marine officer with such an objectionable appearance in uniform as this.
(Treasure Island in its salad days, before it became a Marine base)
This top-secret telegram got me instantly reassigned to the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, headed through the Panama Canal for Vieques and Port au Prince, Haiti and Guantánamo Bay for the invasion of Cuba. I sailed in September aboard the USS Bexar, APA237 as the commanding officer of the 1st Replacement Draft in
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis. I was to receive from the federal government the sort of treatment that Uriah the Hittite had received from King David (2 SAMUEL 11) — I was to be exposed
7. The interrogation focused upon three items: my recent camping trip into the mountains with Berkeley resident and college acquaintance Allen Carrico, since he had since become a member of the “Turn Toward Peace” organization, the FBI’s principled refusal to show me the list of organizations being considered for inclusion on the Attorney General’s list of prohibited associations so that I might verify that indeed this organization “Turn Toward Peace” was on that list (on the grounds that this list was secret), and the absurd idea that I had, that it was just obvious to anyone who read the newspapers, that Director J. Edgar Hoover could only have been maintaining his position in Washington DC all these years, by blackmailing national politicians. The agent asked over and over again whether I had any specific evidence that the Director was a blackmailer, and I responded over and over that he himself surely was aware that that must be the case. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in combat in such manner as to make it likely that I would be killed.
What you need of course to understand is that as a member of that “replacement draft,” I would automatically be assigned to replace the first infantry platoon commander to become a casualty during the projected Marine assault to seize the port of Santiago de Cuba. –And, you will also need to come to understand, of all the various ways to figure out how to get killed, replacing the first Marine infantry platoon commander to fall during an amphibious assault is the very most excellent and certain way. 14 And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. 15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die. 16 And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were. 17 And the men of the city went out, and fought with Joab: and there fell some of the people of the servants of David; and Uriah the Hittite died also.
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When the war down there would not happen, when Nikita Khrushchev would blink and the atomic bombs wouldn’t go off and I would come back to the US in 1963 still alive and personally offensive, I would find that I would be receiving the benefit of a full background investigation and a long-term harassment-by- investigation from the Office of Naval Intelligence and from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, complete with lie-detector tests, one-way mirrors, mail covers, the persistent demand that I resign my officer’s commission, threats to award me a general courts-martial for treasonous political postures, demands that I explain why according to my mother I had masturbated as a teenager, negotiations to allow me to escape all this harassment by accepting a general discharge which they suggested might yet be “under honorable conditions” bu t only if I were to play my cards right, etc. The whole thing was covered up by pretending that I had been guilty of some sort of thought crime, of believing something bad about the USA. When, decades later, I would file a Freedom of Information Act petition in order to get to see that evil telegram, my formal submission was simply ignored. They know very well that they cannot ever allow it to become known that the United States government tolerates such shameful activities. ASSLEY
In follow-up to this personal history, I should tell you that this was 1962, and later on in our national history, President Jimmy Carter would do precisely what I had so casually schemed in 1962. –He would negotiate to turn the Canal Zone over to the Organization of American States. That is what is still, according to the news release below, a current project. When I had suggested it in casual conversation in September 1962, that casual conversation had been made treasonous as a way to dispose of me and my twisted spine, but when the President of the United States actually would go and do it, well, that would be of course very OK (the President’s spine is straight, you see). The President of the US can get a blow job in the Oval Office and that ain’t sex, and the President of the US can give away the Panama Canal and that ain’t treason.
AMANAPLANACANALPANAMA But isn’t it curious, in spite of the fact that my spine has straightened starting in 1980 and 1981 — no agency of our government has as yet sought me out to offer me an apology for having persecuted me for having harbored such treason thought!
Anyway, here’s the latest twist on the long story:
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CENTRAL AMERICA-OUTLOOK: Farewell to US Weapons in 1999 By Silvio Hernandez PANAMA, Dec 21 (IPS) — Central America is getting ready to enter the third millennium without the presence in Panama of a U.S. military enclave whose existence throughout this century has been a thorn in the side of the region’s incipient democracies. On Dec. 31, 1999, the United States will withdraw from Panama’s Canal Zone, where the U.S. Army’s Southern Command exerted political influence on Central America and from where Washington launched many military operations, including one that toppled Panama’s General Manuel Noriega in late 1989. The Southern Command, which is assigned operations throughout Latin America, was moved from Panama to Miami in 1996 under treaties signed between the two governments in 1977. However, 4,400 U.S. soldiers are still stationed in the Canal Zone. Until 1983, the U.S. military base in Panama also housed the School of the Americas, which gave training to most of the military dictators who seized power in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. They include Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer, and Manuel Noriega himself. “Girl, hide, here come those marines dressed in white looking like butchers,” went a popular rhyme sung by children in the San Miguel neighbourhood of the Panamanian capital in the 1940s. The ditty was a legacy of constant U.S. invasions between 1856 and 1989, which did not target Panama alone. The U.S. invaded Honduras in 1911 and 1933 and Nicaragua in 1912 and 1927. U.S. troops left Nicaragua without being able to defeat the resistance of the popular army led by General Augusto Cesar Sandino. At the Palmerola military base in central Honduras, there is still a group of 500 U.S. soldiers of the Southern Command which began its activities in the early 1980s, when Washington backed the war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Salvadoran army was also assisted by U.S. military advisers from the Southern Command during that country’s civil war which began in the 1980s and ended in the early 1990s, when the government and the guerrilla signed a peace accord. Panamanian writer Carlos Changmarin, who has repeatedly denounced U.S. intervention in Central America in his work, pointed out that following the end of the Cold War, the forces of democracy are leading the world towards relationships with the United States that are free of coercion. “The world is against these kinds of supervision,” Changmarin told IPS when asked about the possibility of continued U.S. military presence in the region in connection with the war on drugs. U.S. Secretary of Defence William Cohen told a recent Inter- American Conference of Defence Ministers in Cartagena, Colombia, that his government was negotiating the establishment of a centralized, multilateral centre to fight drug trafficking with some regional countries, including Ecuador, Honduras and Peru.
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Plans to build one such center in Panama failed because Washington wanted to use the elite military units housed there in other missions in the region. Reactions to the latest proposal have not been very favourable. Honduran congressman Matias Fuentes said “the military presence of the U.S. has always been harmful” to his country and he opposed its legitimisation “under the pretext of the fight against drugs.” Honduran congressmen said the stationing of U.S. soldiers at Palmerola base was never ratified by their country’s parliament, something its constitution requires.
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1963
October 10, Thursday: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty entered into force upon exchange of ratification ceremonies in London, Moscow, and Washington DC.
In London, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan underwent successful prostate surgery. In a letter to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, made public on this day, he announced that he would resign his office for reasons of health.
Overture on Russian and Kirghiz Folksongs op.115 by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed for the initial time, in Moscow Conservatory Bolshoy Hall.
WHITE SUPREMACIST FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had in August initiated a secret governmental agenda to discredit the Reverend
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thus destroy the civil rights movement in America.
COMMIE SYMP?
“Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”
— Dwight David Eisenhower
On this day, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was persuaded by the FBI to authorize the wiretapping of the Reverend King, who, he was disingenuously informed by the FBI, was under suspicion of being involved with Stanley Levison, a financier of American Communism. However, this American businessman, the FBI then well knew, had in March severed all his ties with the CPUSA, and was no longer under suspicion of any involvement! The disingenuous FBI managed to persuade the gullible Kennedy that the Reverend King had been being disingenuous with them about his dealings with such a person! (At one point we have a record of Director Hoover denouncing the Reverend King as “the most notorious liar in the country.”) Having solicited and been granted prior formal approval by the Attorney General of the United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would begin bug the motel rooms being used by the
King entourage, seeking evidence of sexual transgressions while on the road, and pass on photographs, tapes, and transcripts obtained in this manner surreptitiously to white supremacist Senator Strom Thurmond and to the wife of the Reverend King as well as to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The Reverend King would be urged to commit suicide. It would be discovered through this sort of inquiry that some of the material in King’s college dissertation had been plagiarized. (Had J. Edgar been himself subjected to such an inquiry, it would have been discovered not only that he was the most dedicated persecutor of homosexuals in government, but also that he was a closet-dwelling homosexual crossdresser who lived intimately for many years with his male significant other.)8
8. The prudential maxim, that those who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones, would not be applicable in this case — since of all people the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation would not live in a glass house. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 39 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1964
At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, at the request of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the FBI tapped the telephone of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hey, hey, LBJ! A Yale University psychology professor, Stanley Milgram, published experimental data showing that cruelty is usually a function of people obeying orders or reacting to peer pressure rather than a characteristic unique to sadists. Indeed, follow-on studies would establish that 60-80% of the population would grudgingly engage in personally distasteful levels of violence whenever directly ordered to do so by someone in authority, with middle-aged males being somewhat more likely to disobey authority than adolescent males or females of any age. (No wonder they retire middle-aged men from the military!)
According to this study, the habit of obedience to a leader, plus an evil leader, is in and of itself adequate to produce disaster:
“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf Hitler
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Mario Savio orated that “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”9
The FBI obtained a tape of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex, and sent a copy of this tape along with an anonymous note to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, suggesting that the Reverend King commit suicide.
Since the Department was well aware that transmitting the information in this way would bring it to the attention of Coretta Scott King, it would appear that the intention was not to induce King’s suicide but to cause King’s wife to bring pressure to bear on him to abandon their civil rights struggle. In this year, when the Kings traveled together to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, the Department attempted to sabotage the receptions in the Reverend King’s honor. (Although at this time in the USA, civil rights leaders were being assassinated, and although the FBI was receiving information as to death threats being made against the Reverend King, and although passing information as to these death threats might conceivably have induced King to tone down his civil rights visibility, nevertheless J. Edgar Hoover curiously decided to withhold such information from him and from his wife and from his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It sure makes you wonder, especially when you read that just prior to killing King, the assassin James Earl Ray had received funding and assistance from a “Raoul” in Canada who seems at one time to have served as an FBI informant.)
9. “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: “If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.… If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 41 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1965
The Federal Bureau of Investigation decided to get tough on the mafia, and so the Boston FBI office began to use known murderers as mob informants. New England Mafia hit men Jimmy Flemmi and Joseph Barboza murdered Edward Deegan, with the FBI, which knew about this beforehand on the basis of a wiretap on the mob headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, but doing nothing whatever to save Deegan’s life. Being FBI informants had given these two mob hit men a license to kill. Not only that, but when four other men were arrested and tried for the murder of Edward Deegan, Director J. Edgar Hoover, who kept himself fully informed of the affair, did not lift a finger to interfere, despite the fact that he knew them to be not guilty. Two of these men were sentenced to death, and two to life in prison — and still, Director Hoover would never lift a finger to get these men off of Death Row or out of prison. Two would die of illness while in prison, and two would be released from prison after approximately thirty years in their cells.
AGENT PROVOCATEUR Subsequently, murderers who were on the payroll of the federal government would kill at least 19 more people in New England, not only with the knowledge of but also sometimes with the assistance of their FBI “handlers.” –Several FBI agents have publicly commented, that in order to defeat “tough” criminals, it is mandatory that law enforcement officials also be “tough.” –So, reader, where do you stand on such an issue?
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1966
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, one of the primary enemies of everything this nation stands for, wrote in a PTA Magazine article that the United States of America was confronted with “a new style in conspiracy — conspiracy that is extremely subtle and devious and hence difficult to understand ... a conspiracy reflected by questionable moods and attitudes, by unrestrained individualism, by nonconformism in dress and speech, even by obscene language, rather than by formal membership in specific organizations.” A whole lot of Real Americans agreed with him, including the President of the United States. (Henry Thoreau –given half a chance– would have had something to say about the Director’s attitude problem.)
1968
June 1, Saturday: Civil war in France seemed averted as many French workers returned to their jobs.
Students opposed to the takeover of Rome University battled with pro-occupation students.
Congress enacted Public Law 90351 providing for the appointment of the FBI Director by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate to a 10 year term. The act was to take effect after the completion of Director J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure (and after they had held a mirror up to his nose to make certain that he wasn’t still breathing, driven a stake through the heart of the corpse, shot the corpse in the back of the head with several silver bullets, buried the corpse at midnight in the center of a crossroads, driven heavy vehicles back and forth across the intersection, sprinkled the entire area with cloves of garlic, and placed a very large and very very heavy stone on top of the disturbed soil).
June 3, Monday: Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces besieged Saigon for two days.
Opposing group of students battled again at Rome University and the police cleared the campus.
FBI agents invaded the Church of the Mediator in Providence, Rhode Island and arrested two men for avoiding conscription (50 people were attempting to prevent the action).
Andy Warhol was shot and seriously wounded in his New York studio by Valerie Solanis, who had appeared in one of his films (she would be judged incompetent to stand trial).
1971
April 28, Wednesday: Director J. Edgar Hoover formally terminated all of the FBI’s COINTELPRO counterintelligence operations against individuals and organizations of which it disapproved. (You will notice that I did not write that such operations were discontinued — I may be a fool but I’m not that easily fooled.)
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DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
1972
May 2, Tuesday: J. Edgar Hoover was found dead in his Washington DC home at the age of 77, after almost 48 years as Director of the FBI. (The death was to all appearances a natural one.)
May 3, Wednesday: The body of J. Edgar Hoover lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington DC, as politician after politician came around to find out if it could really be true. (Frenzied efforts were made to locate and destroy all the blackmail files he had been keeping for so many years in his office, in order to ensure that his influence had been laid to rest for good.) In a ceremony at the White House, President Richard Milhouse Nixon appointed long time FBI operative L. Patrick Gray III as Acting Director of the FBI. (When Gray’s questionable personal role in the Watergate burglary would be revealed by the press, he would withdraw his name from the Senate’s consideration).
1975
September 30, Tuesday: The J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC was formally dedicated. (FBI Headquarters units had been moving into the new building since the previous November.)
December: Robert F. Williams was arrested in Detroit and extradited to Monroe, North Carolina to finally stand trial on that FBI accusation of long duration, of having engaged in 1961 in “kidnapping” (immediately of course the state authorities would decline to prosecute).10
1996
June 19, Wednesday: Gerald David Schine died in an airplane accident in Burbank, California. Tony Kushner would create a one-act play “G. David Schine in Hell” portraying Schine’s reunion with Roy Cohn, Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover (it’s a hoot).
10. J. Edgar Hoover’s institution has sometimes unfairly been denigrated as the FB(P)I, the “Federal Bureau of (Persecution by) Investigation.” 44 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: September 19, 2013
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DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
46 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 47