The Fates of American Presidents Who Challenged the Deep State (1963-1980) アメリカの深層国家に抗した大統領の運 命(1963-1980)
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Volume 12 | Issue 43 | Number 4 | Article ID 4206 | Oct 20, 2014 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Fates of American Presidents Who Challenged the Deep State (1963-1980) アメリカの深層国家に抗した大統領の運 命(1963-1980) Peter Dale Scott In the last decade it has become more and subsurface part of the iceberg I more obvious that we have in America today shall call the Deep State, which what the journalists Dana Priest and William operates according to its own Arkin have called compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.3 two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, I believe that a significant shift in the operated more or less in the open: relationship between public and deep state the other a parallel top secret power occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, government whose parts had culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980. mushroomed in less than a decade In this period five presidents sought to curtail into a gigantic, sprawling universe the powers of the deep state. And as we shall of its own, visible to only a see, the political careers of all five—Kennedy, carefully vetted cadre—and its Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter—were cut off entirety . visible only to God.1 in ways that were unusual. One president, Kennedy, was assassinated. Another, Nixon, was forced to resign. And in 2013, particularly after the military return to power in Egypt, more and more To some extent the interplay of these two forms authors referred to this second level asof power and political organization is found in 2 America’s “deep state.” Here for example is all societies. The two were defined by Hannah the Republican analyst Mike Lofgren: Arendt in the 1960s as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the There is the visible government common Greek way of handling domestic situated around the Mall in affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well Washington, and then there is as the common way of handling foreign affairs, another, more shadowy, more which was force and violence (βία)."4 The two indefinable government that is not represent not just different techniques of explained in Civics 101 or government but different cultures and observable to tourists at the White mindsets, in fundamental tension with each House or the Capitol. The former is other.5 traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The 1 12 | 43 | 4 APJ | JF conservatives; in foreign policy, doves versus hawks. (Yet American liberals when they reach power, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, have also been deeply entwined in the militarization of American politics and its global expansion.) But with the recent expansion since 9/11 of extra-constitutional agencies like the NSA, it is time to supplement these horizontal distinctions with a vertical one: between those agencies constrained by constitutional checks and balances (the public state) and those not so constrained (the deep Hannah Arendt. Source state). Although the deep state as we have defined it has always existed, its recent radical expansion has brought it into occasional This tension increases, and predictably tips conspiratorial conflict with the public state, toward violence, if a well-organized open even with the president. community expands beyond its own borders and is increasingly occupied with the business of supervising an empire. It is repeatedly the case that progressive societies (like America) expand. As their influence expands, their democratic institutions, based at bottom upon persuasive power among equals, are supplemented by new, often secret, institutions of top-down violent power for the control of alien populations abroad, often speaking different and unfamiliar languages. The more the society expands, the more these institutions of violent power encroach upon and supplant the original democracy. As a result these nations also experience a deeper and deeper politics, much of it a contest National Security Agency. Source between these two types of power. One special feature of American deep politics since World War Two is that much of it has beenThe tension between persuasive and violent characterized by a series of conspiratorial deep power has increased incrementally in recent events: emblematic of the ongoing conflict United States history, from the years after between these two forms of power and their World War Two through to September 11, corresponding mindsets. One is the2001. We have seen the emergence to acknowledged public mindset of openness, dominance of what used to be called the egalitarianism, and democracy. The other is the military-industrial complex, and what in my global dominance mindset committed to2010 book I called the American war machine. maintaining and expanding AmericanThis is a major change. When Eisenhower hegemony. In domestic policy we often analyze warned against the military-industrial complex the two cultures as liberals versusin 1961, the values, institutions and resources 2 12 | 43 | 4 APJ | JF that comprised it were still subordinate the historical succession of deep elements in American society. Today it not only events—such as Dallas, Watergate, dominates both parties, but is also financing and 9/11—has impacted more and threats to both these parties from even further more profoundly on America’s to the right. A good measure of this change is political situation. More that liberal Republicans are as scarce in the specifically, … major foreign wars Republican Party today as Goldwater are typically preceded by deep Republicans were scarce in that party back in events like the Tonkin Gulf 1960. incidents, 9/11, or the 2001 anthrax attacks. This suggests that That change has been achieved partly by what I call the war machine in money, but partly also with the assistance of Washington [the forces striving for deep events: events, such as the Kennedy global U.S. dominance, including assassination, Watergate, the 1980 October elements both inside and outside Surprise, Iran-Contra, and 9/11, which government, both inside and outside the United States] may repeatedly have involved law-breaking and/or have been behind them. violence, have been mysterious to begin with, and whose mystery has been compounded by systematic falsifications in media and internal The continuity between all these successive 6 government records. deception plots suggests that there may be an underlying source for all of them, and that the In saying that these deep events haverepeated appearances of external attacks or contributed collectively to a major change in threats (from North Vietnam, Nicaragua or American society, I am not attributing them all Iraq) may be false. I will suggest that for at to a single agent or “secret team.” Rather I see least a half-century the conflict between the them as flowing in part from the socio-dynamic two mindsets has given rise to a series of processes of violent power itself, powerconspiratorial deep events emanating from the associated with and deployed in the service of hidden recesses of the American war machine the global expansion of American military all designed to deceive and coerce the might, which (as history has shown many American people so as to sustain or further times) has the effect to transform both societies military expansion. I will go further, and argue with surplus power and the individualsthat this continuity underlies yet other exercising that power.7 Insofar as these power significant deep events that led, not to the start processes govern America without deriving of yet another external war, but to the from its constitution, we can say that they progressive militarization and political derive from the milieu of the American deep repression of domestic American society. state. Later I came to state this conclusion more forcefully: In discussing the deep events of Dallas, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11, I will argue that, while the mysteries of these deep events Since 1959, virtually all of cannot at present be fully dispelled by America’s major foreign wars have historical analysis (given the tight lock on been wars 1) induced preemptively official documentation), analysis does point to a by the U.S. war machine and/or 2) pattern linking them. InAmerican War disguised as responses to Machine I wrote that unprovoked enemy aggression, 3 12 | 43 | 4 APJ | JF with disguises repeatedly Presidential Strategies engineered by deception deep events, involving in some way We can trace what has happened over fifty elements of the global drug years through the dramatic change in connection.8 presidential attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Kennedy, Johnson, and above all Nixon believed in détente with the Soviet Union. Starting These deceptions were not designed to deceive under Ford and Carter, and climaxing with America’s enemies, but first and foremost to Reagan, elements in the United States set out deceive the American people, to accept the to help destroy what Reagan called “the evil unilateral initiation by America of illegal wars. empire.” Saudi Arabian wealth and influence approved of this change and may have been a The continuity between all these successive factor in achieving it.10 deception plots suggests that the repeated appearances of external attacks or threats The last major achievement of the dove faction (from North Vietnam, Nicaragua or Iraq) have was Kennedy’s peaceful resolution of the all been false. I will suggest that for at least a Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. But the Joint half-century the conflict between the two Chiefs had been eager to engage with the mindsets has given rise to a series ofSoviet Union, and were furious that Kennedy conspiratorial deep events emanating from the denied them this chance. Air Force Chief hidden recesses of the American war machine General Curtis LeMay “called the settlement all designed to deceive and coerce the‘the greatest defeat in our history,’ and urged a American people so as to sustain or further prompt invasion.”11 Earlier LeMay had called military expansion.