JFK, Mary Pinchot Meyer and the Leary Connection

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

Over two thousand books have been written about the life and death of John F. Kennedy almost 50 years ago and 60% of the American people don’t believe the “lone assassin” theory espoused by the official Warren Commission report. It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that if the real assassins have not been brought to justice, they have been and still are, if alive, “hiding in plain sight.” A fractious consensus among assassination researchers points to multiple, complex conspiracies involving elements in the CIA, the military, the mob and Cuban exile groups – all of whom had demonstrated antagonism against the President, thus the motive and the means to carry out the crime.

I am going to discuss two recently published books: (1) David Talbot’s Brothers – The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007) and (2) Peter Janney’s Mary’s Mosaic – The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2012). Both are extensively documented and annotated books of over 400 pages, telling complex stories impossible to summarize. I will follow the example of Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, and state out front the view that I have come to hold, so that the reader can know what my bias is, rather than trying to pretend I don’t have one. I have come to believe that the multiple assassinations of leaders (JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X to name only four of the most prominent) that occurred in the 1960s signaled the end of the American republic and the establishment of a military-industrial empire, governed according to increasingly secretive, fascistic and militaristic principles, with the formerly “free press” reduced to being the propaganda extension of the controlling elites.

The assassination of JFK brought about the end of the American republic analogously to the way the assassination of Julius Caesar by a cabal of wealthy land-owner senators, whose power and influence Caesar had started to break up, brought about the end of the 500-hundred year history of the Roman Republic and was followed by a totalitarian empire. For a fascinating fresh look at that event, read historian Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003).

David Talbot’s Brothers focuses on the relationship of JFK and Robert Kennedy, who became not only his attorney general, but his most trusted advisory as it became clear that, because of the debacle of the botched Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion he could not trust the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, who were always itching to go to war (that’s what the military always want) and had become his sworn enemies. He also could not trust the CIA (which he said he wanted to “splinter into a thousand pieces”) when he realized they were always pursuing their own subversive agendas in various parts of the world, without any oversight or even truthful disclosure, as required by law. The CIA and their Cuban exile allies wanted to take Cuba back from Castro and were deeply resentful of what they perceived as Kennedy’s failure to follow-up their Bay of Pigs invasion agenda by “sending in the Marines” even though Kennedy had assured them beforehand he had no intention of doing so.

During the Cuban missile crisis, when the entire world came within a hair’s breadth of exchanging nuclear missiles and terminating civilization as we know it, JFK only managed to defuse the situation through his personal back-channel connection to Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet Premier who was similarly being pushed by his military commanders breathing down his neck to let fly the missiles. The two men talked directly, but secretly, by telephone and agreed to turn their respective countries away from war and toward peace. Kennedy and Krushchev thereafter started taking the first, small steps toward a negotiated, gradual disarmament process. As a life-long peace activist, this was to me the most moving and dramatic revelation of Talbot’s book – to know that at the height of maximum tension in the Cold War, these two warriors at the heads of their respective imperial armies reached out and agreed to take steps to avert and avoid war for ever. Immediately after the assassination, Robert Kennedy, who was of course aware of his brother’s plans and activities, took pains to use his own back channel connection with the Kremlin to assure Krushchev that he and the Americans were not blaming the Soviets for his brother’s assassination (knowing that the CIA and the military would have attempted to do just that).

Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic is about Mary Pinchot Meyer – a woman whom Kennedy really loved (unlike the numerous bimbos his sex addiction brought to his bed) and with whom he came to share his vision of turning the world toward a lasting peace. Mary Meyer was assassinated in a Washington park where she was walking, a few months after the JFK assassination. An uneducated black man walking nearby was arrested and tried for the murder – but acquitted for lack of credible evidence. Since Mary Meyer came from an upper class family and had relatives and friends in high places (her former husband was Cord Meyer, who was a high CIA official) her death occupied the rumor mills for quite a while, but then receded into oblivion as yet another unsolved murder case. Peter Janney, who spent forty years researching this book, had a personal connection to Mary Meyer since he was best friends with her son, who got killed in an automobile accident as a child. And Janney’s father was also a high-ranking CIA official, making with Cord Meyer and James Angleton, a trio of CIA spooks who feature repeatedly in the various conspiratorial scenarios that swirl around the assassinations of the 1960s and beyond.

I found his book incredibly interesting and powerful, blending a poignant story of personal tragedy with stories of outrageous criminality in the highest corridors of the American imperial court. The Mary Meyer murder story, which features briefly in David Talbot’s book and hardly at all in most other Kennedy books is the central focus of Janney’s book, because of his personal connection to her family. My old friend and colleague Tim Leary also features in the Mary Meyer story, although I personally never heard him talk about this connection. (It does not surprise me at all that Leary would keep his contacts with Mary secret, at her request). In his autobiography Flashbacks, Leary relates that Mary came to see him in 1962-63, seeking guidance on how to guide LSD sessions for a small group of Washington insider wives, who were wanting to turn the world system to world peace. They had a few meetings, Mary reported that things were going well – but then something happened that alarmed her, her peace conspiracy had been discovered. She warned Leary to lie low, they lost contact. Then in November 1963, JFK was killed, three or four months later Mary Meyer was killed. Many people believe that Mary kept a diary of her meetings with JFK, which the CIA and others were anxious to retrieve.

Regardless of whether there was a diary in which Mary described her affair with the President and/or his designs for peace – a supposition that I for one find unlikely, given the woman’s obvious understanding of the explosiveness of their thinking if it was revealed prematurely or at all. Janney’s book includes a description of a never-before published two-hour interview of Tim Leary and what he knew about Mary Meyer, conducted by Leo Damore (himself an assassination researcher who died of a sudden brain tumor before he could finish his own book) in 1990 (i.e. more than forty years after the assassination) confirming much of the story Leary told in Flashbacks, and adding details.

The conclusions emerging from this book are staggering –Kennedy and the only woman he truly loved took LSD together in the White House, conceiving and birthing their vision for world peace and how to bring it about. As Janney writes, explaining his concluding understanding of why she was killed, –

After Dallas, amid utter horror and shock, Mary had taken it upon herself to to discover and make sense of the truth of the conspiracy that had taken place – only to realize the magnitude of the second conspiracy, a cover-up taking place right before her eyes.. It was her own mosaic of people, events, circumstances, and exploration that informed her understanding – not only of the evil that had taken place in Dallas, but of the villainous darkness that was now enveloping all of America. She had furiously confronted her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, possibly Jim Angleton as well, with what she had discovered, not fully realizing the extent of their own diabolical ruthlessness. The Warren Report was nothing but a house of cards; once ignited, it would be engulfed in flames. If Mary courageously went public with who she was, and what she knew, making clear her position in the final years of Jack’s life, people with influence would take notice; the fire of suspicion around Dallas would erupt into a conflagration. She had to be eliminated (p. 391).

This book shines a brave and brilliant light of truth into a still dark and somber chapter of American history (irrespective of whether the story he tells is precisely true in all its details), a crucial turning point on the pathway from republican democracy to military empire, a pathway on which he are still marching, blinded by fear and ignorance. May these two books (and others now coming out about the Kennedy era) contribute to our awakening and a returning to sanity.

Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Psychedelics, Roots of War & Domination, The Sixties | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

The American Imperial Project – Who Benefits and Who Pays?

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Ralph Metzner

An article by Paul Craig Roberts published on the Global Research website (www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29988) makes some insightful comments about the American empire in comparison with empires of the past.

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance…The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

The ruling elites in empires past and present invent a myth justifying (to themselves and their own citizens) their imperial domination project in terms of the alleged civilizing benefits they bring to conquered and subservient peoples. Roberts quotes a book by historian Timothy H. Parsons – The Rule of Empires (2010), which replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. In my book Green Psychology (1999) I wrote about the self-justifying stories told by invaders and dominators, going back to the Indo-European pastoralist tribes that invaded settled farming communities in Old Europe during the Neolithic.

In his blog, Roberts cites the historian Parsons as wondering

whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations. America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars.

So what is it all about? Cui bono – who benefits -  is the question any criminal investigators seeks to answer. The answer to this question that Roberts, Parsons and others, including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn provide is obvious once clearly stated. Paul Craig Roberts continues -

The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty (my italics – RM).
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end, another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined. Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens (my italics – RM).

Here is the reason why the “bloated budgets” and “obscene profits” of the military-industrial-security complex, while the government expenditures on health, education, social welfare, environmental preservation keep being “slashed” in the name of some fictitious theory “balancing” theory.

Roberts concludes his comments by saying -

It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are also the victims of the American empire.

Filed under: Current Events, Economics & Finance, Green Psychology, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Contrary to appearances, social science statistics show a remarkable worldwide decline in violence

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Ralph Metzner

I am as appalled as most people by the astonishing amount of worldwide violence that is the daily staple of our news media. It seems as non-violent peacemaking efforts are few and far between and rarely seem to show dramatic successes. So I was surprised, impressed and heartened when I learned of statistical social science research that shows a historical decline in violence. An article by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, drawing on research by Harvard social psychologist Steven Pinker, as well as others, summarizes the evidence for the trend toward less violence. Below are some excerpts –

That’s the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem. In his book, Pinker writes: “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.” And it runs counter to what the mass media is reporting and essentially what we feel in our guts.

Pinker and other experts say the reality is demonstrated in the black and white of spreadsheets and historical documents. They tell a story of a world moving away from violence.

His findings are based on peer-reviewed studies published by other academics using examinations of graveyards, surveys and historical records:

— The number of people killed in battle — calculated per 100,000 population — has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.

— The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008.

— There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now.

Pinker argued his case in a commentary this past week in the scientific journal Nature. He has plenty of charts and graphs to back up his claims, including evidence …that our everyday lives are also less violent:

— Murder in European countries has steadily fallen from near 100 per 100,000 people in the 14th and 15th centuries to about 1 per 100,000 people now.

— Murder within families. The U.S. rate of husbands being killed by their wives has dropped from 1.2 per 100,000 in 1976 to just 0.2. For wives killed by their husbands, the rate has slipped from 1.4 to 0.8 over the same time period.

— Rape in the United States is down 80 percent since 1973. Lynchings, which used to occur at a rate of 150 a year, have disappeared.

— Discrimination against blacks and gays is down, as is capital punishment, the spanking of children, and child abuse.

Even when you add in terrorism, the world is still far less violent, Pinker says.

“Terrorism doesn’t account for many deaths. Sept. 11 was just off the scale. There was never a terrorist attack before or after that had as many deaths. What it does is generate fear,” he said.

It’s hard for many people to buy the decline in violence. ..In 1998, Andrew Mack, then head of strategic planning for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said a look at the statistics showed the world was becoming less violent. The reaction from his professional peacekeeping colleagues?

“Pffft, it’s not true,” they told Mack, arguing that the 1990s had to be the worst decade in U.N. history. It wasn’t even close.

Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University and author of “Winning the War on War,” has also been telling the same story as Pinker, but from a foreign policy point of view. At each speech he gives, people bring up America’s lengthy wars in the Middle East. “It’s been a hard message to get through,” he acknowledged.

“We see the atrocities and they are atrocious,” Goldstein said. “The blood is going to be just as red on the television screens.”

Mack, who’s now with Simon Fraser University in Canada, credits the messy, inefficient and heavily political peacekeeping process at the U.N., the World Bank and thousands of non-governmental organizations for helping curb violence.

The “Human Security Report 2009/2010,” a project led by Mack and funded by several governments, is a worldwide examination of war and violence and has been published as a book. It cites jarringly low numbers. While the number of wars has increased by 25 percent, they’ve been minor ones.

The average annual battle death toll has dropped from nearly 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s to less than 1,000 in the 21st century. And the number of deadliest wars — those that kill at least 1,000 people a year — has fallen by 78 percent since 1988.

Mack and Goldstein emphasize how hard society and peacekeepers have worked to reduce wars, focusing on action taken to tamp down violence, while Pinker focuses on cultural and thought changes that make violence less likely. But all three say those elements are interconnected. Even the academics who disagree with Pinker, Goldstein and Mack, say the declining violence numbers are real.

“The facts are not in dispute here; the question is what is going on,” John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.”

“It’s been 21 years since the Cold War ended and the United States has been at war for 14 out of those 21 years,” Mearsheimer said. “If war has been burned out of the system, why do we have NATO and why has NATO been pushed eastward…? Why are we spending more money on defense than all other countries in the world put together?”

What’s happening is that the U.S. is acting as a “pacifier” keeping the peace all over the world, Mearsheimer said.

The beauty of this research is that it is numbers and the numbers don’t lie. The interpretation of the findings is another matter. Mearsheimer’s view that the US is acting as a “pacifier” helping to reduce number of violent wars  concurs with the view of the American foreign policy establishment and the US mainstream media. It is of course quite at variance with the views of non-conforming critics of American foreign policy interventions like Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Hudson, Canadians Michel Chossudovsky, Webster Tarpley and others who regard American policies as the consistent expression of a long-term goal of global military and financial dominance (dressed up of course in the rhetoric of humanitarian peacekeeper)

It’s interesting to speculate about whether the downward trends in violence revealed in  these statistics would be even greater if the political goals of the rulers were in accord with the apparent and evident wishes of the masses of the people. And this, synchronistically, is the central message of the Occupy movement.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Bombings-beheadings-Stats-show-a-peaceful-world-2231126.php#ixzz1fdPfvcUx

Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Michael Parenti on the loaded language of “class warfare”

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Ralph Metzner

Michael Parenti is one of our most astute and incisive historians and political commentators.His most recent and superb book is The Face of Imperialism (Paradigm Publishers, 2011), which Gregory Elich calls a “searing indictment of the ruthless nature of imperial capitalism.”

I have also particularly appreciated his fresh take on The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (The New Press, 2003)– in which he points out that Caesar was a tyrant from the point of view of the ruling class whose power he sought to reduce, but a populist for the poorer classes – which is why his assassination triggered civil war that eventually led to the demise of the Roman republic and the establishment of an absolute empire.

Parenti recently made some pointed comments on our present situation from a Marxist perspective, in a posting on Reader Supported News

Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation. The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under – our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting. The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. …

In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term “class” has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy (“Is the speaker a Marxist?”). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics). So instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue collar” and “white collar employees.” Instead of lower class we hear of “inner city poor” and “low-income elderly.” Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.” Don’t take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: “folks,” as in “Folks are strugglin’ along.”)

“Class” is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.

That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class. The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.

“Class” is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called “identity politics” and “culture wars,” class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of “leftists” told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.

I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of “identity politics,” the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.

Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as “Marxist.” The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.

We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.

And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.

Class Warfare Indeed
By Michael Parenti, Reader Supporter News
03 October 11

For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The dark side of U.S. history – A sobering reminder

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Ralph Metzner

Many, perhaps most,  Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world – and this is the view of American international policies promulgated by the mainstream media. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it’s viewed as a mistake or an aberration. Writers and historians such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn and others have long pointed out this is a grossly distorted view of American history. In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.” There is a dark — seldom acknowledged — thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic. This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the “war on terror” over the last decade.

As a psychologist, I know that confronting the truth about the actual effects of one’s actions on others is a necessary prerequisite to liberating change and self-empowerment. In my books The Well of Remembrance (1994) and The Roots of War and Domination (2008), I have written about the need for rituals of memory and truth-speaking as an essential process for civilized societies that wanting to restore peace and sanity to their relations with other nations and their own people. The South African Truth and Reconciliation processes, after the abolition of apartheid, are the outstanding example in our time. This is why the story below can serve as a reminder of aspects of US history that we either never knew, or have forgotten.

http://www.alternet.org/news/148451/surprise_–_the_very_dark_side_of_u.s._history/?page=1

Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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