When America Was Ruled
by Three Evil Queens
by Jeffrey Steinberg and Tony Papert
April 6—Why are Americans so terribly stupid?
The answer to that question lies in developments which began towards the close of World War II—developments which most of those alive today never learned about, while, with some exceptions, those who lived through them try to forget them. This has been a process spread out over several generations, beginning with the death of the greatest 20th-Century President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Suddenly faced with the awesome responsibilities of a wartime President, FDR’s right-wing-imposed Vice President, Harry S Truman, famously confessed his total lack of qualification for the job. Under Truman, the nation was hijacked for Britain’s plans for war against the Soviet Union, our recent wartime ally. The March 5, 1946 Fulton, Missouri Iron Curtain speech by Winston Churchill launched the crusade. But it was a well-placed team of fanatics and perverts who actually engineered the terror bombing of American culture.
While Churchill threw down the gauntlet for a new war against Godless communism, it was FBI Director and self-anointed Grand Inquisitor J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), Joe McCarthy aide and handler Roy M. Cohn (1927-86), and New York’s red-baiting Cardinal Francis Spellman (1889-1967), who led the charge.
The years that immediately followed the death of FDR were marked by a domestic terror campaign, led by Hoover, Cohn, and Spellman, which left a lasting mark on American culture. It was not sympathy for “communism” that was under attack. It was the human mind—the creative intellect.
While the McCarthy witch hunt was its most conspicuous feature, the assault on American morale and creativity was conducted, largely from London and Wall Street, by a larger network of forces that contributed to the climate in which Hoover, Cohn, and Spellman could literally get away with mass cultural murder.
Just as “McCarthyism,” better called Trumanism, was building in momentum, the Frankfurt School, a collection of German exile social scientists in the United States under British patronage, was launching a sophisticated campaign to impose conformity as a virtue, and brand true scientific creativity, often reflected in Classical musical composition and poetry, as a dangerous warning sign of fascist proclivity.
In 1950, émigré Frankfurt School authors published the most comprehensive social survey of American values ever attempted. Under the title The Authoritarian Personality, the authors, led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, argued that anyone who believes in scientific truth is a totalitarian. Public opinion, and strict conformity to public opinion, shaped by what the School called the mass culture industry, was to be the highest virtue.
In line with the Frankfurt School assault, allied agencies under the sponsorship of people such as Allen Dulles and Prescott Bush, launched an unlimited-budget, clandestine war against Classical culture, as part of the alleged fight against “communism” and spreading Soviet influence. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was one of the leading agencies, active in the United States and Western Europe, that promoted a culture of perversion and degeneracy, typified by the atonal music of Stravinsky and Schönberg, abstract painting, and the writings of existentialist philosophers, including outright Nazi sympathizers like Martin Heidegger.
Russell Spilled the Beans
The project to terrorize and manipulate the American people into supine brainlessness, was most clearly spelled out by Lord Bertrand Russell, the man whom Lyndon LaRouche singled out as “the most evil man of the 20th Century.”
In a 1953 book, The Impact of Science on Society, Russell was candid:
“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these, the most influential is what is called ‘education.’... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything, if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.”
Russell continued,
“The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship.... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children, on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity.
“But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise, and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
Russell concluded with a warning:
“Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Hoover’s Gestapo
From the moment he first joined the U.S. Department of Justice, on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I, John Edgar Hoover was American’s closest thing to a Grand Inquisitor, whose army of blackmailers and spies targeted generations of Presidents, Congressmen, and political activists.
Hoover has been accused of involvement in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was certainly implicated in the coverups of those heinous crimes against the nation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Hoover and the FBI had failed to adequately investigate the two assassinations; and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison conducted an in-depth investigation into the Warren Commission coverup, linking a wartime British intelligence colleague of Hoover, Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, to the anti-communist networks implicated in the JFK assassination.
Hoover’s very first assignment, upon joining the Justice Department, was to lead the purportedly “anti-communist” terror campaign, known as the Palmer Raids, as head of the Department’s Alien Enemy Bureau, assigned to implement the 1917 Espionage Act. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to head up the newly formed Bureau of Investigations General Intelligence Division, otherwise known as the Radicals Division.
By 1924, President Calvin Coolidge had named Hoover to head of the Bureau of Investigations, which would become the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 1935, with expanded powers. For nearly half a century, until his death in May 1972, Hoover ran the Bureau with an iron fist.
Years before the United States entered World War II, Hoover established a joint espionage program which the British code named “Venona.” Under the project, the FBI worked covertly with British intelligence to spy on alleged Soviet subversives in the United States and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Until 1952, Hoover conducted the vast Anglo-American espionage program without informing Presidents or Secretaries of State or Attorneys General, under whom he allegedly served. He maintained the files locked in safes in his private office at FBI headquarters.
In 1950, Hoover was made a Knight of the British Empire by King George VI.
In 1956, even as McCarthyism was coming to an end, Hoover launched his own secret witch hunt against his domestic targets. Under the Counterintelligence Program (“Cointelpro”), Hoover accelerated his illegal domestic spying and covert operations, targeting anyone and everyone who fit his own perverse list of “enemies” of the state.
It was only just before Hoover’s death that the first details of Hoover’s private war on America were exposed, as the result of a break-in by antiwar activists into a local FBI office in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971. The exposé of Cointelpro led to its formal shutdown, Congressional hearings, Presidential commissions, and laws establishing the first serious Congressional oversight of both the FBI and the CIA.
Hoover’s Man Cohn
Roy M. Cohn gained notoriety in 1951, soon after he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, for his below-the-belt tactics in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on charges they passed U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviets. The Rosenbergs were executed, based on flawed evidence, some of which was later repudiated by key prosecution witnesses.
As the result of the Rosenberg case, FBI Director Hoover recommended Cohn to his close friend Sen. Joe McCarthy, who was conducting a Senate-led witch hunt against alleged “communists,” based on secret files provided by the FBI against targeted officials of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, the CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency’s Voice of America.
On Feb. 9, 1950, McCarthy, a second-rate Wisconsin Republican Senator, delivered a fiery speech on Lincoln Day in Wheeling, W.Va., in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists and sympathizers in the State Department. The list was compiled by the FBI and passed on to McCarthy. It was the beginning of what Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block soon labeled “McCarthyism,” a term that came to be synonymous with witch hunts, purges, and hate campaigns.
Hoover put McCarthy in touch with Roy Cohn, and urged the Senator to bring Cohn on as his general counsel. While gaining his most notoriety for targeting alleged Communists, McCarthy soon broadened his target list to others, whom he accused of treason. Gen. George Marshall was one of the McCarthy-Cohn priority targets; he was accused of sabotaging the war effort, and, effectively, colluding with the enemy.
In 1953, McCarthy was made Chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, under a Republican majority, swept in with Eisenhower’s victory. While he had coveted chairmanship of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, McCarthy turned the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into his witch hunt vehicle, holding hundreds of closed-door hearings, in which Cohn, using Hoover’s blackmail files, wrecked the careers of countless loyal government officials.
But the targets were not limited to government officials by any means. Anyone, even down to the leader of a Girl Scout troop in Bayonne, N.J., was liable to inquisition, and to penalties including imprisonment or exile for refusal to forswear thought-crimes. The National Security State of those years was a caste society, in which the “security-cleared” caste enjoyed whatever opportunities existed for jobs and advancement, while the “non-security cleared caste,” i.e., everyone else, was left to rummage through garbage cans or worse. Suicides were legion, as during the Cultural Revolution in China.
When the anti-Communist witch hunts ran out of sufficient credible targets, McCarthy and Cohn launched what came to be known as the “Lavender Scare,” a purge of alleged homosexuals infiltrated into all levels of government, and therefore allegedly vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. Again, Hoover provided the ammunition.
Materials on sexual practices, especially homosexuality, were always the number-one priority for FBI field agents to mine, and to send personally under seal to the Director. The major calling of Hoover and his friends was blackmail; their stock-in-trade was compromising information. This, and worse, is still true today. Thus—ask not why your Congressman never, ever gets around to doing something he has repeatedly promised you he will do. He knows, as Edward Snowden has proven, that his every telephone call is on file, along with much of his e-mail and who-knows-what else.
Cohn & Schine vs. the Army
McCarthy was a close friend and protégé of Joseph Kennedy, and, through Kennedy, he enjoyed the backing of a nationwide network of right-wing anti-Communist Catholics, who covered for McCarthy and Cohn during their rampage.
Cohn had brought his intimate friend G. David Schine onto the Subcommittee staff, but Schine was drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped overseas.
Cohn and McCarthy made the fatal mistake of targeting the U.S. Army, when the Army Command denied Schine special privileges. They had already infuriated many American patriots, with their attack on General Marshall, including Marshall’s wartime protégé Dwight Eisenhower.
This McCarthy-Cohn assault led to the famous Army-McCarthy hearings of May-June 1954, in which McCarthy and Cohn’s efforts to bring down the U.S. Army’s top brass ran up against powerful opposition, bolstered by heavy, albeit belated, media attacks against McCarthyism, led by journalist Edward R. Morrow.
In the backlash, McCarthy was publicy wrecked, and Cohn resigned from government, to launch a private law practice in New York City.
Out of government, Cohn became an even more valuable asset of Hoover’s war on American liberties. Hoover maintained a network of private sector agents and propagandists, and Cohn was among his most trusted. As attorney for many of New York’s most powerful mob families, Cohn had access to some of the criminal resources that Hoover needed in his private war. For decades, Hoover denied the existence of organized crime, often personally hob-nobbing with Cohn’s hoodlum clients at race tracks and casinos.
Even after Hoover’s death, Cohn maintained his apparatus of private sector spies, blackmailers, and provocateurs. One of his front groups, Western Goals, was a joint British-American anti-Communist action front that inserted itself into the Reagan Administration’s war on Soviet Communism. Ultimately, Western Goals was exposed as a front for Oliver North in the Iran-Contra operations. John Rees, a British con-man and informant for the FBI as well as British intelligence services, was Cohn’s point man in Western Goals.
Ultimately, after causing immeasurable damage to American popular culture, through their assault on liberties and free speech, through a reign of terror, blackmail, and extortion that ran for decades, McCarthy and Cohn died young. McCarthy died at the age of 49, from liver failure, attributed to alcoholism. Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, just months after he was disbarred for a long list of violations of New York Bar Association codes. He was 59.
Cardinal Spellman’s Crusade
Both J. Edgar Hoover and Roy M. Cohn maintained a special deep, personal friendship with New York’s anti-Communist crusading Archbishop, Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman. Spellman served as Archbishop of New York from 1939-67. He was an intimate friend of Roy Cohn, and an ardent defender of McCarthy and McCarthyism. From his years of work in the Vatican as a young priest, Spellman became a close friend of Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Indeed, when Pacelli was elected Pope in 1939, one of his very first acts was to name Spellman as Archbishop of New York.
Through his close friendship with Joseph Kennedy, Spellman worked on behalf of FDR to crush the pro-fascist Father Charles Coughlin, touring the country in a private plane with the popular Pacelli, in 1936, turning many Catholic voters out for Roosevelt’s reelection. When Roosevelt refused to name Spellman as the first American envoy to the Vatican, Spellman turned against FDR, and became the arch-conservative anti-Communist and ally of Hoover and Cohn.
Thus, the beginning of the answer to our riddle of the stupid Americans, points back to these years of the rule of the Three Evil Queens, in the 1950s. Inside the hushed vastness of the Archbishop’s Mansion near the Mayor’s Gracie Mansion in New York City, a liveried servant brings a telephone to the Cardinal. A “Mr. Cohn” is calling from his lower East Side home office, crowded with stuffed animals, lawyers, lovers, ex-lovers, tourists—in short, anyone and everyone. Perhaps he has recommendations for appointments or firings in the New York Archdiocese, or elsewhere in the Church. Many of these came from Roy Cohn then.
As a gesture of friendly intimacy to his guest in the Mansion, the Archbishop indicated that he is turning the telephone to “speaker.”
“Franny, you fat faggot!” a familiar voice rings out.
