Re: The Canonization Of Katharine Graham
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2001 15:23:34 -0700
From: "dave `who can do? ratmandu!' ratcliffe"
Organization: rat haus reality press
To: Winston Weeks <wweeks@aros.net>
CC: Preston Truman <hermit@downwinders.org>, John Judge
Subject: Re: THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM
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Subject: THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 19:42:33 -0600
From: Winston Weeks <wweeks@aros.net>
To: Preston Truman <hermit@downwinders.org>, Dave
Ratcliffe
(please forward)
07/23/2001
THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM -- By Sam Smith
IN A SIGN that the Washington Post's ability to
misconstrue events will not die with its leader, the
paper gave state funeral status to the passing of former
publisher Katharine Graham. This was more than a simple
act of commercial self-aggrandizement; it marked a
milestone in corporatism, expanding the task of the
consumer from mere purchase of products to a required
reverence for their makers on a level previous reserved
for heroes and royalty. On three successive days the
Post actually printed a map of the funeral procession
route, local TV stations gave the ceremony live
coverage, the police blocked streets, and the holiest
temple of Episcopalianism, the National Cathedral,
pulled out all the stops.
Lost in all this were a few basic facts. The most
celebrated events in Mrs. Graham's journalistic career
-- Watergate and the Pentagon Papers -- occurred more
than 25 years ago and, while honorable, were anomalies
rather than typical. More realistic indicators can be
found in the names on the funeral speaker and honored
guest list, most remarkably -- given all the Pentagon
Paper iconography -- those of Robert McNamara and Henry
Kissinger, two of America's major practitioners of
violence during Mrs. Graham's reign. ... [read full
article]
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[i am including John Judge on this as i know he can share far more
illuminating insights than i on this thread. ]
It's curious how often "facts" are perpetuated by any-and-every
shade-and-hue of world-view. Anytime someone cites something like
"the Pentagon Papers" as an example of "good journalism" or
"journalism the way it's supposed to be practiced", i think back
to what Fletcher used to say about it. Go to
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html and in your web
browser, bring up the "Find" window, and step through the
occurences of "Pentagon Papers". Two of the more salient sections:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html#pgfId=7812
The man who has not lived in the secrecy and
intelligence environment -- really lived in it and fully
experienced it -- cannot write accurately about it.
There is no substitute for the day-to-day living of a
life in which he tells his best friends and
acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one
story while he lives another. The man who must depend
upon research and investigation inevitably falls victim
to the many pitfalls of the secret world and of the
"cover story" world with its lies and counter-lies.
A good example of this is the work of Neil Sheehan and
his associates on The New York Times' Pentagon Papers.
The very title is the biggest cover story (no pun
intended) of them all; so very few of those papers were
really of Pentagon origin. The fact that I had them in
my office, that I had worked with them, and that I had
written parts of some of them proves that they were not
genuine Pentagon papers, because my work at that time
was devoted to support of the CIA. The same is true of
General Krulak, Bill Bundy, and to a degree, Maxwell
Taylor and others.
That people still think the source of the "Pentagon Papers" was
the pentagon and that Daniel Ellsberg was somehow operating
outside the mind-shapers grasp of what was being "floated" as
"reality", is an indicator of how successful such psy-war ops
continue to be -- decades later. Like the Kennedy assassinations,
etc........
To look at this matter in another way, the man who has
lived and experienced this unnatural existence becomes
even more a victim of its unreality. He becomes enmeshed
beyond all control upon the horns of a cruel dilemma. On
the one hand, his whole working life has been dedicated
to the cause of secrecy and to its protection by means
of cover stories (lies). In this pursuit he has given of
himself time after time to pledges, briefings, oaths,
and deep personal conviction regarding the significance
of that work. Even if he would talk and write, his life
has been so interwoven into the fabric of the real and
the unreal, the actual and the cover story, that he
would be least likely to present the absolutely correct
data.
On the other hand, as a professional he would have been
subjected to such cellularization and
compartmentalization each time he became involved in any
real "deep" operation that he would not have known the
whole story anyhow. This compartmentalization is very
real. I have worked on projects with many CIA men so
unaware of the entire operation that they had no
realization and awareness of the roles of other CIA men
working on the same project. I would know of this
because inevitably somewhere along the line both groups
would come to the Department of Defense for hardware
support. I actually designed a special office in the
Pentagon with but one door off the corridor. Inside, it
had a single room with one secretary. However, off her
office there was one more door that led to two more
offices with a third doorway leading to yet another
office, which was concealed by the door from the
secretary's room. I had to do this because at times we
had CIA groups with us who were now allowed to meet each
other, and who most certainly would not have been there
had they known that the others were there. (For the
record, the office was 4D1000 -- it may have been
changed by now; but it had remained that way for many
years.)
Very few people are willing to even TRY to include what LFP points
to above, when they endeavor to "explain" how things have been,
are, and continue "happening" the way they do....
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html#pgfId=8032
1998 Preface
How many of us recall that early in June 1971 the
official history of "The United States Involvement in
Vietnam from World War II to the Present" burst upon the
scene in several of the larger newspapers of this
country? It was said that this enormous collection,
given the name "The Pentagon Papers" of "37 studies and
15 collections of documents done in 43 volumes" had been
secretly released to these newspapers by a young man,
Daniel Ellsberg, who had stolen them despite their cloak
of highest secrecy.
Furthermore, how many recall that the Director of the
Study Task Force, Leslie H. Gelb, whom Secretary Robert
McNamara had directed to head this task force was
assigned to the office of the Assistant Secretary,
International Security Affairs, under the Honorable Paul
C. Warneke and that his immediate superior was the
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Plans & Arms Control,
Morton Halperin?
Quite a stew of "on-the-ground" psychological warfare operations
personnel, eh-ya?
John -- you know worlds about Daniel Ellsberg -- what are the most
fundamental aspects you can clue us in to about him?
dave
Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 02:48:55 -0400
From: John Judge
To: "dave ''who can do? ratmandu!'' ratcliffe"
Subject: Re: THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM
Cannonize it is, and what a nightmare she was. She inherited the
paper after her husband was sent to Chestnut Lodge, a private CIA
psychiatric hellhole that also produced the "suicide" of MKULTRA
whistleblower Frank Olson. His father, Eugene Graham, had given
Phillip control as a "wedding present" of sorts, having locked up
the contracted new owner, civil rights liberal Judith Beck Stein
in Chestnut Lodge where she overheard "Nazi psychiatrists"
discussing the murder of JFK and MLK in 1960.
Eugene Graham was big money. Judith Stein wanted "one paper in
America to tell the truth". Instead we got the Graham version of
reality via the Washington Post, long considered a poor cousin to
the NY Times until the Pentagon Papers issue broke.
By that time, a significant section of the CIA and the ruling
class had decided the war in Vietnam was getting too costly at
home, and wanted to get out. The documents released never touched
Nixon's role, which went back as far as wanting Eisenhower to
release nuclear weapons to the French in 1954 before the fall of
Diem Bien Phu. The US took over the remaining 20% of the war cost
they had not been paying and installed Ngo Dinh Diem, fresh out of
Catholic seminaries in the US, introduced to Kennedy by Cardinal
Spellman (Knights of Malta) and Allen Dulles (CIA, Nazis and
Knights of Malta) as the wonder boy to prop up a fake government
in "south" Vietnam.
It took JFK a few years to wise up, fatally, to his errors. The
Pentagon Papers put all the blame on LBJ instead, but they were
enough to convince the fence sitters that the war might not be all
that great.
Thus, the NYT and the Post played their role as corporate
propaganda pieces for the eastern establishment end of the class.
See Carl Oglesby [Yankee and Cowboy War (1976) and Who Killed JFK?
(1992)] on this split, among others. They damn near gave the White
House a set-up to install pre-release censorship on news, except
for a new and therefore still honest judge in the DC federal court
who ruled them down.
The installment method used for the Pentagon Papers, unlike the
printing of the Warren Report all at once, allowed the government
to intervene. But the damage to the war's credibility was done
either way.
Ellsberg was and still is painted as a hero in all this, but not
according to his co-conspirator Tony Russo who says Ellsberg
bailed before their case eventually brought down Nixon as well.
Wild Man is the new biography of Dan he recommends.
I have talked to Ellsberg over the years and confronted him about
his secrets and top level work. My mother said she was "5 levels
above Top Secret" and had access to the war room. I heard Ellsberg
in a public talk say he was "15 levels above". Now he says he
doesn't know what the term means, but like any good secret
society, there are shrinking rings of control and information flow
(ie 33rd Degree Mason for instance).
Yet Ellsberg says he knew of no "conspiracies". A protege of
Kissinger, he also worked with CIA's Mort Halperin (now at
Institute of Policy Studies), who cut a bad deal between the CIA
and the ACLU on release of information on their budget and
documents.
Mary Pinchot Meyers links Katherine Graham and others to the JFK
operation, including the simultaneous seeking/destruction
(depending on whom you believe) of Meyer's diary after her strange
death by James Jesus Angleton and Bill Bradley. Graham was not
only tight with Kissinger, she was tight with Frederick Sessions
"Fritz" Beebe, a major arms dealer and part of the
military/industrial complex.
Watergate was similarly a controlled scandal, refusing to dip into
the martial law aspects, set-up to take Nixon out, which it did.
ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] point man Woodward and sell-out
Carl Bernstein told the story they were supposed to tell and
nothing more. The break-in of Ellsberg's office by the Watergate
plumbers ties the knot of these two operations.
In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate the press had to be dragged
out as the last possible bastion of "credibility" since the
government had lost it in 1964 with issuance of the Warren Report
(this is statistically documented, not my speculation on timing of
loss of faith). So, of course, she now has to be cannonized in the
church of punditry and media accuracy and courage which we are all
supposed to worship.
I used to cut the Post and the Times for years, sorting and
sifting. Now I refuse to subscribe to either since they are pure
propaganda. For more on Katherine's perfidy see Katherine the
Great [Katherine the Great, Katharine Graham and the Washington
Post, Deborah Davis, National Press, Inc., 1978], an excellent
tonic for the current dyspepsia. We are in the Time of the Toad
again, a phrase Dalton Trumbo coined from reading that Emile Zola
said that during the Dreyfus years he would go to the market, buy
a newspaper, a cup of coffee and a small toad. If he could get the
toad down, he would read the paper.
I told Mae Brussell years ago that we should go back to 1963 and
clip backwards, because they were not covering their ass as well
then. I still believe it to be true if we want to know how we got
here. But the basic outline is clear. A J Liebling and I F Stone
and George Seldes told us all we need to know about newspapers and
the truth. A corporation by any other name would smell as awful.
Prouty knew it was a sham.
I attended the last anniversary panel put on by Vietnam Vets of
America here at the press club, including Sanford Unger who went
on to run Voice of America. A full tape of the proceedings can be
had for $5 if you want it, contact DemocracyU@aol.com.
If Dan Ellsberg and Kate Graham are our heroes, we are in deep
trouble. Mae Brussell alone got out more news and broke more real
scandals than the two together. Prouty made more sense than either
one. But, what else can they do? They have to lionize the liars
for fear anyone will notice those telling the truth.
For real democracy now!
John Judge
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(please forward)
07/23/2001
THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM -- By Sam Smith
IN A SIGN that the Washington Post's ability to misconstrue events
will not die with its leader, the paper gave state funeral status
to the passing of former publisher Katharine Graham. This was more
than a simple act of commercial self-aggrandizement; it marked a
milestone in corporatism, expanding the task of the consumer from
mere purchase of products to a required reverence for their makers
on a level previous reserved for heroes and royalty. On three
successive days the Post actually printed a map of the funeral
procession route, local TV stations gave the ceremony live
coverage, the police blocked streets, and the holiest temple of
Episcopalianism, the National Cathedral, pulled out all the stops.
Lost in all this were a few basic facts. The most celebrated
events in Mrs. Graham's journalistic career -- Watergate and the
Pentagon Papers -- occurred more than 25 years ago and, while
honorable, were anomalies rather than typical. More realistic
indicators can be found in the names on the funeral speaker and
honored guest list, most remarkably -- given all the Pentagon
Paper iconography -- those of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger,
two of America's major practitioners of violence during Mrs.
Graham's reign.
Facts that belong in the Graham story, but which have been
consistently excised, include:
* In 1979 Katherine Graham and her managing editor managed to
suppress the first printing of "Katharine the Great" by
Deborah Davis. The publisher actually shredded 20,000 copies.
Davis sued, eventually won, and the book finally came out.
* Graham, in a 1988 speech to senior CIA employees, said:
"There are some things the general public does not need to
know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the
government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and
when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
* Norman Solomon has written, "Graham was a key player in the
June 1971 battle over the Pentagon Papers. But such
journalistic fortitude came late in the Vietnam War. During
most of the bloodshed, the Post gave consistent editorial
boosts to the war and routinely regurgitated propaganda in
the guise of objective reporting. Graham's [memoirs] never
comes close to acknowledging that her newspaper mainly
functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White
House, State Department and Pentagon."
* Lest you think we're just talking old history, here is what
Matthew Rothschild of the Progressive wrote last year: "In
commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of
Saigon on April 30, many leaders of the mainstream media
pulled out all the stops to cast the U.S. role in a
flattering light. The notable exception was The New York
Times, which blamed President Johnson for the "reckless
spilling of American and Vietnamese blood." . . . The
Washington Post, by contrast, rallied around the flag. Its
editorial on April 30 said, "For the sake of the 58,000
Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, it is important to
recall the large and just cause for which they made their
sacrifice." The Post also expressed relief that "the Gulf War
cured the armed forces of the debilitating Vietnam syndrome."
To reinforce its position, the Post ran an op-ed the same day
by Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, who received the
Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam. Kerrey wrote, "We were
fighting on the right side. . . . The cause was just and the
sacrifice not in vain." The reason the United States lost, he
said, was: "We succumbed to fatigue and self-doubt." Next to
Kerrey's commentary, the Post ran five accounts from
Vietnamese Americans, every one of them bemoaning the U.S.
departure. At least four of the five were South Vietnamese
military officers or their relatives . . . Nowhere in The
Washington Post was there a hint of another Vietnamese
perspective, or another U.S. perspective, for that matter.
Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post Company, was equally
lopsided in its coverage. The May 1 issue had two long
articles on Vietnam. The first was by Evan Thomas entitled
"The Last Days of Saigon." The piece was all but bereft of
analysis except that Vietnam was "at once a noble cause and a
tragic waste," and "a low moment in the American Century, a
painful reminder of the limits of power." The other article
was by -- I'm not kidding you here -- Henry Kissinger! Akin
to having Goering write about the blitzkrieg, Newsweek let
Kissinger (he of the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, he of
the mining of Hanoi's harbors, he of the "madman" theory of
diplomacy) retouch his own portrait even as he smeared the
protesters once more.
* Another point that Solomon has summarized well: "The
autobiography has little use for people beyond Graham's
dazzling peers. Even activists who made history are mere
walk-ons. In her book, the name of Martin Luther King Jr. was
not worth mentioning. For a book so widely touted as a
feminist parable, "Personal History" is notably bereft of
solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They
barely seem to exist in the great media executive's range of
vision."
* Robert Parry -- a Washington correspondent for Newsweek
during the late 1980s -- told Solomon: "On one occasion in
1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling
anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had
been watered down because the story needed to be run past
Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that
weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors
that the story as written might cause some consternation."
(Former CIA director Robert Gates subsequently confirmed
Parry's story in his memoirs.)
* In the 1950s, Graham's husband, Philip, played an important
role in Operation Mockingbird, a major and remarkably
successful effort by the CIA to co-opt journalists. Some 25
major news organizations and 400 journalists were seconded by
the agency for its purposes during this period, as admitted
by the CIA itself during the Church committee hearings. As
one agency operative put it, "You could get a journalist
cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a
month." A number of Post editors and reporters, including
Mrs. Graham's own choice for Managing Editor, Ben Bradlee,
and Bob Woodward, came out of CIA or intelligence
backgrounds. Mrs. Graham continued the paper's close
relationship with the agency.
* The Washington Post joined in the vicious attack on reporter
Gary Webb, who dared to reveal aspects of the relationship
between the CIA and the drug trade. Typical nasties came from
Howard Kurtz: "Oliver Stone, check your voice mail." And from
Mary McGrory: "The San Jose story has been discredited by
major publications, including the Post." And why? Well, in
part because the Post and other papers simply took the CIA's
word. Wrote Marc Cooper in the LA New Times: "Regarding the
all-important question of how much responsibility the CIA
had, we are being asked to take the word of sources who in a
more objective account would be considered suspects."
* In crushing the pressmen's strike, Mrs. Graham not only broke
the back of unions at the Washington Post but set an example
that would be followed by other media throughout America. The
journalistic labor movement never recovered.
* Mrs. Graham, like her husband, believed firmly in a political
aristocracy. Other publishers before them had felt the same
way but mercifully the nation's media was diffuse enough that
they could not have the full power of their prejudices. By
the time Mrs. Graham took charge, however, that was changing.
As Ben Bagdikian wrote in 1990 in 'The Media Monopoly," "At
the end of World War II, 80 percent of the daily newspapers
in the U.S. were independently owned, but by 1989 the
proportion was reversed, with 80 percent owned by corporate
chains. In 1981 twenty corporations controlled most of the
business of the country's 11,000 magazines, but only seven
years later that number had shrunk to three corporations.
Today, despite the more than 25,000 outlets in the U.S., 23
corporations control most of the business in daily
newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures
. . . An alarming pattern emerges. On one side is information
limited by each individual's own experience and effort; on
the other, the unseen affairs of the community, the nation,
and the world, information needed by the individual to
prevent political powerlessness. What connects the two are
the mass media, and that system is being reduced to a small
number of closed circuits."
* The Graham years also saw another profound change. As
Bagdikian noted in his memoirs, only after the World War did
the Labor Department state, in its annual summary of job
possibilities in journalism, that a college degree is
"sometimes preferred." As late as the 1950s, over half the
journalists in the country lacked higher degree. Under the
guidance of papers like the Post, however, reporters would
become part of the elite. In the precedent-setting Style
section and elsewhere, journalists lost their connection with
the readers and became part of the ruling class. American
journalism would never be the same.
* These two factors -- media monopolization and the desertion
of readers by journalists -- helped speed such grim
developments as growing repression and decline of democracy
in the U.S., as well as the corporate takeover of politics
domestically and of national sovereignty internationally.
* Peter Dale Scott wrote in Tikkun Magazine: "In 1989 a
subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry published a report
documenting that the U.S. government had contracted with
known drug traffickers to supply the Contras. This important
finding was minimized in the dismissive news stories
published by the Post and the Times, while Newsweek, owned by
the Post, wrote off Kerry as a "randy conspiracy buff." This
style of ex cathedra put-downs of any critics of the system
would become a hallmark of Post political coverage.
* Under Philip Graham, the Post established a local version of
the Trilateral Commission -- the Federal City Council -- a
business-centered body devoid of political legitimacy but
overflowing with political power. This body became a major
weapon in Mrs. Graham's efforts to control the city, which
included such horrors as relentless advocating a LA type
freeway system and fighting self-government as long as
possible.
* Finally, as the years went on, the Post became less and less
interesting. It became, as Samuel Johnson once said of an
important person of his era, not only dull "but the cause of
dullness in others."
In short, a good journalist once would have at least described the
late Mrs. Graham as "controversial." The fact that hardly any even
thought of the word is a testament to how powerful she and her
paper truly became and how little anyone else has to say about it
anymore.
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