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An Incorrect Political Memoir - by Daniel Brandt
From Lobster, December, 1992 (214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB, UK).Reprinted in Flatland in 1993 (PO Box 2420, Fort Bragg CA 95437).
Anyone who joined the U.S. New Left in 1967 and continued to define this event as a point of departure over the next 25 years is going to have some stories to tell. But only in the last couple years has it become necessary to tell them. Something strange has happened to "progressive" politics, and what's Left bears little resemblance to the issues that consumed us then. I'm doing pretty much the same thing with the same convictions, but someone seems to have moved the goalpost on me....
...The first hint of a PC crack within Public Information Research came in October, 1990, when Chip Berlet resigned from our Board of Advisors because he objected to the fact that Fletcher Prouty was also on the Board. We did not discuss the issue because I was putting in overtime on my technician job and wasn't in the mood to call him back. I whipped out the white-out and removed his name from the letterhead, and thanked him for his past support.
In July 1991, Martha Wenger resigned from our Board of Advisors after reading something about Prouty in a leftist publication, and her final advice to me was to "think long and hard about working together with others who may be opposed to CIA covert operations, but whose political commitments are diametrically opposed to those of the progressive movement." I first met Wenger and her husband Konrad Ege when our paths crossed while working on CounterSpy magazine, and think very highly of them. Wenger is an assistant to Joe Stork at the Middle East Research and Information Project, which does excellent work.
Meanwhile, Chip Berlet was starting to release early drafts of Right Woos Left, which received wide coverage in the left press beginning in early 1992. I still wasn't into writing long letters, so Martha Wenger got the same polite white-out that Chip received the previous year. Then in January 1992, Holly Sklar resigned from our Board, stating that "I find Chip Berlet's objection to sharing a board with Fletcher Prouty compelling, even more so at a time of increasing right wing efforts to build insidious alliances with often unwitting leftists." In the same letter she enclosed a check for an update of NameBase, so it was clear that our work was not the issue. In fact, our work has never been an issue; everyone who uses NameBase swears by it, right or left. It's just that we're not PC.
Sklar is best known for editing a fat volume on the Trilateral Commission in 1980. This book began as a classic of left power-structure research, and is now a staple on the populist, anti-elitist right. In fact, the only inquiries we get at PIR these days on Trilateralism or Bilderberg are from right-wing researchers who are concerned about corruption and conspiracies in high places. Sklar is aware of this, but for her that means that the insidious right is trying to sneak up on the left, and we should exercise extreme caution. To me it means that the right includes reasonable people with reasonable concerns. There doesn't seem to be a middle way, but at least I wrote Sklar a letter defending my position.
Let's go get Stone
It all pretty much hit the fan when Oliver Stone's JFK was released in December, 1991. Z Magazine had just run a Chip Berlet interview in which he bashed Prouty, the Christic Institute, and dozens of others. Stone's sin was to portray a "Man X" that was based on Prouty's experiences in the Pentagon shortly before the JFK assassination. Stone had first approached Prouty for script assistance in July 1990.
Although Right Woos Left in its earlier drafts, as well as the Z Magazine interview, were in type before anyone saw the movie, Berlet was in position. He had the goods on Prouty, and Prouty's prominence in the wake of JFK made the issue that much more topical. Everyone knew about Prouty and "Man X" by then, because one-time assassination author Robert Sam Anson had bashed Stone and Prouty in Esquire two months earlier. What you have to realize about assassination researchers is that they barely tolerate each other. It's just one of those things. And what you have to realize about the Stone movie is that the long knives were out at least six months before it hit the screen. It's enough to make you paranoid.
Berlet hand-delivered a letter to Stone dated January 16, 1992, in which he called on him to "distance yourself publicly from attempts by racist, anti-Jewish and pro-fascist groups to use your film JFK as a vehicle to promote bigoted theories claiming Jewish control of U.S. foreign policy and the CIA.... You appear to have been misled by JFK film advisor Fletcher Prouty regarding the extent of his cooperation with the Liberty Lobby and other neo-fascist operations created by Willis Carto. Willis Carto is infamous around the world as a leading Nazi-apologist. Fletcher Prouty and two other critics of the CIA, Mark Lane and Victor Marchetti, have forged deep and longstanding ties to the Liberty Lobby and other Carto groups."
And so it goes. Berlet hardly gets out two paragraphs without mentioning the words "anti-Semitic," "racist," "bigoted," and "neo-Nazi," and frequently they all appear together. I've read Liberty Lobby's Spotlight every week for ten months now, and I find only infrequent hints of what Berlet is talking about. Of course this must mean that they're only being sneakier than usual. (I signed up for another two years; some of it is good NameBase material that the left ignores. Spotlight is consistently anti-elitist and anti-CIA, they hate George Bush, and they staunchly opposed U.S. intervention in the Gulf.)
Another Berlet target is the Christic Institute, and anyone else who has ever been guilty of sharing information with the Lyndon LaRouche organization. I've been privately critical of Christic's conspiracy theories myself. I won't rehash this now, because the federal government is going after Christic with a vengeance and is turning it into a dead issue (and a dead organization). Christic eventually did some homework and had pretty much cleaned up their act by 1988, but by then their earlier legal offensive was already set in judicial concrete. Now it has collapsed on top of them.
Berlet objects to any association with LaRouche on any level whatsoever; for him it's a moral issue. He has spent most of his career tracking Main Enemy Lyndon LaRouche. In the late 1970s some LaRouchies were locked out of their office for nonpayment of rent, and Berlet purchased several boxes of financial records from a janitor by posing as a paper recycler. He wrote it up, and the Illinois State Attorney General launched an investigation of LaRouchian financial activities. I suppose this is brilliant investigative journalism (at least Berlet is still proud of it), but please remind me to watch my dumpster when he's in town.
I don't object to associations with LaRouche people, but I do feel that all associations should be open and acknowledged, because in some cases it has a bearing on our judgment of certain information offered by certain sources. In other words, Berlet's concern is PC purity, while my concern is the quality and reliability of a particular piece of information. Often I'm unable to make this judgment, in which case the fact of the association itself is filed away for future reference and judgment is suspended. Berlet, on the other hand, makes an immediate judgment on the basis of the association itself, whether the information is useful or not. So if LaRouche was into Iran-contra before the mainstream press discovered it, and if they are uncannily well-informed on certain other specific issues as well, this is irrelevant.
For Berlet, Fletcher Prouty's main sin is that Liberty Lobby's Noontide Press reprinted The Secret Team, which was first published by Prentice-Hall in 1973. The content of the book itself has never been an issue; everyone agrees that it is valuable. Berlet's point is that Prouty should not have given his good name to Liberty Lobby. And once he gave his name, everyone should avoid Prouty. If Public Information Research fails to avoid Prouty, then you should avoid PIR, and so on down the line. But this quickly becomes absurd, and while Berlet probably realizes this he doesn't have time to explain himself. Never mind that no one else offered to reprint Prouty's book, and forget all the trouble I went to when I needed a copy in 1977. It makes no difference to Berlet whether this book is important or useful, or that Prouty's latest book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), offers unique perspectives based on his own experiences in the Pentagon.
At least Holly Sklar tried to define where she would exit this reductio ad absurdum. She stated in her resignation letter that "I have no problem with NameBase being a research tool used across the political spectrum; I know Trilateralism, for example, is widely used on the right. But I think there's a big difference between sometimes overlapping resources and overlapping boards." I don't find this very convincing, particularly when dealing with informal advisory boards that have no legal power. If political identity is important to someone personally, then I can see Sklar's point. But if the quality of the resource is as important as it ought to be, then Sklar has it backwards.
The debate became more pitched during the first half of 1992. First Joel Bleifuss of In These Times quoted an anonymous source -- I think it was Berlet because the particulars matched him and he ignored my invitation to deny it -- who called Prouty a "Nazi crackpot." Then Bleifuss bashed Stone for overreaching with the JFK conspiracy. As this is the same Joel Bleifuss who has been plugging away at an elusive October Surprise story for five years now, he of course ended the same column by implying that it would be more reasonable for Stone to reach even further, by also incorporating more recent conspiracies! Fortunately he started the column by confessing that he was only in the third grade on November 22, 1963, which put me in the proper frame of mind to get through it.
Then Berlet recruited the chief pundit from The Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who started sniping at Stone and Prouty and then proceeded to destroy his own credibility by blithely defending the Magic Bullet theory. Here's someone who should stop writing long enough to read a few books now and again, or perhaps it's no coincidence that The Nation reads like the Wall Street Journal on issues that matter. Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray of Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies Of Our Times, who played a role in getting Stone interested in the assassination in the first place, have endured some of Cockburn's snipes in The Nation. They seem to be trying to stay out of the fray, probably because some years ago Cockburn was on their advisory board. We've fallen out of touch in recent years (the war between CounterSpy and CAIB is another sad story), so I can only guess what they're thinking lately.
I did try to interest Schaap in a response to Berlet from me and Carl Oglesby, but he never returned my call. That left me all bottled up until Lobster expressed an interest. It's worth noting that this piece you're reading cannot get published in the U.S. unless I defect to the right, or I'm lucky enough to stumble onto some mainstream editor who happens to think it's cute, harmless, and topical. That, in a nutshell, is what PC is all about. It's the exact opposite of what we were about in the late sixties.
Jeff Cohen and Marty Lee of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), who in the 1970s researched the JFK assassination and ought to know better, both support Berlet. When I spoke with Lee, it was clear that he bought the Berlet line completely, but I have only second-hand information about Cohen's current position. Cohen and I belonged to the same group in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1981, working on the issue of police repression. I've heard that In These Times staffers generally feel Berlet has gone too far, and Bleifuss is more or less holding his own out there in Chicago. In These Times even runs intelligent discussions of the PC issue on occasion. But judging from FAIR's monthly publication Extra!, FAIR is increasingly in the PC camp. They devote more and more space to soft issues, while carefully paying ritual homage to the god of cultural diversity. As for [recently deceased] Erwin Knoll, longtime editor of The Progressive, he was downright proud of his anti-conspiracism and ran Berlet's Right Woos Left as a cover story titled "Friendly Fascism." Knoll is the one who got my strange letter.
Maybe it will all go away soon; I hope so. Even Sara Diamond, a member of Berlet's fan club, recognizes that the U.S. left is talking to itself on this issue. "In part, it's desperation," Berlet quotes her in The Progressive by way of explaining why leftists are easy prey for rightists. "We have, in fact, lost influence and become marginal." This is easily the most lucid observation that has yet emerged from the Berlet camp. However, the reason that they are increasingly marginal has somehow escaped them. It's simply because the PC left is becoming a privileged segment of society and frequently acts only to preserve their privileges.
That's what I believe is really happening, but if the split deepens it will certainly be disguised with more elevated terminology. Already it seems that a distinction is evolving between the conspiracists and the structuralists. The former see specific historical events (e.g., the assassination of JFK) as probable determinants of other events (the war in Vietnam), while the latter view this as a naive challenge to the conventional left wisdom about infrastructure and economics as major determinants.
The structuralists feel it's inconceivable that John Kennedy, who was initially a predictable product of the System, changed his mind about the System once in office. And more amazingly, that the System would deal with it the way they did -- real people with real names (if only we knew who they were!) deciding he was a threat to their private interests and successfully engineering a coup. Besides Fletcher Prouty, who has long maintained this view, another Stone advisor was Maj. John M. Newman, a professor and military intelligence officer, whose competence was demonstrated in JFK and Vietnam. As soon as it was published this year, structuralists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn went scurrying back to the documents to try and refute him, as if their careers depended on it. But as Newman pointed out in a folksy talk on June 17, 1992, it's finally unimportant whether you are "left wing, right wing, or from the middle of the bird." There are a number of ex-Cold Warrior analyst-academic types in the military who are taking a fresh look at recent history, he assured us, and that has to be healthy. If he's telling the truth -- and I have no reason to doubt him -- then I have to agree.
Back to the real world of people behind the events. Personally, I don't think the PC left has any legitimate use for theory at all. I haven't seen any for over ten years, and that makes me reasonably skeptical. When I requested the names of the Board of Directors from Political Research Associates, the group that sponsors Berlet, it looked like theory had nothing to do with anything. I discovered that their Board is less diverse than one might expect. For me this makes the situation transparent -- these are people who have something to lose if populist conspiracism replaces political correctness. They are the System. They don't need theory, they need protection. If theory provides some protection, that's when we'll get theory.
Political Research Associates doesn't list their Board on their letterhead because, as director Jean Hardisty, Ph.D., explained to me, they've been sued by two of the groups they've attacked and their liability insurance is becoming problematic. Fair enough, I suppose, because it's part of the public record and there are other ways to get it. But Spotlight has a large staff box in every issue, and Berlet seems to be calling up the people on my letterhead, so I'm going to quote from Hardisty's letter:
"Because I am not comfortable putting people in a position of risk equivalent to the risk I am willing to assume, we have a small board. It is made up of me, Lucy Williams, Esq., Rev. Sally A. Dries, Prof. Robin Gillies, and Prof. Deborah Bright. They are, respectively, a law professor at Northeastern Law School in Boston, a United Church of Christ minister in Shamokin, PA, a Political Science Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL., and an Art Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. I do not list their names on the letterhead and do not advertise their membership on the board in order to protect them from harassment."
By contrast, the readers of the hated Spotlight, Liberty Lobby's weekly with a circulation of over 100,000, are far down the elitist ladder. They are concerned about the very issues that have injected Ross Perot into presidential politics. The jury is still out on Perot as a potential leader, but something is stirring out there in the heartland, and Perot is a convenient symbol. He might well be the first presidential candidate who is willing to say that conspiracies and corruption exist in high places. To my knowledge he hasn't made any statements about the JFK assassination, but it's sobering to speculate: How much money would you put on his ability to serve out his term, if he got elected and suddenly reopened the JFK, MLK, and RFK investigations?
The PC left, meanwhile, not only sees this as irrelevant, but is even inclined to call it neo-fascism. There is, of course, fascist potential in any populist movement, just as there is also democratic potential. And it appears to me that there is no potential at all in business as usual on the PC left. Everyone knows it except them. The 75% of the population that feels JFK was the victim of a high-level conspiracy involving the CIA or mafia know it. The 50% of the population who don't vote know it (this year I voted for the first time since 1972). The conspiracy "buffs," "nuts," and "crackpots," -- the ones against whom Berlet crusades and Alexander Cockburn pontificates -- know it. But it is still news to a small group that controls the diminishing "progressive" press in America.
This "progressive" press has been blindsided by a special-interest multiculturalism that has the ruling class laughing all the way to their banks. Unlike in 1976 and 1977, when progressives were interested in Jimmy Carter's rampant Trilateralist connections, these days you have to consult Spotlight to discover that Bill Clinton attended a Bilderberg Group meeting in 1991 (before anyone outside of Arkansas had even heard of him), and that currently he is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. So it came as no surprise to Spotlight readers when David Rockefeller Jr. wrote a strong endorsement of Clinton for the New York Times (October 16).
The populist right considers Clinton a set-up, in the sense that the rich will continue to get richer. The ruling class knows that more subtle techniques are needed than those used by Bush, and will offer some health insurance and job training to deflect discontent. But ultimately free trade will prevail in the New World Order, and the U.S. middle class will be picked clean. I'm "incorrect" if I try to explain this to the U.S. left, and treasonous if I enclose a clipping from Spotlight.
Meanwhile, I'm going to try and ignore the handful of vocal PC leftists. We still have one woman on our Board of Advisors, and a woman and a "person of color" on our Board of Directors. We will survive without grants if we must. Some may continue to call Prouty a "Nazi crackpot" without any justification whatsoever, but we have former Nazi-hunter John Loftus on our Advisory Board also. If that helps confuse the issue, so much the better. We also have other investigative journalists such as Peter Dale Scott and Jim Hougan, who do excellent work and have no need of PC distinctions.
The late Bernard (Bud) Fensterwald of the Assassination Archives and Research Center helped us a bit with our tax-exemption, and I helped them with their computers. Bud was incorrect enough to let his law firm represent Lyndon LaRouche, but so what? Anyone can walk in off the street and go through AARC's impressive collection of material. Is this worth anything to the left these days? Probably not, and it's their loss.
Prouty can stay on our Board of Advisors as long as he likes; we're proud to have him. I submit that left-right distinctions have outlived their usefulness in America, and particularly in the Washington information milieu. They should be replaced with other distinctions -- perhaps between those who believe in more information for more people and those who don't. Or as Dan Moldea suggested to me, maybe a distinction between "players" and "non-players." In either case, Prouty continues to make an important contribution, and so does Victor Marchetti, Mark Lane, and yes, Spotlight and Liberty Lobby.
So forget it, Chip. I'll turn in my SDS membership card if you promise to go away, but the only one qualified to accept it these days is former national SDS president Carl Oglesby. Carl is too busy writing JFK assassination books to bother with your concerns, and feels fine on our Board sitting next to Prouty. And if you ask him, he'll probably tell you that at some point between the late sixties and now, you are the one who changed, not us.
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