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Banned
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Just Coincidence? Or Is Century of "Leadership" of the PTB & It's 2 Bushes a Cancer?
This OP begins , a few weeks ago:
Obama's Rhetoric VS What Was Said to Our Great-Grandparents to Attract Their Votes..
..as an answer to loquitur's question:
PTB= "Powers that Be"... we are fortunate in that so many of them chose long ago to winter together on a tiny barrier Island in Hobe Sound, Fl, north of Palm beach. In the post linked above, I detailed how the Island (Jupiter) came to be owned by arms and ammunition tycoon, Samuel Pryor, a business partner of Bush grandfather, George Walker.
I have taken extra care to link to pages from government websites, the Truman Library, and to mainstream news media. In a just couple of instances, to compress multiple details, I've linked to wiki pages.
So small of a group...a few of the wealthiest Americans have grown even wealthier as they "minded" our federal government for us since early in the last century, designed agencies (CIA), set policy, and "gave" us at least two presidents from their small group, even as they further consolidated their own power and wealth, poisoned us with the products they made and sold to us, and kept us in a near constant state of war or war footing, advancing policies of unprecedented destruction on "enemy" civilian populations as they went along, seems unconscionable.
IMO, we have only ourselves to blame...but the problem is that they are still there, still controlling disproportionate wealth and power, and the white house itself.
Couldn't we have done better, been more aware, made better choices in our voting? I am going to highlight and footnote the point supported by each of the following quote boxes, by my "fav" so far, is the piece from the CIA website, intended to assure us that the influence of Yale, it's secret society "Skull and Bones", and the WASP, northeast Ivy League schools in general, at the CIA, "are just a myth". (1)
I find it amusing because Prescott Bush's Brown Bros. Harriman partner, spouse of the daughter of one of the Brown Bros., fellow resident of Jupiter Island and fellow Yale "Bonesman", Robert A. Lovett was revealed in 1989, in a "History of the CIA", published by the CIA after a 36 years delay, to have chaired the committee that designed the structure of the CIA. The author of the "history", admitted that he had not been permitted access to the minutes of the proceedings of Robert Lovett's committee ! (2)
Quote:
http://www.forbes.com/2004/10/18/cx_cd_1018how.html
Jupiter Island Xanadu
... Since the 1930s, the community known as Jupiter Island as been attracting some of the oldest and certainly some of the richest families in the U.S., if not the world. From Doubledays and Johnsons to Fords and Du Ponts, ....
....Forbes Fact
Over the years, Jupiter Island's illustrious residents include not only titans of industry but also prominent politicians and policy makers. Among the grandees who have wintered on Jupiter Island are former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union W. Averill Harriman, President Truman's Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, Secretary of the Treasury during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations C. Douglas Dillon, and President George H.W. Bush, whose parents Senator Prescott and Dorothy Bush were among the island's earliest inhabitants.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Dillon
Clarence Dillon, (September 27, 1882 - April 14, 1979) born Clarence Lapowski (name legally changed 17 September 1901)
...His son, C. Douglas Dillon (later Secretary of the Treasury, 1961-65) was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1909 while they were abroad.
Dillon met William A. Read, founder of the Wall Street bond broker William A. Read and Company, through introduction by Harvard classmate William A. Phillips in 1912 and Dillon joined Read’s Chicago office in that year. He moved to New York in 1914. Read died in 1916, and Dillon bought a majority interest in the firm. In 1920, William A. Read & Company name was changed to Dillon, Read & Co..
His righthand man at Dillon Read, James Forrestal, became Secretary of the Navy, later Secretary of Defense, and died under mysterious circumstances at a Federal hospital.
During World War I, Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, (known as the Czar of American industry) asked Dillon to be assistant chairman of the War Industries Board.
Dillon was director of American Foreign Securities Corporation, which he had set up in 1915 to finance the French Government’s purchases of munitions in the United States.
In 1957, Fortune Magazine listed Dillon as one of the richest men in the United States, with a fortune then estimated to be from $150 to $200 million.....
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
COHORT OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
By RONALD STEEL; A PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND JOURNALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, IS THE AUTHOR OF ''WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY.''
November 2, 1986
THE WISE MEN Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy. By Walter Isaacson and
Evan Thomas. Illustrated. 853 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.
THERE are two things America is not supposed to have: an empire and a ruling class. ''The Wise Men'' takes the former for granted as a simple fact of international life, and explains through the lives of six privileged and powerful men how the latter works. The way these lives intertwined - through private schools, corporate board rooms and social clubs - and the way the United States became the inheritor of the postwar world provide the material of a fascinating, informative and ultimately disquieting study.
The six men chosen by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, two young editors of Time and Newsweek respectively, were never elected to high national office, nor do any famous statues commemorate them. For the most part they operated just behind the scenes, advising Presidents, setting agendas and carrying out policy. But the decisions they made shaped the postwar world.
They were the architects of that exhilarating, and now receding, era known as the American Century. At a unique moment in history they had the power to shape the world, the energies to do so and the moral certitude to inspire their actions. Theirs is the story of the Marshall Plan and the H-Bomb, the Truman Doctrine and NATO, the Prague coup and the Berlin blockade,
Korea and the Bay of Pigs, and ultimately of Vietnam.
The six form a cohesive unit. Dean Acheson, Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 during the Korean War, the forging of NATO and the decision to rearm West Germany, had also been Under Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947 when the wartime alliance with Russia turned to cold war enmity. It was Acheson who worked out the stillborn plan to share the atom with the Russians, then later sold the Truman Doctrine for the global containment of Communism to a skeptical Congress.
W. Averell Harriman, the inheritor of a great railway fortune, began his career as Presidential ''special envoy'' with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tough but pragmatic toward the Russians, with whom he had had business dealings dating back to the 1920's, he was Ambassador to Moscow during World War II, and ultimately was chief United States negotiator at the ill-fated Paris peace talks on Vietnam in 1968.
George F. Kennan, Harriman's wartime counselor in Moscow, galvanized the Washington bureaucracy in 1946 with a long and alarmist analysis of Russia's expansionist ambitions. Later he turned against the ''containment'' doctrine he helped formulate and declared it had become excessively militaristic.
Charles Bohlen, Mr. Kennan's fellow Soviet expert in the Foreign Service, was with F.D.R. at Yalta and later, like Mr. Kennan, served as Ambassador to Moscow. Less creative than his scholarly colleague, he was a better team player and exerted a subtle role in moderating apocalyptic views of Soviet intentions.
Robert A. Lovett, a deputy to Secretary of War Henry A. Stimson during World War II, was a masterly administrator who helped build American wartime air power. Later, as Under Secretary of State after Acheson, he presided over the early stages of the cold war and then became Secretary of Defense. John J. McCloy worked with Lovett and Stimson during the war and was later criticized for the part he played in the decisions to intern Japanese-Americans in detention camps and not to bomb the Nazi death camps. An adroit tactician who won the confidence of men in high places, he later became President of the World Bank nd High Commissioner for Germany.
They all went to prep schools, even the impoverished McCloy, and two to prestigious Groton (Acheson and Harriman) and one to St. Paul's (Bohlen). They also attended the best colleges: Harriman, Acheson and Lovett were at Yale University, Bohlen at Harvard University, Mr. Kennan at Princeton University, and Mr. McCloy at Amherst College. They were even linked by the best undergraduate clubs: Lovett and Harriman were Skull and Bones, Acheson was Scroll and Key, and Bohlen was Porcellian.
While one could make too much of these social connections, the tendency in our avowedly egalitarian society is to make too little of them.....
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Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...821684,00.html
The General's Successor
Sep. 24, 1951
The Senate took exactly four minutes to confirm Robert Abercrombie Lovett as the new Secretary of Defense;... Langer made the vote unanimous.
Over the last eleven years. Defense's Bob Lovett has held down three important top policy-making jobs, just a short taxi ride across Washington from Capitol Hill. But Lovett, a tall, slender man with the poise and features of a balding Caesar, has nimbly sidestepped the publicity that might have made his name known even to Bill Langer. In a time of crisis, he is well content to work in the shadow of greater names.
Diplomatic Save. Lovett was one of many Wall Streeters (foremost: James Forrestal) who did outstanding work for Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Wise old Henry Stimson, F.D.R.'s Republican Secretary of War, drafted Lovett as Assistant Secretary of War for Air in 1941. The smooth-working, selfless Stimson team, which included Lovett and Chief of Staff George Marshall, became a legend of administrative efficiency and warm mutual loyalty.
In Washington, Air Secretary Lovett took one look at U.S. defense nakedness, another at the tremendous lesson of Nazi air victories in Europe, and fought a campaign to get top priorities for a big U.S. bomber fleet. Then, holding down impulsive Air Chief "Hap" Arnold with a gentle hand, he skillfully got the air corps raised to the status of a semi-independent air force.
Quote:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/...954081,00.html
Goodbye to Berlin
Erich Mendelsohn designed some of the world's finest buildings - and helped destroy the German capital. By Jonathan Glancey
Monday May 12, 2003
Deep in a desiccated, Utah desert, surrounded by mountains and fringed with scorched sage and saltbush, stand the surreal remains of German Village. Out of bounds, out of place, out of time and 90 miles from Salt Lake City, it is surely the most bizarre feature of Dugway Proving Ground, a test site created by the Allied military during the second world war to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in Germany and Japan....
....Washington's war secretary Henry Stimson said he did not want "the United States to get the reputation of outdoing Hitler
in atrocities". His less diplomatic deputy, Robert Lovett, pleading the case for adopting anti-personnel bombs loaded with napalm and white phosphorous, said: "If we are going to have a total war, we might as well make it as horrible as possible."
Churchill trumped Lovett by calling on US president Franklin D Roosevelt to speed up production of a promised 500,000 top-secret "N-bombs" - filled with anthrax, developed at Dugway - to be dropped on Berlin and five other German cities....
...."Mendelsohn was the architect of some of the very best of these white, concrete dreams. Dugway, Davis argues, "led the way to the deaths of, say, two million Axis civilians", and German Village remains "a monument to the self-righteousness of punishing 'bad places' by bombing them".
There is no doubt that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be defeated; but did the Allies really need German Village, Japanese Village and the refined architectural efforts of Mendelsohn and Raymond? At the fiery dawn of the 20th century, beneath the civilised, enlightened facades of Britain and the US, as well as Germany and Japan, was a desire for expansion, destruction and terrible revenge. Sitting on the sun-deck of Mendelsohn's pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, this axis of modern evil seems so very far removed, as far away, in fact, as the sole surviving "rent barrack" of German Village, Utah.
· Dead Cities: A Natural History by Mike Davis, The New Press
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When General Marshall was named Secretary of State in 1947, he urged Lovett to come back from Wall Street to be his Under Secretary. Although Lovett was still recuperating from a serious operation, he came, commenting: "There are only three people to whom I can never say no —my wife, Henry Stimson and George Catlett Marshall." Half the time Lovett ran the department while Marshall was away in Europe. In 1948 Lovett was quick to see the implications of the Russian blockade of Berlin, strongly backed the Berlin airlift as a counterchallenge. A few months later he saved Harry Truman from a major diplomatic blunder. The President was all ready to go on the air and announce that he was sending Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow to reason with Stalin. Lovett heard about the plan, telephoned General Marshall in Paris, and confronted Truman with a joint ultimatum that both of them would resign if the plan went through.
Bob Lovett was born in Texas, the son of Robert Scott Lovett, general counsel and then president of Union Pacific. Young Bob left Yale (Phi Beta Kappa, Skull & Bones) during his third year to go overseas with the Yale Unit in the naval air force. In France he flew the lumbering British Handley Pages on some of the first night glide-bombing attacks, made a careful study of dive-bombing tactics which amazed his friends and delighted the Navy brass. The unit's historian summed up Lieut. Lovett in three words: "Observation, reflection, deduction—and there you were!" ..
.. After the war he tried a year of law at Harvard, then switched to business administration. In 1919 he married Adele Brown, the daughter of Manhattan Financier James Brown. Father-in-law Brown gave Lovett the up-from-messenger treatment in Brown Brothers (later Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), finally made him a full partner and sent him abroad to survey the world with a banker's cool eye. In the 1930s, the eye spotted trouble in Germany, and Lovett warned the firm to get its investments out. In early 1940, from Switzerland, he wrote a penetrating report of the phony war, and accurately predicted the fall of France.
A man with a long history of stomach trouble, Republican Bob Lovett has saved himself from total frustration in Democratic Washington by exercising a deft sense of humor. (Once, after a long pounding by a congressional committee, he told a friend: "It was like getting a shave and having your appendix out at the same time.") ...
....To his new job Bob Lovett brings a thoroughgoing realism much like that of his good friend and predecessor, Jim Forrestal. "This is a severe emergency," said he a year ago. "This is perhaps the last clear chance to get ourselves in shape for the unknown future . . . We tried peace through weakness for generations, with no profit in it, and it seems to me as a matter of conviction that peace through strength might be an enlightening experience."..
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https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...-shepherd.html
The Good Shepherd
Intelligence in Recent Public Media
A movie directed by Robert DeNiro; screenplay by Eric Roth. Universal Pictures. 2006
Reviewed by David Robarge, Gary McCollim, Nicholas Dujmovic, Thomas G. Coffey...
...Another historical falsehood is that becoming a leader at CIA hinges on membership in Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale. No senior figure of the time at CIA ever had anything to do with that organization.(1)
DR: In a sense, The Good Shepherd is a Godfather-type tale told through the imagined lens of the Eastern establishment elite. There are lots of problems with that approach: Angleton went to Yale, but he did not belong to Skull and Bones. Richard Bissell (Edward Wilson in the Bay of Pigs context)
rejected an invitation to join the society because he thought it was too weird. Allen Dulles (the Skull and Bones hierarch Philip Allen) went to Princeton. And Richard Helms (Richard Hayes in the movie), another supposed Skull and Bones guy, went to Williams College and was temperamentally unsuited for that kind of organization...
...Truth in Storytelling?...
,,,,ND: A film can take a strictly documentary approach in trying to take a photograph of history as it happened. If that's the standard, then anyone with historical sense is going to dislike the liberties The Good Shepherd takes. If one approaches the film as a work of art, one must still ask if there is truth in the story-telling. Does it convey the sense of the time: the atmosphere, the motivations, the tone, and the challenges? I think we all agree that the film fails that test as well.
It fails because it inserts themes we know from our studies of the period were not there: the overarching economic interest, the WASP mafia dominance, the cynicism, the dark perspective. In reality, the stakes were high during the Cold War; the Soviets were seen to be on the march and very dangerous. It was serious business, and there were many personal costs. And yet, most CIA people were enjoying their work at the same time, as any number of oral history interviews and memoirs will attest.,,,
Historical Document
Last Updated: Jun 26, 2008 07:15 AM
Last Reviewed: May 25, 2007 11:57 AM
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Quote:
http://www.americanheritage.com/arti...1977_2_4.shtml
THE BIRTH OF THE CIA
When and how it got the green light to conduct “subversive operations abroad”
by Tom Braden
...Sixth, the new peacetime agency would conduct “subversive operations abroad.” Meaning: just that.
In summary, it was to be the wartime OSS taken from under the jealous eye of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and given the independent power to issue orders to G-2, ONI, the intelligence branch of the Department of State—and to the extent to which J. Edgar Hoover was collecting foreign intelligence in South America, to the FBI.
Trohan had not been far wrong in calling it “all-powerful,” though there was no basis in Donovan’s memorandum for the suggestion that it would conduct espionage at home, supersede the FBI, or enable its employees to live luxuriously.
Still, it was pretty strong stuff. Would Roosevelt have accepted the plan if he had lived? We know only that Donovan thought so. He was in Paris the day Roosevelt died. One of his deputies, Colonel Ned Buxton, talked to him that evening. “What will happen now to OSS?” Buxton asked. “Fm afraid it’s the end,” was Donovan’s reply.
He was, however, to make one more try. Shortly after V-J Day, Naval Commander John Shaheen walked into the general’s office to bid him good-by. “You’re not through yet,” said Donovan, and he ordered Shaheen to stay in uniform for sixty more days. Shaheen sat down in mild shock while Donovan related a story. There had been that sensationalized prewar investigation of the munitions industry, conducted by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, in which Donovan had acted as counsel for the Du Pont Company, one of the firms most heavily attacked. “You remember that, John? You know, John, I had to argue, not just the merits but against the whole propaganda campaign and that campaign was Gerald Nye’s Merchants of Death. I tell you John, I learned something. Now let’s see if you can do as well for OSS as Nye did for the isolationists.”
Shaheen rose. “Could your secretary get me a list of writers in OSS who happen to be in Washington?”
For weeks, a series of sensational stories dominated the newspapers and magazines hailing the exploits of OSS’s secret war. As Shaheen and his assistants scoured the files, had the facts declassified, fed them to “writers in OSS who happened to be in Washington,” and as they fed them in turn to eager journalists, OSS parachutists returning from their hitherto secret war and expecting to hear the usual jibes about “Oh So Social” suddenly found themselves figures of glamor. But the new President, Harry Truman, was annoyed. On September 20, 1945, the publicity campaign was cut short. Truman signed Executive Order 9621, “Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of Its Functions.”
•
While the pro-OSS publicity was at its height, Donovan had written a letter announcing his wish to return to private life. “Therefore, in considering the disposition to be made of the assets created by OSS, I speak as a private citizen concerned only with the security of my country.”
Thirty years later, it seems odd that this last plea for his old outfit should have been addressed not to the President of the United States but to Harold B. Smith, Director of the Bureau of the Budget.
But it was, at the time, not at all an odd thing to do.
As the war ended and the mind of Harry Truman turned to problems of demobilization and reorganization for peace, Harold B. Smith became for a few weeks a very powerful man. He was the one man to whom
Truman could turn who knew where everything was and where it had been before. Moreover, he had a tidy housekeeper’s view about what to do with it now. OSS appalled the neatminded Smith. Here was an agency which was part research, part spies, part propaganda, part paratroopers, part saboteurs and forgers, all mixed up together in such fashion that it was impossible to reduce it to a chart. Smith came at once to a solution:
Put the research professors and analysts under the State Department, he advised Truman; put the spies and propagandists and forgers under the War Department and let the paratroopers and saboteurs go home.
For the next four months, the Smith formula of separated functions of State and War became the United States intelligence establishment. Donovan, when he heard about the new formula, called it “absurd.”......
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/bo...=firstchapters
‘Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA’
July 22, 2007
..Colonel Park acknowledged that Donovan's men had conducted some successful sabotage missions and rescues of downed American pilots. He said the deskbound research and analysis branch of OSS had done "an outstanding job," and he concluded that the analysts might find a place at the State Department after the war. But the rest of the OSS would have to go. "The almost hopeless compromise of OSS personnel," he warned, "makes their use as a secret intelligence agency in the postwar world inconceivable."
After V-E Day, Donovan went back to Washington to try to save his spy service. A month of mourning for President Roosevelt was giving way to a mad scramble for power in Washington. In the Oval Office on May 14, Harry Truman listened for less than fifteen minutes as Donovan made his proposal to hold communism in check by undermining the Kremlin. The president summarily dismissed him.
All summer long, Donovan fought back in Congress and in the press. Finally, on August 25, he told Truman that he had to choose between knowledge and ignorance. The United States "does not now have a coordinated intelligence system," he warned. "The defects and the dangers of this situation have been generally recognized."
Donovan had hoped that he could sweet-talk Truman, a man he had always treated with cavalier disdain, into creating the CIA. But he had misread his own president. Truman had decided that Donovan's plan had the earmarks of a Gestapo. On September 20, 1945, six weeks after he dropped America's atomic bombs on Japan, the president of the United States fired Donovan and ordered the OSS to disband in ten days. America's spy service was abolished. ...
...."THE HOLY CAUSE OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE"
The message came from Donovan's deputy, Brigadier General John Magruder, a gentleman soldier who had been in the army since 1910. He adamantly believed that without an intelligence service, America's new supremacy in the world would be left to blind chance, or beholden to the British. On September 26, 1945, six days after President Truman signed away the OSS, General Magruder stalked down the endless corridors of the Pentagon. The moment was opportune: the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, had resigned that week, and Stimson had been dead-set against the idea of a CIA. "Seems to me most inadvisable," he had told Donovan a few months earlier. Now General Magruder seized the opening left by Stimson's departure.
....(Page 4 of 4)
He sat down with an old friend of Donovan's, the assistant secretary of war, John McCloy, one of the great movers and shakers of Washington. Together, the two men countermanded the president. Magruder walked out of the Pentagon that day with an order from McCloy that said, "the continuing operations of OSS must be performed in order to preserve them." That piece of paper kept the hope for a Central Intelligence Agency alive. The spies would stay on duty, under a new name, the Strategic Services Unit, the SSU. McCloy then asked his good friend Robert A. Lovett, the assistant secretary for air war and a future secretary of defense, to set up a secret commission to plot the course for American intelligence-and to tell Harry Truman what had to be done. Magruder confidently informed his men that "the holy cause of central intelligence" would prevail....
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...52C1A96F948260
November 28, 1989
Long-Secret History of C.I.A. Sheds Light on Battles Over Authority
AP
LEAD: The State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military hampered the Central
Intelligence Agency in its infancy by bickering about authority, according to a long-secret history of the agency's early years.
The State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military hampered the Central Intelligence Agency in its infancy by bickering about authority, according to a long-secret history of the agency's early years.
The 1,000-page narrative, written in 1953 by the agency's first historian, Arthur B. Darling, is the first C.I.A. document to be declassified and transferred to the National Archives for release to the public under the agency's historical review program.
A copy of the history was delivered to President Bush last Wednesday by William H. Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Don W. Wilson, Archivist of the United States.Mr. Webster said other agency records would be declassified and transferred to the Archives. Note
Cautions Readers
The declassified version of the history was accompanied by a note from the C.I.A.'s history staff cautioning readers that Mr. Darling, a former professor of history at Yale, had ''a definite and sometimes controversial point of view.''
''Darling blames the State Department, the F.B.I., and what he terms the military establishment - especially the heads of the military intelligence services - for much of the hardship which the early C.I.A. (and its predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group) endured,'' the note says.
The history staff also said that Allen Dulles, who became Director of Central Intelligence in 1953, reportedly ''did not concur with Darling's conclusions'' and restricted access to the history.
Mr. Darling was the agency's historian from 1952 to 1954. He died in 1971.
He wrote that sniping by the military departments began as soon as the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the C.I.A., was established by President Roosevelt in World War II.
Brig. Gen. John Magruder, deputy director of the O.S.S., told Mr. Darling that career military officers ''lowered their horns'' against the economists, geographers, historians and scientists recruited for the C.I.A. Mr. Darling conceded in his history that the military might have been justified in withholding information because the O.S.S. ''deserved part of its reputation for being a sieve.'' The Issue of Security
However, he quotes the O.S.S. chief, Gen. William J. Donovan, as saying that it was the military men who were the ''leaky boys.''
In any event, Mr. Darling wrote, ''They are reluctant to this moment in 1953 to give a central civilian agency intelligence which exposes their capabilities in war.''
''The result,'' he continued, ''has been interference with the flow of raw materials essential to the realistic estimates which should go to the makers of diplomatic policy and military strategy.''
On Nov. 18, 1944, with World War II less than a year from its end, General Donovan urged President Roosevelt to turn the O.S.S. into a permanent central intelligence system. But, Mr. Darling wrote, the F.B.I., the military, the State Department and other agencies were hostile to that idea.On Sept. 20, 1945, President Harry S. Truman disbanded the O.S.S. and ordered the State Department to develop a postwar intelligence network. On Jan. 24, 1946, Truman issued a directive creating the Central Intelligence Group, which was prohibited from interfering with ''internal security functions.''
In 1947 the Central Intelligence Group became the Central Intelligence Agency, as part of the same law that merged the War and Navy Departments into the new Department of Defense.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A96F948260
December 27, 1989
To the Editor:
Your Nov. 28 report on the just-declassified 1,000-page history of the Central Intelligence Agency written in 1953 tells only a part of the story of how the State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military tried to restrict the growth of the C.I.A. when it was established in 1947.
Early in 1946 I was assigned the task of preparing a formal report on the activities of the World War II Office of Strategic Services, this country's first centralized national intelligence agency. The O.S.S. was terminated in September 1945, and senior officials in other departments of government resisted even the idea that a permanent record be made of a centralized intelligence service, which a number of them regarded as a maverick wartime expedient that should not continue in peacetime, at least not as an independent agency or under civilian control.
My job began as a virtually clandestine operation in the Strategic Services Unit, which was the liquidating agency for the operational parts of O.S.S. Finally, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overruled the objections of the military chiefs and authorized the report under the auspices of the War Department (later the Defense Department).
Gen. William J. Donovan, who founded and ran the O.S.S., wanted personally to approve any report, as previous efforts he had begun during the war to record activities as they took place did not sound to him to be balanced or in perspective, being so close to the events they recorded.
With Kermit Roosevelt as editor, we completed the War Report on the O.S.S. in September 1947, and received Donovan's endorsement. I submitted the manuscript, consisting of two volumes, typed without erasures (one original and three carbon copies), to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was promptly marked ''Top Secret'' and not released for publication until 1976, 29 years later. Even then entire sections were blanked out.
We now see that it has taken 36 years for the 1,000-page history of the early days of the C.I.A. that was completed in 1953 to be released. Obviously, long life and persistence are prerequisites for historians in this field.
S. PETER KARLOW Atherton, Calif., Dec. 6, 1989
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...2a01p_0001.htm
APPROVED FOR RELEASE
CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
22 SEPT 93
CONFIDENTIAL
Postwar interregnum as conflicting plans for central intelligence are shaken down into a presidential directive.
THE BIRTH OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Arthur B. Darling1
There was more than economy in mind as Director of the Budget Harold Smith corresponded with General Wm. J. Donovan in August 1945 about liquidating the Office of Strategic Services. On the same day Smith advised the General that agencies with no peacetime activities had to go, Donovan expounded once more in a letter to him the principles which should govern a centralized U.S. foreign intelligence system. Donovan believed those principles were already at work in the OSS. But since it was to be abandoned, another agency should be set up immediately to take over its valuable assets and aid the nation in "the organization and maintenance of the peace."
The newly unveiled atomic bomb naturally dominated the thinking of the time, and some argued that it made the need for a permanent system of national intelligence peremptory. Gregory Bateson, for example, writing to Donovan from OSS headquarters in the IndiaBurma theater, forecast that the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics, social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white. The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare.
1 Adapted from a history of the CIA to 1950 completed by the author in 1953. For a preceding
portion, devoted principally to the OSS, see Studies VIII 3, p. 55 ff.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...2a01p_0008.htm
... The secretaries agreed to form such a committee. At the close of the meeting Secretary Patterson inquired if anyone knew of a good man to be Director of Intelligence, and Lovett said the only name he had heard mentioned was Allen Dulles.
Compromise Effort
The working committee met on November 19. Its members for the State Department were Alfred McCormack and Donald S. Russell; for the Army, Robert A. Lovett and Brigadier General George Brownell; and for the Navy, Rear Admiral Sidney Souers and Major Matthias Correa, special adviser to Secretary Forrestal. ...
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...2a01p_0012.htm
...The Army's committee appointed on October 22 under the chairmanship of Assistant Secretary Lovett gathered testimony by means of a questionnaire and written reports within the War Department.
There were formal interviews with persons specially qualified: General Bissell; William H. Jackson, who had reported on the British system; Kingman Douglass, who bad represented the Army Air Forces at the Air Ministry in London; Lieutenant General Stanley D. Embick, member of the joint Strategic Survey Committee; David K. E. Bruce, who had been prominent in OSS; and Alfred McCormack from the State Department...
The opinions of most of these witnesses can be fairly surmised. Of particular interest, in view of his participation in the Intelligence Survey Group of the National Security Council in 1948 and his subsequent appointment as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence under General Walter B. Smith, are those held at this time by William H. Jackson.4
(2) 4 Taken from a memorandum of the following November 14 to Secretary Forrestal. The testimony proper before the Lovett Committee was not available to the author.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...2a01p_0013.htm
....The finished report of the Lovett Committee noted, as Magruder had, that there was jealousy and mistrust among the departmental intelligence services, and also that the lack of experienced intelligence officers in both military services contributed to the unsatisfactory situation; no serious effort had been made to treat intelligence as a....
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...2a01p_0014.htm
CONFIDENTIAL
Central Intelligence
career. There must be a national intelligence organization, manned by permanent personnel of the highest caliber and trained as specialists in the components of modern intelligence. This could not be approached through the uncoordinated activity of the departmental units now engaged in "haphazard demobilization."...
..Lovett himself, appearing before Secretaries Byrnes, Patterson, and Forrestal in their meeting
on November 14, gave a summary of the report. He spoke particularly of its conception of a "reading panel," the proposed Intelligence Advisory Board in its capacity as an estimating body. The principal civilian agencies as well as the military intelligence services should be represented on it. The FBI,
in particular, had the "best personality file in the world" and incidentally was expert in producing false documents, an art "at which we became outstandingly adept" during the war. The advantage in this plan, Lovett emphasized, lay in the fact that conclusions would be reached not by one man but by a board; it would avoid "the danger of having a single slanted view guide our policies." Thus he joined William H. Jackson in advocating collective responsibility for national intelligence estimates....
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http://news.google.com/archivesearch...k2jzBLJpxg3QNg
FORRESTAL KILLED IN 13-STORY LEAP; U. S. MOURNING SET; NATION IS ...
New York Times - May 23, 1949
... between his departure from the Cabinet and his collapse from nervous exhaustion Mr. Forrestal was at Hobe Sound, Fla., at the home of Robert A. Lovett, ...
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...8CD85F4D8485F9
FORRESTAL DATA HELD UP; Report on His Death Promised but It Is Not Released
July 19, 1949, Tuesday
Page 31, 183 words
WASHINGTON, July 18 (AP) -- Considerable mystery surrounds a delay in releasing the report made by the special naval investigating board that inquired into the death of James V. Forrestal, former Secretary of Defense.
http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/findi...illcutts/index
Admiral M.D. Willcutts Report on the Death of James V. Forrestal, 1949
This page links to two text files in Adobe PDF format containing the 1949 report by Admiral M.D. Willcutts, the Navy Department's chief investigator into the death of James V. Forrestal. The documents were procured by David Martin of Virginia via a Freedom of Information Act request in April 2004. Martin scanned the report and gave the PDF files to the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library in August 2004. Previous versions of this report made available to the public contained redactions; however this version is unexpurgated. Also included are scans of five photographs obtained and scanned by Martin.
First half of the Willcutts Report (15 MB)
Second half of the report (89 MB)
Photographs: Exhibit 2E, Exhibit 2F, Exhibit 2H Exhibit 2K Exhibit 2U
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http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/gray.htm
Gordon Gray Papers
Dates: 1946-1979.
Assistant Secretary of the Army, 1947-1949; Secretary of the Army, 1949-1950; Special Assistant to the President, 1950;
Director, Psychological Strategy Board, 1951.
During the Truman years, Gray was Assistant Secretary and later Secretary of the Army. He resigned in 1950 to accept the position of president of the University of North Carolina. However, he remained in Washington, D.C. to study United States foreign economic policies as a special assistant to the President. Also, during his tenure as president of the University of North Carolina, he was director of the Psychological Strategy Board. In the Eisenhower administration, Gray held positions on several committees and boards including the Atomic Energy Commission's Personnel Security Board.
The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was established by Presidential Directive of April 4, 1951 "to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct, within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations." The founding Presidential Directive instructed the PSB to report to the National Security Council "on the Board's activities and its evaluation of the national psychological operations, including implementation of approved objectives, policies, and programs by the departments and agencies concerned."
The Psychological Strategy Board succeeded the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, which had been established during World War II to coordinate the Government's psychological warfare efforts. During the Truman Presidency, the PSB, in addition to its inherited coordination role, conducted planning for psychological operations undertaken by its constituent agencies. It did not conduct operations of its own. After leaving the Psychological Strategy Board, Gray would serve on a number of committees during the Eisenhower administration.
In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission created a special panel to hold secret hearings to decide if nuclear physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a security risk. The Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Gordon Gray, met from April 12 to May 6, 1954. The board investigated and later found Dr. Oppenheimer loyal to the United States, but did not grant him security clearance. ....
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A966958260
Washington at Work; Turning Loyalty and Service to Bush Into Power as Presidential Counsel
By NEIL A. LEWIS, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: December 12, 1990
Boyden Gray, White House counsel and personal favorite of President Bush, is a man who inspires people to come up with new and inventive ways to say "odd."
Consider his behavior at a meeting over the civil rights bill just before Congress adjourned. William Coleman Jr., a venerable black Republican who was negotiating for the major civil rights groups, pulled out a piece of paper with an Administration proposal that he said showed the White House wanted to scuttle the bill.
At that point, according to those present, Mr. Gray snatched the paper, saying it was "no longer operative," and ripped it into pieces, which fluttered to the floor as everyone else looked on in stunned silence.
'Wanted to Look Bold'
"Hey, it wasn't even his paper," said an Administration official familiar with the incident. "I think he wanted to look bold, but it was probably just awkward."
In the recent past, White House counsels were secondary figures who were primarily involved in giving legal advice. But at the age of 47, Clayland Boyden Gray has become an influential figure on a variety of issues, largely as a result of his special rapport and length of service with George Bush.
The principal theorist behind the President's veto of the civil rights bill, Mr. Gray is also a fierce proponent of the argument that the President need not do anything more than consult with Congress if he chooses that the United States go to war with Iraq. Backer of Presidential Powers
His stand is emblematic of a larger view of Presidential authority that is at the center of his role in the White House. In fact, if Mr. Gray is to make a mark for something other than his forays into an eclectic range of issues, it is his staunch commitment to protect and, if possible, expand Presidential prerogatives in the constitutional scheme.
Mr. Gray initially agreed to be interviewed for this article but later changed his mind, saying he believed the White House counsel should be a figure inconspicuous to the public....
...But their influence was a product of their intellectual heft and political worldliness while Mr. Gray's importance, several mutual friends agreed, is more a result of Mr. Bush's personal regard for him. Product of the Power Elite It is a relationship, those friends say, born of what Mr. Bush might call "the class thing."
A tall figure whose personality oscillates between brooding and genial, Mr. Gray is as indisputable a product of the nation's traditional power elite as is Mr. Bush. Mr. Gray's father, Gordon Gray, served as Secretary of the Army under President Harry S. Truman and was President Dwight D. Eisenhower's national security adviser. He later became president of the University of North Carolina and was an occasional golfing partner of both Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut and his son George.
"The Bushes and the Grays seem to know an awful lot of people in common," said one White House official.
Career of Public Service ...
http://extras.journalnow.com/lostempire/tob9a.htm
Chapter 9
Death of a Prince
RJR is left looking for a leader at a critical time for tobacco; last-minute 'instructions' feed the Gray mystique
By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
Winston-Salem Journal
...Bowman Gray had come a long way -- from the streets of Boston where he hawked cigarettes for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in the 1930s to the chairman's office of the company his father had once run.
He had built an empire that dominated the tobacco industry and, as a response to the growing health threat, had begun to diversify into foods and other businesses.
The deal for Sea-Land Services Inc. in early 1969 would turn a home-grown tobacco company into a conglomerate. ..
...Gordon Gray, who had almost 20 years in Washington working for two presidents, suggested to his brother, Bowman, that he hire Chuck Ellington, who had been an assistant secretary of defense and assistant dean of the Harvard Business School....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-Land_Service,_Inc
Sea-Land Service, Inc. (often referred to by a variety of variations on its name, including: Sea-Land Services, Sea-Land Corporation, or SeaLand) was a pioneering shipping and containerization company founded by American entrepreneur Malcom McLean in 1960, out of the operations of the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, which McLean acquired in 1955. It existed under various changes of ownership (passing from R. J. Reynolds to CSX Corporation, until it was acquired by, and formally incorporated into, the operations of the A. P. Moller-Maersk Group in November 1999.
Sea-Land become notable for its instrumental role in the U.S. military in the Vietnam conflict, delivering as many as 12,000 containers a month to the Indochina peninsula; total revenues from the U.S. Defense Department would amount to $450 million between 1967 and 1973.[1] Later, it drew attention for being the registrant of the ill-fated SS Mayagüez, whose seizure by Khmer Rouge forces on May 12, 1975 provoked the last armed confrontation of the Vietnam War.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...52C1A96E948260
DEECY STEPHENS, AN INSURANCE AGENT, AND BURTON C. GRAY MARRY IN CAPITAL
November 6, 1988
....Mr. Gray, a stepson of Nancy Maguire Gray of Hobe Sound, Fla., is the vice chairman of the Summit Communications Group, a radio and cable television company in Atlanta. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and did graduate work in economics at the University of Chicago. His previous marriage ended in divorce.
The bridegroom's father was the Secretary of the Army in the Truman Administration, President Eisenhower's special assistant for national security, a president of the University of North Carolina and a chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The bridegroom is a grandson of the late Bowman Gray, a president of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. ...
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Last edited by host; 07-07-2008 at 10:32 PM..
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