And when [Liddy] considered the 1972 Presidential election… he realized that for Nixon to fight according to the normal procedures of democratic politics would have been just such a surrender. It was like one of the agents in a novel by Howard Hunt said: “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others.”
Brave words from a desk jockey wanna-be-007, determined to glamorize his petty criminality against honest political opponents. Nixon’s ‘Plumbers’ were every bit as silly as their Yippie / Weathermen “enemies”, but the hippie kids with the big mouths didn’t have anywhere near the weapons at the WH’s disposal.
And this is where I tried & failed to find a usable YouTube version of Tom Paxton’s “The Hostage”, which he wrote right after the Attica uprising:
“I’m a guard in the grey iron prison, or at least I was till now;
It was never a picnic social, never a day;
The cons didn’t come in laughing, and you know we never taught them how,
It was damned hard work and you wouldn’t believe the pay…
[…] Let ’em take the governor [Rockefeller], hold him for a couple of days,
See who comes in shooting to set him free —Hell, they’d open every cell in the country, and send them on their way!
They’d never do to him what the governor did to me…
One more reminder that the compact had been broken. The Top Ten Percenters, having lost interest in running the country rather than ruling their personal fiefdoms, were about to helicopter away from the wreckage and leave their former servants and bodyguards behind. The ‘servant class’, aka ‘Silent Majority’, had nobody to retaliate against except each other and the miserable outcasts even lower on the social scale.
Meanwhile there were the broadcast networks to flay… OTP general counsel Antonin Scalia had drafted a series of memos on how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting might be made a more pliant vassal of the White House.
Another familar name in the War Against American Democracy emerges from the cesspit! If any right-wing criminal of the past 40 years didn’t play a part in Nixon’s White House, it was only because they hadn’t been born soon enough…
Finally, for the capper:
Nixon arranged for Hoover’s half-ton, lead-lined coffin to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda as if he’d been a president and said at his funeral: “The good J. Edgar Hoover has done will not die. The profound principles associated with his name will not fade away. Rather, I would predict that in the time ahead those principles of respect for law, order, and justice will come to govern our nation more completely than ever before. Because the trend of permissiveness in this country, a trend which Edgar Hoover fought against all his life, a trend which was dangerously eroding our national heritage as a law-abiding people, is now being reversed.”
licensed to kill time
The seeds of our present day troubles are everywhere throughout the Nixon years. Scalia trying to get White House influence over PBS, Nixon trying to cut off their funding, the large-scale book buying to vault a “liberal media” tome to best-seller status, Phyllis Schlafly scaremongering about the ERA, David Broder lying about Muskie’s ‘streaming tears’, Karl Rove’s ratfucking and the recruitment of campus conservatives, it’s all there.
They’ve really been working at this a looong time.
Linda Featheringill
Hi, Anne. How are you feeling?
I always assumed that J. Edgar laid in state in DC because so many people in DC wanted to file by and be sure that the SOB was dead.
Amir_Khalid
@Linda Featheringill:
When J. Edgar Hoover’s body was on display, was he dressed in women’s clothing?
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill: Not bad. I thought the lead lining was a nice touch, ‘cuz that SOB had to be radioactive…
Nicole
“The Coven” might have been my favorite chapter- partly for the hilarious summary of the novel of the same name, and partly because of Perlstein’s observation that conservatives really believe that liberals must have some ulterior, self-centered reason for the progressive causes they champion- that the idea of the common good is just incomprehensible to them.
Maude
@Amir_Khalid:
Perhaps the underneath clothing was female.
@licensed to kill time:
Don’t forget Rummy and Cheney.
Chris
I knew Hoover had lied in state, but I never knew it was Tricky Dick who’d arranged it. Figures.
Should have been Bill Donovan instead.
Linda Featheringill
As I was reading these chapters, I realized that I had forgotten just how corrupt the Committee to Reelect really was. Not the first case or the last, but they really were corrupt. And they weren’t working in the best interest of the country.
licensed to kill time
@Maude:
Not forgetting. Really, it’s like a rat’s nest…and they are all still around and still ratfucking.
eta: well, Broder’s gone.
Nicole
As someone who knows Central PA very well, I really also was into the section on the Harrisburg 7. James Carville, I think it was, described PA as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle,” which I’ve always thought was a pretty good description. But Keystoners are ornery, and I enjoyed the outcome of the trial and the jury’s reaction, which was basically, “Do they think we’re morons?” It’s that kind of thing that still give me hope about our contemporary circumstances.
stuckinred
The weather people silly? Hmm.
General Stuck
@licensed to kill time:
Our politics started on the path to what they are while the ink was still wet on the Civil Rights and voting acts. Nixon just smelled opportunity for votes and conceived the southern strategy. It has slowly produced the monster we have today in the Tea Party and GOP proper. The democratic party is in pretty good shape in comparison. And represents as accurately as it ever has, in my lifetime, the general platform of fairness for ordinary people, and without the racist element it once had.
And is congealing into something longer term with some minor nail chewing on the margins. And yes, there is a social and economic streak of conservatism within the dem camp, that exists mostly due to blue collar unions that are socially conservative. And that the party very much needs for a number of practical reasons.
It is one reason why the goopers have thrown out all pretense to participating as a loyal minority party, in lieu of increased ideological purist hegemony that they are still convinced comes from a fundamental center right country, and this turn of progressivism is temp, if they only hold the line.
But once anyone takes the time to peak under the hood of the GOP clown car, there is nothing more than bluster, a lick, and a promise. And a shitload of chaos. We will see it soon on full public display for the coming GOP primary and GE.
licensed to kill time
You know, I was thinking today about how painful and frustrating reading this book is for me and others who lived through the Nixon years, and wondering if it will be just as difficult for future readers when the Bush-Cheney years are finally fully documented. Though, of course, they learned from Nixon that secret tapes are not a good thing.
Linda Featheringill
Hi Stuck.
As I remember it, the “weather people” were very serious and sober.
Linda Featheringill
@licensed to kill time:
Bush and Cheyney:
I have no proof but I really suspect that some very unpleasant stuff went on during those 8 years.
I do wonder what happened in 2008 or so when Bush seemed to wake up and realize what was going on. He spent the last few months actually acting like a president.
General Stuck
@Linda Featheringill:
I wouldn’t know, being a real hippie concerned with peace and love and all that good shit. Especially the love part.
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill:Yea, I mean there was some hard party folks in SDS but the Weather Undergound got pretty hard core. The movie “Katherine” with Sissy Spacek, Henry Winkler and Art Carney is a dramatization of the radicalization of Diana Oughton and worth a gander some time.
Anne Laurie
@Nicole:
Gore Vidal wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay suggesting that E. Howard Hunt was responsible for writing Arthur Bremer’s “diary”, and that Bremer’s attempt to assassinate George Wallace was just another Nixonian ratfvcking. Crazy talk, of course, but IIRC it tee’d off EHH sufficiently that he tried to sue Vidal, and only dropped the idea because he was warned against trying to defend either CREEP tactics or his own authorial skills while under oath.
stuckinred
Pretty good clip from Katherine.
stuckinred
@General Stuck: A “real hippie” huh?
licensed to kill time
@Linda Featheringill:
With regards to Bush Jr, I always wonder if his daddy took him aside for a talkin’ to. I remember a New Yorker cartoon around the time he was ‘elected’ the first time that showed Bush the Elder and Barbara sitting bolt upright in bed with looks of “OMG!” on their faces as they watched the TV and election results. I laughed, then.
Anne Laurie
@stuckinred:
Well, they were certainly dangerous to each other. But their pamphleted dreams of overthrowing the national government, much less the American social system, seemed to me just about as plausible as EHH’s murderous-hippie fantasms.
Damned at Random
I guess I was surprised that the ratfuck recipients in the Dem primaries were looking to each other for the source of the stunts instead of blaming the “Tricky Dick” organization.
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: So if something is implausible it’s silly? Did their “dreams” come true? Obviously not. Did what they did matter? It may have made things worse rather than better depending on your perspective. The frustration of trying to change things peacefully against the forces that Nixonland is all about led some people to do shit that, in retrospect, was ill-fated. I just don’t think it was silly.
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
Yes. That was painful.
Although in their defense, I have found that learning to fight your real enemies is a difficult lesson to learn for humans. Dunno why. It takes some folks a long time to get around to learning this.
Phil Perspective
Do they sell Tom Paxton’s “The Hostage” on iTunes?
General Stuck
@stuckinred:
Yea, well, it was all relative man
Anne Laurie
@licensed to kill time:
I’d bet a store-bought cookie that Cheney’s ‘man-sized safe’ is full of documentation a non-ideological criminal would never have permitted to be made in the first place. Darth Cheney was a Nixonian in his larval days, and having some get-out-of-jail-free blackmail material squirreled away would’ve been an incentive for him right up there with punishing his enemies. Possibly his dearest heir & flame-keeper Lizard Liz has managed to get custody & destroy it by now, but the files from places like Argentina under Peron and the East German Stasi show that “having a proper record” seems to override the self-protective instinct of RW bureacratic thugs to a degree that seems counter-productive.
licensed to kill time
@Damned at Random: Yeah, that was kind of sad. I guess nobody really understood the extent of the Repub ratfuckiness at that point.
stuckinred
@Phil Perspective: Looks like just a Judy Collins version.
stuckinred
You might enjoy Le Déserteur by Peter Paul and Mary.
stuckinred
@General Stuck: My point exactly.
licensed to kill time
@Anne Laurie:
It’s funny (in a not haha kind of way) that Nixon and crew were such terrible yet well-documented criminals, and Bush-Cheney were such effective criminals yet careful to cover their tracks, but in such a blatant way. Think of the ‘lost emails’ et al.
I don’t doubt that Cheney is just arrogant enough to have saved evidence thinking that he could use it in some way in the future.
Damned at Random
Every time Libby makes an appearance, I wonder why he isn’t locked away somewhere- if not prison, certainly a hospital for the criminally insane.
gene108
@Linda Featheringill:
J. Edgar Hoover turned the FBI into a professional crime fighting organization. Professional crime fighting, i.e. what we consider “detective work” today, really didn’t exist at any level. Hoover started using the latest technological tools to battle crime, such as finger print analysis, back in the 1920’s, when the FBI started.
Hoover did some good things. He just stuck around way way way too long and accumulated too much power onto himself, because he was untouchable, he abused that power.
I can understand wanting a state funeral for Hoover. The bad stuff hadn’t come out yet. All of that came out post-Watergate.
Anyway, one comment in the top caught my attention:
The number of prominent Republicans, who got their start in the Nixon Whitehouse pretty much runs the table on major Republican officials for the past 40 years. From Scalia, mentioned above, to Pat Buchanan, to Donald Rumsfeld, to Dick Cheney, to Casper Wienberger, to anyone you can think of as being an important Republican.
I really do wonder why no one has asked these people, what they thought of Watergate and what the principle lesson from Watergate was.
Looking at what they did while in government it was to try and perfect being secretive, while subverting the rule of law, so you can’t get caught and give the President plausible deniability.
Why more hasn’t been made of this connection is sad.
What’s changed in the Republican Party in 2008 and 2010 is the absence of the Jr. Nixons being as politically powerful in the Republican Party as before. Some are just too old now to take up something new. Others screwed themselves up by joining the Bush, Jr. team.
I think part of the reason the Tea Party and the general nuttiness of the Republicans, post-2007, is because of the intellectual power vacuum created by the absence of the Jr. Nixons.
They may have been cold hearted SOB’s, but they weren’t dumb.
General Stuck
@stuckinred:
Thought it was
Anne Laurie
@stuckinred:
Yeah, hindsight is always 20/20. I’ll admit that my personal prejudices as a back-end boomer (“You should’ve been here just 3 years ago, maaan — it was SO great back then!”) have unduly influenced my opinion of people like Bill Ayers. Who, under slightly different circumstances, could’ve been as influential as his brother-in-spirit Osama bin Laden.
Anne Laurie
@Phil Perspective: Paxton has a website, and it might be available directly there?
EDIT: Not on a quick scan, alas. Come to think, I learned the lyrics back in the mid-70s from Collins’ version, after hearing Paxton sing it at a coffeehouse. Surely he must’ve recorded it at some point in his career!
Linda Featheringill
@gene108:
Well, the Republicans won’t listen to Rove any more. The man is not dumb by a long shot and has a lot of political savvy. He probably could save the Republicans a lot of grief. But they aren’t having any of it.
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: Under slightly different circumstances any of us is capable of anything. Take that to the bank.
Phil Perspective
@Anne Laurie: I checked and it doesn’t appear so. Did he even put it out on vinyl?
stuckinred
@Phil Perspective: The album is Peace Will Come, 1972.
LP $6.99 on eBay
http://cgi.ebay.com/TOM-PAXTON-LP-PEACE-COME-REPRISE-/280614451579?pt=Music_on_Vinyl&hash=item4155ecb97b
Anne Laurie
@stuckinred: Thanks! The Spousal Unit buys obscure CDs and even vinyl on-line, I’ll have to get him to look for PEACE WILL COME for me.
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: Glad to help.
gene108
@Linda Featheringill:
Could be the one saving grace for the Democrats. The Republicans are cutting their ties to the professionals, who guided the Party for the past 40+ years.
Assuming the Democrats get a competent person to head the DNC, I think they can keep a hold on power not seen in generations.
No one really likes Republican policies. The right-wing wurlitzer will eventually run out of steam as the people, who are really scared about blacks, gays, etc. die off. The repeal of DADT and lack of right-wing media backlash about the repeal, to me at least, shows how little traction those issues have right now. If it had any traction, banning gays in the military would be a hot-topic for the 2012 GOP primaries.
The only issues that might come up are the constant wedge issues like abortion and gun control. Abortion isn’t something you can negotiate a reasonable position on anymore.
Gun control can be a major single issue for many people, but when push comes to shove and they have a choice between a Republican, who they like because he is “pro-gun”, versus a Democrat who won’t take away their Medicare, Medicaid and / or unemployment benefits, that single issue voter may start rethinking his support for the Republican.
The old professionals would never gut a popular middle class program, without offering some crumbs to make the “little” people feel like they got something in return for the massive tax cut to the wealthy.
licensed to kill time
@gene108: From your excellent comment:
I think this is what they learned:
Don’t get caught, but if you do…deny deny deny.
Our country has a remarkable ability to sweep embarrassing/criminal things under the rug and ‘look forward, not back’. It has happened again and again and again.
Damned at Random
OT, but has there been a decision on the next book – or if the book club will continue? There was talk about SHock Doctrine a few weeks back, but I don’t remember the outcome
Nicole
@gene108:
And it would be interesting, if it weren’t so completely infuriating, to see the MSM do everything they can to give the dimmest of the dim bulbs a pass.
Damned at Random
A big shock to me was the discussion between Kissinger and Nixon about keeping South Vietnam intact through the election. Nixon asked how may people would die if he bombed the dikes and Kissinger said 200,000. Then Nixon said he would rather use a nuke. Pretty callous calculation there for a Quaker. So why are atheists not viable candidates again?
stuckinred
Not much about the Spring Offensive but, what the hell, only about as many casualties as the Iraq War. What was it those silly hippies were so mad about?
stuckinred
@Damned at Random:
Phil Perspective
@stuckinred: Thank you!!
stuckinred
@Phil Perspective: You better bid fast Anne is on it too!
Nicole
What really surprised me about the book was that George HW Bush comes across as someone who at least understood what was being done was wrong, even if he didn’t speak up (and I’m not excusing him in any way). The bit in the book about his meeting with the UN… Secretary General, was it? When he went in to say stop spreading lies and walked out looking like he’d had his clock cleaned. And Nixon’s comment in the 1990’s about how he thought Bush would have been re-elected if he’d just kept the Iraq war (1st one, of course) going through the 1992 elections, because it had worked out so well for him in 1972. Maybe Bush Elder didn’t realize just how short American memories are and thought he’d still be getting credit for victory, but the bleeding heart liberal I am likes to hope, on some level, a genuine war veteran was unwilling to keep a war going longer than necessary, regardless of the electoral advantages.
licensed to kill time
@Damned at Random:
Also shocking was the discussion between Nixon and an aide (I forget who, and it’s too freaking hard to search in my stupid kindle) about doing more bombing. The aide said “They (the public) already think you are killing people, so why not give them some more dead bodies?”
Just chilling.
Damned at Random
@Nicole: I actually had a certain fondness for Bush elder in 1980 – I thought his voodoo economics line was on target. I voted for Carter because of his energy policy realism, but had Bush gotten the nod, I would have taken a very hard look at him. But when he took Reagan’s VP offer, I decided he was a craven opportunist and I pretty much still think so.
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
Nicole
@Damned at Random: I remember reading that GHWB was also a very big supporter of Planned Parenthood and access to family planning, right up until the second Reagan offered him the VP spot.
licensed to kill time
And where I am, I’ve got Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men and Dexter coming up on the machine. My one good night of tv, so I’m outa here for now. Thanks, all.
stuckinred
@licensed to kill time: and no Treme? sheesh
Anne Laurie
@gene108:
Hoover got his start in 1919 running the Palmer Raids against “anarchists” and other troublemakers. From everything I’ve read, he was never really interested in “crimefighting” that didn’t involve punishing those guilty of Wrongthought Against the State. The FBI did, and continues, to do actual crime-fighting, but its achievements have always been compromised by its founding & continued bias towards imposing order at the cost of law, much less justice. Of course, considering the alternative of an efficient national order-imposing authority, probably we’re all better off as it is!
licensed to kill time
@stuckinred: That was last night :) Love it.
stuckinred
One more Tom Paxton buy link.
gnomedad
He was afraid Superman would spy on his corpse?
stuckinred
@licensed to kill time: Ah, season 1.
Damned at Random
@stuckinred: LOve Treme. I thought it was only one season when they wrapped up the first season – everybody was connected through the dead prisoner. What a great piece of plotting that was. I’m TiVoing the new season, but haven’t started watching yet
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: They renewed after the first episode. We wait till Tuesday to watch it on demand because we get sleepy by 10!
Anne Laurie
Thanks everybody… same time, next week, last 3 chapters and we can wrap this puppy up!
I’m conflicted about jumping right into a new Serious, Constructive book for summer discussions. If nothing else, I think we’ll have to switch to a weekday evening to allow for vacations & such — anybody got opinions about Tuesday vs. Wednesday vs. Thursday?
Nicole
Wednesday would be my top choice, but purely selfish reasons.
mclaren
Why did J. Edgar Hoover’s coffin weigh half a ton? And why was it lead-lined?
To keep the stake in place through his heart?
To prevent the radioactive death cloud from escaping?
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: Thanks for doing this, I know it was a slog!
Damned at Random
I don’t like Thursday- for purely selfish reasons. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are preferable.
mclaren
@licensed to kill time:
The Nixon criminalities have still not been fully documented. Did you know that Nixon’s estate is still pursuing lawsuits to prevent most of the Nixon tapes and documents from being released?
It may take centuries of lawsuits for all the criminalities of the Bush years to come to light. We still have no records of the Drunk-Driving Coke-Snorting C Student’s years in the Texas Air National Guard; we still have no record of who Cheney met with in the oil industry and what they discussed prior to the Iraq invasion. We still don’t know most of the people who were kidnapped and tortured, or how many U.S. citizens were kidnapped and tortured and are still being held incommunicado in dungeons, or how many U.S. citzens were assassinated by JSOC killing squads (like the death squad that killed bin Laden).
We still have no real idea the true extent of the unconstitutional crimes committed on America soil between 2001 and 2009 against U.S. citizens by American paramilitary forces like Delta Force and the SEALs and the JSOC assassination squads.
stuckinred
@mclaren: Good, you’ll meet your maker without knowing diddly-shit. Same as it ever was.
WereBear (itouch)
@Anne Laurie: Yes; weren’t the Nazis like that too?
Popped in to read the thread and hope you are feeling better.
Anne Laurie
@WereBear (itouch): Thanks, the stitches come out tomorrow if it looks good to the ortho surgeon (please goddess), and considering what my hand looked like this time last week I’ve been very very lucky!
Joeyess
It’s a generational affair. To be honest, they’ve been at this since FDR, but it took a devious and paranoid political animal like Nixon to bring it all together and synthesize the perfect toxic serum. Nixon ladled it out like Jim Jones and an entire generation drank it wholeheartedly, leaving just enough for later generations to cook up and continue the non existent war on “the left”.
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
The part that really interests me is Hoover’s relation to the Mafia. Hoover refused to even recognize their existence for years, until enough public pressure on him had built up that he had no choice.
To my knowledge, no one’s ever connected Hoover to the mob, let alone suggested any long-term arrangement (e.g. that he’d look the other way if they acted as street muscle when they were needed). But it’s hardly a stretch to imagine; the mob’s collaborated with federal agencies before (during World War Two and the Cold War both), and those kinds of arrangements existed in other Western countries (the French security services, during the same era, were up to their eyeballs in dealings with the Corsican mob, including COINTELPRO type activities).
Anyone know more about this?
LanceThruster
I wonder who did Hoover’s make-up for the burial?
Harold
Army Counter Intelligence Corps.
During WW2 and after Secret operations were conducted by the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, apparently. They routinely passed themselves off as FBI agents while working in the US and Hoover almost prosecuted one of them, Horace Schmall, as an impostor. Something of a rogue operation from the get go. According to wikipedia they bugged Eleanor Roosevelt’s room, were involved in helping the prosecution in the Alger Hiss case, and in forming the “rat line” of finding refuge for former Nazis in South America. T
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_Intelligence_Corps
Chris
@Harold:
What strikes me about that wikipedia article was the line in which, according to the official history of the CIC, the information gleaned from 1941 to 1945 “played a major part in keeping communism under control in the United States ever since.”
The fact that the FBI, HUAC and organizations like the CIC remained so obsessively concerned with communism all the way through World War Two (when the biggest concern was obviously someone else) is an early example of wingnut dementia.
It got so ridiculous that Hoover, who kept careful tabs on the OSS (the wartime CIA), at one point sent its director, General Donovan, a letter accusing him of having communists working for him (hardly surprising, since the OSS was working with anti-Nazi groups in Europe and the majority of them were left wing). The letter did not have the intended effect: Donovan wrote back a curt reply, “I know they’re communists, Edgar. That’s why I hired them.”
Very few people in Washington had the clout to flip him the bird that way. Go Donovan for having done it.
LanceThruster
@Chris:
from: http://www.lacndb.com/php/Info.php?name=Family%20-%20Genovese%20%28Luciano,%20Morello%29
Harold
Chris.
Donovan was a republican. He disliked Truman, who fired him, and was a cold war hawk after the war. According to Louis Menand, Donovan became:
… a hardcore Cold War hawk. He thought that Dean Acheson, who was Truman’s Secretary of State, was a “pantywaist,” and that John Foster Dulles, who was Eisenhower’s, was just as pusillanimous—and Dulles was a man who regularly invoked the threat of nuclear war. Donovan could see no reason that policies considered suitable in wartime—covert military action, bribery, and disinformation—were not equally appropriate in the postwar world. He stirred up as much trouble in Southeast Asia as he could manage in a year, among other things promoting the career of Ngo Dinh Diem, the man who, with American sponsorship, became the disastrous first President of South Vietnam. … Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/03/14/110314crbo_books_menand#ixzz1Lsvw2BDx
Menand concludes that Donovan’s brand of fighting did little to help win WW2 and was harmful subsequently.
Harold
I think the Mafia was used to “cleanse” the labor unions of idealists, or so my mother told me. It was used to massacre communists in Sicily, that’s for sure. In fact the Post WW2 Italian mafia is a creature of the CIA. Was this a good idea? By their fruits shall ye know them.
Chris
@Harold:
I knew Donovan was a Republican and a Wall Streeter, and I’m not surprised at all to hear that he was a Cold War hawk. What I’d heard about the guy before, though, pointed to him being more flexible and less dogmatic than Hoover. E.G. he hated commies, but didn’t spend his WW2 years witch-hunting after them, because there were bigger things to worry about back then.
In your article (good read by the way), it’s worth noting that the one success the author attributed to the OSS was their part in mobilizing the French resistance – i.e. the commies that Hoover was shitting bricks about – to support the Normandy landings.
Chris
@Harold:
I know more about France than Italy, and what you’re saying’s definitely true there. The Corsican mob of Marseille, post-WW2, were street enforcers for U.S. intelligence and for the mayor we’d helped set up (a Socialist ironically), and busted a number of strikes and demonstrations that were or sounded too communist. In exchange, authorities looked the other way as they flooded the U.S. with drugs.
Not as familiar with Italy, but I know we did similar things with their Mafia… and the American Mafia, I believe, helped hook us up with them. (In addition to performing small services for us, like, we gave them control of the docks in New York during the war if they’d keep them clean of Axis agents, By Any Means Necessary).
Chris
Oh, FRAKK me, I used the S-word and am now in moderation. Trying again –
I know more about France than Italy, and what you’re saying’s definitely true there. The Corsican mob of Marseille, post-WW2, were street enforcers for U.S. intelligence and for the mayor we’d helped set up (a soshulist ironically), and busted a number of strikes and demonstrations that were or sounded too communist. In exchange, authorities looked the other way as they flooded the U.S. with drugs.
Not as familiar with Italy, but I know we did similar things with their Mafia… and the American Mafia, I believe, helped hook us up with them. (In addition to performing small services for us, like, we gave them control of the docks in New York during the war if they’d keep them clean of Axis agents, By Any Means Necessary).
Harold
I get the idea from watching movies, anyway, that after the war, or rather just as the war was being won, the allies began bypassing or disposing of their resistance allies and planning to put the same old same old into positions of post war power. That the the resistance members were communists or even popular front leftists was not clearly acknowledged in the post-war mythologizing about them and is only now becoming clearly known — or sort of. I am thinking of some recent resistance movies that came out — Max Manus, Army of Crime, Flame and Citron — that have a very disillusioned take on the aftermath.
Harold
Donovan would use anyone and then dispose of them later. A pattern that continued during the Cold War. It was the short-term thinking that characterizes Wall Street.
Chris
Oh, hell yes. The resistance has been mythologized all the way to hell and back by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, till the myth bears little to no resemblance to reality.
One, the resistance tends to be portrayed as unified and organized. It wasn’t, not to the degree shown in the movies – there were a bunch of different groups with different motives and ideals, often with no connection to each other.
Two, it tends to be portrayed as having massive popular support. It didn’t. Most people were apathetic: the number of resistance fighters was far smaller than portrayed in popular culture. Conversely, collaboration (usually portrayed as just a few German puppets) went much deeper than people are comfortable admitting.
Three, popular culture tends to play the patriotic angle way up, while downplaying the socialist/communist angle as much as possible. (Wonder how many Americans today watch Casablanca and pick up on the fact that the heroes are either socialists, or people so neck-deep in socialist company that they might as well have been?)
Harold
The Russians thought they were being used as tools to dispose of Hitler, while the allies did the minimum. There was paranoia in this but they did bear the brunt, that’s for sure. Today is the anniversary of the end of what they still call the Great Patriotic War.
Andrew
Not unlike Robert Moses in New York City. If either of them had been hit by a bus in 1950 they would have been canonized.