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Subject: THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 19:42:33 -0600
From: Winston Weeks <wweeks@aros.net>
To: Preston Truman <hermit@downwinders.org>, Dave Ratcliffe

(please forward)

07/23/2001

THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM -- By Sam Smith

IN A SIGN that the Washington Post's ability to misconstrue events will not die with its leader, the paper gave state funeral status to the passing of former publisher Katharine Graham. This was more than a simple act of commercial self-aggrandizement; it marked a milestone in corporatism, expanding the task of the consumer from mere purchase of products to a required reverence for their makers on a level previous reserved for heroes and royalty. On three successive days the Post actually printed a map of the funeral procession route, local TV stations gave the ceremony live coverage, the police blocked streets, and the holiest temple of Episcopalianism, the National Cathedral, pulled out all the stops.

Lost in all this were a few basic facts. The most celebrated events in Mrs. Graham's journalistic career -- Watergate and the Pentagon Papers -- occurred more than 25 years ago and, while honorable, were anomalies rather than typical. More realistic indicators can be found in the names on the funeral speaker and honored guest list, most remarkably -- given all the Pentagon Paper iconography -- those of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, two of America's major practitioners of violence during Mrs. Graham's reign. ... [read full article]

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[i am including John Judge on this as i know he can share far more illuminating insights than i on this thread. ]

It's curious how often "facts" are perpetuated by any-and-every shade-and-hue of world-view. Anytime someone cites something like "the Pentagon Papers" as an example of "good journalism" or "journalism the way it's supposed to be practiced", i think back to what Fletcher used to say about it. Go to http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html and in your web browser, bring up the "Find" window, and step through the occurences of "Pentagon Papers". Two of the more salient sections:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html#pgfId=7812

The man who has not lived in the secrecy and intelligence environment -- really lived in it and fully experienced it -- cannot write accurately about it. There is no substitute for the day-to-day living of a life in which he tells his best friends and acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one story while he lives another. The man who must depend upon research and investigation inevitably falls victim to the many pitfalls of the secret world and of the "cover story" world with its lies and counter-lies.

A good example of this is the work of Neil Sheehan and his associates on The New York Times' Pentagon Papers. The very title is the biggest cover story (no pun intended) of them all; so very few of those papers were really of Pentagon origin. The fact that I had them in my office, that I had worked with them, and that I had written parts of some of them proves that they were not genuine Pentagon papers, because my work at that time was devoted to support of the CIA. The same is true of General Krulak, Bill Bundy, and to a degree, Maxwell Taylor and others.

That people still think the source of the "Pentagon Papers" was the pentagon and that Daniel Ellsberg was somehow operating outside the mind-shapers grasp of what was being "floated" as "reality", is an indicator of how successful such psy-war ops continue to be -- decades later. Like the Kennedy assassinations, etc........

To look at this matter in another way, the man who has lived and experienced this unnatural existence becomes even more a victim of its unreality. He becomes enmeshed beyond all control upon the horns of a cruel dilemma. On the one hand, his whole working life has been dedicated to the cause of secrecy and to its protection by means of cover stories (lies). In this pursuit he has given of himself time after time to pledges, briefings, oaths, and deep personal conviction regarding the significance of that work. Even if he would talk and write, his life has been so interwoven into the fabric of the real and the unreal, the actual and the cover story, that he would be least likely to present the absolutely correct data.

On the other hand, as a professional he would have been subjected to such cellularization and compartmentalization each time he became involved in any real "deep" operation that he would not have known the whole story anyhow. This compartmentalization is very real. I have worked on projects with many CIA men so unaware of the entire operation that they had no realization and awareness of the roles of other CIA men working on the same project. I would know of this because inevitably somewhere along the line both groups would come to the Department of Defense for hardware support. I actually designed a special office in the Pentagon with but one door off the corridor. Inside, it had a single room with one secretary. However, off her office there was one more door that led to two more offices with a third doorway leading to yet another office, which was concealed by the door from the secretary's room. I had to do this because at times we had CIA groups with us who were now allowed to meet each other, and who most certainly would not have been there had they known that the others were there. (For the record, the office was 4D1000 -- it may have been changed by now; but it had remained that way for many years.)

Very few people are willing to even TRY to include what LFP points to above, when they endeavor to "explain" how things have been, are, and continue "happening" the way they do....

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appA.html#pgfId=8032

1998 Preface

How many of us recall that early in June 1971 the official history of "The United States Involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the Present" burst upon the scene in several of the larger newspapers of this country? It was said that this enormous collection, given the name "The Pentagon Papers" of "37 studies and 15 collections of documents done in 43 volumes" had been secretly released to these newspapers by a young man, Daniel Ellsberg, who had stolen them despite their cloak of highest secrecy.

Furthermore, how many recall that the Director of the Study Task Force, Leslie H. Gelb, whom Secretary Robert McNamara had directed to head this task force was assigned to the office of the Assistant Secretary, International Security Affairs, under the Honorable Paul C. Warneke and that his immediate superior was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Plans & Arms Control, Morton Halperin?

Quite a stew of "on-the-ground" psychological warfare operations personnel, eh-ya?

John -- you know worlds about Daniel Ellsberg -- what are the most fundamental aspects you can clue us in to about him?

dave

 

Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 02:48:55 -0400
From: John Judge
To: "dave ''who can do? ratmandu!'' ratcliffe"
Subject: Re: THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM

Cannonize it is, and what a nightmare she was. She inherited the paper after her husband was sent to Chestnut Lodge, a private CIA psychiatric hellhole that also produced the "suicide" of MKULTRA whistleblower Frank Olson. His father, Eugene Graham, had given Phillip control as a "wedding present" of sorts, having locked up the contracted new owner, civil rights liberal Judith Beck Stein in Chestnut Lodge where she overheard "Nazi psychiatrists" discussing the murder of JFK and MLK in 1960.

Eugene Graham was big money. Judith Stein wanted "one paper in America to tell the truth". Instead we got the Graham version of reality via the Washington Post, long considered a poor cousin to the NY Times until the Pentagon Papers issue broke.

By that time, a significant section of the CIA and the ruling class had decided the war in Vietnam was getting too costly at home, and wanted to get out. The documents released never touched Nixon's role, which went back as far as wanting Eisenhower to release nuclear weapons to the French in 1954 before the fall of Diem Bien Phu. The US took over the remaining 20% of the war cost they had not been paying and installed Ngo Dinh Diem, fresh out of Catholic seminaries in the US, introduced to Kennedy by Cardinal Spellman (Knights of Malta) and Allen Dulles (CIA, Nazis and Knights of Malta) as the wonder boy to prop up a fake government in "south" Vietnam.

It took JFK a few years to wise up, fatally, to his errors. The Pentagon Papers put all the blame on LBJ instead, but they were enough to convince the fence sitters that the war might not be all that great.

Thus, the NYT and the Post played their role as corporate propaganda pieces for the eastern establishment end of the class. See Carl Oglesby [Yankee and Cowboy War (1976) and Who Killed JFK? (1992)] on this split, among others. They damn near gave the White House a set-up to install pre-release censorship on news, except for a new and therefore still honest judge in the DC federal court who ruled them down.

The installment method used for the Pentagon Papers, unlike the printing of the Warren Report all at once, allowed the government to intervene. But the damage to the war's credibility was done either way.

Ellsberg was and still is painted as a hero in all this, but not according to his co-conspirator Tony Russo who says Ellsberg bailed before their case eventually brought down Nixon as well. Wild Man is the new biography of Dan he recommends.

I have talked to Ellsberg over the years and confronted him about his secrets and top level work. My mother said she was "5 levels above Top Secret" and had access to the war room. I heard Ellsberg in a public talk say he was "15 levels above". Now he says he doesn't know what the term means, but like any good secret society, there are shrinking rings of control and information flow (ie 33rd Degree Mason for instance).

Yet Ellsberg says he knew of no "conspiracies". A protege of Kissinger, he also worked with CIA's Mort Halperin (now at Institute of Policy Studies), who cut a bad deal between the CIA and the ACLU on release of information on their budget and documents.

Mary Pinchot Meyers links Katherine Graham and others to the JFK operation, including the simultaneous seeking/destruction (depending on whom you believe) of Meyer's diary after her strange death by James Jesus Angleton and Bill Bradley. Graham was not only tight with Kissinger, she was tight with Frederick Sessions "Fritz" Beebe, a major arms dealer and part of the military/industrial complex.

Watergate was similarly a controlled scandal, refusing to dip into the martial law aspects, set-up to take Nixon out, which it did. ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] point man Woodward and sell-out Carl Bernstein told the story they were supposed to tell and nothing more. The break-in of Ellsberg's office by the Watergate plumbers ties the knot of these two operations.

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate the press had to be dragged out as the last possible bastion of "credibility" since the government had lost it in 1964 with issuance of the Warren Report (this is statistically documented, not my speculation on timing of loss of faith). So, of course, she now has to be cannonized in the church of punditry and media accuracy and courage which we are all supposed to worship.

I used to cut the Post and the Times for years, sorting and sifting. Now I refuse to subscribe to either since they are pure propaganda. For more on Katherine's perfidy see Katherine the Great [Katherine the Great, Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Deborah Davis, National Press, Inc., 1978], an excellent tonic for the current dyspepsia. We are in the Time of the Toad again, a phrase Dalton Trumbo coined from reading that Emile Zola said that during the Dreyfus years he would go to the market, buy a newspaper, a cup of coffee and a small toad. If he could get the toad down, he would read the paper.

I told Mae Brussell years ago that we should go back to 1963 and clip backwards, because they were not covering their ass as well then. I still believe it to be true if we want to know how we got here. But the basic outline is clear. A J Liebling and I F Stone and George Seldes told us all we need to know about newspapers and the truth. A corporation by any other name would smell as awful. Prouty knew it was a sham.

I attended the last anniversary panel put on by Vietnam Vets of America here at the press club, including Sanford Unger who went on to run Voice of America. A full tape of the proceedings can be had for $5 if you want it, contact DemocracyU@aol.com.

If Dan Ellsberg and Kate Graham are our heroes, we are in deep trouble. Mae Brussell alone got out more news and broke more real scandals than the two together. Prouty made more sense than either one. But, what else can they do? They have to lionize the liars for fear anyone will notice those telling the truth.

For real democracy now!
John Judge

 

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(please forward)

07/23/2001

THE CANONIZATION OF KATHARINE GRAHAM -- By Sam Smith

IN A SIGN that the Washington Post's ability to misconstrue events will not die with its leader, the paper gave state funeral status to the passing of former publisher Katharine Graham. This was more than a simple act of commercial self-aggrandizement; it marked a milestone in corporatism, expanding the task of the consumer from mere purchase of products to a required reverence for their makers on a level previous reserved for heroes and royalty. On three successive days the Post actually printed a map of the funeral procession route, local TV stations gave the ceremony live coverage, the police blocked streets, and the holiest temple of Episcopalianism, the National Cathedral, pulled out all the stops.

Lost in all this were a few basic facts. The most celebrated events in Mrs. Graham's journalistic career -- Watergate and the Pentagon Papers -- occurred more than 25 years ago and, while honorable, were anomalies rather than typical. More realistic indicators can be found in the names on the funeral speaker and honored guest list, most remarkably -- given all the Pentagon Paper iconography -- those of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, two of America's major practitioners of violence during Mrs. Graham's reign.

Facts that belong in the Graham story, but which have been consistently excised, include:

• In 1979 Katherine Graham and her managing editor managed to suppress the first printing of "Katharine the Great" by Deborah Davis. The publisher actually shredded 20,000 copies. Davis sued, eventually won, and the book finally came out.
  
  
• Graham, in a 1988 speech to senior CIA employees, said: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
  
  
• Norman Solomon has written, "Graham was a key player in the June 1971 battle over the Pentagon Papers. But such journalistic fortitude came late in the Vietnam War. During most of the bloodshed, the Post gave consistent editorial boosts to the war and routinely regurgitated propaganda in the guise of objective reporting. Graham's [memoirs] never comes close to acknowledging that her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon."
  
  
• Lest you think we're just talking old history, here is what Matthew Rothschild of the Progressive wrote last year: "In commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, many leaders of the mainstream media pulled out all the stops to cast the U.S. role in a flattering light. The notable exception was The New York Times, which blamed President Johnson for the "reckless spilling of American and Vietnamese blood." . . . The Washington Post, by contrast, rallied around the flag. Its editorial on April 30 said, "For the sake of the 58,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, it is important to recall the large and just cause for which they made their sacrifice." The Post also expressed relief that "the Gulf War cured the armed forces of the debilitating Vietnam syndrome." To reinforce its position, the Post ran an op-ed the same day by Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, who received the Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam. Kerrey wrote, "We were fighting on the right side. . . . The cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain." The reason the United States lost, he said, was: "We succumbed to fatigue and self-doubt." Next to Kerrey's commentary, the Post ran five accounts from Vietnamese Americans, every one of them bemoaning the U.S. departure. At least four of the five were South Vietnamese military officers or their relatives . . . Nowhere in The Washington Post was there a hint of another Vietnamese perspective, or another U.S. perspective, for that matter. Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post Company, was equally lopsided in its coverage. The May 1 issue had two long articles on Vietnam. The first was by Evan Thomas entitled "The Last Days of Saigon." The piece was all but bereft of analysis except that Vietnam was "at once a noble cause and a tragic waste," and "a low moment in the American Century, a painful reminder of the limits of power." The other article was by -- I'm not kidding you here -- Henry Kissinger! Akin to having Goering write about the blitzkrieg, Newsweek let Kissinger (he of the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, he of the mining of Hanoi's harbors, he of the "madman" theory of diplomacy) retouch his own portrait even as he smeared the protesters once more.
  
  
• Another point that Solomon has summarized well: "The autobiography has little use for people beyond Graham's dazzling peers. Even activists who made history are mere walk-ons. In her book, the name of Martin Luther King Jr. was not worth mentioning. For a book so widely touted as a feminist parable, "Personal History" is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seem to exist in the great media executive's range of vision."
  
  
• Robert Parry -- a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the late 1980s -- told Solomon: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation." (Former CIA director Robert Gates subsequently confirmed Parry's story in his memoirs.)
  
  
• In the 1950s, Graham's husband, Philip, played an important role in Operation Mockingbird, a major and remarkably successful effort by the CIA to co-opt journalists. Some 25 major news organizations and 400 journalists were seconded by the agency for its purposes during this period, as admitted by the CIA itself during the Church committee hearings. As one agency operative put it, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." A number of Post editors and reporters, including Mrs. Graham's own choice for Managing Editor, Ben Bradlee, and Bob Woodward, came out of CIA or intelligence backgrounds. Mrs. Graham continued the paper's close relationship with the agency.
  
  
• The Washington Post joined in the vicious attack on reporter Gary Webb, who dared to reveal aspects of the relationship between the CIA and the drug trade. Typical nasties came from Howard Kurtz: "Oliver Stone, check your voice mail." And from Mary McGrory: "The San Jose story has been discredited by major publications, including the Post." And why? Well, in part because the Post and other papers simply took the CIA's word. Wrote Marc Cooper in the LA New Times: "Regarding the all-important question of how much responsibility the CIA had, we are being asked to take the word of sources who in a more objective account would be considered suspects."
  
  
• In crushing the pressmen's strike, Mrs. Graham not only broke the back of unions at the Washington Post but set an example that would be followed by other media throughout America. The journalistic labor movement never recovered.
  
  
• Mrs. Graham, like her husband, believed firmly in a political aristocracy. Other publishers before them had felt the same way but mercifully the nation's media was diffuse enough that they could not have the full power of their prejudices. By the time Mrs. Graham took charge, however, that was changing. As Ben Bagdikian wrote in 1990 in The Media Monopoly, "At the end of World War II, 80 percent of the daily newspapers in the U.S. were independently owned, but by 1989 the proportion was reversed, with 80 percent owned by corporate chains. In 1981 twenty corporations controlled most of the business of the country's 11,000 magazines, but only seven years later that number had shrunk to three corporations. Today, despite the more than 25,000 outlets in the U.S., 23 corporations control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures . . . An alarming pattern emerges. On one side is information limited by each individual's own experience and effort; on the other, the unseen affairs of the community, the nation, and the world, information needed by the individual to prevent political powerlessness. What connects the two are the mass media, and that system is being reduced to a small number of closed circuits."
  
  
• The Graham years also saw another profound change. As Bagdikian noted in his memoirs, only after the World War did the Labor Department state, in its annual summary of job possibilities in journalism, that a college degree is "sometimes preferred." As late as the 1950s, over half the journalists in the country lacked higher degree. Under the guidance of papers like the Post, however, reporters would become part of the elite. In the precedent-setting Style section and elsewhere, journalists lost their connection with the readers and became part of the ruling class. American journalism would never be the same.
  
  
• These two factors -- media monopolization and the desertion of readers by journalists -- helped speed such grim developments as growing repression and decline of democracy in the U.S., as well as the corporate takeover of politics domestically and of national sovereignty internationally.
  
  
• Peter Dale Scott wrote in Tikkun Magazine: "In 1989 a subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry published a report documenting that the U.S. government had contracted with known drug traffickers to supply the Contras. This important finding was minimized in the dismissive news stories published by the Post and the Times, while Newsweek, owned by the Post, wrote off Kerry as a "randy conspiracy buff." This style of ex cathedra put-downs of any critics of the system would become a hallmark of Post political coverage.
  
  
• Under Philip Graham, the Post established a local version of the Trilateral Commission -- the Federal City Council -- a business-centered body devoid of political legitimacy but overflowing with political power. This body became a major weapon in Mrs. Graham's efforts to control the city, which included such horrors as relentless advocating a LA type freeway system and fighting self-government as long as possible.
  
  
• Finally, as the years went on, the Post became less and less interesting. It became, as Samuel Johnson once said of an important person of his era, not only dull "but the cause of dullness in others."

In short, a good journalist once would have at least described the late Mrs. Graham as "controversial." The fact that hardly any even thought of the word is a testament to how powerful she and her paper truly became and how little anyone else has to say about it anymore.

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