Conspiracies real and imagined: the JFK assassination

Since this 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination is being commemorated all over the media, I though I would republish here the full post I did on 02/10/2010 on the conspiracy theories around it.

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This is Part 3 of a four-part discussion of the book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009).

The Kennedy Assassination is probably the most famous of all sets of conspiracy theories, except maybe for anti-Semitic theories about the World Jewish Conspiracy. And even those like to work the Kennedy assassination in.

I'm one of probably about 10 people in the country who actually believe the "lone gunman" theory of the JFK assassination: Oswald, with the rifle, in the Book Depository. But Olmsted's main point here is valid. The Johnson adminstration wanted to wrap up the investigation quickly. The FBI had its secrets to hide, i.e., a seemingly lax handling of the information on Oswald that they had been tracking up to the assassination. The CIA also had a secret assassination program against Fidel Castro that they wanted to be sure stayed under wraps, but which could have been plausibly seen as a motive for the Cuban government to attempt an assassination of Kennedy.

And the eagerness of the official investigators to put the case to rest wound up generating a lot of suspicion in the decades since. "Oswald may have been the real assassin," Olmstead writes, "but the FBI's refusal to consider alternatives ensured that conspiracy theories would flourish."

In some ways, the JFK assassination is a very different kind of conspiracy theory story the first three she describes: revisionist criticism of the First World War, the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy, and the Red Scare. Those all served some substantial political purpose: opposition to war, discrediting of the Roosevelt administration and (for some) of the American war effort in the Second World War, inflaming public passions against Communists to bolster support for Cold War policies, demonizing Democrats as subversives and anti-American.

The JFK assassination conspiracy theories, though, were a much more eclectic set of theories generated by cranks, amateur historians, serious academics, Congressional researchers, investigative reporters, and conspiracists who wanted to work this incident into their Grand Scheme. And, as Olmsted's account illustrates well, research into this case touched on issues historically important in their own right, such as the FBI's questionable competence and willingness to indulge coverups, the CIA's assassination plots that hired major mobsters for the job, Johnson's foreign policy concerns that a thorough investigation would reveal Communist powers' involvement which in turn might lead to a nuclear war, even the question of whether Kennedy had to decided to phase out the American military presence in Vietnam.

While Olmsted is sensibly critical of the approach of the early JFK assassination buffs, she is also fascinated and at least a little impressed by the process. She credits Sylvia Meagher with being pivotal in organizing the early network of assassination researchers. Not incidentally,Meagher was an employee of the World Health Organization who had been dragged before a security hearing in 1953 because she had questioned the legality of the government's loyalty program of the time. She was aware from personal experience that the government was sometimes willing to do stupid and abusive things.

According to Olmsted's account, the first two major books that popularized skepticism of the Warren Commission Report, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment (1966) and Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest (1966), drew heavily on the work of these researchers linked in an informal network. These early theories were largely generated by people like Meagher who considered themselves on the left of American politics. Though far-right groups like the John Birch Society were quick to decide it had all been a Communist plot, like they thought pretty much every event in the world was.

Olmsted also stresses that many among this network of amateur criminologists and historians were women. In a case of the kind of groupthink among the press that in later would grown to bizarre, pathological proportions around other issues, conventional wisdom rallied around the officially accepted version, the Warren Commission's. And the female amateur researchers involved, Osmsted notes, were a particular target:

The women came in for special criticism. The authors of one 1967 attack on the assassination researchers, for example, devoted a condescending chapter to the "housewives' underground," which implied that female researchers such as Meagher and [Maggie] Field were looking for meaning to fill their empty lives. Meagher was singled out as the "Housewives' Supersleuth," though she was a divorcee with a full-time salaried job. [The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller (1967)]

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison also boosted interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories when he indicted a gay New Orleans businessman in 1967 for plotting to kill Kennedy. But he also helped brand them as the domain of crackpots when he fairly quickly showed himself to be one. As well as a DA bringing abusing his prosecutorial powers.

I have to confess that, despite my fuddy-duddy view of the JFK assassination, I have pretty much always been fascinated by the case. So reading Olmsted's account of it is also a bit of a guilty pleasure.

Tags: jfk assassination, kathryn olmsted, real enemies

Conspiracies real and imagined (4): the US public gets used to conspiracies

This is the fourth and final part of a four-part discussion of the book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009).

The final three chapters of the book reivew the history of major government criminal and near-criminal acts, from the Watergate scandals to the Cheney-Bush administration's lies about the reasons for their drive to war in Iraq.

In between, there came a remarkable number of revelations that accustomed the public to the idea that government officials routinely conspire to break the law. And typically get away with it. She covers the story of the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon administration's paranoid reaction to it. A documentary on this particular piece of our history was just released on February 5, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, that looks to be a good one. In the wake of Watergate, a massive amount of illegal spying on the part of the Nixon administration was exposed.

During the Ford administration, Congressional committees investigated revelations of CIA and FBI misconduct that exposed the fact that the CIA had engaged in a variety of illegal activities, including attempts to assassinate leaders of democratic countries. These revelations included J. Edgar Hoover's slimy efforts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., because Hoover was a white racist who despised the civil rights movement. Those revelations promoted fresh looks at the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy as well as that of King's.

During the Reagan administration, the Iran-Contra scandal revealed a secret operation managed by Col. Oliver North to illegally aid rightwing terrorists in Nicaragua and sell arms in violation of the administration's official policy to the Islamic theocracy in Iran. And we're still learning more all the time about the methods used by the Bush II administration to generate Congressional and public support for the Iraq War. And about the torture program and illegal surveillance, the vote suppression and crassly partisan prosecutions, that far outdid the Nixon administration in their contempt for the law and common decency.

Olmsted gives a capable summary of the growth of far-right terrorist groups during the 1990s and gives an idea of the extreme anti-government theories that animated them. Her brief discussions about the sometime agreement of far left and far right on some conspiratorial views of government is also pretty well done. But that is not a major focus of her book, so she leaves it a bit unclear who it is she means by the far left. But the examples she does give make good points, like the mixture of far-right and more left/antiwar theories of the Kennedy assassination in Oliver Stone's JFK movie of 1991.

I was particularly impressed with her treatment of the tragic case of Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who exposed CIA connections with Latin American drug trafficers in a 1996 series of stories in the paper. She takes some space to describe in a nuanced way how his reporting was seized upon by conspiracy theorists who alleged that the CIA was deliberately flooding African-American ghettoes with crack to control the black population. But she also makes it very clear that Webb's basic reporting was sound. And that the mainstream press did him a real injustice in ridiculing his story. The truth of it was that Webb was doing real investigative work at a time when the Establishment press was happily plunging off the cliff they jumped off in 1992 with the Whitewater story, plunging from journalism to stenography and infotainment in a descent that has not yet hit bottom.

ConsortiumNews has a number of stories on the late Gary Webb and the Contra Crack story. Narco News has made available the original stories, known as the Dark Alliance series.

Olmsted in her Conclusion discusses several aspects of conspiracy theories and their relation to reporting and historical research on actual conspiracies. It's actually a good brief primer on critical thinking about conspiricist-type reasoning. Thinking in a self-justifying loop and failing to challenge assumptions that evidence seems to contradict is a good sign of falling into the conspiracy-theory trap. Cynical though the conspiracy theory may have been in this case, she gives a very good example of how this works, Dick Cheney's completely false story about 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta having rendevouzed with Iraqi intelligence in Prague:

Too often, conspiracists press their analysis beyond the realms of facts and logic and in doing so inject toxins into the public discourse. In the 9/11 case, both types of conspiracists, the official and the alternative, constructed narratives about an event, and then constructed ever more elaborate justifications for believing in those stories. This was not so much a leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable, as Richard Hofstadter said, as a slow march toward self-delusion (and the deliberate deluding of others). Conspiracists can sometimes be like children who tell lies and must make up greater and more detailed lies when they fear discovery. Dick Cheney spoke of a "contact" that was "pretty well confirmed," which then became a "fact," which ultimately became a "number" of contacts. The invasion of Iraq flowed from this kind of tortured reasoning. Other theorists often followed a similar trail of logic. [my emphasis]

Our celebrity reporters and pundits like to sneer at conspiracy theorists, and often have good reason to. But how many of them saw through the official conspiracy theories that were so central to the Cheney-Bush administration's case for invading Iraq? Judith Miller? Tom Friedman? Watergate legend Bob Woodward? Mild-mannered and ever-reassuring David "Bobo" Brooks? David "Dean Of All The Pundits" Broder?

She also makes a valuable point in discussing Sen. Frank Church, in particular. Church headed the special Senate Committee created in 1975 to investigate revelations of government misconduct in intelligence operations at home and abroad. Formerly called the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities", it is understandably referred to as the Church Committee. Church had great faith that such investigations could clean up problems of governmental misconduct and prevent them from recurring, as well as increasing public faith in our democratic government. It was obvious from the polls and the political environment at the time that public confidence in the integrity of government had sharply declined from earlier decades. The reason for this in still commonly given as being a result of the Vietnam War and Watergate.

But Olmsted makes a valuable observation that applies not only to the revelations of the Church Committee and the corresponding Pike Committee in the House of that time, but of a number of situations since, most notably the Cheney-Bush torture program:

The percentage of Americans who said they distrusted the government actually increased during and after Church's investigation.

This distrust stemmed in part from the absence of justice following Church's revelations. There was confession, but no expiation. No one went to jail as a result of Church's disclosures. Nor was there much contrition — certainly not from former president Nixon, who would tell the interviewer David Frost in 1977, "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."55 The inherent difficulty of Church's project - discovery without justice, a (cold) war crimes trial with criminals but no convicts - convinced many Americans that public officials routinely committed crimes, covered them up, and escaped the consequences. Americans knew more about their government's secret activities, yet they also distrusted their government more than ever before. More information did not create more trust. [my emphasis]

During the Cheney-Bush administration, we know from what's already in the public record and from the explicit admissions of both Bush and Cheney that in their administration "public officials routinely committed crimes, covered them up, and escaped the consequences."

It should not be that way. It really is the duty of the Obama administration to prosecute crimes committed by the previous administration, particularly the torture crimes and the murders committed in connection with the torture program. Giving encouragement to new conspiracy theories will not be the worst consequence of failing to do so. New conspiracies to violate the law will be a much worse result.

The cycle needs to be broken by restoring the rule of law in the Executive Branch. And that cannot be accomplished with pardons, cover-ups and Look Forward Not Backward.

Tags: kathryn olmsted, real enemies

Conspiracies real and imagined (3): the JFK assassination

This is Part 3 of a four-part discussion of the book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009).

The Kennedy Assassination is probably the most famous of all sets of conspiracy theories, except maybe for anti-Semitic theories about the World Jewish Conspiracy. And even those like to work the Kennedy assassination in.

I'm one of probably about 10 people in the country who actually believe the "lone gunman" theory of the JFK assassination: Oswald, with the rifle, in the Book Depository. But Olmsted's main point here is valid. The Johnson adminstration wanted to wrap up the investigation quickly. The FBI had its secrets to hide, i.e., a seemingly lax handling of the information on Oswald that they had been tracking up to the assassination. The CIA also had a secret assassination program against Fidel Castro that they wanted to be sure stayed under wraps, but which could have been plausibly seen as a motive for the Cuban government to attempt an assassination of Kennedy.

And the eagerness of the official investigators to put the case to rest wound up generating a lot of suspicion in the decades since. "Oswald may have been the real assassin," Olmstead writes, "but the FBI's refusal to consider alternatives ensured that conspiracy theories would flourish."

In some ways, the JFK assassination is a very different kind of conspiracy theory story the first three she describes: revisionist criticism of the First World War, the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy, and the Red Scare. Those all served some substantial political purpose: opposition to war, discrediting of the Roosevelt administration and (for some) of the American war effort in the Second World War, inflaming public passions against Communists to bolster support for Cold War policies, demonizing Democrats as subversives and anti-American.

The JFK assassination conspiracy theories, though, were a much more eclectic set of theories generated by cranks, amateur historians, serious academics, Congressional researchers, investigative reporters, and conspiracists who wanted to work this incident into their Grand Scheme. And, as Olmsted's account illustrates well, research into this case touched on issues historically important in their own right, such as the FBI's questionable competence and willingness to indulge coverups, the CIA's assassination plots that hired major mobsters for the job, Johnson's foreign policy concerns that a thorough investigation would reveal Communist powers' involvement which in turn might lead to a nuclear war, even the question of whether Kennedy had to decided to phase out the American military presence in Vietnam.

While Olmsted is sensibly critical of the approach of the early JFK assassination buffs, she is also fascinated and at least a little impressed by the process. She credits Sylvia Meagher with being pivotal in organizing the early network of assassination researchers. Not incidentally,Meagher was an employee of the World Health Organization who had been dragged before a security hearing in 1953 because she had questioned the legality of the government's loyalty program of the time. She was aware from personal experience that the government was sometimes willing to do stupid and abusive things.

According to Olmsted's account, the first two major books that popularized skepticism of the Warren Commission Report, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment (1966) and Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest (1966), drew heavily on the work of these researchers linked in an informal network. These early theories were largely generated by people like Meagher who considered themselves on the left of American politics. Though far-right groups like the John Birch Society were quick to decide it had all been a Communist plot, like they thought pretty much every event in the world was.

Olmsted also stresses that many among this network of amateur criminologists and historians were women. In a case of the kind of groupthink among the press that in later would grown to bizarre, pathological proportions around other issues, conventional wisdom rallied around the officially accepted version, the Warren Commission's. And the female amateur researchers involved, Osmsted notes, were a particular target:

The women came in for special criticism. The authors of one 1967 attack on the assassination researchers, for example, devoted a condescending chapter to the "housewives' underground," which implied that female researchers such as Meagher and [Maggie] Field were looking for meaning to fill their empty lives. Meagher was singled out as the "Housewives' Supersleuth," though she was a divorcee with a full-time salaried job. [The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller (1967)]

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison also boosted interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories when he indicted a gay New Orleans businessman in 1967 for plotting to kill Kennedy. But he also helped brand them as the domain of crackpots when he fairly quickly showed himself to be one. As well as a DA bringing abusing his prosecutorial powers.

I have to confess that, despite my fuddy-duddy view of the JFK assassination, I have pretty much always been fascinated by the case. So reading Olmsted's account of it is also a bit of a guilty pleasure.

Tags: kathryn olmsted, real enemies

Conspiracies real and imaginged (2): McCarthyism and the post-WWII Red Scare

This is Part 3 of a four-part discussion of the book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009).

McCarthyism: chasing the Red specter

Minnesota Senator Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic and blowhard liar whose biggest claim to fame prior to 1950 was furiously attacking the prosecution of Waffen-SS soldiers who had murdered American prisoners of war in Malmedy, France. But this sleazy character remains to this day a hero of the hyper-patriotic Radical Right in the US. And that's because of his own high-profile accusations about alleged Communist influence in the US Government at the time. Olmsted also emphasizes that the Red Scare also explicitly directed suspicious at homosexuals ("gay" had not yet acquired its curent usage). She notes that during the Truman administration, "more than twice as many gays and lesbians as suspected communists" lost their State Department jobs over suspicious about their sexual orientation.

Only such a conspiratorial influence could account for the issues the US faced in foreign affairs, he argued: "This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man." Yes, it sounds like the ravings of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the present-day leader of the Republican Party. And they are both very much in Joe McCarthy's ugly tradition. McCarthy's sleaze-slinging style and his confident way of asserting falsehoods as fact were actually very similar to Limbaugh's. McCarthy's drug of choice was alcohol rather than OxyContin ("hillbilly heroin"), though.

Olmsted gives a competent brief account of Soviet espionage in the United States up until the 1950s. He discusses only espionage (the collection of information), not subversion or sabotage.

But she's not as cautious as she might have been on the topic. For instance, she credits Whittaker Chambers' accusations that Harry Dexter White - an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury who was the leading official in creating the postwar Breton Woods currency system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank - was a Soviet agent as well as Alger Hiss. I'm convinced that Hiss actually did spy for the USSR. But the evidence on White is far less conclusive.

I haven't kept up with the most recent work on White and I'm not familiar with his case in detail, so I can't say I have a strong opinion on it. But her account would have benefitted with an explanation of why many found the charge against White so dubious.

In an endnote, she also mentions that there "has been some debate among scholars" over whether Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb who headed the scientific effort in the Manhatten Project, also acted as a Soviet agent. There is no evidence in the public record establishing such a conclusion. Oppenheimer was an active Communist in his politics before the Second World War during his period at Berkeley, though he always denied having been an actual Party member. The accusation that he was a spy is essentially speculation based on that association.

Still, her account makes clear that the espionage networks in the government that the Soviets had established before and during the Second World War had been exposed or otherwise neutralized by 1950. When an important Soviet agent named Elizabeth Bentley confessed her espionage role, the Soviets learned about it immediately through the British mole Kim Philby and discontinued that important spy network, for instance. The anti-Red hysteria of what we now think of as the "McCarthy era" was directed against an almost completely imaginary threat, a phantom. J. Edgar Hoover, the cross-dressing bachelor who headed the FBI for decades and lived with another man most of his life, contributed greatly to the start of that Red Scare by leaking FBI files to embarass the Truman administration. Hoover hated Harry Truman.

And, as Olsmsted puts it, "Hoover projected his own Machiavellian tendencies onto the president and resolved to fight him with all the weapons available to him." It's amazing and tragic that such a nasty, sleazy character as Hoover became at that time was able to hold so much sway within the national security establishment for as long as he did. Many Republicans and conservative Democrats during this period were happy to use the Red Scare to reap "the political advantages of linking liberalism with Bolshevism". As we see today, many Republicans are still at it.

But it was the linking of those toxic charges with the fear generated by the then-young Cold War in general with events like the Soviets' development of an atomic bomb, the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the Korean War that gave them the potency they acquired. Ironically, the exposure in 1950 by British intelligence of the role of Klaus Fuchs in stealing Manhatten Project secrets led to the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage and "to the destruction of the remaining traces of the once-formidable Soviet espionage network in North America." The system worked, to pick a phrase. But the fear and demagoguery became much wilder.

Olmsted calls attention to the ways in which far-rightists like John T. Flynn who claimed to fear dictatorship from Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and denounced the state as "the oldest villain in history" (Flynn) found aggressive police powers for the FBI, abusive Congressional investigations, and other intrusive measure against alleged Communist and gay subversives to be just dandy.

Tags: kathryn olmsted, real enemies

Conspiracies real and imagined (1): Merchants of Death and the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy

Kathryn Olmsted's book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009) is an excellent primer on conspiracy theories of recent decades and the real conspiracies and government secrecy that form their historical background. And she makes the valuable point that in some cases, it's actually the federal government itself or some major agency of it that promotes a conspiracy theory for propaganda purposes. Those of us who were aware of public affairs during the last 10 years are not likely to forget the false claims of Saddam Hussein's dreadful weapons of mass destruction and his conspiracy with terrorists to use them to bring unimaginable death and destruction to the US and his own plans to send his plywood drones of death to wreak havoc on the American Homeland directly.

I'm going to discuss her book in four parts because her analysis is very relevant to understand the conspiracist Tea Party mentality of today's Republcan Party and to the Democrats' problems in convincing people that positive government can be constructive in the lives of ordinary citizens.

The First World War and its aftermath

Olmsted's account of the First World War calls attention to a couple of important historical facts that affected later views of the Wilson administration's role in that war. One is that Wilson presented the war aims in highly idealistic terms even though his government knew that our European allies Britain and France had considerably less lofty goals in mind. Downright predatory ones, in fact.

Another is that both during the war itself and afterward in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (which occurred while the war was still in progress), Wilson's administration heavily promoted the idea that critics of the war and radical critics of American capitalism were engaged in massive conspiracies with foreign powers against the well-being of the United States.

The first one contributed to later suspicious about the value of the Great War (as it was then known) and the reasons for American participation. Congressional isolationists who opposed the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations were already skeptical of how the Wilson administration handled the war and American entry into it. By the 1930s, a generally anti-militarist consciousness prevailed in the United States, almost unimaginable in these days when elected officials fall all over themselves to show that they are merely following the desires of our glorious generals and admirals in military policy.

But it was widely believed in the 1930s that US participation in the Great War had been unnecessary. And that in fact, banking concerns - particularly the House of Morgan - and weapons manufacturers had been responsible for the country's involvement in that war. President Roosevelt even supported a Senate investigation of arms manufacturers which was headed by North Dakota Republican Sen. Gerald Nye. An actual bipartisan investigation of war profiteering. Imagine that.

Sen. Gerald Nye

The actual results of the Nye Committee's investigations were of mixed quality. But its work validated the beliefs of many in both parties and among many members of Congress that the US had been conned into entering the Great War unnecessarily. Later in the 1930s, isolationism in international affairs became an increasingly conservative and Republican affair. Olmsted gives a good description of the isolationists, including the America First Committee. As Roosevelt began to encourage rearmament in the face of growing war threats, the isolationists began to accuse him of trying to get the United States into war in order to establish a fascist dictatorship at home. In the 1940 Presidential elections, the Republicans accused FDR of being a warmonger, although Republican candidate Wendell Willkie supporter Roosevelt's position on the most immediate war-related issue, the Lend-Lease Act to support Britain's war effort against Germany.

Roosevelt and the Pearl Harbor attack

The prewar rightwing notion that Roosevelt was madly conspiring to involve the US in the Second World War in order to establish his own dictatorship formed the basis of the crackpot theory that Roosevelt deliberately planned the attack on Pearl Harbor in some form or another. The less insane versions of the theory held that FDR had deliberately provoked such an attack. The loonier ones had him knowing about the impending attack and deliberately allowing it to happen or even giving Japan permission to do it.

For a detailed debunking of the Roosevelt-planned-Pearl-Harbor nonsense, see two books by Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (1981) and Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (1986). And, no, there haven't been any smoking guns emerging since then that affects the conclusion. Did FDR know? by Judith Greer Salon 06/14/01 discusses the accusation.

Olmsted's summary of this is very good. I might quibble on a couple of points, but her chapter on the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy covers it well. She points out here ways in which the bureaucratic and political impulse to assign blame to someone else and to err on the side of secrecy and concealment gave conspiracy theorists gaps in the official explanations at which to point. Some of which are entirely legitimate. For instance, fully explaining the relevant circumstances of the war warning given by the White House to commanders in the Pacific including those in Pearl Harbor before the attack would require divulging that US codebreakers had cracked the Japanese Magic code. And Japan continued to use that code for years after Pearl Harbor, so the government had a legitimate need to keep secret that they had broken the code. As Olmstead writes, "The Magic cables would provide tantalizing evidence to Pearl Harbor conspiracists that the government was covering up the truth."

The notion that the Democratic President was treasonously devious and out to destroy the American form of government and harm the United States fed well into Republican attacks on the Truman administration in the postwar Red Scare and the McCarthy period. Olmsted writes:

The Pearl Harbor conspiracists looked back with longing to the [pre-Second World War] period before the United States had joined the perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Yet the early Pearl Harbor theories were not merely nostalgic. They also helped to construct a foundational myth of modern conservatism. In the mind of the conspiracists, Pearl Harbor demonstrated everything that was wrong with the New Deal: the "confusion, incompetence, wasteful extravagance, double-dealing and double-talking" of the expansive federal government, the GOP activist George Smith contended. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the double-dealing and double-talking architect of this oppressive government, had "lied" the nation into war. This is what happened, the conservatives believed, when the government gained too much power at the expense of the people. As Representative Martin Dies told Congress, "When any group of supermen or social planners get control of government and impose their fanatical beliefs, they become avaricious for power and they subjugate the whole body politic." [my emphasis]

Tags: kathryn olmsted, real enemies