Olmsted - Real Enemies - Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I To 9 - 11-Oxford University Press (2009) PDF
Olmsted - Real Enemies - Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I To 9 - 11-Oxford University Press (2009) PDF
Olmsted - Real Enemies - Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I To 9 - 11-Oxford University Press (2009) PDF
Conspiracy Theories
and American Democracy,
World War I to 9/11
KATHRYN S. OLMSTED
1
2009
1
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
—Delmore Schwartz
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Acknowledgments
x • Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction, 1
Conclusion, 233
Notes, 241
Bibliography, 287
Index, 309
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Real Enemies
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Introduction
IF YOU SEARCH for “9/11 conspiracies” on the Google Video Web site, you
can learn some shocking things. You can learn that there were no com-
mercial airplanes involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—
just drones and cruise missiles. You can link to Web sites that claim that
the World Trade Center towers fell because bombs were secretly placed in
their air ducts, not because planes, commercial or military, manned or not,
crashed into them. You can watch documentary films that allege that 9/11
was an “inside job” perpetrated by the George W. Bush administration to
justify its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. If you look at the information
on the most popular of these documentaries, called Loose Change, you will
see that at least ten million people have already viewed it, and thirty-five
thousand of them have written reviews, giving it an average rating of four
and a half out of five stars.
These opinions may seem to belong on the fringe, but in fact mil-
lions of Americans hold them. Polls show that 36 percent of Americans
think the Bush administration either planned the 9/11 attacks or knew that
they were coming and did nothing to stop them. A majority of Americans
between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe these theories.1
In many ways, the popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories is a mystery.
What can explain this profound distrust of the U.S. government? Why, in
one of the world’s oldest constitutional democracies, would more than a
third of the people believe that officials of their own government plotted to
carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil to trick the people into war?
Here’s one reason: it has happened before.
In March 1962, at the height of the cold war, the U.S. Joint Chiefs
of Staff presented Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with a plan
to deceive Americans into supporting a war on Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Their
proposal: to conduct terrorist attacks in the United States and blame them
on Castro in order to provide “pretexts” for “US military intervention in
Cuba.” They wanted to develop “the international image of the Cuban
government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredict-
able threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”2
The military chiefs planned to explode bombs in U.S. cities, sink boat-
loads of Cuban refugees approaching U.S. shores, and gun down Cuban dis-
sidents in the United States. They even suggested blowing up John Glenn’s
rocket during his historic flight as the first American in space. In each case,
the chiefs proposed to plant fake evidence that would frame Castro as the
guilty party.
In their most fantastical plan, they planned to shoot down a civilian air-
liner. The chiefs plotted to load an airplane with unsuspecting passengers
and then secretly divert it to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Meanwhile, a
drone painted to look like the civilian aircraft would fly across Cuba, where
“Cubans” would shoot it down.3 The chiefs were so eager for war with
Castro’s Cuba that they were willing to stage attacks on their own citizens
to justify it.
There is no record of McNamara’s response, but three days later
President John Kennedy bluntly told the chairman of the chiefs that he did
not intend to invade Cuba anytime soon.4 “Operation Northwoods,” as the
military dubbed the plot to confuse anyone who stumbled across it, never
made it off the drawing board.
Forty years later, the Northwoods plans, which had been declassified
in the late 1990s, were featured in the opening scenes of Loose Change.5
Somewhat improbably, these decades-old historical documents popped up
in books, movies, and on Web sites popular with skeptical twentysome-
things who were born some two decades after Kennedy rejected the chiefs’
plans. After September 11, conspiracy theorists saw in Northwoods the
“precise template for the remote control and plane-switching theory that
2 • Real Enemies
is able to explain so many discrepant facts about 9/11—down to the final
detail of feigned cluelessness.”6 Others believed that it proved U.S. offi-
cials’ willingness to do anything to achieve their goals.7
In the wake of 9/11, the evidence of real government conspiracies from
the past was used to support the conspiracy theories about the government
of the present. To understand contemporary theories, we need to examine
the history of proven government conspiracies, because for all their seem-
ing outlandishness, the successive generations of antigovernment conspir-
acy theorists since World War I have at least one thing in common: when
they charge that the government has plotted, lied, and covered up, they’re
often right.
Introduction • 3
over their shoulder for potential Caesars. From the Illuminati scare of the
late eighteenth century to rumors of a Catholic revolution in the nine-
teenth century, Americans feared that alien forces aimed to take over their
government.
This book argues that American conspiracy theories underwent a
fundamental transformation in the twentieth century. No longer were
conspiracy theorists chiefly concerned that alien forces were plotting to
capture the federal government; instead, they proposed that the federal
government itself was the conspirator. They feared the subversive poten-
tial of the swelling, secretive bureaucracies of the proto–national security
state. In effect, the institutionalized secrecy of the modern U.S. govern-
ment inspired a new type of conspiracy theories. These theories argued
that government officials lied to citizens, dragged the peaceable American
people into foolish wars, and then spied on and oppressed the opponents
of war.
Such portrayals were born out of a time when the federal government
first grew powerful enough to accomplish these nefarious goals. This book,
therefore, traces the fear of conspiracies within the U.S. federal govern-
ment from the birth of the modern state in World War I to the current war
on terror.
World War I was a watershed in the development of the U.S. govern-
ment: it marked the moment when the government gained the power to
carry out real conspiracies against its citizens—and when it began to use
that power. During the conflict, the U.S. federal government drafted mil-
lions of its citizens, commandeered factories and railroads, and spied on
and imprisoned dissidents. Through the newly established central bank,
the president could control the ebb and flow of American money across
the oceans to belligerent countries. The government criminalized dissent
with the Espionage and Sedition Acts and encouraged Justice Department
agents such as the young J. Edgar Hoover to hound antiwar radicals.11
Sinister forces in charge of the government could do a lot more damage in
1918 than they could have done just a few years earlier; in fact, in the view
of some conspiracists, the state was the sinister force.
The powers of the state continued to grow throughout the twenti-
eth century, especially after the cold war began. The fear of communist
plots inspired the U.S. government to adopt the conspiratorial tactics of its
enemy. Determined to combat this international communist conspiracy,
4 • Real Enemies
the CIA teamed up with the mafia on murder plots, the FBI spied on civil
rights leaders who it feared were secret communists, and President Richard
Nixon took governing conspiracies to a new level by conspiring to use state
power to punish his personal enemies, whom he saw as the nation’s ene-
mies. Paradoxically, the end of the cold war did not ease these worries but
instead prompted many Americans to redirect their fears from the Soviets
to their own government. This suspicion of the government continued
to climb after 9/11, as President Bush’s attempts to centralize power in
the presidency and his administration’s deceptions about the Iraq war led
many Americans to believe him capable of the worst crimes imaginable.
Most conspiracy theories about the U.S. government focus on wartime
decision making or tragic national events. Theorists have tried to explain
what they saw as the inexplicable: why the U.S. started or joined a war, or
why it suffered a catastrophe or sudden reversal. They saw the war deci-
sions as historical mysteries that American citizens needed to solve. Why,
they wondered, did the United States join the Great War in 1917, after a
majority of voters had reelected President Woodrow Wilson partly because
he kept the country out of war? Why, in 1941, was the nation so woefully
unprepared for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? Could the president
have known the attack was coming—and decided to allow it to take place
for his own diabolical reasons? Why did the United States, for a brief time
the world’s only nuclear superpower, win World War II but then lose its
atomic monopoly? Why, in 1963, could an American communist gun down
the president in the middle of a major city in broad daylight? And, more
recently, how could a handful of Arabs destroy the World Trade Center
towers and crash a plane into the Pentagon?
In all of these cases, government officials took the conspiracy theory
seriously enough to investigate it. Sometimes the official storytellers
rejected a conspiracy, as they did in the Kennedy assassination; sometimes
they suggested a conspiracy, as when Bush administration officials implied
that Iraq secretly gave the 9/11 terrorists the help they needed to carry
out their attacks. When government officials proposed a conspiracy, they
became conspiracy theorists.
The officials also became storytellers. Social scientists argue that by
constructing narratives, we make sense of other people’s motives and
behaviors; we can also begin to understand and cope with our own feelings
and actions.12 “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essayist Joan
Introduction • 5
Didion has said.13 Conspiracy theories are easy ways of telling complicated
stories. Official conspiracy theorists tell one story about an event; alterna-
tive conspiracy theorists doubt the stories told by public officials, and then,
to make sense of the world, they tell their own.
The history of conspiracy theories is often the story of the struggle
over the power to control the public’s perception of an event. Government
officials try to control this narrative. President Wilson proclaimed that he
was fighting a war to make the world safe for democracy; President Franklin
Roosevelt insisted that the U.S. government had received no warning of an
imminent Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. Conspiracy theorists chal-
lenge this official story, proposing counternarratives to the government’s
history of an event.
Early in the twentieth century, ordinary citizens found it difficult to
distribute their alternative histories to a wide audience. Jacob Abrams, an
anarchist who believed in a capitalists’ conspiracy behind U.S. interven-
tion in the Russian revolution, used a small printing press to publish his
own antiwar leaflets and urged his friends to toss them from the third
floor of a Manhattan building onto the heads of surprised pedestrians. The
government found the pamphlets to be seditious and put Abrams and his
comrades in prison for their efforts.14
In the first half of the twentieth century, American elites—men with
cultural authority and access to the media—had more success in spreading
their theories. Skeptical reporters wrote stories in newspapers opposed to
the administration in power; revisionist historians found small presses will-
ing to publish their work. Most significantly, members of Congress could
launch an official investigation of a conspiracy theory, usually when dif-
ferent parties controlled Congress and the presidency. Republican Senator
Joseph McCarthy squared off against Democratic President Harry Truman;
Democratic Senator Frank Church challenged Republican President Gerald
Ford. Congressional investigators used their subpoena power to pry loose
documents from a secretive White House. In these and other cases, mem-
bers of Congress investigated the alleged misdeeds of the president, while
the president countered that the investigators were endangering the
nation’s security by revealing its secrets. The two-party system, combined
with the democratic checks and balances created by the Constitution, pro-
duced a dynamic that fed the conspiracist imagination, which sought to
explain real or purported failures of American democracy.
6 • Real Enemies
Although elites continued to confront the president throughout the
twentieth century, by the 1960s ordinary citizens gained more power to
challenge the secret actions of the national security state. With the pas-
sage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, all Americans were now
empowered to examine previously classified government documents—the
raw materials of history—and construct their own alternative stories of
events. In effect, information became more democratized, though officials
still blacked out huge sections of documents and refused to let go of oth-
ers altogether. This governmental ambivalence about freedom of informa-
tion—releasing, say, a Northwoods memo, but keeping other documents
secret—sometimes had the effect of frightening citizens rather than reas-
suring them.
Changes in the media also led to the dispersion of cultural authority
to challenge the government’s narrative. Though fewer owners controlled
newspapers and radio and television networks, conspiracy theorists found
other media to spread their theories. Researchers of the John F. Kennedy
assassination, for example, used grassroots citizen groups, guerrilla the-
ater troupes, and even pornographic magazines to tell other Americans
about their theory that U.S. government officials—perhaps even the cur-
rent president—had conspired to kill President Kennedy. Hollywood was a
powerful disseminator of conspiracy theories. Its community included JFK
director Oliver Stone and X-Files writer/producer Chris Carter, who could
construct powerful visual arguments and expose millions to their counter-
narratives. The Internet further leveled the playing field for proponents
of alternative conspiracy theories. Anyone in the world could broadcast a
personal theory to a potential audience of billions and form a virtual com-
munity with fellow skeptics. The Internet provided the Jacob Abramses of
the twenty-first century with the tallest building in the world.
This book traces successive generations of these modern skeptics of the
government. It introduces senators from the heartland who believed that
Wall Street financiers had connived with treacherous agents in the White
House to push an unwilling country into World War I. It recovers the story
of the World War II admiral who believed that he had been scapegoated
by an interventionist president who knew much more about the Japanese
attack at Pearl Harbor than he was willing to say. It reconstructs the atmo-
sphere of fear in the country after the United States won World War II but
lost its monopoly on the bomb.
Introduction • 7
These stories of conspiracy often had surprising consequences. A
Nobel Prize–winning scientist may have missed out on making his most
important discovery because the conspiracy theorists at the FBI believed
he threatened national security. This scientist then turned his genius to
proving that other secret government agents had conspired to kill the
president he believed was working for peace. A senator from the rural
West, outraged over CIA domestic spying, was driven to try to expose
the government’s lies of the past. This senator was the ultimate liberal—a
proud believer in the tenet that a strong government could help its least
advantaged citizens—yet his investigations inadvertently fueled antigov-
ernment anger by teaching millions of Americans to despise and distrust
their elected officials.
The last two chapters introduce the swashbuckling journalist who dared
to charge that the CIA allowed some of its anticommunist allies to bring
drugs into the United States—and his dismissive colleagues in the press who
forced him to pay a stiff price. Finally, these chapters link this history to the
citizens of today who are trying to make sense of the war in Iraq, sometimes
by discerning a pattern of treason behind official failures and deceptions.
My goal is not to try to prove or disprove the conspiracy theories dis-
cussed in this book. Some are impossible to prove; others have been effec-
tively rebutted by experts.15 Instead, I examine why so many Americans
believe that their government conspires against them, why more people
believe this over time, and how real conspiracies by government officials
have sparked these conspiracy theories about the government.
8 • Real Enemies
ted by un-American forces. “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,”
Richard Nixon told his aides once, as he devised one of his own plots.16
Later, as industrious congressmen and journalists revealed these actual
conspiracies by the government, many Americans came to believe that
the most outrageous conspiracy theories about the government could be
plausible.
Second, many Americans developed alternative conspiracy theories in
response to the official conspiracy theories proposed by the government.
Government agents in the modern era often found it convenient to pro-
mote some officially sanctioned conspiracy theories. They said that un-
American forces were working with the Germans (or the communists, or
the terrorists) and that the U.S. government needed to take on more pow-
ers to control these domestic enemies.
In other words, government officials promoted a certain conspira-
cist style—a deep, pervasive fear of hidden plotters—but they wanted
to maintain the power to construct these conspiracy theories themselves
and quash those that did not serve official interests. “Let us never tolerate
outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the
11th,” President Bush said on November 10, 2001, shortly before his own
administration began spreading outrageous conspiracy theories concern-
ing September 11 and Saddam Hussein.17 This book examines the relation-
ship between official conspiracy theories (bin Laden plotted with Saddam)
and unofficial or alternative conspiracy theories (bin Laden plotted with,
say, Dick Cheney).
Finally, the government’s efforts to spy on and harass dissenters con-
vinced many Americans that the government was out to get them. There
were so many U.S. agents charged with stopping “sedition” in 1918 that
they tripped over one another during their investigations. One former
agent recalled that he would sometimes interview a suspect in a sedition
case during World War I only to find that “six or seven other government
agencies had [already] been around to interview the party about the same
matter.”18 In 1936, President Roosevelt formally gave the Federal Bureau
of Investigation the power to monitor “subversive activities” in the United
States in peacetime, and the FBI began to add agents and new powers.
During the Roosevelt years, from 1933 to 1945, the FBI’s budget grew
from $2.7 million to $45 million, and the number of special agents jumped
from 266 to some 5,000.19
Introduction • 9
During the cold war, the FBI started its domestic covert action pro-
grams, known by the acronym COINTELPRO, in which agents infiltrated
dissident groups and eventually tried to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, dis-
credit, or otherwise neutralize” them.20 The FBI did not just monitor these
individuals, but tried to break up their marriages, “seed mistrust, sow mis-
information,” and provoke them to commit crimes so that they could be
arrested.21 The FBI originally directed this program at American commu-
nists, but it soon expanded its definition of communism. By 1960, when
the Communist Party counted about five thousand members in the United
States, the bureau maintained more than eighty times that number of files
on “subversive” Americans at its headquarters, and FBI field offices around
the country collected even more.22
Not surprisingly, these surveillance and harassment programs aggra-
vated the antigovernment fears of many Americans. Strangely enough, these
fears also served the bureau’s purposes. One purpose of COINTELPRO,
according to an official memo, was to “enhance the paranoia endemic in
[dissident] circles” and convince activists that “there is an FBI agent behind
every mailbox.”23 The agents believed that paranoid, divided dissident
groups were easier to handle than purposeful, united dissident groups. In
other words, the FBI conspired to create fear of conspiracy. And it suc-
ceeded. When the dissenters learned of these official government programs
to deny them their First Amendment rights, they felt that their long-time
fears had been vindicated. As the poet Delmore Schwartz has said, even
paranoids have real enemies.24
These government actions—the official conspiracies, the official con-
spiracy theories, and the attempts to quash alternative conspiracy theo-
ries—fueled the fears of dissenters. Government officials tried to control
how the public interpreted events, sometimes lied about these events, and
spied on and harassed those citizens who suggested different interpreta-
tions. Because of the countervailing tradition of openness in the U.S. gov-
ernment, some reporters and whistleblowers eventually revealed these
conspiracies and domestic spying programs for all to see. But instead of
being reassured by the process of revelation, skeptics were outraged—and
afraid of what could come. They charged that other, as yet undiscovered
secrets lay within the government’s darkest vaults.
Over four decades ago, Richard Hofstadter noted that conspiracy theo-
rists seem to follow the rules of logic until they suddenly make the “big
10 • Real Enemies
leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable.”25 Writing in the 1960s, he
never could have imagined how the revelation of the real government con-
spiracies after Watergate and Iran-contra could terrify so many Americans
into making that jump. Once they learned bizarre details of real govern-
ment conspiracies in the 1970s and 1980s, the critics leaped over the last
remaining limits on their imaginations. By the dawn of the new millen-
nium, some believed that the government encouraged aliens to abduct and
molest them, or that it was responsible for the spread of illegal drugs, or
that government officials blew up the World Trade Center towers. And
some of them believed all of those things at once.
Introduction • 11
who prosecuted a Louisiana businessman for plotting to kill John Kennedy,
or a Joseph McCarthy, the demagogue who gave his name to an era, can
sometimes manipulate their fears with surprising effectiveness and tragic
results.
But most of the ordinary conspiracy theorists in these pages were not
motivated by personal gain. On the contrary, most of them believed, in
all sincerity, that their country faced an imminent and existential threat.
They believed that they needed to act, and act quickly, to save America. The
republic was always in peril, and they, personally, were the ones to save it.
These conspiracy theorists were authentic patriots, convinced that
they needed to do what they did for the sake of the country. The official
conspiracy theorists always justified their surveillance by linking domes-
tic dissidents with foreign plotters. They said that they needed to spy on
these citizens because these Americans took their orders from the nation’s
enemies. The dissidents were un-American.
The dissidents, on the other hand, maintained that they were the true
patriots who were defending their country from un-American forces. From
those who decried a war fought on the “command of gold” in 1917 to the
anti-Bush activists of the twenty-first century, they believed that their
country would perish without their efforts to find the Truth. “I wouldn’t
be a patriot if I didn’t try to prove the government’s story is preposter-
ous,” said Barbara Honegger, a former Reagan administration official and
a member of the 9/11 Truth movement.28 This is the story of the patriots
in the government and the patriots who distrust the government, and how
they have combined to create an escalating spiral of fear.
12 • Real Enemies
1
The Consent of the People:
Presidential Secrecy and the
First World War
IN JUNE 1918, federal agents invaded the plant of a small Washington, D.C.,
publisher, searching for the printing plates for a book that promoted “sedi-
tious” ideas. Why Your Country Is at War and What Happens to You After
the War charged that a cabal of bankers and public officials had manipulated
the country into joining the Great War in Europe. The author, a former
Congressman from Minnesota named Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., claimed
that he had discovered the real truth about the war. “I believe that I have
proved,” he argued, “that a certain ‘inner circle,’ without official authority
and for selfish purposes, adroitly maneuvered things to … make it practi-
cally certain that some of the belligerents would violate our international
rights and bring us to war with them.”1
In the federal government’s view, those words endangered the republic.
On the orders of the attorney general of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer,
the government agents found the plates and smashed them. For good mea-
sure, they also destroyed the plates for Lindbergh’s earlier book, published in
1913, which decried the subversion of the republic by the “money trust.”2
While the content of Lindbergh’s books reflected the demonology of
the nineteenth century—the “money sharks” and the Catholics—the treat-
ment they received foreshadowed the defining villain of the twentieth. The
destruction of Congressman Lindbergh’s books marked a turning point in
the development of the U.S. federal government and of conspiracy theo-
ries about the government. When Lindbergh published his first book about
the “money power” conspiracy that supposedly controlled the country, the
federal government had neither the budget nor the inclination to view him
as anything but a crank. The total federal budget was less than $1 billion.
The fledgling federal police force, the Bureau of Investigation, had fewer
than one hundred agents and no responsibility for suppressing dissent.
And most American conspiracy theorists did not concern themselves with
government crimes. Like Lindbergh, they worried about the money power
or the Jews or the Catholics or the Masons, but not the government. It
simply was not big or strong enough to merit their fear.
But just five years later, in 1918, the federal government controlled an
almost $13 billion budget, employed more than eight hundred thousand
civilian workers, and included several agencies charged with countering
subversion.3 Under the Sedition Act of 1918, public officials gained the
power to arrest anyone who uttered or printed any “disloyal, profane, scur-
rilous, contemptuous, or abusive language” about the government—anyone
who dissented, in other words, from the war effort. Empowered by the
Sedition Act and its predecessor, the Espionage Act, government officials
also destroyed books that challenged the official explanations for entering
the war. In the process, these federal agents elevated Charles Lindbergh
from harmless critic to Enemy of the State.
As the government defined conspiracy theorists like Lindbergh as the
enemy, conspiracy theorists responded by redefining their enemy. Some
Americans had worried for decades that malign forces might take over the
government. Now, with the birth of the modern state, they worried that
the government itself might be the most dangerous force of all.
The government could draft men to fight an unpopular war, imprison
its most vocal opponents, and suppress the writings of dissidents. The locus of
power had begun to shift, and American fears shifted along with it. Conspiracy
theorists like Lindbergh now had some real enemies to worry about.
For the next twenty years, Americans would continue to debate the
reasons for their nation’s participation in the Great War and argue over
whether it was fought for freedom or gold, for self-determination or
England, for democracy or the narrow interests of a selfish inner circle.
For the rest of the twentieth century and into the next, they would
continue to challenge, and to fear, the proto–national security state born
14 • Real Enemies
of the war. In the end, World War I skeptics came to believe that it was the
U.S. state itself—the expansive, militarized, twentieth-century state that
emerged from the war—that truly imperiled the American republic.
16 • Real Enemies
When the president asked Congress to pass a law giving him the power to
arm American merchant ships against submarines, a group of eight senators
filibustered the bill to death in a marathon twenty-six-hour floor session.
Wilson remarked angrily that a “little group of willful men” had hijacked
U.S. foreign policy.13 The senators argued that they were defending the
Constitution against executive tyranny. “Under this bill the President can
do anything; his power is absolutely limitless,” said Senator George Norris
of Nebraska. “This, in effect, is an amendment of the Constitution, an ille-
gal amendment. We are abdicating, we are surrendering our authority.”14
Norris refused to surrender his authority, but Wilson took it anyway. The
president declared that the Constitution already gave him the power to
arm the ships, and he quickly issued orders allowing American gun crews
to shoot German submarines on sight in war zones.15
In April 1917, Wilson took the next step and asked Congress to declare
war. Some antiwar senators continued to insist that bankers and indus-
trialists with investments in Britain were forcing the United States into
a pointless bloodbath. Using a phrase that later became famous, Senator
Norris eloquently explained his vote against intervention. “We are going
into war upon the command of gold,” he said. “I feel that we are about to
put the dollar sign upon the American flag.”16 Norris lost his battle in 1917,
but his words would be revived and revered two decades later.
The six senators and fifty representatives who voted against the war
represented a substantial minority of Americans who opposed interven-
tion and distrusted the Wilson administration from the start. Some of
these Americans opposed the war because they had relatives in Germany
or their ancestors had come from Germany, or because they deplored the
brutality of the British suppression of the Irish revolution.
Many antiwar Americans, though, saw the conflict through the lens of
populism. The People’s Party of the 1890s had mobilized the farmers of the
South and Midwest to fight the predatory practices of eastern and British
railroads and banks. At times, the Populists had used conspiracist language—
sometimes overtly anti-Semitic or Anglophobic—to attack the “secret cabals
of the international gold ring.”17 Many midwesterners and southerners saw
U.S. military intervention as yet another case where the government lis-
tened to the command of gold, not the needs of the people.18
Once the United States entered the war, the government embarked
on a massive campaign to manufacture support and eradicate dissent. Just
18 • Real Enemies
Asia.” The German Empire was a “sinister power” that had “stretched its
ugly talons out and drawn blood from us.”21
Even worse, this “sinister power” received help from people within the
United States, according to the official conspiracy theorists. Wilson pro-
claimed that Germany “filled our unsuspecting communities and even our
offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere
afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within and without,
our industries and our commerce.”22 In Wilson’s view, some naturalized
Americans had poured the “poison of disloyalty” into the nation’s arter-
ies.23 The administration knew how to respond to these traitors. “If there
should be disloyalty,” the president said as the nation entered the war, “it
will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.”24
This hand of repression came down hard on American dissidents. With
the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the U.S. government outlawed criticism of
the government, the president, and the war effort, thus effectively crimi-
nalizing opposition to the war. When Jacob Abrams printed antiwar leaflets
and his friends tossed them from a Manhattan building, government offi-
cials arrested them for sedition. In their pamphlets, the radicals charged that
President Wilson had “hypnotized the people of America to such an extent
that they do not see his hypocrisy.”25 For their criticism of their govern-
ment, they received prison terms and a place in history as defendants in
a famous Supreme Court case, Abrams v. United States. Despite an elo-
quent dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court upheld their
convictions in 1919. The government also charged hundreds of other war
opponents with sedition: the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs went to jail for
saying the war was being fought by the poor for the rich; another man was
indicted for proclaiming that the war was “a Morgan war and not a war of
the people.”26 Twenty years later, millions of Americans would agree with
that statement, but in 1918 public support for it could land one in prison.
At the Department of Justice, a young former librarian named J. Edgar
Hoover began tracking enemy aliens and dissenters. Hoover started by
targeting German Americans but moved smoothly to surveillance and
harassment of communists after the war. In 1919, he would set up an index
card system that catalogued every suspected subversive person, group, and
publication in the country; by 1921, he had 450,000 cards.27 Hoover and
his domestic surveillance system would continue to haunt American dis-
sidents for over five decades.
20 • Real Enemies
After draft riots rocked Butte, pro-war Montanans organized vigilante
groups to force dissenters to buy war bonds and perform public acts of
patriotism such as kissing the flag. Resisters were tarred and feathered,
beaten, and lynched. The day after Wheeler’s decision not to bring charges
against Frank Little, six men dragged the union leader from his bed and
hanged him from a railroad trestle.31
The vice president of the United States praised the lynch mob—the
hanging had a “salutary effect,” Thomas Marshall proclaimed—but
Wheeler learned a different lesson. Like Congressman Lindbergh and his
son, Wheeler had seen firsthand that war hysteria could cause Americans
to become “unpatriotic, lawless, and inhuman.”32 Fearing a repeat of the
wartime hysteria, Wheeler and Charles Lindbergh Jr. would fight bitterly
against U.S. intervention in the next world war.
The opponents of vigilantism during the Great War were shocked
to discover that Americans were capable of perpetrating these outrages
against civil liberties and human life. But one aspect of the vigilantism
outraged these nascent civil libertarians more than anything else: the fed-
eral government itself, they believed, had deliberately fanned the flames of
irrational fear and thereby encouraged the violence.
The government’s responsibility for this assault on constitutional rights
was horrifying to many Americans. As the historian Charles Beard later
wrote, “Never before had American citizens realized how thoroughly, how
irresistibly a modern government could impose its ideas upon the whole
nation and, under a barrage of publicity, stifle dissent with declarations,
assertions, official versions, and reiteration.”33 Americans realized that their
government could not only suppress dissent: it could also control the terms
of debate.
The Wilson administration had set forth a narrative of the war, featur-
ing sinister Germans, democratic war aims, and noble allies. It had sup-
pressed, censored, spied on, and jailed anyone who attempted to present a
different story about the war. Over the next decade, some citizens’ anger
at the government’s manipulation of public opinion slowly evolved into
profound doubt about the government’s truthfulness and trustworthiness.
As more Americans grew suspicious of the government’s official history of
the conflict, they resolved to find the “real reasons” for U.S. intervention
and to expose the lies and evasions of wartime leaders.
22 • Real Enemies
Yet Wilson had claimed that the war was fought for democracy, self-
determination, and open covenants. To Barnes, Wilson’s grand statements
were “the grossest form of compensatory, if partially sub-conscious, hypoc-
risy to assuage him for his unpleasant knowledge of the Secret Treaties.”38
The president had lied to him, Barnes believed, and had manipulated him
and his fellow historians into producing provably false and misleading
propaganda.
Regretting his part in helping the government create the myth of the
“black devilishness of the Central Powers and the lamb-like innocence of
the Entente,” Barnes and other disillusioned propagandists set out to revise
the world’s understanding of the causes of the war.39 A torrent of books
and articles challenged earlier interpretations.40 Every year, new books
expanded on the revisionists’ arguments: Austria-Hungary was justified
in declaring war on Serbia; the Germans had not committed atrocities in
Belgium; if any one nation deserved blame for the war, it was Russia, not
Germany or Austria-Hungary.
As the revisionists examined German guilt, they began to question the
truthfulness of the U.S. government. If in fact the Germans had not started
the war and committed war crimes, they reasoned, then the United States
had no reason to wage war against them. By the mid-1920s, Americans
were publishing a flood of revisionist writings on U.S. entry into the war.
Barnes’s Genesis of the World War and In Quest of Truth and Justice,
Frederick Bausman’s Facing Europe, and C. Hartley Grattan’s Why We
Fought sought to discover why the United States had made what these
writers saw as a colossal mistake. These historians all posed the same ques-
tion: Why, given initial resistance to joining the war, had the people of
the United States been pushed into what Barnes called an “unmitigated
disaster”?41
The earliest revisionist works posited three answers, all of which empha-
sized the power of wicked individuals. First, they revived the arguments of
Norris, Lindbergh, and the Populists to decry the influence of a few pow-
erful bankers and industrialists over U.S. policy. Norris, they decided, was
right: the war had been fought on the “command of gold.” Barnes summed
up this view in 1924: “We did not actually go into the World War to protect
ourselves from imminent German invasion, or to make the world safe for
democracy, but to protect our investment in Allied bonds.”42 The United
States, wrote John Kenneth Turner in his 1922 book Shall It Be Again?
24 • Real Enemies
but House had more influence over the president, at least for a time. Both
men had been seen as pro-English during the war, but their attempts to aid
Britain were not fully exposed until they began to boast of them in their
memoirs. The first volume of Page’s autobiography was released in 1922,
and House’s own multivolume account reached the public beginning in
1926. These self-serving memoirs ironically became the primary source
material for the two men’s harshest critics.
Colonel House was a natural villain for conspiracy theorists. The
“colonel” had never actually seen battle or served in the military, but had
received his honorary title from one of the many grateful Texas politi-
cians he had helped to put into power. He never held political office, or ran
for office, or even held any official governmental post. He wrote a uto-
pian novel in which a hero suspiciously similar to himself overthrew the
U.S. government and appointed himself dictator. Yet this shadowy man of
apparent authoritarian proclivities became one of President Wilson’s most
important advisers.45
When the colonel first met Wilson in 1911, he was already known as
the political mastermind behind four successive governors in his home state
of Texas. House was a Democrat, as were all politically ambitious Texans
in the early twentieth century, and eager to find a candidate for president
who was deserving of his support and capable of winning. A sickly man
with no identifiable illness, House liked to hover in the background and
exercise power through other men. He arranged to meet the rising star
from New Jersey who had the best chance of winning the White House
for the Democrats. For his part, Wilson was pleased to win the support of
the fabulously wealthy donor who had a reputation as a political fixer. The
men liked each other from the start. “We found ourselves in such complete
sympathy, in so many ways,” the colonel remembered later, “that we soon
learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed
himself.”46
Once Wilson took office in 1913, House became his top adviser and
controlled access to him. He decided who could see the president, whose
requests were passed along to him, and who received jobs in the admin-
istration. The colonel believed that it was his duty to “offset the criticism
and lighten the burden of detail that weighs upon every President.”47 Yet
he refused to take a formal post or draw a government salary. The lack of
an official title only added to House’s air of mystery.
26 • Real Enemies
anxieties—an inner circle was trying to subvert the republic and institute
dictatorship—and provided a solution to them at the same time. By blam-
ing these “two or three men,” Villard granted himself more control over an
increasingly frightening world situation. Expose the handful of evil men in
Washington, he implied, and we can avoid a second great war.
The only man in the Wilson administration more odious than House,
in the view of the revisionists, was the American ambassador to Britain,
Walter Page. Like House, Page used his memoirs to reveal the extent of his
influence on Wilson’s decision to go to war. In Page’s telling, Wilson’s State
Department had been willfully blind to the clear moral superiority of the
“sacred cause” of the Allies in the early years of the war. As Wilson’s repre-
sentative in London, Page had worked to moderate what he saw as his gov-
ernment’s unnecessarily hostile stance toward the British, who, he believed,
should be supported because they were democratic and racially pure. In one
case, a State Department missive protesting British violations of American
rights had lacked the tenor that he thought Anglo-Saxons should use when
communicating with their equals. “There is nothing in its tone,” he com-
plained to Colonel House, proving “that it came from an American to an
Englishman: it might have been from a Hottentot to a Fiji Islander.”54
Outraged by this disrespect toward fellow Anglo-Saxons, Page worked
assiduously to signal to the British that the State Department did not rep-
resent real U.S. interests. The most flagrant example of Page’s preference
for the English appeared in the memoirs of his close friend, British Foreign
Secretary Sir Edward Grey. In Grey’s account, Page came to him one day
with a State Department demand that the British stop seizing American
ships. “I am instructed to read this dispatch to you,” Page explained. After
performing his official duty, Page then said, “I have now read the dispatch,
but I do not agree with it; let us consider how it should be answered.”
When the story became public in 1925, the New York Times editorialized
that Page’s decision to undermine his own government set a “demoral-
izing and disastrous” precedent.55 Revisionists went further. Page, wrote
C. Hartley Grattan, was a latter-day Benedict Arnold.56
According to his critics, Page had subverted the peaceable members
of the Wilson administration—and the will of the American public—by
manipulating the president into war. Without Page and his “virulent pro-
English attitude,” Harry Barnes contended, “the story of American foreign
policy from 1914–1919 would have been far different from what it was.”57
FOR YEARS PACIFISTS and socialists had been calling without success for an
investigation of war and war profits. But as the world lurched toward war
in the 1930s, the question of U.S. involvement in a foreign war suddenly
seemed urgent to many Americans. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931,
Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and Mussolini prepared
to invade Ethiopia. A world conflagration was on the horizon, and most
Americans wanted no part of it.
Americans worried even more about the collapse of their own econ-
omy. During the Great Depression, the years of spiraling unemployment
and poverty eroded the nation’s faith in businessmen and in an unregu-
28 • Real Enemies
lated market. In this climate, many citizens supported public officials who
attacked corporate and financial titans.
As the Great Depression continued and the world crisis escalated,
many Americans came to agree with the revisionists that the war had been
a waste of lives and money. More than a hundred thousand Americans had
died in the war, but for what? To make the world safe for Hitler, Stalin, and
Mussolini?
The popular culture of the 1930s reflected this revulsion against war.
Scholars began questioning the wisdom of U.S. participation in just about
every war. Walter Millis exposed the ignorance and deceit behind the
Spanish-American War in The Martial Spirit, and historians argued that
the Civil War had been the product of a “blundering generation.” Even
the kaiser’s soldiers—rapacious brutes of government propaganda just fif-
teen years earlier—became heroes in popular culture. The German antiwar
novel All Quiet on the Western Front humanized the German soldiers and
caused more Americans to question the official history of the war. Young
Americans were particularly moved by the books and movies about the
mistakes of the previous war. As the journalist Eric Sevareid remembered,
the students of the 1930s were “revolted by the stories of the mass hyste-
ria of 1917, the beating of German saloon keepers, the weird spy hunts, the
stoning of pacifists, the arrests of conscientious objectors.”59
When the Democrats recaptured the White House and Congress in the
election of 1932, they seemed eager to rethink and reexamine established
policies. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people had not
been clearly defined during the campaign, but the new president quickly
indicated his intention to use government to solve the economic crisis. He
was particularly receptive to attacks on the corporate leaders who opposed
his expansion of the federal government.
The economic, diplomatic, and political shocks of the 1930s, in short,
gave pacifists a chance to teach Americans about the futility of war. One
veteran peace activist seized this opportunity and pushed her advan-
tage to secure a congressional inquiry into the causes of wars. Dorothy
Detzer, one of the most influential female lobbyists of the interwar years,
had been representing the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom (WILPF) on Capitol Hill since the 1920s.60 She had nursed casual-
ties of war with Quaker relief societies in postwar Europe for three years,
before returning home to find her beloved twin brother, Don, suffering the
30 • Real Enemies
Henry Ford, the auto magnate and noted isolationist, also endorsed an
investigation. If the world could rid itself of “scheming munition makers
looking for enormous profits,” Ford proclaimed, then “the people would
enjoy peace.”65
President Roosevelt decided to support the investigation as well. Besides
his general approval of greater government oversight of the arms indus-
try, Roosevelt saw potential political benefits in an inquiry. A high-profile
Senate investigation of the arms makers would inevitably target Pierre Du
Pont, the wealthy arms manufacturer who was pouring millions into the
effort to defeat Roosevelt’s reelection bid in 1936. As Roosevelt nurtured
America’s infant welfare state and called for more government involve-
ment in the economy, Du Pont organized his fellow industrialists into
the Liberty League, a group dedicated to the defeat of the New Deal. In
Roosevelt’s view, a high-profile investigation of the merchants of death
seemed politically advantageous: it would annoy Du Pont, confirm the self-
ishness of Roosevelt’s most determined opponents, and please the eight
hundred thousand members of the American Legion.66 Once the president
gave his approval, the Senate quickly passed the resolution and set up a
select committee to investigate the arms industry.
The members of the committee and its staff represented the breadth of
the coalition supporting the munitions investigation. Populist Republicans,
conservative Democrats, democratic socialists, and even secret communists
hoped to use the committee to demonstrate the dangers of a privately
owned munitions industry. The committee’s chairman, Gerald Nye of
North Dakota, was an agrarian Republican whose state had strongly sup-
ported the People’s Party in the 1890s and still retained a popular fear of
banks and eastern “interests.” After Nye, the most important committee
member was Missouri Senator Bennett Clark, a Democrat and son of the
legendary speaker of the House, Champ Clark. One of the founders of the
American Legion, Clark was at once populist, conservative, anti–big busi-
ness, and anti–New Deal.
The committee’s staff also included some energetic socialists, including
Stephen Raushenbush, the chief of staff. Raushenbush, who had simpli-
fied the spelling of his name, was the son of Social Gospel minister Walter
Rauschenbusch, who, as early as 1907, had blamed arms makers for start-
ing wars. During the investigation, conservatives attacked Raushenbush
and other leftist staffers as Marxists who were conspiring to destroy
32 • Real Enemies
The Nye Committee’s investigation of the arms makers succeeded
in convincing the public that the “death merchants” had played a role
in causing the war. As a result of the investigation, Americans became
even more determined to avoid future wars. In 1936, as part of the larg-
est mass student movement in U.S. history up to that point, half a mil-
lion college students marched out of class to protest war.70 The same year,
Robert Sherwood won the Pulitzer Prize for his play criticizing European
arms merchants, Idiot’s Delight. In 1939, 68 percent of Americans agreed
that the United States should not have joined the Great War, and 34 per-
cent said that “propaganda and selfish interests” were to blame for this
mistake.71
Yet despite its success in helping to influence the public’s memory of
the war, the Nye Committee could not prove that the merchants of death
had any direct influence on policy makers. The committee could discover
no documents or witnesses to show that the Du Ponts and their fellow
munitions makers had any sway over the president. At the same time, a
staff investigation into the role of British propaganda also ended in fail-
ure. Investigators spent months trying to prove that “London gold” had
financed the purchase of key newspapers and then planted pro-British sto-
ries in them.72 But the detectives never found enough evidence to justify
public hearings on that subject.
After failing to prove that arms makers or British bribes played any
meaningful role in the intervention drama, the committee at last turned to
more promising lines of inquiry. Eighteen months into the investigation,
the senators began to focus their public hearings on the men the revi-
sionists had always viewed as the real problem: the classic villains of the
Populists, the bankers.
By following the money, the committee hoped to discover if, as George
Norris had charged back in 1917, the United States had gone to war on
the command of gold. This investigation had the potential to produce real
evidence of official blunders and crimes. After the war began in Europe, the
Wilson administration had changed its policy on loans to allow bankers to
send more money to the Allies. Some committee members believed that
these loans had tied the United States to one side and effectively forced
U.S. intervention in the war. If the committee could show that bankers had
pressured Wilson to loosen credit, they could prove the bankers’ responsi-
bility for America’s decision to join the war.
34 • Real Enemies
unpopular fact that he had paid no income taxes for two years. Morgan had
come off poorly in that previous investigation, which had been chaired by a
feisty Sicilian immigrant, New York’s Ferdinand Pecora. Reporters waited
eagerly to see how the blue-blooded Anglophile would handle the folksy
but determined investigators from the Midwest in this latest probe.75
The Nye Committee members aimed to answer one question that they
deemed essential to proving a conspiracy behind intervention: Why did the
U.S. government decide, once in October 1914 and again in August 1915,
to loosen American regulations to allow more loans to the Allies? At the
start of the war, the United States had maintained a “money embargo”
and prohibited loans to both sides. Secretary of State William Jennings
Bryan, whose suspicion of banks stretched back to his denunciation of the
international gold ring in his “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, urged the
embargo on Wilson. “Money is the worst of all contrabands because it
commands everything else,” Bryan warned the president prophetically in
August 1914.76 Yet just two months later, the president, on the advice of
State Department counselor Robert Lansing, decided that American banks
could offer some short-term “credits” to Allied countries when they could
not pay for their purchases. Wilson had reasoned that credits were quite
different from loans. Yet at the Nye Committee hearings, even Jack Morgan
had to admit that credits and loans were basically the same. He insisted,
however, that his bankers “never had anything to do with any effort, if one
was made, to get President Wilson to change his mind.”77 Indeed, the com-
mittee could find no evidence that they did.
However, the committee did find a more promising paper trail related
to the second presidential decision to allow more loans. The committee
investigators grew convinced that a key event had occurred in August
1915. That summer, after months of buying American goods, the British
began to run an enormous trade imbalance with the United States. The
value of the pound started to drop against the dollar, and officials in both
countries believed that the dollar was so overvalued that the British would
have to halt their American purchases immediately.
Indeed, the drop in the value of the pound could bring about a U.S. eco-
nomic collapse, argued the U.S. treasury secretary, William McAdoo, and
Robert Lansing, secretary of state following Bryan’s resignation. “Our pros-
perity is dependent on our continued and enlarged foreign trade,” McAdoo
wrote the president. “To preserve that we must do everything we can to
36 • Real Enemies
Though Warburg’s angry dissents impressed some Nye Committee
members in 1935, they had no effect on policy in 1915 and 1916. The
Federal Reserve Board relaxed its credit regulations—though without a
strong public statement of support from the president—and the House of
Morgan quickly arranged a massive loan to the English and the French.85
Morgan money bought more dynamite and mules and wheat for the Allies,
which enabled them to win the war. It also brought more American ships
into the sights of German submarines and, thus, American boys to the
trenches of France.
Senator Bennett Clark believed that he could identify the moment
when the Morgans forced the United States to abandon neutrality. The
key issue, he decided, was the drop in the value of the pound. The ensuing
exchange crisis had caused the U.S. government to allow the Anglo-French
loan, and the loan had led the United States into war. So why, he wondered,
did the exchange crisis occur? It was obvious: the House of Morgan, as
the chief holder of British securities in the United States, created the cri-
sis, and thus brought on the war. The Morgan bank, he charged, “stepped
out from under and permitted the sterling exchange to flop,” and then
pressured McAdoo to facilitate the huge loan. “The question of exchange,”
Clark charged, “was used as a lever to bring about a complete change in our
neutrality policy.”86
The bankers could barely conceal their fury at this interpretation.
Thomas Lamont disputed the committee’s allegation that the “money
power” ever influenced U.S. governmental policy. “Bankers do not bring
leverage on governmental Departments over here, and if they attempted
to do it they would be very badly rebuffed,” he said huffily. The committee
members could not contain their disbelief. “Do you mean they do not do it,
or that they do not admit that they do it?” Nye sneered in response.87 Jack
Morgan chose a more limited, and effective, defense: he categorically denied
that he or his firm had helped to cause the exchange crisis. “That is one of
the most discreditable actions which is foreign to our history and it is for-
eign to our tradition, and we never did such a thing in our lives,” he said.88
To prove his case, Morgan dramatically produced a cable proving that
his bank had offered to lend the British $100 million as the pound began to
slip. The British had declined the offer. In other words, Morgan had tried
to prevent the exchange crisis, not create it. But Clark refused to allow
the facts to get in the way of a good theory. It did not matter “whether
38 • Real Enemies
The intense debate over loans and credits took place not in Congress, but
in secret meetings of the Federal Reserve. For Americans in the mid-1930s,
it was surprising and frightening to find out how little they had known
about their nation’s policies during the war. The Nye Committee members
raised “the dark velvet curtain of history” on the shadowy actors in the
drama, the historian Charles Beard wrote in 1936. “They disclose[d],” he
continued, “the starkness of the ignorance that passed for knowledge and
wisdom in those fateful days.”92
Most explosively, the Nye Committee learned that the president had
actively fostered this ignorance: he had lied to Americans and to Congress
about the Allies’ real aims in the war. Near the end of the inquiry, the Nye
Committee staff learned from secret documents that Wilson and Secretary
of State Lansing had known soon after intervention in April 1917 that the
Allies had written secret treaties divvying up territory in the event of their
victory, though Wilson had stated categorically during the war that the
“processes of peace” would be “absolutely open” and would involve “no
secret understandings of any kind.”93
After the war, Wilson explained that he had believed these statements
to be true at the time that he made them. In a meeting with the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in August 1919, he answered definitively—
and inaccurately—a direct question from Senator William Borah of Idaho
about his knowledge of the treaties. Earlier in 1919, he said, the “whole
series of understandings were disclosed to me for the first time.”94
The Nye Committee proved what Harry Barnes and others had claimed
in the 1920s: the president had not told the truth. Secretary of State
Lansing’s diary and other formerly secret papers showed that Wilson had
indeed known of the treaties in 1917. When Senator Clark produced the
papers at a hearing, Nye proclaimed that Wilson had lied to the nation.95
Moreover, he alleged, the Wilson administration had misled the nation
throughout 1915 and 1916. Before intervention, the Wilson administra-
tion was just “pretending neutrality” while “actually hoping for a break
with Germany, inviting that sort of break,” he concluded.96
Nye’s accusations against Wilson provoked a furious reaction from
the president’s defenders. The Republican senator’s charge against “a dead
man, a great man, a good man,” as Democratic Senator Tom Connally of
Texas put it, outraged many Democrats in Congress. The Senate had not
charged the committee with rewriting history, Connally contended. Yet
40 • Real Enemies
and a lovely postwar world without victors or vengeance. Then he had
imprisoned anyone who dared to tell the truth.
What could they do to stop this from happening again? They could
not turn the clock back and strip the executive branch of its current pow-
ers; President Roosevelt was far too popular for them even to attempt this.
So they decided to limit the president’s opportunities to misuse his pow-
ers—to draw an unwilling nation into a foreign war—by restricting profits
and trade during wars.
First, the committee wanted to confiscate war profits and nation-
alize the munitions industry. If no one made money from war, they
believed, then no “interests” could manipulate the country into war. But
the Roosevelt administration’s opposition helped to doom these efforts.
The president lost patience with the committee once it stopped attack-
ing the Du Ponts and began championing open government and lim-
its on presidential power. Privately, the Nye Committee staff members
believed that the president did not want them to propose any legislation
“with real teeth in it.”103 But even if Roosevelt had endorsed these radi-
cal reforms, they would not have saved the United States from the hor-
rors of the war to come.
The other solution was to limit international trade during wars.
Members of the Nye Committee realized that Wilson had made his deci-
sion to abandon neutrality because the U.S. economy was increasingly
dependent on transatlantic trade. Nye began groping toward an under-
standing of this issue near the end of the hearings. “It was commercial
activity as a whole, in which the bankers had a hand,” he explained to Jack
Morgan in 1936, “which did finally break down completely our neutral-
ity.” Morgan agreed with him, but disputed his assertion that the bankers
played a prime role. Everyone, he retorted, had a hand in the trade that led
to intervention.104
If the United States had been drawn into war by “commercial activity
as a whole,” then the revisionists believed the country must isolate itself
from future conflicts. Charles Beard suggested that the United States
needed to till its own garden and cut off loans and the munitions trade
to belligerents in times of crisis.105 Some senators agreed. “I would rather
temporarily abandon all our world commerce,” said Nye Committee mem-
ber Homer T. Bone, “than to have this Republic, which my father fought
to preserve, destroyed or irreparably injured by another great war.”106
42 • Real Enemies
AS THE NYE COMMITTEE wound up its work, it struggled to explain the
meaning of its investigation for future government policy. For many of the
investigators, the inquiry showed that modern presidents could make deci-
sions about war and peace in complete secrecy. And as they contemplated
the implications of this growing presidential power in the current world
climate, they became alarmed.
President Roosevelt first troubled the investigators and Great War revi-
sionists when he tried to stymie any real reforms the munitions inquiry
might propose. A former assistant Navy secretary who had focused on
domestic problems in his first term, Roosevelt seemed to become more
internationalist, and perhaps more interventionist, in his second. When the
Nye Committee investigators compared the current president to the one
they had just investigated, they grew worried. As Raushenbush explained,
Woodrow Wilson was “never a big-Navy, four-Army man.” Furthermore,
he presided over “the most idealistic administration this country has ever
had.” Yet he made secret decisions that led to war, and then lied about
them. What could Americans now expect from the big-Navy, four-Army
man in the White House, a man whom even his most ardent supporters
would never describe as idealistic?112
As the world slid toward crisis in the late 1930s, many anti-interven-
tionists awoke to the terrifying realization that the brilliant politician in the
White House could be their greatest enemy of all. Shrewder than Colonel
House and more powerful than Jack Morgan, the president might be even
more dangerous to U.S. democracy than the plotters of the previous war.
Perhaps, they worried in their darkest moments, he might even create an
“incident” to force the country into another unwanted war.
46 • Real Enemies
Americans received an increasing number of benefits from the govern-
ment in return for these taxes. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal
government took on unprecedented responsibilities for economic and social
security. Through the creation of an “alphabet soup” of federal agencies,
the government provided jobs to the unemployed, welfare and pensions
to the unemployable, and protection for workers who wanted to use their
collective power to demand better wages and conditions. The New Deal, as
the historian David Kennedy has said, “gave to countless Americans who
had never had much of it a sense of security, and with it a sense of having
a stake in their country.”5 Roosevelt’s policies and personal style were phe-
nomenally popular, with about 60 percent of voters consistently approving
of his performance.6
Yet some Americans still despised Roosevelt. Conservatives never for-
gave him for signing the National Labor Relations Act, which gave gov-
ernment protection to unions. Some leftists, on the other hand, thought
that Roosevelt should have made more radical changes, such as national-
izing the banks. Yet although progressives and conservatives disagreed on
whether Roosevelt had done too much or too little, they all agreed on one
point: the president seemed to have an ominous lust for power.
One-time liberals such as the journalist John T. Flynn, the historian
Harry Elmer Barnes, and Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Democrat
who had been one of the New Deal’s most enthusiastic supporters in
Congress, were horrified by Roosevelt’s 1937 attempt to enlarge the
Supreme Court. Flynn called the court-packing plan “the great massacre of
the six old men,” and Wheeler wrote in his memoirs that FDR’s “unsubtle
and anti-Constitution grab for power” reminded him of totalitarian dicta-
tors.7 They saw the president as a menace to the delicate checks and bal-
ances written into the supreme law of the land by the nation’s founders.
Roosevelt’s critics were also outraged by his efforts to retool the
executive branch beginning in 1937. Branding his reorganization pro-
posal the “dictator bill,” Roosevelt’s opponents claimed the bill would, as
Representative Hamilton Fish said, “concentrate power in the hands of the
President and set up a species of fascism or nazi-ism or an American form
of dictatorship, far from the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln.” Another rep-
resentative fulminated that the bill would pave the way for a “demagogue
with personal power madness” to “assassinate the American Republic.”8
In 1939, a majority of Congress disagreed with these critics and passed the
48 • Real Enemies
The president was equally determined to do everything he could to help
the British. A dedicated antifascist, Roosevelt had been suspicious of the
Nazis from the moment they took power in 1933.17 He grew more uneasy
and angry about Hitler’s policies throughout the 1930s, but he was reluc-
tant to challenge American public opinion. In 1938, the British ambassador
to the United States explained that Roosevelt “is strongly anti-German
and is revolted at what the German Government are doing but … at the
same time he fully appreciated limitations which public opinion places on
his policies and actions.”18
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Roosevelt
responded definitively to a reporter’s question about whether the United
States could avoid involvement. “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe
we can,” he said, “and that every effort will be made by the Administration
so to do.”19 Before the 1940 election, he publicly maintained that he would
not send American boys to die overseas, even as he grew privately con-
vinced that U.S. security depended on British survival. “I have said this
before, but I shall say it again and again and again,” he proclaimed. “Your
boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”20 Roosevelt’s enemies
recalled this statement frequently, and with great bitterness, after Pearl
Harbor. Even historians who sympathize with Roosevelt’s internationalist
views have characterized his pre-intervention public pronouncements as
misleading and “deliberately disingenuous.”21
The anti-interventionists were not surprised by Roosevelt’s deceptions:
they saw them as part of his campaign to expand the powers of the presi-
dency. He had no sincere love for Chinese freedom or British democracy,
they believed. In their view, he pretended to have these values only as a
means to an end: to persuade the American people to support his drive for
big government and total personal power. Roosevelt, Flynn wrote to Robert
E. Wood, “will break his promises to England as quickly as he breaks them
to the American people.”22 Both Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, leading
promoters of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories in later years, firmly believed
that Roosevelt planned to use the war to bring fascism to America.23 To his
critics, Roosevelt was starting a war scare as part of his plan to grab power at
home. He wanted, Senator Hiram Johnson said, “to knock down two dicta-
tors in Europe, so that one may be firmly implanted in America.”24
A massive rearmament program fulfilled many of Roosevelt’s nefari-
ous goals, the critics believed: it camouflaged what they saw as the failure
50 • Real Enemies
who would later promote World War II conspiracy theories, including John
T. Flynn, joined the organization. The historians Charles Beard and Harry
Elmer Barnes offered their support. America First attracted populists and
conservatives, pacifists and extreme nationalists, millionaire businessmen
and socialists.31
Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was America First’s most important
spokesman. Dubbed the “Lone Eagle” by the newspapers after becoming
the first person to fly alone across the Atlantic, he was one of the most
recognized men in the world at the time. While visiting fascist Germany,
Lindbergh was impressed by the Nazis’ skill in aviation, their energy and
efficiency, and their determination to stop communism. He heralded the
Germans’ technical achievements while ignoring the Nazis’ crimes, espe-
cially their brutal treatment of the Jews. The German government rewarded
him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, the highest award given
to a non-German.
Some America First members shared Lindbergh’s admiration for the
Nazis, but others despised them. The anti-interventionists were united,
though, in their conviction that American intervention abroad would
endanger democracy at home. A war with Germany would strengthen
the U.S. presidency and weaken the strongest bulwark against Stalin in
Europe. When measured against these dangers, Hitler’s crimes against
human beings thousands of miles from U.S. shores seemed slight to the
anti-interventionists. And they were determined to thwart what they saw
as Roosevelt’s plan to pull them into the war.
After he won his third term, Roosevelt took his biggest step toward
aiding Great Britain: he asked Congress to pass the Lend-Lease bill, which
gave him the power to “lend, lease, or otherwise dispose of” supplies to any
country he deemed essential to the defense of the United States.32 No lon-
ger would the British need to pay cash for their goods; the U.S. government
would loan them whatever they needed. Despite Roosevelt’s insistence
that the law would help the country avoid war, the anti-interventionists
knew that Lend-Lease signaled a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, and
they put up a tremendous fight against it. They repeatedly invoked the
“lessons of history” taught by the revisionists and the Nye Committee.
Senator Wheeler, the leader of congressional forces against Lend-Lease,
used arguments similar to those George Norris had made in 1917.33 The
“interests” were once again foisting “one war measure after another on
52 • Real Enemies
Most newspapers and public officials condemned Lindbergh’s speech—
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, called it “the
most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national repu-
tation”—and Flynn and some America First leaders were distressed by it.43
But many anti-interventionists believed that Lindbergh had simply told
the “truth,” that, as the lawyer Amos Pinchot explained, “as a group, the
Jews of America are for intervention.”44 These anti-interventionists shared
Lindbergh’s conviction that Americans would never willingly join a war
against Germany; instead, they were being forced into it by selfish Brits, a
lying executive, and Jewish warmongers. Though they insisted that these
beliefs were not anti-Semitic, they ignored the long history of American
anti-Semitism that lay behind Lindbergh’s accusation.45
In many ways, the anti-interventionists were, as the historian Manfred
Jonas has said, “moving further and further away from reality.”46 They
refused to see the differences between the First World War and the Second,
between the British and the Nazis. They did, however, understand that the
U.S. government was changing in immense—and, they believed, fright-
ening—ways. Senator Robert Taft, the dean of anti-interventionist con-
servatives, argued that support for Britain would be the first step down a
slippery slope to a national security state. “If we admit at all that we should
take an active interest,” he said in 1939, “we will be involved in perpetual
war.”47 The United States would become more like European countries,
with a powerful, centralized government launching wars around the globe.
The increase in the coercive power of the government—to draft men, to
commandeer resources, to suppress dissent—would imperil Americans’
historic independence and autonomy. It would provoke the hysteria and
mob violence that Wheeler and Lindbergh had witnessed firsthand in the
previous war, while concentrating frightening powers in the president’s
hands. It would, as Wheeler said, “slit the throat of the last Democracy still
living.”48
Roosevelt responded with some heated rhetoric of his own. Drawing
on Woodrow Wilson’s petulant description of the “little group of willful
men” who opposed war, he called the America First leaders a “small group
of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to
feather their own nests.”49 He compared “Lone Eagle” Lindbergh to the
Copperheads, the Confederate sympathizers in the North during the Civil
War. In another speech, he proclaimed that “evil forces” were “already
54 • Real Enemies
royalists or will you heed those Americans who stand for peace?”54 Nor,
in their opinion, was Roosevelt sincere in his hatred of fascism; instead, he
wanted to bring a brand of fascism to the United States and install himself
as führer.
In Wheeler’s view, the president had his knife at the throat of American
democracy. Roosevelt was just waiting for an incident that would give him
the opportunity to plunge it in.
56 • Real Enemies
removed the radio transmission keys and took out some of the fuses. As
the task force sailed for Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Navy started a “radio
deception” program so that eavesdroppers from the U.S. Navy would think
that the ships were actually in Japanese home waters.61
American naval officers did not know about the strike force, but they
did know that the Japanese were preparing for war. Thanks to a stunning
cryptological breakthrough, appropriately code-named “Magic,” American
code breakers had been reading Japanese diplomatic messages since the
fall of 1940. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Army cryptographers were read-
ing between fifty and seventy-five cables a day from Tokyo. To keep the
Japanese from learning that their codes had been broken, the U.S. govern-
ment closely guarded the secret of Magic. The translators put the messages
into locked briefcases and delivered them to a handful of top military and
civilian officials.62 The Pearl Harbor commanders did not receive copies.
On November 27, because the Magic intercepts showed that Japanese
diplomats expected war with America soon, the U.S. Army and Navy sent
cautionary telegrams to U.S. military bases all over the world. “Negotiations
with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only the
barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and
offer to continue,” wrote Gen. George Marshall in the Army’s message.
“Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any
moment.” The Navy’s telegram was even more blunt. “This despatch is to
be considered a war warning,” it announced in its first sentence.63
In Hawaii, the top officers in both services, Gen. Walter Short and
Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, received the messages but took little action.
The two commanders were not on the Magic distribution list, so they
did not understand the context of the message from Washington. Short
thought that there was little chance of an attack on Hawaii and presumed
that the message was intended primarily for Gen. Douglas MacArthur in
the Philippines. Kimmel also thought that the Navy was warning him that
Japan was going to “attack some place,” but not Hawaii.64 Indeed, the top
Army and Navy officers anticipated a strike on British possessions or on
the Philippines. No one from Washington called Hawaii to follow up on
the telegrams.
On the evening of December 6, a Navy lieutenant carried a copy of
the most significant Magic telegram to the president, who was working
in his study with his aide Harry Hopkins. In the first thirteen parts of its
58 • Real Enemies
Connally became apoplectic. “Hell’s fire, didn’t we do anything?” he
demanded of the president. He said he was astounded “at what happened
to our Navy. They were all asleep.”69 Other members of Congress shared
his anger. “There will have to be an explanation—sooner or later—and
it had better be good,” Congressman Roy Woodruff, a Republican from
Michigan, told Congress the next day.70
Caucasian Americans were especially shocked that Asians had suc-
cessfully planned and executed the raid. British and U.S. military officers
believed that the Japanese could never become skilled pilots because they
lacked good eyesight and balance. Some U.S. officers initially thought that
the Germans had planned the attack. When Japanese planes flew over the
Philippines and destroyed U.S. planes still sitting on the tarmac, General
MacArthur insisted that Japanese could not have been at the controls.
It must have been white mercenaries, he concluded.71 Years later, when
Congress investigated Pearl Harbor, some citizens continued to find it hard
to believe that the “dumb Japs” could by themselves win such a stunning
military victory.72
But Americans did not have the luxury of dwelling on doubts or
questions at the time. On December 8, the president rallied the nation
to war with his eloquent speech before Congress. As the historian Emily
Rosenberg has shown, he portrayed Pearl Harbor as an outrage against
civilization by a barbaric foe, a modern Alamo or Custer’s Last Stand.73
By framing the attack as a stab in the back, Roosevelt hoped to unite the
nation behind him.
Supporters of the administration acted swiftly to quash any discus-
sion of incompetence or conspiracy. The chairman of the Naval Affairs
Committee, Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, told his colleagues
that they must trust the president. “My God!” he exclaimed. “We have
no other course but to throw ourselves and all that we have—heart, soul,
body, mind, and all our possessions, into his hands, for him to use as our
war President.”74 Americans agreed that the nation needed to have confi-
dence in the executive. For more than a week, the Navy did not announce
how many ships had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, and a vast majority of
citizens told pollsters that they believed that this secrecy was necessary.75
But even at this early hour, the Roosevelt administration realized that
calls to patriotism and unity were not enough. If the president hoped to
avoid a congressional investigation of the Pearl Harbor disaster, he would
HARRY ELMER BARNES and John T. Flynn were the natural leaders of
the World War II conspiracist community. Because they had vociferously
opposed U.S. intervention in the war until the day of the attack, they
saw Pearl Harbor as a personal humiliation as well as a national tragedy.
Moreover, they shared another characteristic of early Pearl conspiracists: a
deep, visceral hatred of Franklin Roosevelt and a belief that he would use
any means necessary—even murder—to achieve his goals.
The revisionist community of the Second World War rested on the
shoulders of Barnes, the “ ‘Atlas’ of Revisionism,” as he proudly called him-
60 • Real Enemies
self in his later years.78 Barnes’s strident anti-interventionism had caused
the New York World-Telegram to drop his column in 1940 in response
to what Barnes believed was pressure from “the war-mongers,” British
intelligence, and the Morgan bank. He bitterly reflected that if the United
States entered the war, “there will be no need of columnists in a few years.
The columns will be furnished by the Department of Propaganda.”79
In the first year and a half of the war, Barnes had to mute his suspicions
about the president and the war as the country rallied round the troops.
Even the publishers of his textbooks asked him to rewrite certain sections
to make them more patriotic.80 But by 1943, as the military tide turned and
an eventual U.S. victory seemed likely, some Roosevelt opponents began
encouraging Barnes to turn his skeptical eye to the current war. Charles
Tansill, a conservative historian and later Pearl Harbor conspiracist, urged
Barnes to write a revisionist work, as did William Neumann, a young pacifist
historian who had been inspired by Barnes’s earlier books. “I had thought
that the work that you and others did in the ’20s and ’30s might forestall a
reoccurrence,” wrote Neumann, “but the comedy begins anew.”81
Barnes quickly set to work assembling a community of scholars and
journalists who were skeptical about the official version of U.S. entry into
the war. He corresponded with several like-minded historians, all of them
prewar anti-interventionists, and provided them with encouragement,
information, and connections. As he networked with prominent scholars
and novices alike, Barnes also trolled for money for his project from Robert
E. Wood, the Sears, Roebuck CEO who had led and helped to bankroll the
America First movement.82 Ultimately, Barnes’s friends and colleagues
would write some of the most influential early Pearl Harbor revisionist
works.83 His goal was stunningly ambitious: in the midst of total war, he
hoped to persuade the American people that their commander-in-chief
was a would-be dictator who had ruthlessly allowed twenty-four hundred
Americans to be murdered so that he could pursue his imperial ambitions.
One of Barnes’s most significant correspondents was his comrade in
the lost cause of isolationism, John T. Flynn.84 Like Barnes, Flynn had a
personal stake in showing that the war he had so fervently resisted was
based on a lie. Also like Barnes, Flynn had paid a professional price for his
unyielding isolationism in 1940, when the New Republic “liquidated” his
column.85 Undaunted, he continued to criticize the Roosevelt administra-
tion. In 1943, he succeeded in finding a publisher for As We Go Marching,
62 • Real Enemies
whether to keep extending the statute of limitations for prosecution of
the two commanders. Each time, the debates provided opportunities for
the president’s critics to discuss the broader issue of whom to blame for
the disaster.90 In June 1944, amid the partisan rancor of an election year,
Congress agreed to delay the trials once again, but only if the Army and
Navy launched new Pearl Harbor investigations. To avoid the appearance
of a cover-up, Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to the new inquiries. By this
time, Kimmel was so enraged that he refused to accept any responsibility
at all for the catastrophe.91
As the first post–Pearl Harbor presidential election approached in
1944, Kimmel discovered that he might use partisan politics to help his
cause. It was a difficult election for the Republicans because any attacks
on the president’s current war policy seemed unpatriotic, while criticism
of domestic policies seemed irrelevant. The solution, some activists urged,
was to assail Roosevelt’s prewar foreign policy and suggest that a different
president might have kept the country out of war, or, at the least, been bet-
ter prepared at its start. In the spring, as the party united behind New York
governor Thomas Dewey, Republican leaders began exploring the possibil-
ity of using Pearl Harbor as a campaign issue.
Knowing of Kimmel’s anger, a Republican Party staffer, George H. E.
Smith, approached the admiral’s lawyer and began working closely with
him to prepare a precise chronology of what key officials knew and when
they knew it.92 Excited by the partisan possibilities, Smith reported back to
his party’s bosses that the catastrophe could be portrayed as a lethal exam-
ple of New Deal incompetence. “It can be shown with telling documenta-
tion,” he wrote, “that the Roosevelt pre-war approach to foreign policy was
so stupid and inept that it constituted a danger to American interests and to
world peace which contributed to the ultimate outbreak of war.”93
Meanwhile, Flynn and Barnes also contacted the Republicans. Flynn
worked as a consultant for the GOP, giving speeches and writing essays
that amplified his argument that the New Deal was essentially fascistic.
He proclaimed that Roosevelt’s reelection would mean the triumph of the
“unholy alliance of corrupt politicians interested in jobs and reckless radi-
cal zealots interested in revolution.”94 Yet Flynn’s arguments were tame
compared to Barnes’s polemics. In a letter to Bruce Barton, a party offi-
cial and advertising executive, Barnes told the Republicans it was time for
them to stop acting like a “Quaker deaconness” and start telling the truth
64 • Real Enemies
tive, formerly isolationist Chicago Tribune to publish the first revisionist
account of the origins of World War II.
“The Truth about Pearl Harbor” contained the essential outlines of
later Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories. According to Flynn, Roosevelt had
goaded the Japanese into attacking—and had indeed known that an attack
was imminent—but had done nothing to warn the commanders at Pearl.
Afterward, he and his secretary of state proceeded to cover up their inepti-
tude and impose on “two helpless officers the odium of their guilt.”100 The
Tribune called it an “overpowering” exposé of “a governing clique seeking
to save itself from disgrace by damning innocent men.”101 Flynn printed
thirty thousand copies of the article and sent one “to every publisher and
every editor in [the] country, to every commentator, columnist and news
service,” along with every congressman and senator and “large numbers of
influential private persons.” He hoped to force a congressional inquiry.102
Although Flynn accused Roosevelt of needlessly provoking war, he
did not think that the president knew when and where the attack would
come. Indeed, there was no evidence that he did. But as Flynn composed
his article, Republican leaders were learning a national secret, a secret that
potentially could lead to credible evidence of a deeper conspiracy. Someone
privy to the military inquiries told them about Magic.
66 • Real Enemies
code breakers worried that the disclosure of the Magic deciphering machine
would alert the Japanese that the United States had broken their naval codes
after Pearl Harbor. The United States had won the Battle of Midway because
of this intelligence coup, which provided a window on Japanese planning.109
But Dewey did not entirely believe Marshall on this point. Convinced that
Roosevelt was a “traitor” who deserved impeachment because of Pearl Harbor,
he felt justified in doing all he could to force the man from office.110 He knew,
though, that he had no choice but to abandon this line of attack. If he kept
quiet, he lost a valuable campaign issue, but if he revealed the information,
the administration could justifiably accuse him of treason.
The Pearl Harbor critics were stunned in November 1944 when Roose-
velt won another vote of confidence from the American people, defeating
Dewey 53 to 46 percent in the popular vote. As the president’s party won
its seventh straight national election, Roosevelt’s critics remained shut out
of power. They were marginalized; and people on the margins are most
inclined to see conspiracies against them.
THE PRESIDENT’S CONTINUED popularity mystified his critics. Why were the
American people so resistant to their message? The obvious answer, of course,
was that they were attacking a popular president during a necessary war. But
FDR’s critics saw their failure differently. It was the result of a plot—a plot
against America. In their mind, a cabal of government agents, media provo-
cateurs, and antifascist activists were part of the plot. It was the critics’ task to
unmask these conspirators. In this way, they—the unfairly maligned oppo-
nents—could regain control. But they had to be careful in their quest to expose
the true story of the Roosevelt administration. “Any discussion of this enter-
prise should be highly confidential,” Barnes told Robert Wood, “for if there
is anything the powers that be fear it is a calm exposition of the facts.”111 The
truth could set them free. It could also prompt the FBI to start a file on them.
The Pearl Harbor skeptics had good reason to believe the government
was out to get them, for indeed it was. After the excesses of World War I
and the early postwar years, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone in 1924
had appointed young J. Edgar Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation
and strictly limited it to “investigations of violations of law.” But during
the New Deal, Hoover’s newly expanded Federal Bureau of Investigation
moved back into the business of spying on the “ideas and associations” of
potential dissenters.112
68 • Real Enemies
Roosevelt ordered Hoover to wiretap, bug, and physically spy on his
anti-interventionist opponents during the Lend-Lease debate of early
1941.121 He contended that they must be getting money from the nation’s
enemies. Hoover complied with reports on Senator Nye, Senator Wheeler,
Colonel Lindbergh, and the America First Committee, among others. In a
clear case of harassment, the Internal Revenue Bureau also investigated
the finances of America First without giving a reason for the inquiry.122
The FBI’s reports on the anti-interventionists were filled with gos-
sip about the president’s political opponents but contained no evidence
of illegal activity or foreign connections. The surveillance did, however,
help the government collect political intelligence. Ironically, considering
Hoover’s diligence, Roosevelt was not content with the FBI reports alone,
and soon hired his own personal spy, the former journalist John Franklin
Carter, and attached him to the State Department. Paid with “special emer-
gency” funds, Carter amassed a staff of eleven men charged with spying
on the president’s enemies. Hoover was furious and began spying on FDR’s
spy.123
With Hoover’s assistance, Roosevelt used taxpayer money and fed-
eral bureaucrats to investigate and harass his political enemies. To Flynn,
the president’s expansion of the FBI was part of his plan to establish a
police state and drag the country into war. “You have to terrify the people
before they will authorize military expenditures,” he wrote to Senator
Bennett Clark in 1940. “This is part of that program.”124 Roosevelt may
have sincerely believed—or else convinced himself that he believed—that
he needed to monitor and suppress his enemies at a time of national emer-
gency. In his opponents’ eyes, though, he was concocting a phony emer-
gency to expand his power.
At the same time the FBI expanded its secret surveillance of dissidents,
the Justice Department publicly pursued opponents of war by prosecuting
thirty right-wing leaders for wartime conspiracy. In U.S. v. McWilliams, the
government charged a motley collection of fascist intellectuals and Hitler
sympathizers with spreading propaganda to further the international Nazi
conspiracy. The indictment was clearly an abuse of prosecutorial author-
ity. Though most of the defendants were anti-Semites, the government
could not prove that they had received money or instructions from abroad.
Most of the alleged “conspirators” had never even met before the trial. In
a brazen act of intimidation, the special prosecutor darkly hinted that he
70 • Real Enemies
the Jews knew what was good for them, he often said, they would stop
provoking the rest of us. Otherwise, the victimized conservatives would
rise up against “minority groups,” and Jews would find that their paranoid
fantasies had become reality.129
Flynn nursed such intense hatred of “Jewish Hollywood” because he
believed that his political enemies controlled the modern media, and thus
controlled the public’s understanding of the war. Flynn and his friends
still had access to the print media; even after the New Republic cancelled
his column, he could publish in the Chicago Tribune and with right-wing
publishing houses. But his opponents seemed to command the attention
of the new media, radio and motion pictures. “The moving picture indus-
try,” wrote Flynn in a confidential memo to the America First Executive
Committee just months before Pearl Harbor, “went out 100 per cent for
war propaganda pictures. The radio gave time to some of our speakers but
filled in the space between with a ceaseless flow of propaganda.”130 In his
view, FDR and the Jews of Hollywood had the unchallenged authority to
tell the story of the war—and the story of its supposedly un-American
opponents.
As if persecution by the Jews and the government were not enough,
the old anti-interventionists also felt besieged by antifascist activists. These
American opponents of Hitler had organized in pro-intervention groups in
the late 1930s as the crisis in Europe escalated. One of the loudest voices
for intervention was the Friends of Democracy, whose national committee
included such luminaries as the German-born writer Thomas Mann and
the philosopher John Dewey. L. M. Birkhead, a former minister who served
as national director, accused America First of harboring Nazis and giving
“aid and comfort” to Hitler.131
Once the war started, the antifascists intensified their attacks. Several
wrote salacious exposés that accused prewar anti-interventionists of promot-
ing un-American ideas. Although anti-interventionists claimed that they
wanted to save the republic, the authors argued, in fact they were engaged
in a “plot against America.” In Sabotage! The Secret War against America,
Albert E. Kahn and Michael Sayers alleged that Nazis secretly controlled
America First and manipulated anti-interventionist congressmen. Other
anti-isolationist books took the classic form of the diary of an undercover
agent. Richard Rollins’s I Find Treason, for example, told the story of his
infiltration of the American Nazis. The most popular book-length exposé
72 • Real Enemies
forces behind the antifascist crusade. There were three main groups back-
ing the anti-isolationist books, Flynn believed: the Jews, the Roosevelt
administration, and the communists.137
And here he marked a seemingly small but very important develop-
ment in twentieth-century conspiracy theories. In his famous Des Moines
speech, Lindbergh had railed against the Jews and Roosevelt, but the
British had been the third member of his unholy trinity. Flynn’s substitu-
tion of the Red menace for the British one showed the increasing impor-
tance of anticommunism among the Pearl Harbor conspiracists. Indeed, as
the war continued, he saw little reason to distinguish between the com-
munists and the New Dealers. They were all pursuing the same goal: sub-
version, totalitarianism, and the demonization of the few good men who
opposed their plot.
Those who saw the hand of Stalin at work in America were voices in the
wilderness during the war. They had high hopes, though, for the new world
that would be born when the shooting stopped. “No matter in what direc-
tion the election goes,” wrote Flynn to the conservative publisher DeWitt
Wallace in October 1944, “the atmosphere is going to change. I am as sure
of that as I have ever been of anything in my life.”138 Flynn and his friends
would be back on top, and the real un-Americans would come to regret it.
THOUGH THEY WERE despondent about its results, the election did provide
Roosevelt’s critics with one consolation. Once FDR won his fourth term,
the administration agreed to release the summaries of the Army and Navy
inquiries into Pearl Harbor. The summaries made it clear why the admin-
istration wanted to keep the full reports secret. In contrast to the White
House–controlled Roberts Commission, the Army and Navy both placed
much of the blame on Washington. The Navy virtually exonerated Admiral
Kimmel, and the Army Board sharply criticized both General Short and
his superiors in Washington.139 Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Navy
Secretary James Forrestal ordered yet more investigations to counter the
embarrassing summaries.140
Then, on April 12, 1945, the man so hated by the Pearl Harbor revi-
sionists, the president with a “boundless will to power,” suddenly passed
from the scene. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered the next day to
watch the presidential train carry Roosevelt’s casket from Warm Springs,
Georgia, to Washington. Many of the mourners wept openly.141
74 • Real Enemies
poised to attack. Although Flynn did not publicly accuse the president of
knowing where the attack would come, Roosevelt was clearly the villain
of the piece. Flynn charged him with “doing everything except swimming
under water with the bombs in his teeth,” the New Republic’s colum-
nist TRB snidely noted.146 Privately, Flynn and Tribune publisher Robert
McCormick told each other that they suspected the real truth of Pearl
Harbor was still to be revealed. In their view, Pearl Harbor was not the
result of incompetence; it was a conspiracy.147
The revelation of Magic was so explosive that the president and his
party could no longer avoid a congressional investigation. To preempt the
Republicans, the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate called
for an immediate joint congressional inquiry. Senate Majority Leader
Alben Barkley appointed himself chairman. The committee included six
Democrats and four Republicans, a division reflecting the Democrats’
numerical edge in Congress.148 The Democrats had agreed to an inquiry,
but they were determined to hire the staff and control the direction of the
probe.
The Republicans were equally determined to be heard. To foil the
Democrats’ control of the staff, they raised private funds to hire a GOP
activist as their own “chief research expert.”149 The stakes were high: Senator
Homer Ferguson of Michigan, one of two Republican senators on the
panel, proclaimed that nothing less than the survival of American democ-
racy depended on “ascertaining the truth” about Pearl Harbor.150 The
Republicans speculated darkly that the Truman administration was trying
to bury this truth. Rumors circulated throughout Washington that some of
Roosevelt’s most damning papers had suddenly disappeared.151 The jour-
nalist John Chamberlain predicted that the investigation would make the
rancorous debates over entry into World War I “look like a polite exchange
at a garden party.”152
The congressional hearings opened in November 1945 with all of the
media attention one would expect for a major investigation of the pos-
sible subversion of American democracy. Four hundred fifty spectators and
five newsreel cameras crowded into the Senate Office Building’s caucus
room to observe the proceedings. Under the intense lights installed for
the cameras, the five senators and five congressmen sat sweating at long
tables facing their witnesses. The committee members struggled to make
their voices heard over the whirring of motion picture cameras and the
76 • Real Enemies
searched desperately for it, but, John T. Flynn wrote, “always there was a
mysterious hand somewhere to frustrate them.” Flynn further charged
that Navy officials had traveled around the world to destroy all evidence of
every single intercept of the winds message. Then they had threatened and
browbeaten witnesses and forced them to repudiate Safford’s charges.158
To the committee’s chief counsel, a seventy-one-year-old conserva-
tive Democratic lawyer named William Mitchell, the fuss over the winds
code was emblematic of the blind hatred of the Roosevelt opponents. First,
not one other witness ultimately supported Safford’s testimony. This
meant that Captain Safford himself was either a lone fighter for truth
or, as Mitchell and others believed, a bit of a nut. Safford had spent years
struggling to prove that the Navy and the administration had “framed”
Admiral Kimmel, and he was convinced that his enemies were engaged in
a conspiracy to discredit him.159 Mitchell found such a conspiracy incred-
ible. Even more important, the counsel insisted again and again, it did not
matter whether or not the winds code had been transmitted and inter-
cepted. The Roosevelt administration already knew that Japan was prepar-
ing for war in early December. So why did Pearl Harbor revisionists such
as Flynn call the alleged disappearance of the winds message a “bomb-
shell”? Mitchell became so angry over what he saw as the Republicans’
grandstanding that he and his staff quit in protest just one month into the
investigation.160
Pearl Harbor, once a unifying symbol for the country, had now become
a symbol of partisan discord, the New Republic noted.161 The Republicans
tried to use every witness and document to prove that evil forces were at
work in the prewar White House. “It is possible that Hull pulled the trig-
ger,” said Senator Owen Brewster at one point, thus neatly shifting blame
from the Japanese to America’s own secretary of state.162 Republicans who
were not on the committee were even less restrained in their accusations.
On the floor of the House, Congressman Dewey Short expressed shock
that one witness was still alive to tell his story. “I’m surprised he has not
been liquidated,” Short said.163
Despite their claims, neither side really wanted to discover “the truth”
about Pearl Harbor, but to use the Japanese attack to further their own
interests.164 For their part, the Democrats believed that Pearl Harbor showed
the folly of isolationism. There was no point in trying to assign individual
blame for a tragedy that stemmed from America’s collective unwillingness
78 • Real Enemies
contending that he intentionally exposed the fleet to attack, Ferguson and
Brewster accused Roosevelt of provoking the Japanese, and then failing to put
the Hawaiian commanders on full alert. These dissenters did not believe that
the president withheld information because he wanted to protect the nation’s
code-breaking secrets; instead, they argued that he deliberately deceived
the public for his own sinister purposes. “Indeed, the high authorities in
Washington seemed to be acting upon some long-range plan which was never
disclosed to Congress or the American people.”171 Throughout their quest to
reveal this long-range plan, the investigators found that “there was a deliber-
ate design to block the search for the truth.”172 In their view, it was their own
government, not that of the enemy, that was guilty of infamy on December 7.
IN THE YEARS TO COME, many authors continued to search for the elusive,
absolute “truth” about Pearl Harbor. The Chicago Tribune reporter George
Morgenstern and the historian Charles Beard built on Flynn’s work in
the late 1940s; Charles Tansill, the conservative historian who had urged
Barnes to examine the war’s origins back in 1943, published his own revi-
sionist work in 1952.173 Flynn persevered with his quest to prove the plot
at Pearl until he became too old and ill to work.174 Harry Barnes also kept
up the crusade by inspiring, editing, reviewing, and promoting books that
argued for a conspiracy. “If I dropped Revisionism,” he wrote in 1958, “it
would stop as suddenly all over the world as the bloodstream of Marie
Antoinette stopped when the guillotine blade dropped on her neck.”175
Although Barnes found a ready market for his work with right-wing pub-
lishers, he grew infuriated by the “mythmongers” and the “court histo-
rians” and became obsessed with proving that U.S. entry into World War
II was “the most lethal and complicated public crime of modern times.”
Unhinged by the continued resistance to his arguments, the legendary
revisionist of the First World War refused to believe the grisly evidence
of Hitler’s Final Solution. Once the patron saint of independent thinkers,
Harry Barnes became a hero to Holocaust deniers.176
Admiral Kimmel and his admirers formed a different, intersecting cir-
cle of men who spent years trying to prove that the admiral had been the
American Dreyfus, scapegoated by selfish politicians. Kimmel’s cause was
taken up by Adm. Robert Theobald, who worked with Barnes and Flynn to
produce a major revisionist work in 1954.177 These conspiracists created a
community: they shared their research, helped secure funds and publishers,
80 • Real Enemies
minds on this point. The Chicago Tribune argued that Pearl Harbor showed
Roosevelt’s “insouciant stupidity or worse.”182 Yet how could an insouci-
antly stupid administration pull off such a grand conspiracy? The expand-
ing government, these antistatists argued, could do nothing right—except
when it enslaved its citizens. This inconsistency in logic would plague many
antigovernment conspiracy theories for the rest of the twentieth century.
The Pearl Harbor critics also expected this conspiratorial organiza-
tion called a government to leave clues for its enemies to prove its perfidy.
Their reliance on the documents of the centralized state to prove their
case against the state showed the increasing irrelevance of antistatist ide-
ology. Roosevelt’s opponents firmly believed that government investiga-
tions would prove the existence of a government conspiracy. Roosevelt,
they seemed to think, was capable of provoking a Japanese attack, scape-
goating the local commanders, and then wiping out all evidence of a con-
spiracy—except for a few documents he carelessly left behind for future
anti-Roosevelt investigators.
But for all their hatred of the expansive, incompetent, yet malevolent
federal government, the Pearl Harbor conspiracists began to see some vir-
tues in one of the official agencies they used to fear. Back in 1940, Flynn
had regarded the FBI as a part of President Roosevelt’s plan to frighten
the American people into granting more power to the presidency. In his
view, J. Edgar Hoover, the man responsible for many of Attorney General
Palmer’s “atrocities after the last war,” helped to persuade Americans that
they needed to surrender some of their liberties to the government so that
the government could protect them.183
But Flynn came to discover that Hoover shared some of his concerns
and philosophies. Like Flynn, Hoover worried about the men and women
they called “antifascists” during the war and “Reds” afterward. Throughout
the war, Hoover’s FBI leaked derogatory information about the anti-
anti-interventionists to Flynn and his friends.184 Hoover also shared their
tendency to demonize their opponents as enemies of the republic.
Now that the war was over, the Roosevelt critics saw the glimmerings
of a new dawn. “Their smearing days are over, John,” Burton Wheeler had
written Flynn in the midst of the war, “and the more they try to smear
people now, the more it is going to react against them when this war is
over.”185 It was time to expose the real plot against America, and this time
the FBI was going to help them do it.
IN THE EARLY YEARS of the cold war, when teams of scientists around the
world were racing to discover the structure of DNA, an American chemist
stood out among the contenders as the individual most likely to answer the
fundamental question about the nature of life. One of the most brilliant sci-
entists of the century, Linus Pauling was the leader of revolutions in quan-
tum chemistry and molecular biology. The California professor had written
several seminal works in chemistry, including his groundbreaking Nature of
the Chemical Bond, and he published forty-three scientific papers from 1950
to 1952 alone.1 European scientists, excited by Pauling’s latest research, orga-
nized a meeting in London in May 1952 to discuss his recent discoveries.
There was only one problem: the U.S. government would not allow the
guest of honor to leave the country. The State Department’s passport office
decided that permitting Pauling to attend the conference would not be in
the “best interests of the United States.”2 According to the government,
the famous professor and antinuclear activist might be a communist.
Pauling’s outspoken leftist politics had first attracted the attention of
the FBI in 1947.3 At the start of the cold war, he had begun to associate
himself “in a smaller or larger way with every peace movement that has
come to my attention,” he proudly recalled.4 The bureau had expanded
its investigation in 1950 when Louis Budenz, an ex-communist, named
Pauling as a potential subversive in testimony that was later thoroughly
discredited.5 After years of surveillance, government agents could never
prove that Pauling had even attended a Communist Party meeting.
Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s, agents of the U.S. government
did their best to ruin Pauling’s career. They prevented him from speak-
ing and traveling, urged private donors to stop funding his lab, and per-
suaded his university to launch an internal investigation of his politics.
When Pauling denied Party membership under oath, FBI chief J. Edgar
Hoover responded by urging the Justice Department to prosecute him for
perjury.6
It was Hoover’s suspicions that lay behind the passport division’s deci-
sion to prohibit Pauling from attending the scientific meeting held in his
honor.7 Some scholars have speculated that he suffered his greatest scien-
tific disappointment as a result. Had he been allowed to attend the con-
ference, he might have seen the X-ray images of DNA taken by British
scientists, and he, rather than the Cambridge University team of James
Watson and Francis Crick, might have solved the riddle of the double helix.8
Despite his disappointment in DNA research, Pauling did win the Nobel
Prize for chemistry in 1954. Some U.S. officials argued against allowing
him to travel to Sweden to accept it.9
The story of the U.S. government’s harassment of Linus Pauling is, at
first glance, a perplexing mystery. Why, in the midst of the cold war, did
government officials actively impede the work of one of its greatest sci-
entists, a researcher who could help to advance the frontiers of American
science and showcase the superiority of capitalism? The answer lies in
the conspiracy theory of communist subversion. This theory prompted
America’s internal security agency to identify one of its most innovative
minds as an enemy of the state.
There were real reasons for Americans to fear communist spies dur-
ing the cold war. Communists had, after all, spied on the U.S. government,
especially during the U.S.-Soviet alliance of World War II. But the combi-
nation of defections by some key spies, good counterintelligence work by
the FBI, and a strict loyalty-security program effectively destroyed this
conspiracy. By 1951, when Senator Joseph McCarthy made headlines by
denouncing a conspiracy “so immense” at the highest levels of the U.S.
government, there were no Soviet spies of any importance remaining
within the government.
84 • Real Enemies
Just when the U.S. government was winning the war on Soviet espio-
nage, many Americans became convinced that they were losing it, and los-
ing badly. And they reacted with panic. The post–World War II Red Scare
cost thousands of people their careers, cast suspicion on the highest offi-
cials of the government, and discredited progressive politics for a genera-
tion, all because some Americans feared a defunct conspiracy, a conspiracy
that communist defectors and the FBI had already destroyed.
The public revelation of the real but obsolete conspiracy of communist
espionage inspired one of the most consequential conspiracy theories in
U.S. history. Conspiracy theorists exaggerated the story of the espionage
plot until it became unrecognizable; in their telling, it became the expla-
nation for America’s supposed “impotency,” as Joe McCarthy said, after
World War II.
The public officials who promoted this conspiracy theory used all of
the powers of the secret agencies of the government to smash the phan-
tom conspirators. Ironically, when these public officials began to conspire
against the supposed red plotters, they would lay the foundation for a new
generation of conspiracy theories about the government.
FROM THE TIME they seized power in 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks wor-
ried about the “countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet
power by people who are infinitely stronger than us.”10 To combat these
plots, the new Soviet state set up its own conspiratorial organizations, the
most extensive and dreaded security agencies in the world at the time. Some
of these Soviet agents began coming to the United States in the 1920s as
part of a coordinated campaign to glean industrial secrets from U.S. busi-
nesses. The Soviets’ industrial espionage program was extremely successful
over the years, with one American chemist, Harry Gold of Philadelphia,
earning the Order of the Red Star for his efforts in helping the Soviets to
unravel the mysteries of synthetic rubber, nylon, and photo processing.11
In 1933, after the United States opened diplomatic relations with the
Soviets, Soviet spies expanded their operations to include the U.S. gov-
ernment as well as American industry.12 Because of their respect for U.S.
power in the world, the Soviets were tantalized by the possibility of gain-
ing an insider’s view of the workings of U.S. foreign policy. “In world
politics, the U.S. is the determining factor,” Moscow officials wrote in
one memo to their spies in America. “There are no problems, even those
Masters of Deceit • 85
‘purely’ European, in whose solution America does not take part because
of its economic and financial strength.”13 To discover America’s proposed
solutions to these problems, Soviet agents posing as diplomats began to
recruit American case officers, who were charged with finding and manag-
ing sources who worked in key U.S. government agencies.14
The most significant of these early case officers was a young New Yorker
named Whittaker Chambers. A talented writer, Chambers took charge of
a cell of secret communists in the Roosevelt administration in 1934 and
encouraged them to steal information. Chambers’s sources included some
upwardly mobile young bureaucrats, including a lawyer in the Agriculture
Department, Alger Hiss, who would later become a counsel to the Nye
Committee and then a mid-ranking official at the State Department, and
economist Harry Dexter White, who was later appointed assistant secre-
tary of the treasury.15
But in the late 1930s, Stalin’s fear of conspiracy helped to ruin many
of the networks that his agents had built. Fearing enemies within, the
Russians turned on some of their own best agents, snatching them off
the street, charging them with treason against the Soviet state, and order-
ing them back to Moscow, where they were often tried and executed.
The purges disillusioned and terrified many agents, including Chambers.
In 1938, alienated from his former comrades and fearful that he might
become a victim of the purges himself, Chambers left the Soviet under-
ground and went into hiding. The next year, as the Soviets and the Nazis
signed a nonaggression pact and World War II began in Europe, he told
his story of secret communists within the government to an official in the
Roosevelt administration.16
At first, the U.S. government failed to take Chambers seriously, as State
Department officials and FBI agents found the tale told by the disheveled,
mumbling defector less than credible. For his part, Chambers was ambiva-
lent about informing on his old friends, and he was deliberately vague and
somewhat hostile to his government interrogators. The FBI opened files on
those he named but did not immediately pressure them to leave the gov-
ernment.17 Chambers emerged from hiding and settled into a new career as
a journalist at Time, where he told a few friends of his former life as a spy.
Despite the dangers posed by this critical defection, Soviet espionage in
the United States continued to thrive. New case officers went on to recruit
dozens more American agents.
86 • Real Enemies
The war soon provided an unprecedented opportunity for Soviet
spies in the United States. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in
June 1941, President Roosevelt opened the flow of Lend-Lease supplies
and began shipping food, oil, Army boots, jeeps, machine guns, tanks, and
fighter planes to the country that would ultimately lose more than twenty
million lives fighting Hitler. Besides sharing supplies, the U.S. government
also began to share some intelligence with the Soviets, even when Stalin
refused to reciprocate. As the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in 1943,
“Even if we get no information from the Russians it is still, on the narrow-
est view, to our advantage to put into the hands of the Russians the means
of killing more Germans.”18
But the U.S. government kept some secrets from Stalin, secrets that the
Soviets tried to discover on their own. Wartime Soviet intelligence agents
created a network of military, industrial, and government spies who fun-
neled valuable information to the U.S.S.R. They put their greatest effort
into infiltrating the atomic bomb project. Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee
physicist hired by the British for the project, and Theodore Hall, a young
American scientist, passed secret information on the bomb from their
posts in Los Alamos.19 Machinist David Greenglass provided some sketches
that confirmed their data. Harry Gold, the Soviets’ most significant indus-
trial spy, worked as a courier for both Greenglass and Fuchs, slipping their
documents under his coat after anxious meetings on busy bridges in Santa
Fe or in cramped apartments in Albuquerque. Besides Fuchs and Hall,
other nuclear scientists and engineers in Canada, Tennessee, Chicago, and
Berkeley also helped the Soviets.20 Thanks to the stolen data, the U.S.S.R.
tested its own bomb in 1949, probably about one to two years earlier than
it would have on its own.21
The FBI knew the general outlines of this atomic espionage conspiracy,
though none of its details. Thanks to their surveillance of the Communist
Party leader Steve Nelson, bureau agents had learned that a graduate stu-
dent and a research fellow in the Berkeley radiation laboratory were pass-
ing information on the bomb project to Nelson and the Soviets. To try to
catch these spies, the bureau stepped up its surveillance of Nelson and sent
125 additional agents to the San Francisco Bay Area.22 It was foolhardy
for the Soviets to use Nelson as a spy, because his role in espionage would
later provide ammunition for those who argued that membership in the
Communist Party was equivalent to treason.
Masters of Deceit • 87
The Soviets also received important military information from a ring
of communist spies in New York headed by Julius Rosenberg. A thin,
intense Stalinist, Rosenberg recruited a group of his fellow engineers,
many of them friends from his college days in the Young Communist
League. Rosenberg also recruited his brother-in-law, David Greenglass,
after the young sergeant was stationed at Los Alamos, though Greenglass’s
knowledge was crude compared to the disquisitions on nuclear physics that
the Russians received from Fuchs. Julius’s wife, Ethel, helped him with his
espionage, but was not a major spy in her own right.23
Besides the Rosenberg group and the atom spies, a third significant
Soviet wartime spy ring provided key political and military informa-
tion. Centered in Washington, D.C., this network was run by Elizabeth
Bentley. The product of a long line of Republican Episcopalians in New
Milford, Connecticut, Bentley later claimed that her idealism led her to
the Communist Party. This was partly true, but she was also drawn to the
excitement of belonging to an organization that horrified her family and
hometown. The thirty-year-old Vassar graduate started her espionage in
1938 as an assistant to her lover, who was one of the top Soviet agents in
the United States. When he died in 1943, she took over his job. She made
twice-monthly trips from her home in Manhattan to Washington, where
she met with sources, soothed their anxieties, and collected their docu-
ments. One of her agents received information directly from Chambers’s
old source, now a high-ranking Treasury Department official, Harry Dexter
White, who continued to pass information to the Soviets despite the defec-
tion of his former case officer. She discreetly tucked rolls of microfilm into
her knitting bag, which she shared with her Soviet controllers.24
Like most of the communist spies in this era, Bentley’s sources received
no money for their efforts. In fact, thanks to the hefty dues imposed by the
Party, they paid for the privilege of working for what they saw as the uto-
pian goal of worldwide communism. During the Depression, they had seen
professionals selling apples to survive, children eating out of trashcans,
and millions malnourished, while government officials destroyed food. “In
that period of passionate conviction,” explained one American communist,
Hope Hale Davis, “I could not understand anyone’s being merely a theo-
retical Marxist.”25
Moreover, during the war, the Soviet Union was allied with the United
States. Some Americans spied because they disagreed with their govern-
88 • Real Enemies
ment’s decision to withhold crucial information from their ally in the bat-
tle against fascism. In particular, the atomic spies disagreed with the U.S.
government’s refusal to share nuclear information with the Soviets, which,
they believed, showed that Americans were conspiring to use the bomb to
establish global hegemony. Alan Nunn May, a Canadian who spied on the
atomic project for the Soviets, later insisted that he was trying to ensure
the “safety of mankind” by preventing one power from monopolizing the
bomb. In this view, sharing information brought safety, even survival; by
contrast, secrecy bred fear, conspiracy, and domination.26
The official conspiracy theorists at the FBI chased after many of these
spies, especially those in the atomic program. Though they had little success
during the war, the hunt for red spies in the early 1940s would profoundly
influence Hoover and the FBI and U.S.-Soviet relations for years to come.27
Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, Hoover had believed that commu-
nism was “the most evil, monstrous conspiracy against man since time
began—a conspiracy to shape the future of the world.”28 As he received
increasing numbers of reports of Soviet spying in the United States during
the war, he found more evidence for his conviction that the communists
were “masters of deceit,” as he would title his 1958 book.
Then, just after the end of the war, Elizabeth Bentley knitted together
all of the disparate strands of the conspiracy for Hoover. In 1945, teetering
on the edge of panic and paranoia, Bentley grew convinced that the FBI was
about to arrest her, which was not true, and that her thuggish Russian con-
trollers were thinking of assassinating her, which was. In November 1945,
she went to the FBI’s New York field office to give a complete report to the
bureau and to save herself from Stalin’s assassins. The New York operatives
sent an urgent telegram to Washington in the middle of the night alerting
FBI headquarters to this stunning development: the voluntary defection
of a woman who “furnished information relative to a Russian espionage
ring with which she was affiliated and which is presently operating in this
country.”29 At 2 a.m. panicked FBI clerks began rifling through files for
evidence to corroborate her story.30 Thus began the Great Spy Scare of the
1940s and 1950s.
As he read Bentley’s statement, Hoover became more convinced that
all American communists were engaged in a massive conspiracy to subvert
and destroy the republic. She named dozens of Americans who had coop-
erated with Soviet intelligence during the war. Most of her sources were
Masters of Deceit • 89
mid-ranking bureaucrats, but a few had held influential positions: Lauchlin
Currie, one of a half-dozen special assistants to President Roosevelt, had
passed along a few bits of information orally, she said, and Harry Dexter
White had been a “valuable adjunct” who stole some documents and tried
to influence policy. She had also heard that a man at the State Department
named Hiss—she could not remember his first name; was it Eugene?—
spied for Soviet military intelligence.31 This confirmed the FBI’s preexist-
ing suspicion of Alger Hiss, whom Chambers had named years before.32 In
response to the new information from Bentley and from another defector
in Canada, the FBI began to wiretap and spy on Hiss, and State Department
officials successfully pressured him to leave the government.33
On November 30, 1945, the FBI presented Bentley with the results of
her confession: a 107-page, typed statement packed with all of the names
she had given them—those of her brutal controllers, her skittish gov-
ernment sources, and her former lovers and friends. At the last minute,
she refused to sign. “She characterized the Americans’ activities as being
motivated by an ideology,” an FBI memo explained, “and that they felt
that the information they obtained was to help an ally.” The agents per-
sisted. They did not have to remind her that she had a selfish interest in
helping the government. She had no immunity agreement, and wartime
espionage, even for an ally, was a capital offense. Bentley finally signed
the statement.34
But the FBI and the Justice Department prosecutors still had no case. It
was Bentley’s word against the people she accused, and she had not saved
any documents to prove her accusations. To gather more evidence, the FBI
decided to run her as a double agent: she pretended to continue working for
the Soviets, while the bureau followed her and remained in the shadows,
collecting evidence for future trials.
Unfortunately for the FBI’s case, the Soviets learned immediately of
Bentley’s defection. The head of Soviet counterintelligence for the British
secret service, Kim Philby, was one of a handful of American and British
security officials to be briefed on Bentley. Philby also happened to be a
Soviet mole himself. He informed Moscow of her defection while she was
still giving her statement. Soviet officials immediately contacted all of her
sources, and any agents who might have known her sources, and told them
to stop spying. In response to this unprecedented security breach, they
rolled up their spy networks in the United States.35 A few years later, they
90 • Real Enemies
reactivated some atomic and military spies who had not known Bentley,
but the FBI soon either caught these agents or forced them to flee.
Philby’s information gave the Soviets the chance to save their American
spies. But though Soviet intelligence saved its agents from prison, it did so
only by turning them into ex-agents. Any attempts to reestablish contact
with their agents could “lead to fatal consequences,” Moscow controllers
wrote their new station chief in Washington. In the new era, the Soviets
in America were reduced to clipping newspapers, complaining about anti-
Soviet American movies, and reporting on internal embassy disputes.36 The
KGB later resumed spying in the United States, but only when it found
some mercenary Americans willing to spy in return for huge payments. It
would take many years for Soviet espionage in America to recover from
the damage caused by this one defection.
Masters of Deceit • 91
be told about Venona.39 The president thus saw little proof of a real espionage
conspiracy but heard many tales told by self-interested and alarmist con-
spiracists. Given this incomplete and biased data, Truman soon learned to
be skeptical of everything Hoover told him.
Hoover reciprocated with unrestrained loathing for the president.
According to one of his assistants, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no
bounds.”40 The president infuriated Hoover by creating a new Central
Intelligence Group (later the CIA) to handle foreign intelligence and limit-
ing the bureau to domestic work. In Hoover’s view, Truman did not under-
stand the importance of the FBI to U.S. national security, in part because
the president underestimated the danger of domestic communism.
Not surprisingly, given his disdain for the unfounded allegations that
the FBI chief sent him almost daily, Truman paid little attention to Hoover’s
warnings about the treasonous activities of Harry Dexter White. Despite
Bentley’s and Chambers’s charges, Truman nominated White to be the
executive director of the International Monetary Fund in January 1946. To
Truman, the stories about White were unbelievable. The famed economist
was the architect of the premier capitalist postwar institutions, the IMF and
the World Bank. Not only was he clearly devoted to global free trade and
exchangeable, capitalist currencies, but he also worked with other American
officials to ensure U.S. dominance of the postwar economic order.41 Because
he trusted White and doubted the FBI, Truman ignored Hoover’s warn-
ings about White’s alleged Soviet sympathies until after he had sent his
nomination to the Senate.42 White would direct the IMF for less than a year
before he resigned, in part because of pressure from the FBI.43
In Hoover’s view, Truman’s decision to promote White proved that his
administration was infested with communist agents and their dupes. What
else could explain the president’s decision to name a suspected spy to such
a high post? In response, Hoover started a covert war against his president,
a sort of internal government conspiracy aimed at discrediting those who
he thought refused to take the communist conspiracy seriously enough.
He began leaking top-secret information to Republicans in Congress who
suspected communist influence in the Truman White House, giving them
files, suggesting witnesses for their investigations, and even sending them
lists of questions to ask. As one FBI memo reported, the bureau wanted to
use anticommunists in Congress “in order to properly and factually bring
before the American public what Communist activity has been going on in
92 • Real Enemies
the government for many years.”44 In this way, Hoover could expose the
blunders of his enemies in the White House while controlling the release
of the information so that the president and his aides, not the FBI, would
take the blame for past mistakes.45
Increasingly paranoid about his enemies in the White House, Hoover
even began to fear that Truman might be planning some sort of ploy to dis-
credit Bentley’s accusations, which, thanks to Philby, the FBI had not been
able to prove and which were still secret as the presidential election of 1948
approached. He thought that Truman’s attorney general might attempt to
prosecute the Bentley case without corroborating evidence because he knew
it would fail. As one FBI official explained, the president would “then be in
a position in 1948 to say that such charges of Communist infiltration made
by Republicans were investigated by the bureau and shown to be without
foundation.”46 Hoover projected his own Machiavellian tendencies onto the
president and resolved to fight him with all the weapons available to him.
By 1948, as the campaign began, Hoover took his crusade against the
administration to its logical—and disloyal—conclusion: he began using his
power to ensure that Truman was not reelected. He leaked his secret file
on the president to Truman’s Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. Most
of the file consisted of rumors of the president’s corruption years earlier
when he was a political boss in Missouri.47
Unlike earlier conspiracy theorists who suspected the government of
various crimes, however, Hoover was not an antistatist. He believed that
the state had an important role to play in protecting Americans from
overt enemies abroad and concealed enemies at home. In fact, he thought
the state—particularly his arm of the state—should have more secret power.
He was, however, opposed to the administration temporarily in control of the
state and determined to turn it out of office. As the election approached, he
began giving congressmen one file that he thought they needed to protect
the state’s security and confront the current government. It was marked
“Elizabeth Bentley, Internal Security, Espionage.”48 Hoover planned to
make the Bentley case public, in the proper congressional venue and at the
proper time. He could not, however, control his star witness.
BENTLEY HAD LED a rather glamorous life as a spy: good money, luxuri-
ous vacations, and frequent dinners in New York’s best restaurants. But
the FBI did not pay nearly as well as the KGB, and furthermore, it seemed
Masters of Deceit • 93
to be making little progress on her case. After more than two years as a
double agent, she began thinking about making her story public in hopes
of landing a lucrative deal with a book publisher. When she mentioned her
intentions to her FBI supervisors, however, they prohibited her from talk-
ing to reporters.49 Hoover wanted to manage when and how the Bentley
story reached the public. But in direct defiance of the FBI’s orders, Bentley
contacted an ex-communist reporter on New York’s Scripps-Howard news-
paper and began to tell her tale.50
The New York World-Telegram broke the story on July 20, 1948.
Deciding that a good spy story would be even better with a suggestion of
sex, the editors dubbed her the “blond spy queen.” The story of the red
queen, whose “gnawing pangs of conscience” had driven her to the FBI,
created an instant sensation in Washington.51 Within days, Bentley was
on a train to Washington to testify before two congressional committees,
including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Bentley’s spy story served the interests of an increasingly powerful
conservative lobby that was determined to discredit liberal officials and
their policies by associating them with communists. Since its birth in 1938,
HUAC had been crusading to destroy communist influence in the country,
which meant, in the views of most HUAC members, the destruction of the
New Deal itself. Its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, claimed
that New Dealers worked “hand in glove with the Communist Party,” and
a powerful Democratic member, John Rankin of Mississippi, dismissed
civil rights for African Americans as “communistic bunk.”52 A new mem-
ber of the committee, Richard Nixon of California, had recently defeated
the popular incumbent congressman from his district by falsely implying
that he was in league with subversives and communists.53
The committee received help from a loosely organized group of a few
hundred journalists, priests, businessmen, and ex-communists that had
been working diligently for years to expose what they saw as the hid-
den influence of communism in American life. The businessmen funded
the anticommunist network, the journalists disseminated its message, and
the ex-communists compiled lists of their former comrades to investi-
gate.54 Most important, Hoover and the FBI used the secret powers of
the government to gather information on these alleged subversives and
funnel it to the red hunters on HUAC. Like Hoover, most of the members
of the network were sincere in their deep aversion to communism, but
94 • Real Enemies
many of them also saw the political advantages of linking liberalism with
Bolshevism.
Some of the leaders of the anticommunist network had already estab-
lished careers as antigovernment conspiracists. John T. Flynn, a journal-
ist and the Nye Committee consultant and early Pearl Harbor skeptic,
continued his critique of statism with best-selling books. Flynn smoothly
transferred his suspicion of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt to
the newest Democrat in the White House. Soon he would begin construct-
ing an ambitious theory linking the supposed Roosevelt treachery at Pearl
Harbor to the triumph of communism in Asia.
In 1947, as the Republicans took control of Congress, Thomas took
charge of HUAC, and he trolled for headlines by exposing communists in
the movie industry. However, by 1948, Democrats sensed that the commit-
tee was losing public support. Truman felt confident enough to assail it as
“more un-American than the activities it is investigating.”55 Then Bentley
gave it new life.
Bentley’s public charges before HUAC in August 1948 seemed straight
out of pulp fiction. She told of surreptitious meetings on street corners,
knitting bags bulging with microfilm, and secret formulas scrawled on
scraps of paper. Most important, she alleged that more than twenty men
and women in the U.S. government had betrayed their country and know-
ingly passed information to the Soviets, now the country’s worst enemy.
“We knew about D-Day long before D-Day happened,” she said, drawing
on her cigarette, “and we were right.”56 No one on the committee noted
that top U.S. military officers had of course given a D-Day briefing to the
Soviets before the invasion since they were American allies at the time.
Bentley’s charges were sensational, but she had no proof for them. As
a result, liberal commentators soon began painting her as a fantasist and a
sociopath. They argued, in essence, that Bentley had middle-aged crushes
on the men she accused and that she had responded to their rejections by
inventing vicious lies.57 But the Republicans on HUAC wanted to believe
her, for she validated their dire warnings about the dangers of communists
in America. If she was telling the truth, then there had indeed been com-
munist traitors working in the New Deal administration. To many con-
servatives, her testimony seemed to give credence to the notion that the
expansion of government power in the United States had actually been
part of a communist plot. Desperate to find a corroborating witness, the
Masters of Deceit • 95
committee staff decided to subpoena a man known in anticommunist cir-
cles for making similar charges. In Whittaker Chambers, the red hunters
found their witness.
In a packed congressional hearing room, with the hum of movie cam-
eras and the pop of flashbulbs in the background, the repentant ex-spy made
his confession. Chambers supported Bentley’s story, though he was as vul-
nerable as the spy queen to charges of delusional psychosis. Slouching and
unkempt, he told the committee of his own long strange journey through
the “insidious evil” of the communist underground. In the mid-1930s, he
testified, he had supervised a group of American communists who had
infiltrated the New Deal. According to Chambers, two of his agents had
attained significant positions: Harry White, who had also been named
by Bentley in her public testimony, and Alger Hiss, who had not. At this
early stage, Chambers accused the men of being part of a “secret, sinister,
and enormously powerful force” bent on enslaving Americans. He did not
accuse them of spying.58 However, he explained, every communist was a
potential spy. “Disloyalty,” he testified, “is a matter of principle with every
member of the Communist Party.”59 White and Hiss angrily denied the
charges and demanded the chance to respond.
Harry White gave the Democrats a great boost when he eloquently
affirmed his innocence before HUAC. “The principles in which I believe,
and by which I live,” he testified, “make it impossible for me to ever do a
disloyal act or anything against the interests of our country.”60 The bril-
liant economist’s polished, confident demeanor contrasted favorably with
Bentley’s clearly mercenary performance and Chambers’s gloomy mum-
blings. As White parried the committee’s questions, the audience responded
with enthusiastic applause. Three days later, he died of a massive heart
attack. A few fringe anticommunists suggested that he had been “liqui-
dated” by fellow communists or had faked his death and escaped to the
Soviet Union.61 But the liberal outrage following his death convinced most
red hunters to drop the White case—for the moment.
As the most important accused spy still living, Alger Hiss took on tre-
mendous symbolic power. A Harvard Law graduate who had impressed
even his most distinguished professors, Hiss had always exuded the kind of
self-confidence and quiet intelligence that prompted others to predict that
he was bound for greatness.62 In his testimony, Hiss denied even knowing
Chambers, let alone sharing secrets with him in the 1930s. He relied on his
96 • Real Enemies
résumé and his connections to support his contention that he was hardly
“the concealed enemy,” as Chambers called him, but a trusted friend of
Supreme Court justices and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He had
advised Franklin Roosevelt at the wartime Yalta conference; he had served
as temporary secretary general at the founding conference of the United
Nations. He could not be a traitor.
Hiss’s shrewdest antagonist on the committee was the freshman con-
gressman from Orange County, Richard Nixon. Already a seasoned anti-
communist, Nixon was as angered by Hiss’s condescending attitude as he
was by his alleged crimes. Nixon pressed the witness until Hiss finally
admitted that he might have known Chambers under another name—but
not, he insisted, as a fellow communist.
When Hiss dared his accuser to repeat his charges outside the privi-
leged halls of Congress, Chambers obliged. “Alger Hiss,” he told a panel
of reporters on Meet the Press, “was a Communist and may be now.”63 In
response, Hiss sued him for slander. He had no reason to believe that he
would lose. After all, Chambers had never given any hint that he had been
more resourceful than Bentley and saved documents to prove his claims.
The Hiss-Chambers case seemed destined to end in a standoff: both
men insisted that they were telling the truth, but neither one was able
to prove it. The Truman administration responded by vigorously counter-
attacking the spy hunters. The president assailed HUAC throughout his
1948 reelection campaign, agreeing with a reporter’s characterization of its
espionage inquiry as a “red herring.”64 After he won a surprising victory in
November, Truman believed that he had the political muscle to smash the
committee’s conspiracy theories about the communization of America. He
hoped to persuade the House to abolish HUAC in the next congressional
session.65
But the mysterious Chambers had more surprises to reveal. As he met
with his lawyers to plan his defense against Hiss’s slander suit, he admitted
that there was “something missing” in his earlier charges. Hiss was more
than a communist: he had been a Soviet spy, Chambers said, and he had
the papers to prove it. Chambers led HUAC investigators to the edge of
his Maryland farm. He reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and trium-
phantly extracted some microfilmed State Department documents dating
from his spy days. He had hidden a stash of microfilm and papers—his
life preserver, he called it—soon after his defection, and had just recently
Masters of Deceit • 97
moved the microfilm to the pumpkin.66 The documents included memos
dating from the 1930s in Hiss’s and White’s handwriting.
98 • Real Enemies
fascist atmosphere in the U.S.”73 The Soviets were forced to abandon the
Communist Party as a recruiting ground for spies and to begin the modern
practice of paying Americans to spy for them.74
Yet in 1949 and 1950, a series of terrifying events gave credibility to
the conspiracists’ charges that enemies still lurked within the U.S. gov-
ernment. On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the
Soviets had exploded their own atomic bomb. Some Republicans charged
that Congress needed to discover and expel the traitors who had given the
bomb to the communists and would continue to leak national secrets to
America’s enemies. “Plainly,” said Representative Harold Velde, “Congress
must act now unless we want to welcome a second Pearl Harbor with open
arms.”75
The next month, Mao and the Chinese communists forced their oppo-
nents to flee to Formosa. Anticommunist congressmen proclaimed that the
communists had suddenly altered the global balance of power by adding
a half-billion people to their side—and that treasonous Americans within
the government had helped them do it. “Traitors in the high councils of
our own Government make sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side
of the diplomatic table,” Congressman Nixon argued.76
Who had “lost” China, Nixon and others demanded to know? A New
York jury seemed to provide part of the answer in January 1950, when it
convicted Alger Hiss of perjury. To compound the public relations disaster
for the Truman administration, Secretary of State Dean Acheson defended
Hiss, saying that he would never turn his back on his friend. Republicans
pounced on the statement as evidence of the incompetence and subversion
within the White House. “This,” said Congressman Nixon, “is only a small
part of the whole shocking story of espionage in the United States.”77
The next week, British officials announced that the Soviets had indeed
stolen some of the information they needed to build a bomb. They arrested
Klaus Fuchs for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. Fuchs had been iden-
tified by U.S. Army code breakers who had been diligently trying to deci-
pher Soviet telegrams dating from World War II. British agents confronted
him and, after some resistance, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Fuchs’s
confession led investigators to his courier, Harry Gold, whose own vol-
uble confession linked Fuchs, Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg, and some of
Bentley’s sources in a massive spying plot. The Soviets’ inattention to one
of the basic rules of spycraft—never let one courier handle the documents
Masters of Deceit • 99
of different spy rings—led to the destruction of the remaining traces of the
once-formidable Soviet espionage network in North America. “The circle
was complete,” wrote Robert Lamphere, the FBI agent in charge of the
Fuchs-Gold case.78 The battle was won.
Yet in destroying the espionage conspiracy, the FBI also exposed the
plot’s frightening dimensions. To some, this massive conspiracy seemed to
explain not just the Soviets’ luck in shaving a year or two off the time it
took to make a bomb; not just their swift advances in synthesizing rubber,
or processing film, or improving their airplanes. Instead, it explained noth-
ing less than the course of recent world history.
By 1950 the United States seemed to be on the “losing side” of the
cold war, in Whittaker Chambers’s words. The communists successfully
imposed their system on hundreds of millions of people and detonated the
most powerful weapon in history. Many Americans wanted to know how
the United States, the strongest and most virtuous country in the world,
could suffer these reverses. There was only one possible explanation: con-
cealed enemies, proven traitors like Hiss, White, and Fuchs, plus hundreds
of their unknown comrades, must have weakened America from within.
All of the elements of the conspiracy theory were in place. It remained for
one man to put them all together and give them a malicious twist.
PAULING AND OTHER TARGETS of FBI surveillance during the Red Scare
knew that the government was watching them. They also knew that many of
the red hunters in the government relied on exaggerations and outright lies. To
the victims of these lies and programs, the conservative anticommunist leaders
seemed more than overzealous or misguided. They seemed to have a plan.
To some progressives, only one thing could explain the hysteria over
domestic communism: a conspiracy by right-wingers to destroy the New
Deal, discredit radical ideas, and smother the hope of progressive change
in postwar America. According to Owen Lattimore, the man Joe McCarthy
had called the “top Soviet spy in America,” the real goal of the red hunt-
ers was to persuade Americans “that the man who thinks independently
thinks dangerously and for an evil, disloyal purpose.”122 Some progres-
sives, including former vice president Henry Wallace and former ambas-
sador Joseph Davies, even came to believe in 1950 that anticommunist
extremists were plotting an antigovernment coup.123
For his part, Pauling could not understand why the U.S. government
had pursued the self-defeating policy of trying to destroy him. The answer,
he decided, was that the anticommunist conspiracy theorists were them-
selves part of a great American conspiracy. Hoover, the FBI, and the “mili-
tary-industrial complex” were conspiring to silence progressive American
voices. The real un-Americans, Pauling believed, were the extreme anti-
communists.124 Hoover’s official conspiracies and conspiracism had inspired
an entirely different set of fears.
IN FEBRUARY 1964, three months after the assassination that shattered her
world, Shirley Martin packed her four children and her dog into her car
and drove seven hours southwest to Dallas. With a recorder concealed in
her armpit and her kids in tow, she tracked down the people she was sure
could help her learn the truth. On this and several subsequent trips, she
interviewed more than fifty people who had information about the assas-
sination of President John F. Kennedy, including the priest who gave him
the last rites, the woman who shared her house with the accused assas-
sin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and his family, and the furniture salesman who
stood close to the limousine when the fatal shot hit. Mrs. Martin’s hus-
band used a stopwatch to check the FBI’s time frame for Oswald’s alleged
movements.1 Before the assassination, Shirley Martin had been a house-
wife from Hominy, Oklahoma. But now she had a calling: she was going to
discover who had killed the president.
Martin was not alone. Maggie Field, a Beverly Hills housewife, filled
her spacious home with scrapbooks, file boxes, and seventy-five charts
detailing the names and locations of witnesses and other known facts of
the assassination.2 A bookkeeper from Los Angeles, Lillian Castellano, sent
for a map of the Dallas sewer system to see if another assassin might have
hidden in a storm drain.3 Sylvia Meagher, an analyst for the World Health
Organization in New York, spent six months making an annotated index
to the official government report on the assassination, which she termed a
“sleazy and insulting fantasy.”4
These skeptics shared a common conviction: they were certain that
their government was lying to them. At a time when 76 percent of the
public trusted the government to “do what is right most of the time,”
these Americans believed that their government was working to cover up
the truth—and that this cover-up could have tragic consequences.5 “There
are forces in this country who have gotten away with this thing, and will
strike again,” said Maggie Field. “And not any one of us is safe.”6
These researchers of the Kennedy assassination not only believed that
government officials had conspired, lied, and covered up aspects of the
murder; they also believed that they could expose this conspiracy on their
own. They could reenact key moments in the drama to check the official
story; they could interview eyewitnesses and “earwitnesses” to determine
the location of a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) shooter. They devel-
oped a nationwide, grassroots network to pool their knowledge and prove
that ordinary citizens could penetrate the national security state’s culture
of secrecy. “We are not alone,” wrote Castellano to another researcher.
“There are thousands of little people like you and I—all not satisfied—all
wanting the truth.”7
Unlike the anticommunist conspiracy theorists of the 1950s, the Ken-
nedy researchers had no alliances with wealthy businessmen or govern-
ment agencies. Indeed, they found themselves attacked by powerful
interests. Yet without patrons or publishing contracts, they were deter-
mined to find the source of what one researcher called “this evil set loose
on the world by the assassination of our president.”8 They formed local
study groups, spent hours on the phone with each other, wrote letters of
protest to the FBI, combed through the National Archives, and filled their
garages with witness location charts and photography labs.
Over the years, they would convert millions to their cause. They had
the virtues of dedication, diligence, and almost messianic belief in the righ-
teousness of their cause. They also had the advantage of being partly right.
BOTH THE CIA and the FBI had secrets that they hoped they could bury
with Kennedy. The FBI’s secret was mundane, but nevertheless vital to the
men who ran the bureau. FBI officials hoped fervently that the Warren
Commission would never discover the extent of the bureau’s “gross incom-
petency,” in Hoover’s words.36 The FBI had known before Kennedy visited
Dallas that Oswald was violent, unstable, politically extreme, and employed
at a warehouse on the president’s motorcade route. Moreover, Oswald
had threatened the U.S. government in person at the FBI field office in
Dallas. The bureau had a system for monitoring people who might harm
the government: it put their names on lists called the Security Index and
the Reserve Index, which included tens of thousands of Americans. Linus
Pauling was on one of them.37 Oswald was not on either one.38 Hoover’s
first priority was to cover up this embarrassing fact.
As a Soviet redefector, Oswald had fallen into the FBI’s vast domes-
tic surveillance net. Agents in Dallas and New Orleans had interviewed
him three times in 1962 and 1963. Initially, the agents did not believe that
Oswald merited more attention, and they closed his file. But when the
WHILE THE FBI was trying to cover up its incompetence, the CIA worked
to protect far more significant secrets. In trying to hide its own attempts
to murder foreign leaders, the CIA obscured the cold war context of the
assassination and robbed it of its political meaning.
Many citizens had long believed that a powerful, centralized spy
agency undermined American values of openness and limited govern-
ment. In 1944, when the wartime spy chief William Donovan proposed
a plan for the U.S. government’s first centralized intelligence group, crit-
ics responded that a spy agency was an un-American idea. The Chicago
Tribune lambasted Donovan’s proposed intelligence agency as a “Gestapo”
and quoted congressmen who foresaw the dawning of a totalitarian police
state in Washington. “What is it they call that Russian spy system—the
OGPU? It would certainly be nice to have one of those in our own country,”
one Republican senator commented dryly. Critics charged that the new
agency would give too much power to the executive branch. The Tribune
speculated that the new spy director could “determine American foreign
policy by weeding out, withholding, or coloring information gathered at
his direction.”52 These isolationist skeptics combined with military officers,
who wanted to control intelligence themselves, and J. Edgar Hoover, who
wanted to protect the FBI’s bureaucratic turf, to kill the 1944 plan for a spy
agency.53
But in 1947 President Truman decided to try again. He was convinced
that the U.S. government needed a strong, central spy agency to compete
against the Soviet Union in the cold war. To overcome Congress’s fears that
the new Central Intelligence Agency might be used against Americans,
Truman promised that it would have no internal security or police func-
ALL OF OFFICIAL WASHINGTON—the CIA, the FBI, the White House, and
the Kennedy family—expected the Warren Commission to conclude that
one sociopath had killed the president. The Warren Commission members
and staff were generally willing to follow this scenario. But their determi-
nation to prove the lone gunman theory encountered two unanticipated
problems.
Most later Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories would focus on
two key pieces of physical evidence: the silent movie of the killing made
by a bystander, local dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, and the president’s
body. In both cases, the U.S. government’s examination of the evidence was
rushed, incompetent, and unconvincing.
The Warren Commission started with the assumption that the assassin
had fired three shots. This seemed relatively uncontroversial at first: the
FBI had found three cartridge cases on the sixth floor of the book deposi-
tory, and the majority of witnesses had heard three shots. In its initial
report on the assassination, the FBI concluded that the three shots had all
hit something: the first shot hit Kennedy in the neck, the second wounded
Texas Governor John Connally, who was in the limousine with the presi-
dent, and the third hit the president’s head and killed him.
The Zapruder film captured the drama and all its grisly details on film.
On the day of the assassination, Zapruder had clambered to the top of a
concrete pillar midway up a grassy slope, hoping to use the added height
to get a good picture of the presidential motorcade with his color movie
camera. Unlike most of the other amateur photographers on the plaza that
day, he kept filming even after he heard the gunshots. In its first frames,
the two couples in the car, John and Jacqueline Kennedy and John and
Nellie Connally, seem smiling and relaxed. Suddenly, Kennedy grabs his
throat, then Connally slumps down. In its most disturbing sequence, the
film shows Kennedy’s head blown apart by a lethal shot.
Zapruder’s twenty-six-second color movie helped to spawn generations
of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Even before it was released
THOUGH THE PRESIDENT and at least one of the commission members did
not believe the Warren Report, they had utmost confidence in their ability
EVER SINCE NOVEMBER 22, 1963, many Americans have ascribed tran-
scendent importance to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was “the
archetypal crime of parricide” that shook the nation to its core, according
to a staff report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence.169 The historian Christopher Lasch proclaimed it “a symbol
of the country’s thwarted promise, of former greatness overthrown, of
the American dream in decline.”170 Many observers have concluded that it
marked the beginning of the end of faith in the liberal state.
Besides their obvious distrust of government, the assassination con-
spiracy theories also reflect a loss of faith in all experts—in government and
science—and in the whole idea of “expertise.” When the amateur sleuths
NIXON HATED ALL of the members of what he regarded as the liberal estab-
lishment, but he particularly loathed Jews, Eastern elites, and reporters.
The son of a grocer from Orange County, California, he had always been
AT LAST, THE CRITICS had won their fourteen-year battle: Congress had
authorized a thorough investigation by the elected representatives of the
people. Many of the Warren Report skeptics rushed to help the congres-
sional investigators, much as they had poured their enthusiasm into Jim
Garrison’s probe years earlier. Eager to accept their help, the committee
staff members organized a two-day conference with the leading critics.80
In an inquiry that lasted thirty months, cost $5.5 million, and employed
250 staff members, the House Select Committee on Assassinations used
subpoena power to compel testimony from witnesses, mobsters, and even
the “umbrella man,” a person who, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists,
seemed to signal someone by opening his umbrella as the motorcade went
past.81 In the end, the committee issued a massive report and twelve vol-
umes of hearings and appendixes.82
Yet the committee failed to satisfy anyone—the critics, the few defend-
ers of the Warren Report, or the public. On the one hand, the investigators
concluded that no agency of the U.S. government had conspired to assas-
sinate either Kennedy or King, and that the accused assassins, Oswald and
Ray, were indeed guilty. Furthermore, they upheld the single-bullet theory
in the JFK murder.
But the committee also contended that it had recently discovered new
evidence of a fourth shot, and therefore of a second gunman in Dealey
Plaza. The congressional investigators claimed that a motorcycle officer in
the motorcade had inadvertently recorded the assassination when his radio
transmitter got stuck in the “on” position. Acoustic experts said that they
ON THE SURFACE, the soldiers of Oliver North’s Enterprise might not seem
to have an obvious connection to little green men from outer space. But
inventive skeptics soon suggested otherwise. In the 1980s, conspiracists
dusted off a decades-old mystery in the New Mexico desert, imbued it with
cosmic significance, and “proved” its likelihood by linking it to real Reagan
administration conspiracies. In Roswell, antigovernment conspiracy theorists
found the ultimate explanation for government deception and cover-ups.
The Roswell “incident” occurred at the dawn of the nuclear age and
the cold war, just months after President Harry Truman had officially
announced his administration’s intention to fight communism all over the
globe. At the beginning of the summer of 1947, the first summer of the
cold war, hundreds of Americans began calling newspapers, radio stations,
and government agencies to report mysterious, unidentified objects hover-
ing in the night sky. By early July, a wave of “flying disk” sightings had
rippled across the American West. Many of these early witnesses assumed
that they were seeing secret U.S. or Soviet military vehicles, not ghostly
ships from another planet.48
WEBB’S ADMIRERS on the right drew on the ideas and strategies of earlier
white supremacist movements. Calling themselves the Patriot movement,
these activists of the 1990s had roots that stretched back to the neofascist
organizations of the 1970s and 1980s. Groups like the Order, the Aryan
Nations, and the Posse Comitatus spread the “Christian identity” belief
that people of color were subhuman “mud people” and that Jews were the
spawn of Satan.85 Right-wing extremists firebombed synagogues, robbed
banks, terrorized government officials, and assassinated liberal spokesmen
throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways, these far-right groups
were mirror images of the leftist revolutionary groups of the same era.
They organized in secretive cells, mixed ammonium nitrate bombs in
their cellars, and hoped to provoke government oppression, which, they
reasoned, would radicalize the masses and generate sympathy for the ter-
rorists.86 But these groups were on the fringes of American life. The FBI
estimated that the Posse Comitatus had between twelve thousand and fifty
thousand members, while the Order was far smaller.87
After the end of the cold war, these fringe groups helped to lay the
foundation for a much larger movement. Building on the doctrines of the
neofascists, the Patriot movement leaders emphasized a secular, libertar-
ian form of government bashing. White supremacy took a backseat to a
more marketable grievance: the threat posed to American citizens by their
government.
The Patriot movement comprised an eclectic assortment of antiabor-
tion activists, antienvironmentalists, nationalists, unapologetic racists,
survivalists, and gun rights advocates. Some members of this loosely orga-
nized movement were registered Republicans who worried about what
they saw as assaults on gun rights but believed it was possible to reform
the system from within; others were hard-core conspiracists who believed
THE FOUR WIDOWS from New Jersey were nervous as they sat down to
meet with the man they privately called “everyone’s favorite war crimi-
nal.”1 It was late 2002, and the women and other 9/11 family members had
just won their long battle to force President George W. Bush to appoint
a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the unanswered questions of
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Their husbands died in those
attacks, and these widows, known collectively as the “Jersey Girls,” wanted
desperately to discover if the 9/11 conspiracy involved more people than
the hijackers from Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist group.
But when the president appointed former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, one of the strongest advocates of official secrecy in U.S. govern-
ment history, as chair of the inquiry, the women wondered whether the
commission would wage an aggressive fight for truth. They worried that
Kissinger might try to turn the investigation into a whitewash that exon-
erated his friends in the Bush administration and the Saudi clients of his
international consulting business.
Kristen Breitweiser, a petite, thirty-two-year-old blonde with a scrubbed
face and carelessly tied ponytail, took the lead. She and the other three Jersey
Girls came from upscale, Republican suburbs across the state line from
New York, and two of them had voted for Bush in 2000. But the admin-
istration’s opposition to an exhaustive investigation of 9/11 had convinced
them that Bush did not want to discover the whole truth about the events
of that day. They looked like amiable soccer moms, but, as the president’s
supporters would soon learn, they should never be underestimated.
After introductions and small talk, Breitweiser, an attorney who had
practiced for just three days before quitting, and other family members
asked Kissinger to disclose his client list. Visibly irritated, Kissinger mum-
bled about confidentiality. He grudgingly conceded that perhaps “a lawyer”
could look at the list. “Kristen’s a lawyer,” one of the other widows piped
up. Kissinger stiffened in irritation. Then another Jersey Girl, Lorie Van
Auken, asked him if he represented clients who might present a conflict
of interest—such as, for example, the bin Laden family. Kissinger knocked
over his coffee cup and “nearly fell off the couch,” Breitweiser remem-
bered.2 He soon resigned from the commission.
The president’s supporters were outraged that the widows had effec-
tively vetoed his choice to lead the investigation, and they quickly mobi-
lized to assail the Jersey Girls as manipulative narcissists who reveled in
the attention brought by their victimization. The tone of these and subse-
quent attacks was always the same: How did these women dare to dictate
the terms of an investigation to the president of the United States?3 When
the widows met with the New York Post to complain about a particularly
vicious editorial against them, the Post’s editor, Bob McManus, expressed
amazement that they had gotten an appointment. “I don’t even know who
you people are, who you may think you are,” he said, “and frankly, I don’t
know how you even got in the building.”4
The Bush supporters were angry because the Jersey Girls had done far
more than get in the building: they had successfully disputed the power of
the mainstream media and political elites to define the meaning of 9/11.
In time, they would reject the findings of the official commission that they
had demanded and begin considering and popularizing “revisionist” theo-
ries about 9/11 that diverged from the official conspiracy theory sanctioned
by the White House. They worried that a small group of executive branch
officials—a cabal of neoconservatives—was trying to cover up damning,
perhaps even horrifying, secrets about 9/11. “We felt that the country was
at risk from terrorists and from incompetence,” Van Auken explained in a
9/11 documentary. “And maybe worse.”5
Real government conspiracies and cover-ups made these revisionist
theories more believable. The popularity of alternative 9/11 conspiracy
BUT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION began to lose some control over the
9/11 narrative just eight months after the attacks. In May 2002 reporters
revealed that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had separately warned
Washington in the months before the attacks that terrorists might be train-
ing in U.S. flight schools.38 A Phoenix agent even recommended that the
FBI check the visas of foreigners attending the schools—a recommendation
THE JERSEY GIRLS were among those who had begun to wonder about the
extent of their government’s prior knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Ironically,
the investigation for which they had fought so hard, conducted by the
9/11 Commission, only intensified their doubts. The commission failed to
answer many of the families’ questions, especially about the two hijackers
who lived in San Diego with the FBI informant. Was the government trying
to cover up links between the hijackers and Saudi or Pakistani intelligence?
The families were also furious that the commission stopped short of blam-
ing any U.S. government official for the tragedy. Despite the scale of the
catastrophe, CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all kept their jobs. Tenet, who
presided over the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history, even received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest award for civilians.
The Jersey Girls did not advocate a single alternative conspiracy theory.
Breitweiser focused on the mysteries surrounding a Pentagon operation
IN JUNE 2006, about five hundred members of the 9/11 Truth movement
gathered in Chicago to listen to lectures and panel discussions on the
unanswered questions of the September 11 attacks. The New York Times
described the group as a collection of “professors, chain-saw operators,
mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, college
students, a former fringe candidate for United States Senate, and a long-
haired fellow named hummux (pronounced who-mook) who, on and off,
lived in a cave for 15 years.” The Times explained that friends and family
members of the “truthers” thought that they might be “completely nuts.”
It was clear that the reporter shared this view.1
American scholars, public officials, and journalists frequently use the
metaphor of illness when they discuss alternative conspiracy theorists.
The experts see the conspiracist worldview as a pathology, a form of dis-
ease afflicting the body politic. In their view, the conspiracists suffer from
paranoia, as Richard Hofstadter said, or from a kind of social leprosy, in
the view of the Times. Their illness, for most observers, casts them to the
margins of our culture.
But by stopping at diagnosis and finger-pointing, these analysts of
conspiracy theories miss an opportunity to understand the sources of the
illness. Most important, their attempts to contain the disease tend to
exacerbate rather than alleviate it. To find a cure, we need to understand
why conspiracy theories are endemic to American democracy, how they
become epidemic, and which environments allow them to thrive. And here
we must turn from psychology to political history.
From World War I to the present, U.S. government actions have helped
to create these conspiracy theories in three ways. First, officials often pro-
moted conspiracy theories of their own. From Woodrow Wilson to George
W. Bush, they argued that sinister powers were pouring the “poison of dis-
loyalty” into our national arteries, or that enemies were plotting to bring “a
day of horror like none we have ever known.” To combat this evil, the official
conspiracy theorists argued, citizens must give more power to their govern-
ment. Often, though, Americans responded by rejecting these officials’ self-
interested arguments while embracing their conspiracist view of history. The
citizens agreed that there was a plot, but they identified different villains.
Second, government officials provided fodder for conspiracism by
using their powers to plot—and to conceal—real conspiracies. Operation
Northwoods, MKULTRA, and the arms-for-hostages trades were real con-
spiracies against democracy and individual rights. When U.S. government
agents dropped LSD into the drinks of ordinary citizens or offered a suit-
case full of cash to mafia gunmen to turn their sights on Fidel Castro, they
made the most outrageous conspiracy theories seem plausible.
Third, public officials have fed citizens’ antigovernment paranoia
by actively suppressing alternative views. The government agents who
smashed the printing plates of Charles Lindbergh’s books or put the tape
recorder under Martin Luther King Jr.’s bed were trying to control dis-
sidents and maintain trust in the U.S. government. But exposure of their
actions only intensified the public’s fears. The story of the dynamic rela-
tionship between these conspiracy theorists, the official and the alterna-
tive, is a tragedy of American democracy.
In the case of 9/11, the Bush administration officials’ response to the
terror attacks followed the model established in World War I and perpetu-
ated and refined through the cold war. They promoted conspiracy theories
(there were “a number of contacts”). They plotted conspiracies (the “intel-
ligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”). They expanded
executive power, repressed dissent, and lied and covered up the truth of
what they had done. All of these actions worsened rather than allayed the
American public’s distrust of its government.
Conclusion • 235
weakened over time. In the early twenty-first century, Americans discov-
ered that the mainstream media were often reluctant to challenge execu-
tive secrecy and question presidential narratives. Employed by a shrinking
number of media outlets, afraid of being labeled “conspiracy theorists” and
thus cut off by their official sources, reporters often serve as stenographers
to power. By calling attention to these failings, alternative conspiracy theo-
rists can play a useful role by demanding more transparency in the U.S.
government. Conspiracists, at their best, have inserted themselves into the
system of checks and balances.
Yet the costs of conspiracy theories far outweigh their benefits. 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 jus-
tifications 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. They started from the undeniable fact
that Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush did not
want a real investigation into a national tragedy. Then they moved, step
by step, down the path of supposition until they were convinced that the
president did not want to investigate a murder because he was, in fact, the
murderer.
Alternative conspiracy theorists can sometimes hinder the process of
historical discovery by refusing to change their position when the facts
they discover undercut their favorite theories. As a result of the Kennedy
researchers’ efforts, for example, historians have learned of conspiracies
and cover-ups in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but not the
ones the critics usually emphasize. The conspiracists never propose the
possibility, more likely on the basis of the evidence, that it was Kennedy’s
staunch anticommunism that got him killed. Instead, in their view, he
was the one person standing up to the evil plots of the military-industrial
Conclusion • 237
this sudden public involvement?” one reader asked. “Secret documents are
found and now the public is allowed to riffle through them all we want.
What are we being distracted from now?”9
Despite these complications, there are possible treatments. If official
conspiracies are the cause of the disease of conspiracism, then transpar-
ency surely is the cure. There’s an old saying that the cure for the ills of
democracy is more democracy. As the philosopher John Dewey explained,
this phrase signals the necessity of returning to the idea of democracy, “of
clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our
sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations.”10
Of course, the U.S. government can never be completely open, for a
modern state needs to keep some secrets to survive. Franklin Roosevelt,
for example, could not have allowed a real investigation of Pearl Harbor
without revealing to the Japanese that the Americans had broken some
of their codes. Moreover, as the Dallas Morning News case shows, total
transparency will not calm all fears, as some skeptics will never believe that
government officials or the media are disclosing everything they know.
But excessive secrecy breeds distrust, which can make it impossible for
democracy to flourish. By contrast, transparency causes government offi-
cials to hesitate before they engage in real conspiracies—and, at the same
time, restores Americans’ trust in their government. Opening the govern-
ment to public scrutiny would have helped to avoid many of the most cor-
rosive conspiracy theories of the twentieth century. If Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt had informed the public about their growing conviction
that the United States would soon join the world wars, they would have
deprived their critics of one of the best arguments against them: that they
“lied” the country into war. Similarly, if George W. Bush and his advisers
had not manipulated and misled the American public before the invasion of
Iraq, they would have avoided many of the worst conspiracy theories about
9/11. Thanks to the American tradition of openness, official conspiracies
nearly always come to light, and when they do they undermine the careers
and the power of the conspirators. As Richard Nixon, one of the preeminent
conspiracy theorists of the twentieth century, said in his farewell address,
“Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win
unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”11
Nixon did not understand the irony of his words, and the extent to
which his own hatred and fear had led to his downfall. His failure to grasp
Conclusion • 239
They have engaged in conspiracies and used the cloak of national security
to hide their actions from the American people. With cool calculation, they
have promoted official conspiracy theories, sometimes demonstrably false
ones, for their own purposes. They have assaulted civil liberties by spying
on their domestic enemies. If antigovernment conspiracy theorists get the
details wrong—and they often do—they get the basic issue right: it is the
secret actions of the government that are the real enemies of democracy.
INTRODUCTION
1. Thomas Hargrove and Guido H. Stempel III, “Anti-Government Anger Spurs 9/11
Conspiracy Belief,” Scripps Howard News Service, August 2, 2006, available at http:
//newspolls.org/story.php?story_id=55, viewed February 2, 2008.
2. Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Justification for US Military Intervention in
Cuba,” March 13, 1962, cover memo and appendixes, available at http://www.gwu.edu/
~nsarchiv/news/20010430/. For analysis of Northwoods, see Bamford, Body of Secrets,
82–91.
3. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba.”
4. Memo by General Lansdale, “Meeting with the President, 16 March 1962,” avail-
able at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/press3.html, viewed March 20, 2008.
5. See Loose Change, directed by Dylan Avery, at http://video.google.com/videoplay
?docid=7866929448192753501, viewed March 20, 2008.
6. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, 99.
7. Daniele Ganser, “The ‘Strategy of Tension’ in the Cold War Period,” in Griffin and
Scott, 9/11 and American Empire, 99.
8. For the best surveys of conspiracy theory in U.S. history, see Hofstadter, Paranoid
Style; Davis, Slave Power Conspiracy and Fear of Conspiracy; D. H. Bennett, Party of Fear;
Goldberg, Enemies Within; Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie.
9. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style.
10. Davis, Fear of Conspiracy, xiii.
11. For an interesting discussion of how Hoover effectively became the nation’s inter-
nal security minister, see Frank Donner, “Hoover’s Legacy,” Nation, June 1, 1974.
12. On conspiracy theories as narratives, see Fenster, Conspiracy Theories. See also
Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”; Knight, Conspiracy Culture. On narrative, see H. White,
Content of the Form.
13. Didion, White Album, 11.
14. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, 65–66.
15. For discussions of the “merchants of death” theories about World War I, see
M. W. Coulter, Senate Munitions Inquiry; Wiltz, In Search of Peace. Some important
refutations of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories include Alvin D. Coox, “Repulsing the
Pearl Harbor Revisionists: The State of Present Literature on the Debacle,” Military
Affairs 50, no. 1 (January 1985): 29–31; John Zimmerman, “Pearl Harbor Revisionism:
Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 2 (Summer
2002): 127–46; Stephen Budiansky, “Closing the Book on Pearl Harbor,” Cryptologia
24, no. 2 (April 2000): 119–30; Philip H. Jacobsen, “A Cryptologic Veteran’s Analysis of
‘Day of Deceit,’ ” Cryptologia 24, no. 2 (April 2000): 110–18. On communist spies and
McCarthyism, see Sibley, Red Spies in America; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; Haynes
and Klehr, Venona. The most complete refutation of JFK conspiracy theories is Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History. On Nixon’s crimes, see Kutler, Abuse of Power and The Wars of
Watergate. On conspiracy theories after Iran-contra, see Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy.
Finally, there are many Web sites and books debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, including
Dunbar and Reagan, Debunking 9/11 Myths.
16. Kutler, Abuse of Power, 8.
17. President George W. Bush, Address to the United Nations General Assembly,
November 10, 2001, available at the American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency
.ucsb.edu.
18. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities (hereafter Church Committee), Final Report, book 2, 23n.
19. Sibley, Red Spies in America, 2–3; Whitehead, FBI Story, 90.
20. Church Committee, Final Report, book 2, 20.
21. Ibid., book 3, 34.
22. Ibid., book 2, 47.
23. “Stolen Documents Describe FBI Surveillance Activities,” Washington Post,
March 24, 1971.
24. Robert Phillips, foreword to Schwartz, Ego, x.
25. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 38.
26. Ronald Inglehart, “Extremist Political Positions and Perceptions of Conspiracy:
Even Paranoids Have Real Enemies,” in Graumann and Moscovici, Changing Conceptions,
231–44. For more on who believes conspiracy theories, see Robins and Post, Political
Paranoia; Pipes, Conspiracy; Showalter, Hystories.
27. M. Moore, Dude, 2.
28. Quoted in Michael Powell, “The Disbelievers,” Washington Post, September 8, 2006.
1. Lindbergh, Why Your Country Is at War, 6. For the story of the smashing of the
plates, see Walter Eli Quigley, “Like Father, Like Son,” Saturday Evening Post, June 21,
1941; Larson, Lindbergh of Minnesota, 233–34. See also Quigley’s introduction to the 1934
edition of Lindbergh’s antiwar book, Your Country at War (Philadelphia: Dorrance). For
general discussions of the suppression of dissent in World War I, see Murphy, World War
I; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters.
2. Lindbergh, Banking.
3. The budget and employment data come from Statistical History of the United
States: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic, 1976), 1114, 1102. The main
U.S. agencies charged with suppressing dissent were the Bureau of Investigation, the
Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, and the Secret Service.
4. J. M. Cooper, Warrior and the Priest, 277.
5. “President’s Annual Address to Congress,” New York Times, December 9, 1914.
6. “President Wilson’s Speech,” New York Times, January 9, 1915.
7. “Text of President’s Speech,” New York Times, May 11, 1915.
8. O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, 2.
9. Leuchtenberg, Perils of Prosperity, 15; Lafeber, American Age, 273.
10. For examples of the Wilson administration’s secret sympathy for the British, see
House to Wilson, May 25, 1915, “House Material—Diary, Letters,” Records of the Special
Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (hereafter Nye Committee files), box 333;
House to Wilson, January 13, 1916, “House Material—Diary, Letters,” Nye Committee
files, box 333, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
11. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 140.
12. Quoted in Barnes, In Quest, 99.
13. “Text of the President’s Statement to the Public,” New York Times, March 5, 1917.
See also Ryley, Little Group.
14. Congressional Record, 64th Cong., 2d sess., 5007. For more on Norris’s opposition
to the war, see Lowitt, George W. Norris, chapters 3 and 4.
15. See Link, Wilson: Campaigns, 340–77.
16. Congressional Record, 65th Cong., 1st sess., 214.
17. Quoted in Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 8.
18. See W. I. Cohen, American Revisionists, 12–13. See also “Pacifism in the Middle
West,” Nation, May 17, 1917, 595–97.
19. Wilson’s Fourteen Points address to Congress, January 8, 1918, available at the
American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
20. Quoted in Todd, Wartime Relations, 17.
21. Wilson, speech in Washington Monument Grounds, June 14, 1917, available at the
American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
22. Wilson message to Congress, April 2, 1917, available at the American Presidency
Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
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3. Quoted in Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation, 438.
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Index
9/11 commission, 60, 214, 216, 219–20, 229–31 American Legion, 30–31
9/11 Truth Alliance, 223 American militia movement, 195–96
9/11 Truth Movement, 222, 224–25, 233, 235 American University address, 133–34
Andrews, Dean, 139
Able Danger, 230 Anticommunist conspiracy theories
Abrams, Jacob, 1, 18 9/11 and, 221
Acheson, Dean, 91, 97, 99–101, 103–5 end of cold war and, 195
Addison’s disease, 129 first Red Scare, 19
Adelman, Kenneth, 208 Iran-contra and, 178
Afghanistan, 1, 207, 222 Kennedy assassination and, 116, 123, 142, 148
African Americans mind control, 174–75
conspiracy theories and, 186–87 (see also Pearl Harbor and, 72–73
Tuskegee syphilis experiment) second Red Scare, 92–109, 112
theories about spread of crack cocaine, See also Castro, Fidel: assassination plots
187–92 against; Operation Northwoods; Soviet
Against All Enemies, 219 espionage
Al Qaeda, 205, 207–10, 220–21, 230–31 Anti-Semitism
Ali, Muhammad, 153 in anticommunist theories, 103–4
All Quiet on the Western Front, 29 in far-right theories, 193, 199–200
Allen, Woody, 136 in Nixon administration, 149–50, 155
America First Committee, 50, 69, 71–72 in Pearl Harbor theories, 52–53, 69–71, 73
American Civil Liberties Union, 70 in Populism, 17
American Justice Federation, 197 in World War I theories, 36
Area 51, 197, 199 Breitweiser, Kristen, 205–6, 212–16, 229, 231
Army-McCarthy Hearings, 106 Breitweiser, Ron, 214
Aryan Nations, 193 Bremer, Arthur, 156
As We Go Marching, 61–62 Brewster, Owen, 77, 79
Assassination Inquiry Committee, 144 Bryan, William Jennings, 16, 35
Assassination Review Board, 226–27 Buck, Pearl S., 55
Atta, Mohammed, 207, 209 Buckley, William F., 106
Avery, Dylan, 224, 226 Budenz, Louis, 83
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,
Baker, Howard, 222 195–98
Baldwin, Roger, 70 Bureau of Investigation, 14. See also Federal
Bamford, James, 227 Bureau of Investigation
Barber, Steve, 170 Bureau of Land Management, 198
Barkley, Alben, 75 Bush, George H. W., 183, 194
Barnes, Harry Elmer, 224 Bush, George W.
and opposition to World War II, 47–49, 51 and 9/11 commission, 205–6, 213
and Pearl Harbor theories, 60–63, 66, 70, 74, 79 conspiracy theories about, 1, 5, 221–22,
and World War I revisionism, 22–23, 27–28, 225–31, 235, 236–38
30, 39 (see also World War I) conspiracy theories of, 9, 208–10, 234
Barton, Bruce, 63 and control of 9/11 narrative, 211, 215,
Batista, Fulgencio, 123 220–21
Bausman, Frederick, 23 and domestic surveillance, 163, 228, 239
Bay of Pigs, 113, 124–25, 155–57 intelligence failure on 9/11, 211–15
Beard, Charles, 21, 39, 41, 51, 79 and weapons of mass destruction, 208–10,
Bentley, Elizabeth, 88–96, 99 216–20
Berlet, Chip, 200
Berlitz, Charles, 184 Cameron, Ewen, 177
Bernstein, Carl, 189 Campbell, Judith, 125
Bertrand, Clay. See Shaw, Clay Cantor Fitzgerald, 215
Bin Laden, Osama, 9, 205–7, 211–12, 219–22 Carlson, John Roy, 72
Birkhead, L. M., 71 Carroll, Jon, 237
Bissell, Richard, 124 Carter, Chris, 7, 202
Blair, Tony, 220 Carter, Jimmy, 163, 176, 178
Blix, Hans, 210 Carter, John Franklin, 69
Bluebird. See MKULTRA Casazza, Patty, 215
Blum, Jack, 188 Casey, William 179, 181
Body of Secrets, 227 Castellano, Lillian, 111–12
Boggs, Hale, 118 Castro, Fidel
Bolsheviks, 85, 89, 95, 116, 137 assassination plots against, 113, 119, 123–26,
Bone, Homer T., 41 134, 147, 162, 165–66, 168, 234–35
Borah, William, 39, 80 and Kennedy assassination theories, 113,
Brady Law, 196 116–18, 142, 147, 168–69, 227
Branch Davidians, 196–97, 200–201 plot to blame for terrorist attack, 2, 227
310 • Index
Catholics, conspiracy theories about, 4, 14 Colson, Charles, 156, 158, 165–66
Central Intelligence Agency, 5, 92, 122, 179 Committee to Investigate Assassinations, 132
in Bush administration, 209, 212, 217–19, Committee to Re-elect the President, 157
225–26, 229 Communist International, 105
and congressional investigations after Communist Party, 88, 99, 101, 108–9
Watergate, 162–64 COINTELPRO, 10, 107–8, 154, 161, 163, 191
conspiracy theories about, 113, 140–42, Condon, Richard, 175
145–46, 165–66, 168, 177–78, 186 Connally, John, 127–30, 137
in Cuba, 122–23, 125–26, 155 Connally, Nellie, 127, 130
and drugs, 8, 175–77, 186–92 Connally, Tom, 39, 58
and Iran-contra, 179, 181 Conspiracy theories
and Kennedy assassination theories, 113, believers of, 11–12, 166–68, 236–37
118–20, 122, 124, 127, 137, 140–42, history of, 2, 6
145–46, 168 theories about, 2, 5–8, 233–34
in Nixon administration, 153, 156–59 See also entries for individual conspiracy
See also Operation CHAOS theories
Chamberlain, John, 75, 78 Contras, 178–79, 182, 188–89, 191
Chambers, Whittaker, 86, 88, 92, 96–97, 100, 110 Cook, Fred, 132
Checkers speech, 151 Cooper, John, 118
Cheney, Dick Cooper, Milton William, 173, 194,
conspiracy theories about, 9, 204, 217, 220, 199–200, 203
222, 228 Coughlin, Charles, 54
conspiracy theories of, 207–11, 236 Coulter, Ann, 216
views on executive power, 160, 182, Creel, George, 18
213, 228 Crick, Francis, 84
Christian right, 194 Cuordileone, K. A., 105
Christiansen, Richard, 143 Currie, Lauchlin, 90
Church, Frank, 6, 160–61, 163–64, 166, 169, Czolgosz, Leon, 116
171, 224
Church Committee, 162–63, 166, 176, 184, 199, Danforth, John C., 196
213, 228, 239 Dark Alliance, 189–91
Churchill, Winston, 50, 64 Davies, Joseph, 109
CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Davis, David Brion, 3
Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, 153 Davis, Hope Hale, 88
Clark, Bennett, 31, 37–40, 69 Dealey Plaza, 114, 134, 144, 156, 167, 169–70
Clark, Champ, 31 Dealey Plaza Irregulars, 170, 235
Clarke, Richard, 208–9, 219 Debs, Eugene V., 19
Cleland, Max, 230 Decker, Bill, 170
Clinton, Bill, 173–74, 196, 198, 208 Department of Defense, 109, 149, 195, 217, 228
Clinton, Hillary, 202 Department of Justice, 4, 69–70, 84, 116–17,
Cockburn, Alexander, 147, 200 127, 153, 168. See also Bureau of
cold war, 104, 182–83, 195, 203, 227. See also Investigation; Federal Bureau of
anticommunist conspiracy theories Investigation; Hoover, J. Edgar
Index • 311
Department of State, 100, 104–5, 108, 132, 149, Kennedy assassination, 111–12, 114, 118–22,
182, 195 127–29, 132, 137, 139
Derounian, Avedis, 72 role in Bush administration, 209, 211–12,
Detzer, Dorothy, 29–30, 32 214, 226, 229
Deutch, John, 190 role in Nixon administration, 152–54, 157–59
Dewey, John, 71, 238 See also Bureau of Investigation;
Dewey, Thomas, 63, 65–67, 93, 185 COINTELPRO; Hoover, J. Edgar
Diem, Ngo Dinh, 155 Federal Emergency Management
Dies, Martin, 72, 80 Administration, 195, 225–26
Donner, Frank, 68 Federal Reserve Board, 36–37
Donovan, William, 122 Fensterwald, Bud, 132
Downing Street memos, 220 Ferguson, Homer, 75–76, 79, 101–2
Draper, Theodore, 181 Field, Maggie, 111–12, 135, 137
Du Pont, Pierre, 28, 31–33, 41 Fish, Hamilton, 47
Duelfer, Charles, 217 Flying disks, 183–84, 202, 222
Duke, David, 221 Flynn, John T., 224
Dulles, Allen, 118, 126–27, 130 and anticommunism, 73, 95, 103–4, 106–7
and hatred of Franklin Roosevelt, 47–49, 51,
Early, Steve, 68 53, 55
Eglin Air Force Base, 2 and Nye Committee, 32
Ehrlichman, John, 157 and Pearl Harbor theories, 60–65, 69–77,
Eisenhower, Dwight, 103, 106, 113, 123–24, 134, 79–81
147, 152, 185 Ford, Gerald, 6, 118, 177, 213, 228
Ellsberg, Daniel, 149–50, 154–57, 159, and post-Watergate investigations, 158–60, 171
166, 218 Ford, Henry, 31
Enemies List, 152, 158 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),
Engelbrecht, Helmuth, 30, 32 163, 228, 239
Enterprise, 179, 183, 185 Forrestal, James, 73
Epstein, Edward, 136, 140, 144 Fortune, 30
Espionage Act, 4, 14, 18 Fourteen Points Speech, 18
Frazier, Joe, 153
Fair Play for Cuba, 115 Freedom of Information Act, 7, 147, 176, 228
Faludi, Susan, 216 Friends of Democracy, 71
Faulk, John Henry, 132 Frost, David, 164
Fay, Sidney, 22 Fuchs, Klaus, 87–88, 99–100
Federal Aviation Administration, 226 Fulbright, William, 154, 159
Federal Bureau of Investigation, 5, 84
dramatized on television and in film, 202–3 Gaddis, John, 104
growth and secrecy of, 8, 67–69, 81, 107–8, Gallery, 170
152, 161–63, 165–66, 168, 195 Gallup poll, 159, 166
investigating communists, 85–89, 91–94, 100, Garrison, Jim, 11, 138–46, 167, 169, 224, 235
102–3, 106–9 Garson, Barbara, 142–43
investigating far-right groups, 193, 195–96 George, Walter, 40
312 • Index
Geraldo, 168 Holsinger, Joseph, 177
Giancana, Sam, 124–25, 162, 165 Homosexuality, used by conspiracy theorists,
Glass, Carter, 40 105, 108, 139–40, 199–200
Glenn, John, 2 Honegger, Barbara, 12
Globalization, 15 Hoover, Herbert, 55
Gold, Harry, 85, 87, 99 Hoover, J. Edgar, 4
Goldman, Emma, 116 anticommunist crusades, 19, 81, 84, 89,
Graham, Bob, 212–14, 225 91–94, 102, 107–9
Graham Committee, 212–14 in Church Committee investigation,
Grattan, C. Hartley, 23, 27 162–63, 166
Great Depression, 28–29, 34, 46, 88 Kennedy assassination, 113–14, 116, 119–22,
Greenglass, David, 87–88, 99 125, 137, 148
Gregory, Thomas W., 20, 54 in Nixon administration, 152, 154
Grey, Edward, 27 in Roosevelt administration, 67–69
Griffin, Burt, 126 See also COINTELPRO; Federal Bureau of
Griffith, Robert, 101 Investigation
Groden, Robert, 168 Hopkins, Harry, 57–58
Gulf of Tonkin, 132 Hosty, James, 120, 166
Gulf War (1991), 210, 217 House, Edward, 24–27, 42–43. See also
Gun control laws, 199. See also World War I
Brady Law House Intelligence Committee, 164
House Select Committee on Assassinations,
Haldeman, Bob, 149, 154–55, 160, 169–70
168, 218 House Un-American Activities Committee,
Hall, Theodore, 87 94–97
Hamilton, Lee, 230 Hubbell, Webster, 173–74, 198–99, 235
Hanighen, Frank C., 30 Hull, Cordell, 56
Hasselbeck, Elisabeth, 229 Hull Ultimatum, 56
Helms, Richard, 113, 125, 146 Humes, James, 128–29
Hersh, Seymour, 159–61 Humphrey, Hubert, 157
Hezbollah, 180 Hunt, E. Howard, 150, 156, 163, 168, 201
History Commons, 223 Hussein, Saddam, 207–11, 220, 228, 231
Hiss, Alger Huston, Tom Charles, 152
accused of espionage, 96–100, 102–4, 134 Huston Plan, 152, 159
and Nixon, 97, 149, 151, 155, 165
and Nye Committee, 32 I Find Treason, 71
and Soviet espionage, 86, 90 Idiot’s Delight, 33
Hofstadter, Richard, 3, 10–11, 233, 236 Illuminati, 4, 28, 222
Holland, Max, 140, 146–47 Income tax, 199
Hollywood, 70–71, 235. See also Motion Inouye, Daniel, 179
pictures, conspiracy theories; Television, Inquest, 136
used to distribute conspiracy theories Internal Revenue Service, 153
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 19 International Monetary Fund, 92, 97, 103
Index • 313
Internet Kennedy, John F., 109, 163
used to distribute conspiracy theories, 1, 7, assassination of, 111, 114, 118–19, 121–27,
189–90, 196, 221–25, 227, 235, 237–38 145–46, 162
YouTube, 224 conspiracy theories about assassination of, 5,
Iran-contra scandal, 178–83, 185, 188, 191, 193, 7, 112–18, 124–45, 166–69, 173, 185, 189,
199–200, 202–3, 228 200–201, 222, 224–25, 236–37, 239
Iraq effects of assassination and theories on
and 9/11 conspiracy theories, 1, 8, 207–9, American people, 145–48, 200, 203, 226,
220–22, 228, 236 229, 235
alleged weapons of mass destruction, 210–11, Nixon’s attempts to discredit, 152, 157
217–20 Kennedy, Robert, 113, 117, 125–28, 130,
144–45, 148, 162, 167, 177
Jackson, Jesse, 190 Kennedy, Ted, 156–57
Jefferson, Thomas, 198 Kent, Tyler, 64
Jenkins, Walter, 114, 122 Kerry, John, 188, 216
Jersey Girls, 205–6, 214–17, 229–30, 235 Kerry Committee, 188
Jews, 3, 155, 193. See also Anti-Semitism KGB, 91, 93, 98, 140, 146. See also
JFK, 146, 200, 227, 235 Soviet espionage
John Birch Society, 192, 221 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 179–80, 183
Johnson, David K., 105 Khrushchev, Nikita, 118
Johnson, Hiram, 49–50 Kimmel, Husband E., 57, 62–63, 73–74,
Johnson, Hugh, 52 76–77, 79
Johnson, Lyndon, 125, 132, 147 King Jr., Martin Luther, 145, 162, 165–67, 169, 234
conspiracy theories about, 140, 142, 236–37 Kissinger, Henry, 149, 153, 155, 205–6
conspiracy theories of, 113, 117, 126 Knight, Peter, 202
Nixon’s attempts to discredit, 152, 157 Korean War, 102, 175
and Warren Commission, 116–19, 130, 148 Koresh, David, 196
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 153. See also Department Kornbluh, Peter, 191
of Defense Krock, Arthur, 40
Jonas, Manfred, 53 Ku Klux Klan, 161, 221
Jones, Steven E., 226 Kuhn-Loeb firm, 36
314 • Index
Lennon, John, 177 Marcus, Raymond, 134, 142
Lewis, Anthony, 159 Marks, John, 176
Libby, I. Lewis, 207, 218 Marrs, Jim, 222, 226–27
“Liberal media,” 149–50 Marrs, Texe, 194
Liberty League, 31 Marshall, George, 57–58, 66, 76, 103, 185
Liddy, G. Gordon, 157 Marshall, Thomas, 21
Lifton, David, 136, 144 Masons, 3
LIHOP (“let it happen on purpose”) Martin, Shirley, 111, 131, 133
theorists, 221–22, 229 May, Alan Nunn, 89
Lincoln, Abraham, 198 McAdoo, William, 35–37
Lindbergh Jr., Charles A. McCain, John, 213
and anti-interventionism, 20–21, 45, McCarthy, Joseph, 6, 12, 84, 138, 144, 155, 195
51–53, 69 anticommunist conspiracy theories of,
anti-Semitism of, 53, 73 100–109
and hatred of Roosevelt, 48, 64 detrimental effects of, 123–24, 131–32,
Lindbergh Sr., Charles A. 140–141, 167
and anti-interventionism, 20–21 McCarthyism, 105, 108, 131
books smashed, 13–14, 234 McCloy, John, 91, 118
conspiracy theories of, 13–14, 23, 38, 141 McCone, John, 113
Little, Frank, 20–21 McCormick, Robert, 75
Lodge Jr., Henry Cabot, 50 McFarlane, Robert, 179–80
Long, Huey, 139 McGovern, George, 156
Long, Russell, 139 McKinley, William, 116
Loose Change, 1–2, 224–26, 229 McKinney, Cynthia, 221–22
LSD, 175–77, 234 McManus, Bob, 206
Luce, Clare Boothe, 45 McNamara, Robert, 1, 132, 227
Luce, Henry, 55 McVeigh, Timothy, 197–99, 201–2, 208
Lusitania, 16 Meagher, Sylvia
index to Warren Report, 111–12, 135
MacArthur, Douglas, 57 and Jim Garrison, 139, 143
MacBird! 142–43 organizes Kennedy skeptics, 131–37, 235
MacLeish, Rod, 165 victim of McCarthyism, 108, 131
Mafia “Merchants of death” conspiracy theories. See
and anti-Castro plots, 5, 113, 116, World War I
123–24, 234 Meyssan, Thierry, 222
and Kennedy assassination conspiracy MIHOP (“made it happen on purpose”)
theories, 147, 170 theorists, 221–22, 229
Magdoff, Harry, 98 Miller, Adolph, 36
“Magic,” 57–58, 60, 65–67, 74, 185 Millis, Walter, 29
“Magic bullet,” 128–30, 169 Mind control, 174–75, 177–78, 186. See also
Maheu, Robert, 124 Central Intelligence Agency
Mailer, Norman, 135 Mindszenty, Cardinal, 175
Mann, Thomas, 71 Mitchell, John, 150
Index • 315
Mitchell, William, 77 New Left, 142, 167
MKULTRA, 175–76, 234. See also Central New York Times, 149, 151–52, 154, 159–60, 170,
Intelligence Agency; Mind control 176, 183, 191, 218, 233
Mobsters. See Mafia Nixon, Richard, 115, 174
Moore, Michael, 11 paranoia of, 9, 149–55, 163–65, 218, 238–39
Moore, William L., 184 role in investigating communists, 94, 97, 99,
Morales, Frank, 235 101, 108
Morgan, Glen, 204 use of government to punish enemies and
Morgan, House of, 15–16, 24, 34–38, 42, 61. See obstruct justice, 5, 156–58, 167–68
also World War I Noonan, Peggy, 179
Morgan Jr., John Pierpont, 34–37, 41, 43 Norris, George, 17, 23, 33, 51
Morgenstern, George, 79 North, Oliver, 179–83, 199
Mormons, 3 Novak, Robert, 218
Motion pictures, and conspiracy theories, 202, Nye, Gerald, 31–32, 37, 39–43, 45, 48, 50,
223, 230. See also JFK 69–70, 107
Moussaoui, Zacarias, 212, 214 Nye Committee, 31–42, 51, 85, 94
Moyers, Bill, 199
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 182 O’Donnell, Kenneth, 128
Mueller, Robert, 229 O’Donnell, Rosie, 229
Mulder, Fox, 202–3, 227 Oglesby, Carl, 167
Murrow, Edward R., 106 Oklahoma City bombing. See McVeigh,
Muskie, Ed, 157 Timothy
Mylroie, Laurie, 208 Olson, Frank, 175–76
O’Neill, Paul, 219
National Academy of Sciences, 170 Operation CHAOS, 152, 159, 161. See also
National Archives, 112, 129, 226 Central Intelligence Agency
National Association for the Advancement of Operation Majestic, 12, 185, 222
Colored People, 190 Operation Midnight Climax, 176–77. See also
National Institute of Standards Central Intelligence Agency; LSD;
and Technology, 226 Mind control
National Labor Relations Act, 47 Operation Mongoose, 124, 161. See also
National Security Archive, 227 Castro, Fidel; Central Intelligence Agency
National Security Council, 123, 153, 179, 213, Operation Northwoods, 2, 227, 234–35
229. See also Rice, Condoleezza Operation Staunch, 180
Nativism, 3. See also Anti-Semitism; Catholics, Order, the, 193
conspiracy theories about Orwell, George, 116
Nelson, Steve, 87 Oswald, Lee Harvey
Neumann, William, 61 background of, 113–17
Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, 42, 48 and FBI, 119–22, 166
New Deal, 46–47, 67, 70 Johnson administration’s conviction that he
alleged Communist influence in, 80, 94–98, was lone gunman, 118–19, 128
107, 109 and Kennedy assassination researchers, 111,
See also Roosevelt, Franklin 131, 134–35, 139, 141, 145–46, 169
316 • Index
possible motive, 126, 147–48 Pumpkin Papers, 97–98
Oswald, Marina, 115–16, 120
Oval Office tapes, 149, 154, 158, 182 Radio, used to distribute conspiracy theories,
54, 71, 103, 189–90, 192, 221–22
Pacifists. See Detzer, Dorothy; Women’s Rangel, Charles B., 163
International League for Peace and Rankin, John, 94
Freedom Rauschenbush, Stephen, 31–32, 36, 38, 42–43
Page, Walter Hines, 24–25, 27–28, 42. See also Rauschenbusch, Walter, 31
World War I Ray, James Earl, 145, 166, 169
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 13, 53, 81 Reagan, Ronald, 12, 177–83, 200
Parker, Gilbert, 24 Red Scare, post–World War II, 84–85, 109. See
Parkland Hospital, 128 also Anticommunist conspiracy theories
Patriot Movement, 193–94 Reno, Janet, 196
Pauling, Linus, 83–84, 108–9, 119, 132–34 Reorganization Act, 48
Pearl Harbor attack, 56–59, 185, 238 Reserve Index, 119
and 9/11, 208, 228 Rice, Condoleezza, 210, 212, 229–30
and alleged communist plot, 95, 104 Roberts, Charles, 137
conspiracy theories about, 5, 7, 45–46, 61–67, Roberts, Owen, 60, 118
74–75, 79–81, 147, 155, 218, 221, 235 Roberts Commission, 60, 73
official investigations of, 60, 63, 73–74, Rockefeller, Nelson, 160
75–79, 130 Rockefeller Commission, 60, 160, 175–76
Pecora, Ferdinand, 35 Rollins, Richard, 71
Pentagon Papers, 149, 154, 159 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 48
Pentagon terrorist attack. See September 11 Roosevelt, Franklin, 6, 73–74
terrorist attacks alleged communist influence on, 84–86, 90,
People’s Party, 17, 23, 31, 33, 36, 38 95–98, 104
Philby, Kim, 90–91, 93 growth of government powers, 68–70, 80–81,
Pierce, William, 198, 201–2 107, 118, 142, 238
Pike, Otis, 164–65, 171 New Deal Programs, 46–48, 80
Pike Committee, 164 Nixon’s attempts to discredit, 150, 157
Pillar, Paul, 209, 219–20 role in Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, 45,
Plumbers, 150, 153, 157, 159 61–67, 74–78, 80–81, 218, 221, 236 (see
Poindexter, John, 180, 228 also Pearl Harbor attack)
Pope, James, 40 role in World War I investigation, 29, 31,
Populists. See People’s Party 41–43
Posse Comitatus, 192 support for Allies in World War II, 49–56,
Powell, Colin, 210–11, 220 59, 63, 73
Presidential Medal of Freedom, 229 Roosevelt, Theodore, 15
Project for a New American Century, Rosenberg, Emily, 59
207–8, 228 Rosenberg, Ethel, 88, 134
Prouty, Fletcher, 200 Rosenberg, Julius, 88, 99, 102, 134
Public opinion polls, 48, 209, 211, 220, 229. See Rosselli, Johnny, 124
also Gallup poll Roswell incident, 183–85, 203
Index • 317
Rove, Karl, 218, 230 Sherwood, Robert, 33
Rowe, Korey, 229 Shipstead, Henrik, 64
Ruby, Jack, 11, 120 Short, Dewey, 77
Ruby Ridge siege, 195–96, 200, 203 Short, Walter, 57–58, 62, 73–74, 76
Rumsfeld, Donald, 154, 160, 207, 218, 220 Sidey, Hugh, 159
Rush to Judgment, 136 Simpson, O. J., 202
Russell, Richard, 118–19, 130 Single-bullet theory. See “Magic bullet”
Russian Revolution, 6, 137 Sirhan, Sirhan, 144, 177
Ryan, Leo, 177 Skull & Bones, 194
Smith, George H. E., 63, 78
Sabotage! The Secret War against America, 71 Somoza, Anastasio, 178
Safford, Laurance, 76–77 Soviet espionage, 84–93, 97–100, 147, 204
Safire, William, 165 Springsteen, Bruce, 215
Salandria, Vincent, 133–34 Stalin, Joseph, 51, 73, 85–87, 89, 104
Salinger, J. D., 177 Star Wars, 198
San Jose Mercury News, 188–91 Stimson, Henry, 56, 73
Saudi Arabia, 213, 225, 229 Stokes, Louis, 181
Sayers, Michael, 71 Stone, Harlan Fiske, 67
Schorr, Daniel, 159 Stone, Oliver, 7, 146, 200, 224, 226–27, 235
Schwartz, Delmore, 10 Students for a Democratic Society, 167
Schweiker, Richard, 168, 177 Suskind, Ron, 211, 225–26
Scully, Dana, 202–3, 227
Second Amendment, 195, 197 Taft, Robert, 53
Secret Brotherhood, 194 Tague, James, 121
Security Index, 119, 121 Taliban, 207
Sedition Act of 1918, 14, 18. See also Tansill, Charles, 61, 79
Espionage Act Television, used to distribute conspiracy
Seldes, George, 30 theories, 106, 168, 173–74, 200, 202–4,
Senate Munitions Inquiry, 28 207, 229
September 11 terrorist attacks Tenet, George, 229
alternative conspiracy theories about, 1, 5, 9, Theobald, Robert, 79
11, 221–31, 236, 238 Thomas, J. Parnell, 94–95
intelligence failure to predict, 211–14 Thompson, Paul, 223, 225, 227
official conspiracy theories about, 9, 207–11, Three Days of the Condor, 168
236, 238 Trafficante, Santo, 124
official investigations of, 205–6, 211–16, 219, Trillin, Calvin, 135
229–31 Trochmann, John, 195
See also 9/11 commission Truman, Harry, 6, 157, 175, 183
Sevareid, Eric, 29 creation of CIA, 122–23
Shanklin, Gordon, 120 and domestic anticommunism, 91–93, 95,
Shaw, Clay, 139–41, 145–46 97–99, 101–2, 105
Sheen, Charlie, 229 Pearl Harbor investigation, 74–75, 78
Shenon, Philip, 230 Tumulty, Joseph, 40
318 • Index
Turner, Stansfield, 163, 176 Wall Street. See World War I:
Turner Diaries, 197–98, 201 financial interests in
Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 186–87, Wallace, DeWitt, 73
191, 203 Wallace, George, 156–57, 201
Tydings, Millard, 102 Wallace, Henry, 91, 109
Walsh, David I., 59
Unabomber, 201 Warburg, Paul, 36–37
Unidentified Flying Objects. See Flying disks Warren, Earl, 115, 118, 130, 133, 142–44,
United Nations, 97, 103, 109, 115, 196, 210, 148, 239
217, 220 Warren Commission, 60
United States federal government critics of, 131–47, 166–69, 173
conspiracy theories promoted by, 9–10, 234, investigation, 118–30
239–40 (see also Bush, George W.; Iran- Warren Report. See Warren Commission
contra scandal; Johnson, Lyndon; Kennedy, “Warrenologists,” 131
John F.; World War I; World War II) Washington Post, 154
distrust of, 1–3, 173–74, 234, 238–39 Watergate scandal, 156–60, 178, 182, 222
(see also Iran-contra scandal; September 11 distrust caused by, 80, 165–68, 170–71,
terrorist attacks; Vietnam War; Watergate) 184–85, 191, 202–3
growth of, 4, 8–9, 14, 18, 235–36 Waters, Maxine, 190
investigations of conspiracy theories by, Watson, James, 84
6–8, 169–70 (see also Church Committee; Waugh, Evelyn, 106
Graham Committee; Kerry Committee; Weaver, Randy, 195, 200–201
Nye Committee; Pike Committee; Warren Weaver, Samuel, 195, 200–201
Commission) Weaver, Vicki, 195, 200–201
U.S. v. McWilliams, 69 Webb, Gary, 188–93, 199, 235
USA Patriot Act, 228 Weisberg, Harold, 108, 131, 137, 140
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, 211 Wheeler, Burton K., 69
anticommunism of, 103, 107
Van Auken, Lorie, 206, 235, 239 opposition to vigilantism, 20–21
Velde, Harold, 99 suspicion of FDR, 47, 51–55, 64, 72, 81
Venona, 91–92 White, Harry Dexter, 86, 88, 90, 92, 96, 98, 100,
Vidal, Gore, 201–2 102–4
Vietnam War, 179 White, Jack E., 190
distrust generated by, 80, 132–33, 161, Wicker, Tom, 170
184, 186 Wilkerson, Lawrence, 220
and Kennedy assassination theories, 140, Willkie, Wendell, 53
142–43, 144–45, 167 Wilson, Joseph, 217–18
and Nixon, 149, 151, 155 Wilson, Valerie Plame, 217–18
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 26–27 Wilson, Woodrow, 83, 95
accused of lying, 39–41, 238
Waco siege, 196–97, 200–201, 203 and intervention in World War I, 15–17, 238
Waits, Tom, 215 rhetoric about World War I, 6, 18–19, 21–23,
Walker, Edwin A., 115, 141–42 40–41, 42, 234
Index • 319
Wilson, Woodrow (continued) debate over U.S. entry into, 5, 17
in World War I conspiracy theories, 25–28, financial interests in, 15–16, 23–24
33–35, 201 (see also Morgan, House of;
See also World War I Nye Committee)
Wolfowitz, Paul, 207–8, 219 turning point in growth of government, 4, 15
Women’s International League for Peace and vigilantism, 20–21
Freedom, 29–30 World War II
Wood, Robert E., 49, 61, 66 debate over U.S. entry into, 5, 61–63, 66
Woodruff, Roy, 59 See also Pearl Harbor attack; Roosevelt,
Woodward, Bob, 189 Franklin
World Bank, 92
World Health Organization, 108 X-Files, The, 7, 173–74, 202–4, 227
World Trade Center, 7, 225–26, 229
World Trade Center bombing (1993), 208 Yalta Conference, 97–98, 104
World Trade Center Towers. See September 11 Young Communist League, 88
terrorist attacks Zaharoff, Basil, 32
World War I Zapruder, Abraham, 127
conspiracy theories about Zapruder film, 127–28, 130–31, 135, 138, 145,
German Americans in, 20 168, 224
conspiracy theories about U.S. entry into, Zedong, Mao, 99
7, 13–14, 25, 181, 234 (see also Nye Zelikow, Philip, 230–31
Committee) Ziegler, Charles, 184
conspiracy theories set forth by Wilson Zimmermann, Alfred, 16
administration, 18–19, 21–22, 234, 239 Zumwalt, Elmo, 153
320 • Index