McCarthyism, from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump

Posted on October 7, 2019 by petrel41

This 28 January 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”: Film Explores How Joseph McCarthy’s Ex-Aide Mentored Trump & Roger Stone

Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who was arrested on Friday, and Donald Trump share a unique history: Both were heavily influenced by the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s and would later become a leading mob attorney. Cohn represented Trump for years and once claimed he considered Trump to be his best friend. Cohn is the subject of a new documentary at the Sundance Film Festival titled “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” We speak to the film’s director, Matt Tyrnauer.

By Fred Mazelis in the USA:

Where’s My Roy Cohn?: A documentary on McCarthy’s right-hand man, mentor to Trump

7 October 2019

The title of this newly released documentary refers to a tirade reportedly unleashed by Donald Trump early in his presidency, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the federal investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russian “meddling” in the 2016 campaign.

Although Cohn had by then been dead for 31 years, Trump was wishing he still had the services of the man who became infamous as the 26-year-old second-in-command to the notorious senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy at the height of the anti-communist witch hunt of the early 1950s. Cohn later became the mentor to the New York real estate developer who now occupies the Oval Office. Many observers have already noted the similarities in style and politics between Trump and Cohn—the barefaced lying, gangster mentality and tactics, disdain for elementary democratic rights, and fanatical hostility to socialism and communism—but further examination of the connection between the two men is certainly appropriate.

The film, directed by Matt Tyrnauer, a journalist for Vanity Fair magazine, adds little to what is already known about Cohn’s life and fails to offer a serious explanation of Cohn’s rise to prominence or his legacy. That legacy, however—the contemporary role of the ultra-reactionary politics he personified—makes this a timely film, if only for its archival material.

A generation that was not even born when Cohn died in 1986 can learn something from the newsreel footage, old television interviews and other elements presented. Among those interviewed for this film are journalists David Cay Johnston, Ken Auletta and Sam Roberts; Cohn’s cousins Anne Roiphe and David Marcus; and others. There are snippets of television journalist Mike Wallace, as well as a brief excerpt from an angry televised exchange between Cohn and writer Gore Vidal.

As recounted in the film, Cohn was born in 1927 into a wealthy New York City Jewish family. His father was a judge. His mother had by all accounts the greatest influence on him as he grew to maturity. He attended private schools in the city, and then Columbia College and Law School, from which he graduated at the extraordinarily young age of 20. He was only 21 when, thanks to family connections, he became an assistant US attorney.

Soon he joined the prosecution team in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been charged with conspiracy to commit atomic espionage for the Soviet Union. As the documentary notes, Cohn, along with trial judge Irving R. Kaufman, was used to immunize the government against charges of anti-Semitism.

The authorities were well aware that a large percentage of American Jews were influenced by the Communist Party and by the left in general. They used the prosecution both to whip up anti-Semitism and also, at the peak of the Cold War, to secure the allegiance and obedience of that section of the Jewish population that occupied a prominent place in government, business and academia. Cohn played a particularly filthy role in railroading the Rosenbergs, and it was later revealed that he had had telephone discussions with Judge Kaufman, a flagrant violation of judicial ethics, to insist that both defendants be put to death.

Cohn’s aggressive role in the Rosenberg trial brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, the fanatically anti-communist director of the FBI. Hoover then recommended Cohn to Joseph McCarthy, who, as chairman of the Senate Special Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was riding high in his crusade against suspected communists and their sympathizers in government, the media and elsewhere.

Cohn’s role with McCarthy came to an end in 1954, after the Army-McCarthy hearings. Cohn was accused by the Army of repeated and improper attempts to secure special treatment for G. David Schine, his “close personal friend”, who had been hired as a consultant to the McCarthy committee and drafted into the Army in 1953.

Part of the hearings were televised to a wide audience, as shown in video footage in the documentary. Behind the specific charges leveled against Cohn were bitter tactical differences within the ruling establishment. The proceedings led eventually to McCarthy’s censure by the Senate in December 1954, a blow that proved fatal to his political career and was followed by his death a few years later.

Cohn had been forced to resign from his Senate staff position. The young anti-communist crusader did not disappear, however. On the contrary, as Where’s My Roy Cohn? explains, he went on to enjoy a lucrative legal career.

Cohn became a partner in the New York firm of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan. Business executives and various white-collar criminals were eager to make use of his services. Cohn used his trademark methods to amass great wealth over the next several decades. His clients included the New York Yankees and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. In the 1970s, Cohn became prominent as the attorney for the biggest Mafia families, including those headed by the likes of Carmine Galante, John Gotti and Tony Salerno.

It was during this period that Cohn was also retained by Donald Trump. The Trump Organization had been sued by the US Justice Department in 1973, accused of racial discrimination in the rental of apartments it managed in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Cohn countersued for the improbable sum of $100 million. While the countersuit was dismissed, Trump was able to settle the case out of court a few years later. Cohn became a mentor to the young Trump, who at the time was not yet 30 years old.

Alongside his wealth, and despite his notoriety, the former McCarthy aide continued to enjoy significant political influence during the 1970s and 1980s. Cohn was always able to get through to the White House during the Nixon and Reagan years, serving at times as a kind of unofficial adviser.

In the late 1970s he met Rupert Murdoch, who had bought the erstwhile liberal New York Post, his first major foray into the US media market. It was Cohn who later introduced Trump to Murdoch. There is thus a fairly direct connection between the McCarthyite prosecutor of the 1950s and today’s Fox News, the semi-official media outlet for the Trump White House.

Cohn never lacked for friends in high places, in both business and government circles. These connections are illustrated in the film in striking photographs of Cohn at various social and political functions. One shows him with Trump and New York Mayor Ed Koch. Another has Cohn between former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and New York’s arch-right-wing Francis Cardinal Spellman (one of Cohn’s strongest supporters). Other footage shows Cohn at New York’s Studio 54 nightclub, hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol.

Although he was the subject of federal investigations on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohn—no doubt helped by many friends among both Democrats and Republicans—was able to either avoid charges or win acquittal. In 1986, this support began to wane.

The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred Cohn, citing, among other things, misappropriation of clients’ funds and pressuring a comatose client to amend his will. The documentary dwells on this latter case, concerning Lewis Rosenstiel, the multimillionaire founder of Schenley Liquors. Cohn lifted the hand of the unconscious and dying man. The resulting “signature”, shown to somewhat comical effect on screen, was ruled indecipherable and inadmissible in court.

Only five weeks after his disbarment, Cohn was dead of AIDS. His refusal to the very end to acknowledge either his homosexuality or his illness is highlighted at some length in the film. What makes this pertinent is Cohn’s own use of right-wing homophobia. In the 1950s he assisted McCarthy in the so-called Lavender Scare, during which homosexuals were hounded out of their federal jobs on the grounds that they were security risks. Thousands suffered ostracism and humiliation, and a few committed suicide.

It is necessary to understand Cohn and not merely to describe him. On this score, Where’s My Roy Cohn? gives generally shallow answers. How did he become so prominent when he was still in his early 20s? Why was he able to go on to a life of wealth, privilege and continuing political influence even after he was disgraced in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954? And why, above all, has he seemingly been reincarnated in the Trump White House today?

The usual answers, including attributing Cohn’s behavior to his mother’s influence or to some inexplicable lust for power, are either false or misleading. Cohn’s vitriolic anti-communism drove him from the beginning. He never wavered for an instant, never softened his views during the more liberal decade of the 1960s. He is shown in an interview toward the very end of his life. Asked whether he had any regrets about sending the Rosenbergs to their deaths, he replies, “If I could have pulled the switch, I would have done it myself.”

His rabid anti-communism made Cohn useful to the ruling elite. The McCarthyite Red Scare, with Cohn playing such a prominent role, must be understood in the post-World War II context. The American ruling class faced a massive strike wave in the years immediately following the end of the war. At the same time, it had to confront the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the growth (based in part on the prestige of the Soviet Union, despite the crimes of Stalinism) of the Communist Parties in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the colonial revolution sweeping much of Asia and Africa.

A major aim of the anti-communist hysteria was the purging of the labor movement, especially the housebreaking of the CIO, which had emerged out of the industrial union struggles of the 1930s. A major reason for the shift in the political winds against McCarthy by 1954 was the consolidation of a bitterly anti-communist and pro-imperialist bureaucracy in both the AFL and CIO. The two union federations merged in 1955 on the basis of ferocious anti-communism and support for US imperialism in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The development of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy as a bulwark in defense of capitalism persuaded sections of the ruling class that the Wisconsin demagogue, with the reptilian Cohn at his side, was no longer necessary—especially when he began to attack the pillars of the capitalist state, including the Army.

As noted, Cohn did not fade away, despite pious liberal denunciations of McCarthyism in subsequent years. For capitalism in the period of imperialist decay, democracy is always disposable. The ruling classes may prefer to rule when they can through forms that allow for open debate within the establishment, along with the promotion of certain democratic illusions for the masses. The past century has shown how quickly these democratic forms are dispensed with, however.

Cohn’s friendships in high places were an indication that his methods were still being held in reserve. The whole McCarthy era passed, but the impact of the devil’s bargain made by American liberalism with the most reactionary anti-communist forces continued to be felt. Cohn’s brand of semi-fascism was put on the shelf, but never buried.

Which brings us to the Trump presidency. Where’s My Roy Cohn? clearly aims to point the finger at Trump with an eye to the 2020 election. To the extent this film has a message, it is that today’s self-proclaimed “progressives” are the answer to the dangers emanating from the White House.

…

Since the theft of the 2000 election, it has become increasingly clear that there is no longer any constituency within the US ruling class … for the defense of democratic rights at home, as well as throughout the world.

This finds expression today both in the Trump presidency and the Democrats’ efforts to attack Trump from the right. In the White House itself, Trump’s 34-year-old chief aide Stephen Miller struts about like a resurrected Roy Cohn. Trump, the political descendant of McCarthy and Cohn, has ascended to higher office than his mentor and is encouraging the formation of a fascist movement. Yet such is the depth of the political crisis of American capitalism that Trump can argue, with some perverse justification, that he is the victim of a witch hunt, as the Democrats play the national security card over issues such as Ukraine and Russia.

The author also recommends:

New York Times column compares Trump probe to hunt for Soviet “atomic spies”
[3 April 2017]

Trump: An American Dream—Documentary traces rise of New York real estate billionaire
[11 June 2018]

‘Thousands of German nazis recruited as United States spies’

Posted on October 27, 2014 by petrel41

This 2012 History Channel video from the USA is called CIA and the nazis, documentary.

From the New York Times in the USA:

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

OCT. 26, 2014

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.

The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist “sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

His son, Gus von Bolschwing, who learned many years later of his father’s ties to the Nazis, sees the relationship between the spy agency and his father as one of mutual convenience forged by the Cold War.

“They used him, and he used them,” Gus von Bolschwing, now 75, said in an interview. “It shouldn’t have happened. He never should have been admitted to the United States. It wasn’t consistent with our values as a country.”

When Israeli agents captured Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, Otto von Bolschwing went to the C.I.A. for help because he worried they might come after him, memos show.

Agency officials were worried as well that Mr. von Bolschwing might be named as Eichmann’s “collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the U.S.” a C.I.A. official wrote.

After two agents met with Mr. von Bolschwing in 1961, the agency assured him it would not disclose his ties to Eichmann, records show. He lived freely for another 20 years before prosecutors discovered his wartime role and prosecuted him. He agreed to give up his citizenship in 1981, dying months later.

In all, the American military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that declassified war-crime records.

The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team, but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible.

“U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes,” he said. “Information was readily available that these were compromised men.”

None of the spies are known to be alive today.

The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.

Mr. Dulles believed “moderate” Nazis might “be useful” to America, records show. Mr. Hoover, for his part, personally approved some ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed accusations of their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda.

In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.

John Fox, the bureau’s chief historian, said: “In hindsight, it is clear that Hoover, and by extension the F.B.I., was shortsighted in dismissing evidence of ties between recent German and East European immigrants and Nazi war crimes. It should be remembered, though, that this was at the peak of Cold War tensions.”

The C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

The Nazi spies performed a range of tasks for American agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, from the hazardous to the trivial, the documents show.

In Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In Connecticut, the C.I.A. used an ex-Nazi guard to study Soviet-bloc postage stamps for hidden meanings.

In Virginia, a top adviser to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains.

But many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security reviews show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or embezzlers, and a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents, the records show.

Mr. Breitman said the morality of recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely considered. “This all stemmed from a kind of panic, a fear that the Communists were terribly powerful and we had so few assets,” he said.

Efforts to conceal those ties spanned decades.

When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene.

The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show.

Mr. Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994.

When C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him “you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its ex-spy, he said.

Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was ultimately deported.)

The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers.

In a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A. wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”

This article is adapted from “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” by Eric Lichtblau, to be published Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Albert Einstein and politics

Posted on June 25, 2007 by petrel41

This is a video about Albert Einstein and the E=mc² equation.

From History News Network in the USA:

6-25-07

What Were Einstein’s Politics?

By David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann

David E. Rowe & Robert Schulmann are the editors of Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton University Press, 2007).

The Cold War ushered in a period of intense rivalry and suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Domestically, formal and unofficial probes into an individual’s political reliability became commonplace. The era of the loyalty oath and the security-clearance boards had arrived. Given Einstein’s propensity to speak his mind and his fearless association with organizations under suspicion he presented a tempting target for those who viewed expressions of sympathy for the wartime Russian ally, however measured, as treasonable.

Claims that he was an extremist had been levied against Einstein early in his career. In response to the charge in 1919 that he was “a Communist and anarchist,” he declared in an interview that “nothing is farther from my mind than anarchist ideas. I do advocate a planned economy, which cannot, however, be carried out in all workplaces. In this sense I am a socialist.” Similar wild-eyed accusations of radicalism were floated after the Second World War. Infuriated, for example, by Einstein’s call to break relations in late 1945 with Spanish leader Francisco Franco, an erstwhile ally of Hitler’s Germany, Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi attacked Einstein on the floor of Congress as a “foreign-born agitator” who sought “to further the spread of Communism throughout the world.”

Often detractors skirted the issue of outright allegiance to Moscow by asserting that Einstein was but a hapless victim. Just months before the Russian regime exploded an atomic device, Life magazine presented a powerful visual display of Einstein’s questionable loyalties by situating him prominently in a rogue’s gallery of photos. The banner title read: “Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress up Communist Fronts.” Thus were assertions of political unreliability readily paired with claims of naïveté.