Carl
Oglesby was born in Ohio. After graduating from Kent
State University, he worked in Michigan as a technical editor
for a defense contractor.
Oglesby
was radicalized by the Vietnam War. In
1965 he was elected president of the Students
for a Democratic Society, a group that organized opposition to
the war. Oglesby went on to teach politics at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Dartmouth
College.
In
1972 Oglesby was one of the founders of the Assassination Information
Bureau. His writings include the afterword in the book written by
Jim Garrison (On
the Trial of the Assassins). Oglesby is also the co-author
of Containment and Change (1967)
and the editor of The New Left Reader
(1969). Oglesby is also the author of three books on the assassination
of John F. Kennedy and related topics
such as Watergate: The
Politics Of Conspiracy (1975), The
Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond
(1976), Who Killed JFK? (1991)
and The JFK Assassination: The Facts and
the Theories (1992).
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
The Yankee and Cowboy War
Debate: The Yankee and Cowboy War
Namebase: Carl Oglesby
(1)
Carl
Oglesby, Let
Us Shape
the Future, speech (27th November, 1965)
We are here again
to protest a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the
habit of thinking it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal
reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition
of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg
we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that
heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and
quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this
demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a Government
that since 1932 has considered itself to he fundamentally liberal.
The original commitment
in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It
was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified
by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men
who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the
commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk,
Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters.
They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.
But so, I'm sure, are many
of us who are here today in protest. To understand the war, then,
it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism.
Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different
liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at
all.
Not long ago I considered
myself a liberal and if, someone had asked me what I meant by that,
I'd perhaps have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, who first
made plain our nation's unprovisional commitment to human rights.
But what do you think would happen if these two heroes could sit down
now for a chat with President Johnson and McGeorge Bundy?
They would surely talk
of the Vietnam war. Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why
their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution.
The living liberals would hotly deny that it is one: there are troops
coming in from outside, the rebels get arms from other countries,
most of the people are not on their side, and they practice terror
against their own. Therefore: not a revolution.
What would our dead revolutionaries
answer? They might say: "What fools and bandits, sirs, you make
then of us. Outside help? Do you remember Lafayette? Or the three
thousand British freighters the French navy sunk for our side? Or
the arms and men, we got from France and Spain? And what's this about
terror? Did you never hear what we did to our own Loyalists? Or about
the thousands of rich American Tories who fled for their lives to
Canada? And as for popular support, do you not know that we had less
than one-third of our people with us? That, in fact, the colony of
New York recruited more troops for the British than for the revolution?
Should we give it all back?"
Revolutions do not take
place in velvet boxes. They never have. It is only the poets who make
them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam
is a complex and vicious war. This war is also a revolution, as honest
a revolution as you can find anywhere in history. And this is a fact
which all our intricate official denials will never change.
But it doesn't make any
difference to our leaders anyway. Their aim in Vietnam is really much
simpler than this implies. It is to safeguard what they take to be
American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary
change, which they always call Communism - as if that were that. In
the case of Vietnam, this interest is, first, the principle that revolution
shall not be tolerated anywhere, and second, that South Vietnam shall
never sell its rice to China - or even to North Vietnam.
There is simply no such
thing now, for us, as a just revolution - never mind that for two-thirds
of the world's people the Twentieth Century might as well be the Stone
Age; never mind the melting poverty and hopelessness that are the
basic facts of life for most modern men; and never mind that for these
millions there is now an increasingly perceptible relationship between
their sorrow and our contentment.
Can we understand why the
Negroes of Watts rebelled? Then why do we need a devil theory to explain
the rebellion of the South Vietnamese? Can we understand the oppression
in Mississippi, or the anguish that our Northern ghettoes makes epidemic?
Then why can't we see that our proper human struggle is not with Communism
or revolutionaries, but with the social desperation that drives good
men to violence, both here and abroad?
(2) Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976)
Baker details his discovery that CIA Director of Security Osborn ordered Pennington material removed from CIA Watergate files before the files were handed over to Congressional investigating committees, and points out that the information on Pennington came to light in the first place "only as a result of the position taken by a staff employee of the Personnel Security Division." This staff employee "was so concerned that the documentary evidence - of the Pennington information would be destroyed by others in the CIA that he and a co-employee copied the relevant memoranda and placed them in their respective personal safes:" An unsung Ellsberg, this staff employee. The "relevant memoranda" referred to appear to be a single internal CIA report by Paul Gaynor on the results of agent Pennington's trip to the McCord house several hours after the Watergate arrest. As we shall see, Gaynor remained in close contact with the McCord operation from then on, at least up to the March 19 letter and the opening of the Sirica phase.
One or both of these anonymous CIA "staff employees" ( intelligence analysts?) balked at going along with a CIA letter notifying the Ervin Committee that it had seen everything the CIA had to show on the question. According a Jim Squires story appearing in the Boston Globe, March 26, 1974, Gaynor's report had been kept secret over a year by Security Director Osborn, who "took an early retirement last month." Paul Gaynor also "retired from the Agency last year." Heads falling in the forest-do they make any sound.
(3) Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976)
Alch told the senators that Fensterwald had volunteered to him the information that Fensterwald and McCord had "a past relationship" going before Watergate. Alch said Fensterwald referred to contributions, in fact, that McCord had made to the CTIA. What could be going on?
Two days after Alch told the world this story I visited the 'dilapidated downtown Washington office of Fensterwald's CTIA and tried to get some reaction to Alch's testimony' from Fensterwald's (then) aide and office manager Bob Smith, a small, overwrought, pale, exasperated man of middle age, who was sarcastic and impatient with the idea of a prior McCord-Fensterwald relationship or that something between them might be hidden. Then what about the contributions Alch says Fensterwald says McCord made to, the CTIA? Were there any such contributions? To my surprise, Smith sputtered and said that there were of course no contributions, but that there had been certain irrelevant, money transactions involving McCord, Fensterwald, and the CTIA going back well before Watergate.
Oh?
Smith's story was that Fensterwald's old friend Russell materialized in McCord's ambit when he was hired by McCord's Security International to help handle convention security on contract to the Republican National Committee. When Russell found it difficult to cash his paychecks from McCord's security firm, said Smith, he got into the habit of bringing them around to Fensterwald's office at the CTIA. . Russell would sign his McCord check over to the CTIA and Fensterwald would write him a personal check for the like ' amount, which Russell could then easily cash around the corner at Fensterwald's bank. Russell brought the first such check around, recalled Smith, in March 1972. The practice was current as of Watergate. There were, as Smith remembered, about a dozen such checks. The larger, he thought, were for about $500.
(4)
Bill Winter, Carl
Oglesby - Libertarian (2004)
Carl Oglesby may be the ultimate politically hyphenated American:
He's an anti-interventionist-New Left-humanist-libertarian. He's also
a folk singer with two albums to his credit, an author, and one of
the nation's leading experts on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Oglesby's background didn't
hint that he would end up, as Murray Rothbard called him in 1992,
a "longtime libertarian." Born in Ohio, Oglesby attended
Kent State University and then worked in Michigan as a technical editor
for a defense contractor.
His world turned upside
down in 1965 when he became radicalized about the United States' growing
military involvement in Vietnam. Later that year, he was elected president
of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a "New Left"
group that organized student opposition to the Vietnam War.
As he traveled around the
country, Oglesby came to realize that the United States' foreign policy
wasn't just a matter of left (good) versus right (bad). In 1967, he
wrote Containment and Change (with Richard Shaull), which argued that
the libertarian, non-interventionist "Old Right" should
be the New Left's best ally in opposing an imperialistic American
foreign policy.
In 1971, Oglesby was a
speaker at a "Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation." The
event, sponsored by the California Libertarian Alliance, was designed
to lay the groundwork for a libertarian/New Left anti-war coalition.
Oglesby made the case that "the Old Right and the New Left"
were "morally and politically" united in their opposition
to war, and should work together.
Oglesby also began speaking
out against the alliance of big business and government -- what he
called the "corporate state" -- and in favor of "radically
humanist politics" that embraced decentralization and free association.
During those same years,
Oglesby earned recognition for his musical talent. He released two
albums, Carl Oglesby (1969) and Going to Damascus (1971), that were
praised for their "psychedelic folk rock sound." The albums
were re-released in CD format in 2003.
After the Vietnam War ended,
Oglesby's innate suspicion of government led him down another career
path -- investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He wrote
three books: On the Trail of the Assassins (with Jim Garrison, 1988);
Who Killed JFK? (1991); and The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the
Theories (1992). All three voiced skepticism about the government's
"lone-gunman" theory.
In 1991, Oglesby again
bridged the gap between his libertarian/left perspective and the liberty
movement in a speech to the Massachusetts Libertarian Party. In it,
Oglesby discussed secret American intelligence operations, including
the U.S. Army's post-World War II "Gehlen Deal" that recruited
former Nazis to spy on the USSR for NATO; the CIA's 1953 Operation
Ajax that overthrew the government of Iran; and the FBI's Vietnam
War-era COINTELPRO campaign against anti-war activists. Such covert
operations, warned Oglesby, were indicative of an out-of-control "national-security
oligarchy" that constituted "a secret and invisible state
within the public state."
(5)
Carl
Oglesby, Is the Mafia Theory a Valid Alternative (1988)
As a Washington
co-director of the Assassination Information Bureau, which was created
early in the 1970s to build a movement for a new J.F.K. investigation,
I watched Blakey from a short distance and sometimes close up over
a period of about a year and a half as he prepared and presented his
theory of the assassination for the committee's review and approval.
At first I supported his Mafia theory for basically strategic reasons.
It was at least a conspiracy theory that was not rightwing, it could
command an official consensus, and it thus appeared strong enough
to get the case properly reopened and activated by the Justice Department.
Blakey believed the committee's then - fresh leads pointed to the
Mafia. Many of us who were watching thought he was mistaken, and that
the leads would punch right through the Mafia cover and track straight
back to several departments of official U.S. intelligence. That was
the gamble and the deal: Let the government start pulling the Mafia
string, we thought, and we will see what else it brings with it.
Then came
the Reagan era and the total freeze-out from government sympathy of
any project in the least memorializing of the Kennedys. Blakey did
not take the offensive when the F.B.I, rudely closed the Justice Department's
door in his face, basically telling him and the committee, "We
don't buy it, so you're out of luck."
Why did Blakey
choose not to fight harder and more publicly about it? Why did he
seem to retire from the fray?
But then:
Why did he try to crucify Garrison? Why did he not credit Garrison
for the contribution Garrison has made to the development of this
case, though working with a fraction of Blakey's resources and under
the intense pressure of an active covert opposition?
Why did Blakey
ignore the evidence turned up by his own investigators that the Cuban
exile community was equally well positioned to kill a President as
was the Mafia? Why did he ignore the fact that this Cuban exile community
was the creature of the C.I.A.'s operations directorate?
(6)
Carl
Oglesby,
The
Secret State, speech to the Massachusetts Libertarian Party (19th
December, 1991)
1953: Operation Ajax:
The CIA overthrew Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, complaining
of his neutralism in the Cold War, and installed in his place General
Fazlollah Zahedi, a wartime Nazi collaborator. Zahedi showed his gratitude
by giving 25-year leases on forty percent of Iran's oil to three American
arms. One of these firms, Gulf Oil, was fortunate enough a few years
later to hire as a vice president the CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt,
who had run Operation Ajax. Did this coup set the clock ticking on
the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80?[7]
1954: Operation Success:
The CIA spent $20 million to overthrow the democratically elected
Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala for daring to introduce an agrarian reform
program that the United Fruit Company found threatening. General Walter
Bedell Smith, CIA director at the time, later joined the board of
United Fruit
1954: News Control: The
CIA began a program of infiltration of domestic and foreign institutions,
concentrating on journalists and labor unions. Among the targeted
U.S. organizations was the National Student Association, which the
CIA secretly supported to the tune of some $200,000 a year. This meddling
with an American and thus presumably off-limits organization remained
secret until Ramparts magazine exposed it in 1967. It was at this
point that mainstream media first became curious about the CIA and
began unearthing other cases involving corporations, research centers,
religious groups and universities.
1960–61: Operation
Zapata: Castro warned that the United States was preparing an invasion
of Cuba, but this was 1960 and we all laughed. We knew in those days
the United States did not do such things. Then came the Bay of Pigs,
and we were left to wonder how such an impossible thing could happen.
1960–63: Task Force
W: Only because someone still anonymous inside the CIA decided to
talk about it to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, we discovered
that the CIA's operations directorate decided in September 1960: (a)
that it would be good thing to murder Fidel Castro and other Cuban
leaders, (b) that it would be appropriate to hire the Mafia to carry
these assassinations out, and (c) that there would be no need to tell
the President that such an arrangement was being made. After all,
was killing not the Mafia's area of expertise? It hardly seemed to
trouble the CIA that the Kennedy administration was at the very same
time trying to mount a war on organized crime focusing on precisely
the Mafia leaders that the CIA was recruiting as hired assassins.
1964: Two weeks after the
Johnson administration announced the end of the JFK Alliance for Progress
with its commitment to the principle of not aiding tyrants, the CIA
staged and the U.S. Navy supported a coup d'etat in Brazil over-throwing
the democratically elected Joao Goulart. Within twenty-four hours
a new right-wing government was installed, congratulated and recognized
by the United States.
1965: An uprising in the
Dominican Republic was put down with the help of 20,000 U.S. Marines.
Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador, Abe Fortas, a new Supreme Court
justice and a crony of LBJ's, presidential advisors Adolf Berle, Averill
Harriman and Joseph Farland were all on the payroll of organizations
such as the National Sugar Refining Company, the Sucrest Company,
the National Sugar Company, and the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company
- all of which had holdings in the Dominican Republic that were threatened
by the revolution
1967: The Phoenix Program.
A terror and assassination program conceived by the CIA but implemented
by the military command targeted Viet Cong cadres by name - a crime
of war. At least twenty thousand were killed, according to the CIA's
William Colby, of whom some 3,000 were assassinated. A CIA analyst
later observed "They assassinated a lot of the wrong damn people".
August 1967: COINTELPRO.
Faced with mounting public protest against the Vietnam War, the FBI
formally inaugurated its so-called COINTELPRO operations, a rationalized
and extended form of operations under way for at least a year. A House
committee reported in 1979 that "the FBI Chicago Field Office
files in 1966 alone contained the identities of a small army of 837
informers, all of whom reported on antiwar activists, political activities,
views or beliefs, and none of whom reported on any unlawful activities
by (these activists)".
October 1967: Two months
after the PBI started up COINTELPRO, the CIA followed suit with MH/Chaos,
set up in the counterintelligence section run by a certifiable paranoid
named James Jesus Angleton. Even though the illegal Chaos infiltration
showed that there was no foreign financing or manipulation of the
antiwar movement, Johnson refused to accept this, and the operation
continued in to the Nixon administration. By 1971, CIA agents were
operating everywhere there were students inside America, infiltrating
protest groups not only to spy on them but to provide authentic cover
stories they could use while traveling abroad and joining foreign
anti-war group. Chaos was refocused on international terrorism in
1972, but another operation, Project Resistance, conducted out of
the CIA Office of Security, continued surveillance of American domestic
dissent until it was ended in June 1973.
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