The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  In 1976, Morris ran for the conservative American Independent Party presidential nomination against a Louisiana conservative named John Rarick and former Governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox.

  Then in 1982, Morris entered the Republican Senatorial primary in New Jersey, but dropped out early. In this latter race, Morris stated that his major issue was Soviet expansionism. Then again in 1984, he entered the New Jersey Republican Senate primary.

  The description of the career of Robert J. Morris is presented above both 1) because he was probably involved in the JFK assassination and 2) his fanaticism illustrates the type of individuals who perpetrated the assassination.

  Notes:

  Information in this chapter from and about Robert Morris comes mainly from his books Disarmament, Weapon of Conquest and Self-Destruct: Dismantling America’s Internal Security.

  Information provided by Dr. Jeffrey H. Caulfield can be found in his iconic work General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy: The Extensive New Evidence of a Radical-Right Conspiracy.

  Chapter 13

  The National Security Council

  When we discuss the National Security Council (NSC) in the context of the assassination, we must begin with one of the most blatant of the claims and accusations that exist anywhere in the assassination literature. The claim was made by federal informant Roy Frankhouser and is reported in the book Final Judgment by Michael Collins Piper, at page 319:

  In a series of exclusive interviews [with a little-known publication]…former National Security Council operative Roy Frankhouser has provided information which conclusively demonstrates that the National Security Council planned and co-ordinated the November, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  Based on circumstances, it is virtually impossible that any other part of the government besides the NSC could have been responsible for co-ordinating or at least giving final approval to the assassination. This fact is based on 1) the history of the National Security Council (which was created for the very purpose of limiting presidential powers) and 2) the NSC consisted of members decided by federal statute, not by the President and which in 1963 included the Vice President, the Secretaries of Defense and State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as advisor, and, usually by invitation, the Secretary of the Treasury.

  Very few people in the U.S. knew at that time or know even now about the National Security Council, what it is, when it was started or why it exists. When one begins to read and research the history of the National Security Council, the material almost reads like science fiction.

  Those readers who remember the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration in the 1980’s at least know something about the National Security Council. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was a rogue National Security Council employee and as a result, he ended up being convicted of a felony. What the reader should know about the rogue NSC of the Reagan years is that certain CIA employees were temporarily attached to the NSC, so these Iran-Contra covert actions were considered to be NSC activities although they involved CIA agents.

  The purpose of this strategy is that the NSC is not subject to oversight by Congress. The only oversight of the NSC is by the President himself. And this presents a problem when the activity of the NSC happens to be plotting the murder of the President.

  In the year 1947, several institutions were created which are now famous (if not infamous): the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Security Council (NSC), the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This is quite a list. And, unbelievably, all this was officially invented by an international banker (significantly with Jewish ancestry and connections, though not Jewish) named Ferdinand Eberstadt.

  According to the biographers of Ferdinand Eberstadt – Robert Perez and Edward Willett – Eberstadt created this list of (mostly spy) agencies by following the model of the Congress of Vienna, which took place in 1815.

  So why was our Federal Government re-invented in 1947 according to the plan of the Congress of Vienna? The Congress of Vienna took place following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. It was a plan to attempt to reverse the effects of the French Revolution and to re-impose Monarchism in Europe under the leadership of the Czar of Russia and the British throne.

  And so, in 1947, 150 years later, we have the National Security Act of 1947, which could be viewed as a counter-revolution in itself. In creating the NSC, the DOD, the CIA and the NSA, the idea was to bury the New Deal and avoid a repeat of the FDR regime. After all, at Yalta and Potsdam, FDR, Stalin and de Gaulle represented the tradition of the three revolutions, the American, the French and the Russian.

  The odd men out at Yalta and Postdam were 1) the British Monarchy (and the British Empire), 2) assorted pretenders to the thrones of Italy, Russia (the Czarist White Russians) and other smaller countries, 3) the remnants of the French colonies (which had not been part of the French Revolution) and 4) any number of surviving Nazis and Ukrainian, Vichy-French and Eastern European Nazi-collaborators. And we should also mention, the pro-Monarchist Vatican, which still clung to the ancient “divine right of kings.”

  It is this counter-attack by European Monarchists against the U.S. Government (and the Soviet Government and de Gaulle) which is personified in the persons of the Three Barons – Baron Tscheppe-Weidenbach, Baron George de Mohrenschildt and Baron Wernher von Braun.

  In the U.S., these reactionary, counter-revolutionary Europeans were represented by international bankers such as the Dillon, Read partners led by Clarence Dillon, the Kuhn, Loeb bank represented by Robert Strauss, the Rockefellers, Joseph P. Kennedy, and former President Herbert Hoover. For some unknown reason, Harry S. Truman (a high-school graduate and woefully inept), turned the keys to the U.S. Government over to this group. And so we had banker Ferdinand Eberstadt (a so-called expert in government – not!) designing a new version of the U.S. Government, at the head of which was to be the newly created National Security Council.

  At one point, Eberstadt and his allies proposed that the President of the U.S. would serve on a committee that included four cabinet members and himself. And on this five member Committee, the President would only have one vote! That absurd proposal is the whole story of the National Security Council in a nutshell.

  This list of NSC members included the four most powerful people in the government aside from the President. For some reason which is not entirely clear, the Attorney General has been excluded from the National Security Council from the beginning, both by statute and by practice. The absence of the Attorney General was icing on the cake for the NSC should they ever desire to eliminate the President. It is also an implicit admission that the NSC would be involved in activities which by their nature would be illegal. Why else would the Attorney General be excluded? Excluded in this manner were both the Department of Justice and the FBI.

  To fully understand the problems with the NSC in the JFK administration one must realize that John F. Kennedy believed that it was better at times that he absent himself from NSC meetings in order to not unduly influence their decisions and not to inhibit open discussion. This was another good example of how JFK made unwise decisions which jeopardized his personal safety and abdicated the priceless authority he possessed as the President.

  This is a chart of the National Security Council during the Eisenhower Administration:

  The following is quoted from a study prepared by the Congressional Research Service:

  The Kennedy NSC, 1961-1963

  President John Kennedy, who did not share Eisenhower’s preference for formal staff procedures, accepted may of the recommendations of the Jackson Committee and proceeded to dismantle much of the NSC structure, reducing it to its statutory base. Staff work was carried out mainly by the various departments and agencies, and personal contacts and ad hoc task forces became the main vehicles for policy discussion and formulation. The NSC was now one among many sources of advice.

  Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge
Bundy, played an important policy role directly under the President. The nature of this position was no longer that of a “neutral keeper of the machinery”; for the first time the Adviser emerged in an active policymaking role, in part because of the absence of any definite NSC process that might preoccupy him.

  Kennedy met regularly with the statutory NSC members and the DCI, but not in formal NSC sessions. Studies and coordination were assigned to specific Cabinet officers or subordinates in a system that placed great emphasis on individual responsibility, initiative and action. The Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was initially seen as the second most important national security official in the President’s plans, and Kennedy indicated that he did not want any other organizations interposed between him and Rusk. However, Kennedy came to be disappointed by the State Department’s inability or unwillingness to fill this role as the leading agency in national security policy.

  At the beginning of the Kennedy Administration, the NSC was reportedly cut from seventy-one to forty-eight and “in place of weighty policy papers produced at regular intervals, Bundy’s staff would produce crisp and timely National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs). The new name signified the premium that would be placed on ‘action’ over ‘planning. With an emphasis on current operations and crisis management, special ad hoc bodies came into use. The outstanding example of this was the Executive Committee (ExCom) formed in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which orchestrated the U.S. response to Soviet moves to introduce missiles in Cuba.

  Organizational Changes: Kennedy added the Director of the Office of Emergency Planning to the NSC, replacing the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. It was planned that the new appointee would fill the role originally envisioned for the National Security Resources Board in coordinating emergency management of resources.

  The Planning Board and the Operations Control Board were both abolished (by Executive Order 10920) in order to avoid the Eisenhower Administration’s distinction between planning and operations. The NSC staff was reduced, and outside policy experts were brought in. Bundy noted that they were all staff officers:

  “…If his Cabinet officers are to be free to do their own work, the President’s work must be done—to the extent that he cannot do it himself—by staff officers under his direct oversight. But this is, I repeat, something entirely different from the interposition of such a staff between the President and his Cabinet officers.

  Evaluation: Some critics attacked the informality of the system under Kennedy, arguing that it lacked form an direction, as well as coordination and control, and that it emphasized current developments at the expense of planning. As noted, Kennedy himself was disappointed by the State Department, on which he had hoped to rely. In retrospect, Kennedy’s system was designed to serve his approach to the presidency and depended upon the President’s active interest and continuous involvement. Some critics, both at the time and subsequently, have suggested that the informal methods that the Kennedy Administration adopted contributed to the Bay of Pigs debacle and the confusion that surrounded U.S. policy in the coup against President Diem of South Vietnam in 1963.

  For purposes of illustration, presented below is a chart of the Nixon NSC structure.

  McGeorge Bundy

  As can be seen from the charts, the President’s National Security Advisor is in charge of the staff of the National Security Council. This could well mean he was in practical control of the activities of the Council since the staff reported to him.

  In his widely read and acclaimed book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, author Col. L. Fletcher Prouty provides evidence at page 280 that McGeorge Bundy was involved in a situation that indicated advance knowledge of the assassination.

  Prouty focuses on a meeting of JFK’s cabinet held in Honolulu, Hawaii on November 20, 1963. According to the Pentagon Papers, the cabinet meeting in Hawaii was dominated by discussions about issues set out in National Security Memorandum #273, published November 26, 1963. NSAM #273 recommended an escalation of the U.S. commitment to Vietnam. But this proposed escalation was diametrically opposed to the JFK policy of a pullout, which he had announced in NSAM #263, published on October 11, 1963.

  McGeorge Bundy prepared and signed the cover letter for NSAM #263. This Bundy cover letter avoided any mention or endorsement of the pullout from Vietnam which Kennedy had ordered in the memo. Bundy was apparently involved in planning the agenda for the Honolulu meeting on November 20, 1963, at least to the extent that the agenda was governed by or included in certain national security memoranda.

  Prouty’s point is this: how could the cabinet be discussing escalation of the Vietnam War on November 20, 1963, two days before JFK was killed? JFK had ordered a pullout, not an escalation. And further, the Cabinet was conveniently out of the continental U.S. at the time, and thus isolated. Prouty concludes that the debate prior to the assassination could only have occurred based on advance knowledge of someone, most likely Bundy, that the President was not going to be around after November 22, 1963.

  So to analyze the possible involvement of the National Security Council in the assassination, we must look deeper into the beliefs, attitudes and political affiliations of McGeorge Bundy.

  McGeorge “Mac” Bundy was born on March 30, 1919 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the third child in an old Republican family. His two older brothers were named Harvey and William. William would later become famous along with Bundy himself. Bundy’s father, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had served as a law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and then became a prominent Boston attorney. His father was a close associate of Henry L. Stimson, who served Herbert Hoover as Secretary of State and Franklin D. Roosevelt as Secretary of War. Bundy’s mother was even higher on the Massachusetts social register. She was related to the Cabots, the Lowells and the Lawrences and her uncle was a president of Harvard University.

  Bundy attended the private Dexter Lower School in Brookline, Massachusetts and then the top prep school in the U.S., the Groton School, where he placed first in his class. He was admitted to Yale College where his older brother William was a sophomore. Bundy majored in mathematics and was tapped as a member of the “Skull and Bones” fraternity.

  When World War II broke out, McGeorge Bundy entered the military in 1941 and served as an intelligence officer. He entered as a private, but within one year he had made captain. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II as an aide to Admiral Alan Kirk, who was in naval intelligence.. In that capacity he assisted with the planning for the invasions of Sicily and France (In 1951, Admiral Kirk would become a major figure in peacetime intelligence groups, working for, among others, the National Security Council).

  The Bundys met and befriended Colonel Henry L. Stimson at some point in time. As Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover, in 1931 Stimson appointed McGeorge’s father Harvey Bundy as his Assistant Secretary of State. Later, Bundy’s father served again under Secretary of War Stimson.

  Under Stimson, the elder Bundy’s title was Special Assistant on Atomic Matters. Part of his duty was to serve as liaison between Stimson and the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush. William and McGeorge grew up knowing Stimson as a family friend and colleague of their father. The senior Bundy also helped implement the Marshall Plan.

  Immediately after he left the armed forces in 1946, Bundy was given the chance to work with Secretary Stimson on the latter’s autobiography, which was to be published under the title On Active Service in 1948.

  After World War II, and with high-level experience in Military Intelligence on his resumé, Bundy was selected for the Council on Foreign Relations in 1949. He worked with a study team on implementation of the Marshall Plan. After that, Bundy signed on to the staff of Thomas A. Dewey, the 1948 Republican presidential candidate, as a consultant on foreign policy issues.

  Although Bundy lacked an advanced degree, he was next appointed as a profes
sor of government at Harvard University. In 1953 he was the youngest dean ever to serve Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where it was said that he worked to develop Harvard as a merit-based university. This theory of “merit-based” was apparently propounded despite the obvious fact that Bundy had achieved nothing academically to merit working for the prestigious Harvard University. The reader is left to conclude that Bundy’s definition of “merit” was “highly meritorious social or intelligence agency connections.” Bundy became a full professor at Harvard within five years in 1954.

  In 1961 he joined Kennedy’s administration.

  So why did JFK choose McGeorge Bundy as National Security Advisor? Paul Nitze was a person of significant influence on the transition team for JFK in 1960. Nitze wrote in his autobiography regarding the issue of JFK’s transition from the Eisenhower administration. As a starting point, Nitze recounts that Bundy possibly had exerted some influence in putting together the 1952 Republican Platform with respect to the plank on foreign policy. If that were true, that would put Bundy together on that 1952 project with John Foster Dulles and Congressman Charles Kersten. That 1952 platform plank was particularly controversial because it demanded freedom for the people behind the Iron Curtain.

  Since Eisenhower would be the person to change the Republican Party from isolationist to globalist, this platform plank would have been a major piece in that transition. Nitze writes that the plank represented a vicious attack on prior Truman administration foreign policy (i.e. globalism). Nitze claims that he, Nitze, switched from Republican to Democrat because of Ike’s embrace of this plank which Nitze took as too radical for his taste. Adding up all of the above, this could indicate that Bundy had made an impression as a radical globalist/anti-Communist with beliefs similar to those of John Foster Dulles and possibly Congressman Kersten.