by Jon E. Lewis
Did “severe ramifications” include murder? No one without a large wallet, the heart of a lion and a good lawyer was going to accuse Cheney of orchestrating an offing, but speculation – including by nervous Democrats on Capitol Hill – that right-wingers and/or the CIA had hit Wellstone was rampant. Two researchers into the case, Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, dug up some odd happenings around the time of the Wellstone downing. Firstly, the FBI arrived at the crash scene at 11.00 a.m., only an hour or so after the ambulances – and in order to do that, the FBI would have needed to leave their St Paul office at 9.30, the same time that Wellstone’s flight was taking off.
Secondly, around the time of the crash cell phones and electronic instruments in the vicinity wildly malfunctioned.
The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), despite queries raised by individual officials, initially determined that icy conditions were responsible for the tragedy. However, other craft were taking off and landing at Eveleth–Virginia just fine that morning. Besides, the Beechcraft King Air A-10 boasted an elaborate de-icing system, which records showed was fully operational.
Obliged to disqualify ice, the NTSB suggested that the main pilot, Richard Conry, was to blame because his approach speed was too slow. But Conry was a massively experienced pilot, who had passed a routine assessment two days before, and the King Air had an alarm to alert pilots about low airspeed. As to why the King Air was heading south instead of west the NTSB magnificently failed to address.
Four Arrows and Fetzer believe the King Air stopped communicating and went off course because an electromagnetic pulse was aimed at the plane, which prevented the electronics from operating. The same pulse also screwed up cell phone calls locally; the interference was described by one man driving within a couple of blocks of the airport as being “between a roar and loud humming voice … oscillating … screeching and humming noise”.
This is maybe the place to make the point that Four Arrows and Fetzer are not your usual conspiracy nuts. They are university professors. In maintaining that Wellstone was assassinated they are in plentiful company; in one poll of Minnesotans 69 per cent of respondents said they had a hunch that a “GOP Conspiracy” (Grand Old Party, a.k.a. the Republicans) had arranged Senator Wellstone’s death.
Wellstone had been the target of an assassination before. In 2000, during a visit to Colombia, a bomb was found along his route from the airport. He was also sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate by a helicopter while sojourning in that Latin American country.
Wellstone is far from being the only American politician from the awkward squad to die in a “mysterious” plane crash: Democratic Governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan was killed during a close Senate race when his small plane crashed in 2000; John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a 1999 plane crash; Commerce Secretary Ron Brown perished in a 1996 “accident” (there is a widely reproduced photograph of Brown with a bullet wound in his head at the post-mortem); and John Tower, Republican, was writing a revealing book about the Iran-Contra affair when he conveniently died in a plane accident in 1991.
According to the website From the Wilderness of twenty-two air crashes involving federal and state officials, 64 per cent were Democrats and 36 per cent Republicans.
So, if you’re scared of flying, make sure you don’t have a dissident Democrat aboard your plane.
Further Reading
Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, 2004
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110102_wellstone.html
THE WHITE HOUSE PUTSCH
What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories.
So wrote the journalist John L. Spivak in his book A Man in His Time. The conspiracy Spivak was referring to was the attempted 1934 overthrow of the Great Depression presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a clique of bankers and industrialists. Not just any Wall Street financiers and manufacturers either, but big-corporate names, among them DuPont and Morgan Bank. And what did these money-men wish to replace FDR’s Democratic government with? Nothing less than a full-blown fascist dictatorship on the model of Mussolini in Italy.
Time has done little to diminish Spivak’s observation that the putsch against the White House is hardly known to the public. It remains un-footnoted in standard histories of the US of A.
In all probability, the 1934 plot was the second attempted coup d’etat against Roosevelt. In the previous year, there had been an assassination attempt against him from which he had escaped unscathed but Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak had died. The assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, was captured and pronounced to be a lone killer. (Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald.) Scuttlebutt on the street, though, was that he was in the pay of the Mafia or a Wall Street cabal.
Certainly in summer 1933, General Smedley Darlington Butler, war hero and former Marine, was approached by bondsman and fascist-sympathizer Gerald C. MacGuire and offered the opportunity of leading a coup against Roosevelt. The veterans’ association, the American Legion, MacGuire boasted to Butler, was to be transformed into a 500,000-strong army. MacGuire also promised a $3 million war, courtesy of DuPont, General Motors and Morgan Bank. Arms and ammunition were to be supplied by DuPont’s subsidiary, Remington.
Fortunately for American democracy, MacGuire and his fellow conspirators chose the wrong man. And how. Butler, the “fighting Quaker”, was an instinctive anti-authoritarian, a man of integrity and a railer against capitalist greed. As a loyal soldier, he complained that he had:
helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Butler played along with MacGuire with the aim of drawing his “friends” out of the woodwork and into the light.
The friends turned out to be a list of American great and bad, and included:
•
John W. Davis, senior attorney for J. P. Morgan
•
Robert Sterling Clark, Wall Street stockbroker
•
Grayson Murphy, director of Morgan Bank, Bethlehem Steel and Goodyear. He also ran the brokerage firm where MacGuire worked
•
Al Smith, former governor of New York, and the co-director of the newly founded American Liberty League.
According to MacGuire the American Liberty League was the crucible of the coup. Grayson Murphy was its treasurer, DuPont executive John J. Raskob was its other co-director, and its founder was the industrialist Irénée DuPont.
DuPont was an out-and-out fascist. What is extraordinary is the number of big beasts from FDR’s own Democratic Party who were in on the plot, such was their hatred for him and his radical “New Deal” policies. Davis was a former Democratic presidential candidate, and Raskob a former chairman of the party.
As soon as Butler had the names of the plotters, he reported to the White House. Roosevelt’s initial instinct was to arrest the conspirators, but the American economy was in the doldrums. He had to assume that a mass imprisoning of Wall Street financiers might trigger another stock market crash. So, Roosevelt defused the plot by leaking the story to the press, taking the gamble that a public outing would make the cabal back off. He also tipped off the House of Representatives’ McCormack–Dickstein Committee (the forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee) to launch an investigation. The plotters were asked to appear and, to no great surprise, denied any knowledge of an inte
nded coup to replace the president. The McCormack–Dickstein Committee took four years to release its report on the coup d’etat, and marked it for “restricted circulation”. Publicly, the committee claimed “no evidence” other than “hearsay” linked MacGuire, Clark, Davis, DuPont et all to the putsch. This was a direct contradiction of its internal summation to the House, which concluded: “these attempts [at a fascist coup] were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient …” (See Document, p.587.)
The committee also suppressed parts of General Butler’s (and others’) testimony in its published report (see Document.)
Why did the committee say one thing in public and another in private? Why were none of the conspirators hauled before a court? Almost certainly, because Roosevelt, having headed off the coup at the pass, wanted to save the Democratic Party from embarrassment.
The putschists, meanwhile, went back to captaining finance and industry, their only admonishment the embarrassment of having their Nazi sentiments exposed.
Smedley D. Butler was twice awarded the Medal of Honor and once the so-called “Brevet medal”. But the bravest thing he ever did was putting down the White House putsch.
Further Reading
Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, 1973
John L. Spivak, A Man in His Time, 1967
DOCUMENT: REPORT OF THE MCCORMACK-DICKSTEIN COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION OF NAZI AND OTHER PROPAGANDA, FEBRUARY 15, 1935 [EXTRACTS] AND THE TESTIMONY OF GENERAL SMEDLEY D. BUTLER BEFORE THE COMMITTEE.
There have been isolated cases of activity by organizations which seemed to be guided by fascist principle, which the committee investigated and found that they had made no progress …
In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country.
There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.
This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler (retired), twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler (p. 8–114 D.C. 6 II).
MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veterans’ organizations of Fascist character (p. III D.C. 6 II).
The following is an excerpt from one of MacGuire’s letters:
I had a very interesting talk last evening with a man who is quite well up on affairs here and he seems to be of the opinion that the Croix de Feu will be very patriotic during this crisis and will take the cuts or be the moving spirit in the veterans to accept the cuts. Therefore they will, in all probability, be in opposition to the Socialists and functionaries. The general spirit among the functionaries seems to be that the correct way to regain recovery is to spend more money and increase wages, rather than to put more people out of work and cut salaries.
The Croix de Feu is getting a great number of new recruits, and I recently attended a meeting of this organization and was quite impressed with the type of men belonging. These fellows are interested only in the salvation of France, and I feel sure that the country could not be in better hands because they are not politicians, they are a cross-section of the best people of the country from all walks of life, people who gave their “all” between 1914 and 1918 that France might be saved, and I feel sure that if a crucial test ever comes to the Republic that these men will be the bulwark upon which France will be served.
There may be more uprisings, there may be more difficulties, but as is evidenced right now when the emergency arises and part difficulties are forgotten as far as France is concerned, and all become united in the one desire and purpose to keep this country as it is, the most democratic, and the country of the greatest freedom on the European Continent (p. III D.C. 6 II).
This committee asserts that any efforts based on lines as suggested in the foregoing and leading off to the extreme right, are just as bad as efforts which would lead to the extreme left. Armed forces for the purpose of establishing a dictatorship by means of Fascism or a dictatorship through the instrumentality of the proletariat, or a dictatorship predicated in part on racial and religious hatreds, have no place in this country.
Testimony of Maj. Gen. S. D. Butler (Retired)
Redacted sections are reinserted in italics.
(The witness was duly sworn by the chairman.)
The CHAIRMAN. General, you are a retired Commandant of the Marine Corps?
General BUTLER. No, I was never Commandant.
The CHAIRMAN. You were in the Army how long?
General BUTLER. I was in the Marine Corps 33 years and 4 months on the active list.
The CHAIRMAN. As I remember, you are a Congressional Medal of Honor man; received the Congressional Medal of Honor on two occasions?
General BUTLER. Yes.
The CHAIRMAN. General, you know what the purpose of your visit here is today?
General BUTLER. Yes.
The CHAIRMAN. Without my asking you any further questions, will you just go ahead and tell in your own way all that you know about an attempted Fascist movement in this country?
General BUTLER. May I preface my remarks by saying, sir, that I have one interest in all of this, and that is to try to do my best to see that a democracy is maintained in this country.
The CHAIRMAN. Nobody who has either read about or known about General Butler would have anything but that understanding.
General BUTLER. It is nice of you to say that, sir.
But that is my only interest.
I think I had probably better go back and give you the background. This has been going on for a year and a half. Along – I think it must have been about the 1st of July 1933, two men came to see me. First there was a telephone message from Washington, from a man who I did not know well. His first name was Jack. He was an American Legionnaire, but I cannot remember his last name – cannot recall it now accurately. Anyhow, he asked me if I would receive 2 soldiers – 2 veterans—
If they called on me that afternoon. I said I would.
About 5 hours later a Packard limousine came up into my yard and 2 men got out. This limousine was driven by a chauffeur. They came into the house and introduced themselves. One said his name was Bill Doyle, who was then the department commander of the Legion in Massachusetts. The other said his name was Jerry MacGuire.
The CHAIRMAN. Where did MacGuire come from?
General BUTLER. MacGuire said he had been State commander the year before of the department of Connecticut and was then living in Connecticut. Doyle was living in Massachusetts.
The CHAIRMAN. Had you met either of these men before?
General BUTLER. Never had seen them before, as I recollect. I might have done so; but as far as my impression then was, they were absolute strangers. The substance of the conversation, which lasted about 2 hours, was this: That they were very desirous of unseating the royal family in control of the American Legion, at the convention to be held in Chicago, and very anxious to have me take part in it. They said that they were not in sympathy with the then administration – that is, the present administration’s treatment of the soldiers.
They presented to me rather a confused picture, and I could not make up my mind exactly what they wanted me to do or what thei
r objective was, but it had something to do with weakening the influence of the administration with the soldiers.
They asked me to go to the convention, and I said I did not want to go – that I had not been invited and did not care anything about going.
Then MacGuire said that he was the chairman of the distinguished-guest committee of the American Legion, on Louis Johnson’s staff; that Louis Johnson had, at MacGuire’s suggestion, put my name down to be invited as a distinguished guest of the Chicago convention. that Johnson had then taken this list, presented by MacGuire, of distinguished guests, to the White House for approval; that Louis Howe, one of the secretaries to the President, had crossed my name off and said that I was not to be invited – that the President would not have it. I thought I smelled a rat, right away – that they were trying to get me mad – to get my goat. I said nothing.
They said, “We represent the plain soldiers, and we want you to come to this convention.” They said, “We want you to come there and stampede the convention in a speech and help us in our fight to dislodge the royal family.”
