Politician, Political Worker or Spy – An Account – Page 3

Tiger In the Court

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The Book of the Week is “Tiger In the Court, Herbert J. Stern…” by Paul Hoffman, published in 1973.

Stern was born in November 1936 in “Alphabet City” very far east of Manhattan’s Union Square. He earned a law degree. He learned he’d passed the bar exam for New York State when results were revealed in the New York Times, while he was stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey. After that, the U.S. Army assigned him to drive a truck.

While Stern was building his legal career, race riots erupted in Newark in July 1967. The usual response of public officials, when prompted to do something about violence in their city, is to assemble a task force or commission to study the matter and to make recommendations. New Jersey’s governor did just that. The commission concluded that Newark’s government was corrupt. Investigations of the offices of the police director and mayor ensued.

In connection therewith, Stern became a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey for three and a half years, beginning in September 1969. During his reign– his caseload included 79 (!) federal, state and local officials who were accused of crimes.

A major case concerned members of the Mafia, whose phones were illegally wiretapped by the FBI. Stern had nothing to do with that action. He felt there were wiser uses of investigators’ resources. It violated the suspects’ privacy, and should have been taken only against foreign agents, or in the case of illegal gambling, because the phone was a key tool in gambling in that era.

At any rate, from the recorded New Jersey Mob’s phone conversations (dubbed the “DeCarlo tapes”) between September 1964 and July 1965, investigators learned all about the suspects’ hierarchy. A federal jury was empaneled in January 1970 to try those accused of the now-cliched crimes of corruption.

Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands among the Mob, the entire administration of the city of Newark, its mayor, city council, in-house attorneys, infrastructure contractors and construction suppliers– in the form of racketeering, kickbacks, bribery, extortion, etc., etc., etc. The judge put the tapes’ 1,200-page transcript into the public domain, by filing it with the court clerk. Local New Jersey newspapers and the New York Times were then able to publish excerpts.

As is well known, the Pentagon Papers were published in dribs and drabs starting in June 1971, but the top-secret information in that case ignited a firestorm because it was associated with an unspeakably ugly war and unspeakably ugly actions taken by a series of American presidents.

Anyway, the media reported that Newark’s organized crime community was on the hook for running a gambling ring, and tax evasion. Stern also prosecuted a bunch of suspects in Jersey City.

Stern believed street crime was less harmful to society than white collar crime. The former consists of robberies, burglaries or drug deals, and might traumatize a few random victims– those caught in crossfire, or a bank’s employees. White collar crime is victimless– but a public servant is stealing from everyone in the community; the resulting misallocation of public funds cheats ordinary citizens out of government services, and the victims usually pay more in taxes, for the sins of the criminals.

In October 1971, Stern read in the Newark Star Ledger that in the wintertime, nineteen communities’ water-treatment plants were pumping leftover toxic-sludge into the Atlantic Ocean less than a thousand feet from the Jersey Shore; during the summer, unknowing people swam at the beaches there. Stern, as one of them, took legal action to stop that practice. Lo and behold, on Memorial Day weekend of 1972, Stern read in the Newark Star Ledger that “… a barge loaded with more than one million tons of raw sewage was being towed north from Virginia to be dumped off the Jersey Shore.” Welcome to America.

Read the book to learn: a wealth of additional details about Stern’s cases, peripheral issues he encountered, and how successful he was at his job.

From Ghetto to Guerrilla

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The Book of the Week is “From Ghetto to Guerrilla, Memoir of A Jewish Resistance Fighter” by Samuel Lato, published in 2006.

The Jewish author was born in February 1925 in the town of Baranowicze in eastern Poland, near Belarus. In September 1941, the Germans encircled his community with barbed wire and formed a ghetto. About ten Jewish families were crammed together (with about a nine feet of space per person) in each house previously owned by gentiles– who had fled or were evicted.

Living conditions were unsanitary and repugnant. The Nazi-imposed curfew meant that people risked getting summarily shot if they visited the outhouse after dark. So a pail was placed in the middle of the floor of the people-stuffed house. The author wrote, “The Nazi hatred permeated the entire town in the same way that the [latrine] pail stank up our whole house.”

The victims suffered many hardships, with only rationed bread, potatoes and flour for food. The able-bodied were forced to do hard manual labor to help the German war effort. Through the war years, the Germans committed atrocities against the Jews on their major holidays– herding a few thousand Jews into the woods, forcing the victims to: strip naked and dig their own graves; after which, the soldiers would shoot them dead.

In March 1942, the author left his parents and much younger brother to join the Resistance movement. A group of “partisans” hid in the woods of Poland, planning and carrying out life-saving operations of their fellow Jews, and secret acts of sabotage against the German war machine. The author began smuggling bullets, medicine and guns to his fellow Resistance members, risking his life with the help of his mission-teammates, traveling on foot long distances.

In spring 1943, the author was chosen to fight for a KGB-sponsored special-forces militia to help defeat the Germans. The Russians hated the Germans as much as the Jews did. In the following war-years, he and his fellow fighters destroyed by fire: a post office / telegraph and telephone station, bridges, a lumberyard, a bakery and a German-war-supply warehouse. The Polish military offered to recruit the author, but he declined because he knew that Polish people in general tended to be anti-Semitic.

Toward the end of the war, the author ended up in Gutstadt in East Prussia. The Russian militia occupied a bank building where they emptied out the vaults. They used some of the then-worthless paper currency to start fires in the pot-bellied stoves to heat the building. For, the winter of 1945 was extremely cold.

The aforesaid Baranowicze had a population of approximately 13,000 when it was turned into a Jewish ghetto. Read the book to learn how many Jews were left alive after its 1944 liberation by the Russians, plus much more about the author’s near-death, and life-affirming experiences during the war.

As I Saw It

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“We in the government were at a disadvantage, having to keep our feet grounded in the realities of that conflict while exposed to sharp, uninformed, and often partisan attack.”

-Dean Rusk, secretary of state, regarding the Korean War

Unsurprisingly, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Book of the Week is “As I Saw It” by Dean Rusk as told to Richard Rusk, published in 1990.

Born in February 1909 in a northern suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Rusk had four siblings. They all pitched in on the family farm. The Farmer’s Almanac told his father when to plant crops pursuant to the phases of the moon. Every American household had the Sears Roebuck catalog, which was used for toilet paper. The school curriculum propagandized on the Confederacy, convincing young minds that there was nothing wrong with slavery.

During WWII, FDR was preoccupied with an overwhelming number of serious political issues. Rusk commented that, for whatever reason, the president failed to address the issue of pushing for the elimination of colonialism, especially in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina. But Rusk did say the United States used the Indians for cheap labor in transportation, supplies and infrastructure in China and along the Burma road, so it was in its best strategic interest to maintain the status quo.

“Reflecting on my experiences in government, I think we tended then (late 1940’s)– and now– to exaggerate the necessity to take action. Given time, many problems work themselves out or disappear.” Yes, civilized nations of the world began to take a dim view of colonialism, but it would not have worked itself out on its own. However, as is well known, countless lives were sacrificed in colonialism’s disappearance.

Rusk favored sending American troops to Korea in summer 1950 because he claimed that it was hard to gauge the intentions of the leaders of the U.S.S.R., North Korea and China. But then, that implies that America’s spies were incompetent. Perhaps that is why America got into so many foreign policy scrapes through the decades of Rusk’s career.

On the other hand, the Soviets didn’t correctly assess America’s national-security situation and attitude immediately following WWII, either. For, “If Stalin had invested ten years in genuine peaceful coexistence, he would have faced a disarmed and isolationist America. But instead, he embarked upon adventures which forced the United States to rearm and play a greater role in world affairs.”

It’s impossible to say how much better off the U.S. would have been economically if it had engaged in long-term detente with the Soviets. But, first off– there would have been minimal military spending and few needless deaths and ruined lives from war. And some American president would eventually see the advantages of trading with the rest of the world, including the Communists.

Although Rusk was pro-war most of the time, he believed in basic freedoms, such as the right not to be spied on. Rusk was vague on the time frame of an anecdote he related, but the upshot was that he forced an investigator to resign for claiming under oath that the investigator hadn’t illegally surveilled a State Department employee by bugging his phone and going through his trash, when in fact, the investigator had.

Anyway, read the book to learn Rusk’s take on many other historical incidents in American foreign policy, and his life and times.

Speaking of lying under oath, here’s a little ditty explaining Trump’s situation.

UGLY LIES

(Dirty Dancing version) sung to the tune of “Hungry Eyes” with apologies to Eric Carmen.

Biden got him indicted.
Agencies were on, Hillary’s side.
They violated his privi-lege, he cries.
He’s innocent tonight.
Now he’s got, Biden in his sights, with these

ugly lies.
One bad arraignment and his donations rise.
He’s got ugly lies.
He’s always the victim, in his eyes.

He held the records so you heard, him out.
They were his records, is what it’s all about.
He’s innocent tonight.
Now he’s got, Biden in his sights, with these

ugly lies.
One bad arraignment and his donations rise.
He’s got ugly lies.
He’s always the victim, in his eyes. He’s got
ugly lies.
Now he’s got, Biden in his sights, with the
ugly lies.

His act is no surprise.
He needs you to see,
he’s never, ever guilty.

He’s got ugly lies.
One bad arraignment and his donations rise.
He’s got ugly lies.
He’s always the victim, in his eyes. He’s got
ugly lies.

Now he’s got, Biden in his sights, with the
ugly lies.
His act is no surprise.
With his ugly lies.
Ugly. Ugly lies.
Now he’s got, Biden in his sights, with his
ugly lies…

The Impossible Takes Longer

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“The materialism here is dreadful, pitiless. To occupy oneself here with anything not directly connected with earning one’s bread, it is necessary to be either very rich or very talented.”

-Chaim Weizmann, commenting on England’s elitist, aristocratic bent– as opposed to France’s and Germany’s more meritocratic bent, at the dawn of the twentieth century

The Book of the Week is “The Impossible Takes Longer, The Memoirs of Vera Weizmann, As Told to David Tutaev” by Vera Weizmann, published in 1967.

This book’s subjects included both Vera and Chaim Weizmann. The latter was best known as the first president of Israel, but he was actually just a figurehead. His Zionism ought to be noted, though. His brand of Zionism harped on the fact that the “wandering Jew” was rejected most everywhere he or she sought refuge from oppression. By the twentieth century, Arabs, on the other hand, could find refuge in many countries which would gladly accept them if there was political turmoil in their homeland.

Vera, one of seven siblings, was born in November 1881 in Rostov, in the former Soviet Union. Chaim, one of ten siblings, was born in November 1874 in western Russia, in the Pale of Settlement.

In late 1932, Chaim delivered a lecture to the leaders of the Jewish community in Germany, raising the alarm on the dangers of Hitler’s rhetoric. Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, already provided a hint of his take on Jews. Chaim sat on various boards of Zionist-related entities. Controversies raged through the 1930’s, among myriad other goings-on, over violence in Germany, violence in Palestine, what to do about refugees, and whether to make Palestine a Jewish homeland.

In 1935, Chaim was pressured to become president again of the World Zionist Organization. He relented, but going in, he knew he would become a scapegoat for the wrongs committed by the British government. Great Britain was in a tough spot, as it wanted Arab oil and to keep control of Palestine, but part of fighting against fascism meant doing the right thing by helping the cause of freedom for all peoples of the world, including Jews.

In 1937, in a speech to the Peel Commission, Weizmann again urged Jews to leave Germany. He was the one who said there were approximately six million of them. At that time, pursuant to the British Mandate, a tiny percentage of them could obtain a certificate allowing them entry to Palestine. Between 1940 and 1944, only about thirty-two thousand people were allowed to move to Palestine.

Vera and Chaim’s Jewish ancestors had been oppressed in their native lands. The two moved to England at the start of the 1900’s to minimize the possibility of their own persecution. In 1900, when Chaim was in his late twenties, he helped found the Jewish National Fund, whose donors bought up land in Palestine for the Jews. Beginning in her late teens, Vera studied in Geneva, Switzerland to be a medical doctor.

Read the book to learn of what became of Vera and Chaim.

Haven

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The Book of the Week is “Haven, The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America” by Ruth Gruber, originally published in 1983.

As is well known, 1944 was a presidential election (or reelection) year. In June 1944, politician that he was– FDR announced that the United States would allow about a thousand (out of millions and millions of) European refugees from eighteen different nations to cross the Atlantic via ship (funded by relief agencies) and temporarily settle in a camp in Oswego in northern New York State, near the Canadian border. They had all happened to have fled to Italy. They weren’t counted in America’s then-quotas on immigrants coming from specific countries.

Gruber, who had friends in high places in the American government, got the coveted assignment to assist them. But first, she was vetted by the War Relocation Authority, the State Department, and the Public Health Service. Upon traveling to the transport ship in Naples, she received the U.S. Army title “general” so that she would be treated like a prisoner of war (pursuant to the Geneva Convention) if she was captured by the Axis Powers.

The refugees had suffered terrible hardships and traumas prior to their arrival in Oswego. However, they continued to live their lives as best they could while confined to the camp. The Jewish ones held a bar mitzvah, a wedding and a bris for the baby born there. The able-bodied were made to do various local jobs such as farm work or shoveling coal, for which they were paid eighty cents a day; insultingly enough– paid approximately the same as the Nazi POWs with whom they worked side by side.

When the end of the war was declared in spring 1945, the immigration status of the Oswego camp’s residents became a political football. In August 1945, about a twentieth of the refugees opted to return to their home countries. Thereafter, different stakeholders– government officials and political activists argued over whether to let the refugees stay in America, or go where they wanted, such as to Palestine.

Read the book to learn many additional details about the people involved, and their fates.

We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders

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The Book of the Week is “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders, A Memoir of Love and Resistance” by Linda Sarsour, published in 2020.

First off, the author explained that jihad means “to strive.” When using this word, the vast majority of people who practice the religion of Islam are not extremists and therefore do not take it to mean “religious war.”

Of course, propagandists (haters, predatory stalkers, bullies, doxers and their ilk) twist a word such as “jihad” so that all Muslims are branded as extremists and the one-word description most often used in the United States– “terrorists.” The propagandists know how to whip up a frenzy of fear, and get satisfaction from: seeing their victims sustain psychological damage, as much as egging on their followers who do physical damage.

Anyway, the author, the oldest of seven siblings of Palestinian extraction, was born in May 1980 in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York State. She grew up in the nearby Sunset Park section– the multi-ethnic, immigrant community in which “…neighbors looked out for each other and disciplined one another’s children…”

At the author’s high school, John Jay, there were only three guidance counselors for more than three thousand students, but every day, tens of police officers arrested students whose punishments were outsized, for the minor offenses committed. After 9/11, across the country, numerous culturally and linguistically disadvantaged young rule-breakers (who were targeted because they were Muslim) were detained and deported without due process. Other Muslims left of their own accord, as they saw that the United States was becoming a hostile residential environment for them.

The author helped found an organization that assisted Islamic women and children in New York City. She and her colleagues practiced local political activism and community organizing. They realized they needed to ally with other minority groups to acquire sufficient power to change education policies for their own group. They also knew they needed to become partisan, so they formed the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, before the 2013 mayoral election.

In December 2014, the author and her fellow activists protested the handling of two different incidents the previous summer; the deaths of two (non-Caucasian) men resulting from law enforcement’s extremely inappropriate conduct in Staten Island in New York State, and in Ferguson, Missouri. The protestors got together with pop cultural influencers and social justice advocates including Jay-Z and Lebron James to stage a “die-in” at a New York Nets basketball game in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. This, on a night when there was high attendance because the royal couple William and Kate were there.

Read the book to learn many other details about the author’s: family, and her trials and tribulations as a Muslim and an activist.

The Price of Empire

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The Book of the Week is “The Price of Empire” by J. William Fulbright, with Seth P. Tillman, published in 1989. In this volume, given his time and place as a Democratic senator (and boastful alpha male, at that) from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, Fulbright expressed his views on the Cold War in terms of major historical events and hot wars.

Fulbright’s narratives deserve special scrutiny because they were written before the fall of the Berlin Wall– before historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight. He also expounded some, on the main reason he appeared to be racist: In the Postwar Era, government leaders from Southern States wouldn’t have a long political career if they favored civil rights for African-Americans (case in point– Carl Elliott, Representative from Alabama).

The author presciently asserted that in waging its anti-Communist campaigns, the United States had as its goal, because it knew it had superior technology: to bankrupt the Soviets via attrition in an arms race. But in so doing, the U.S. has damn near bankrupted itself!

Fulbright wrote, “The winners, present and prospective are the bystanders, in Europe and Asia, whose resources are committed to making their societies work.” He contended that the detente school of thought (in which the U.S. and Russia agreed to coexisting peacefully rather than fomenting hatred against the other; crowded out by greedy politicians) turned out to be superior economically, not to mention societally.

The United States is now paying the price for that. As is well known, politics cannot be divorced from economics. That is why top government leaders desirous of getting reelected have always harped on job growth— bragging about their own, and smearing their opponents’ lack thereof.

In 20/20 hindsight, workers who were making expensive war toys (many of which were wasted one way or another) for the military-industrial complex in the Postwar Era, could have been engaging in more constructive, productive, progressive endeavors in the areas of education and environmentally-friendly vehicles and infrastructure. Oh, well.

Be that as it may, (according to the book, which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References and Bibliography), in 1946, in connection with trying to counter the adverse effects of the nation’s war-making, Fulbright made lemons from lemonade. He established a scholarship program for Americans to study abroad in barter transactions. War-impoverished countries would supply education because they could not pay (in the form of currency, due to crushing war debt) for the American military supplies such as blankets, food, drugs and trucks they used on their respective battlefields during WWII.

Read the book to learn a boatload of additional history which the author made, witnessed, and by which he was shaped.

Yellen

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The Book of the Week is “Yellen, The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval” by Jon Hilsenrath, published in 2022. This book’s name is deceptive. For, this volume contained as much information on certain aspects of major economic events in American history (but was far from comprehensive in doing so), as it did biographical information on Janet Yellen.

Born in 1946 in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, Yellen married an economist, and her son became an economist, too. She and her husband both had careers teaching, theorizing, publishing and politicking. The author presented a bare-bones, oversimplified theory developed in the 1980’s by Yellen and her husband regarding unemployment. It was unclear whether this was for the benefit of the reader. As should be well known, the economy of the United States is hugely complex, what with unions, illegal immigrants, globalization, automation, and many other confounding variables, not to mention political meddling in connection therewith.

The author did mention two majorly interesting factoids, though:

“Trump said he would shrink the budget deficit and eliminate debt, but instead the deficit expanded from $585 billion before he took office to $984 billion in 2019, and the debt soared by $3 trillion along the way.”

Thus far in American history, no economist except Yellen has served in the following high-level political positions: Fed chair, Treasury secretary and chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Read the book to learn much more about how, through the decades, the changing times have forced economists to search for new theories (as the old ones have been discredited) to explain, with their seemingly authoritative (but actually uncertain) pronouncements– why they are taking specific actions.

No Such Thing As A Bad Day

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The Book of the Week is “No Such Thing As A Bad Day, A Memoir” by Hamilton Jordan (NOT to be confused with Jim Jordan or Vernon Jordan), published in 2000. This volume was a mishmash of a few topics, including his bouts with cancers, a bit about his political career, and his uncle’s civil rights activism. He claimed not to be an attention whore, but the book’s front cover featured a photo of his face, and the back cover, a photo of him with his family.

During the Vietnam Era, the author’s friends at the University of Georgia were either members of ROTC or the National Guard. In 1967, at 23 years old, he joined International Voluntary Services (an organization sort of like the Peace Corps) to help the Vietnamese people grow rice.

The author was a tad insecure, apparently feeling the need to engage in name-dropping of celebrities, even though he must have met a huge number of them in his lifetime; he worked for Jimmy Carter, before and during the time Carter was president. He wrote, “Roy Cohn practiced law in New York City… representing some celebrity (like Donald Trump) in some highly public divorce settlement or scandal.” In August 1979, the FBI showed up at the author’s home, in connection with cocaine and Studio 54 in New York City.

The author then described his uncle Clarence’s civil-rights activities, that in the mid to late 1950’s, consisted of organizing a biracial Baptist commune with tens of residents, called Koinonia in rural Georgia (the state of the United States). Clarence was just trying to practice what Christians preached, but (excuse the cliche) no good deed ever goes unpunished. As can be imagined, Clarence was doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One last interesting factoid: According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and an index) when Bill Clinton was a newly elected president, the author advised aide George Stephanopoulos to recommend that Clinton get rid of the Independent Counsel law. That law had been a thorn in the sides of presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and others, and continues to be. Enough said.

Read the book to learn various other details about the above, and about the author’s bouts with cancers.

His Eminence and Hizzoner

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The Book of the Week is “His Eminence and Hizzoner” by John Cardinal O’Connor and mayor Edward I. Koch, published in 1989. As might be recalled, at the book’s writing, O’Connor had recently been named a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. Koch was New York City’s mayor, starting in 1978. Each man took turns expressing his views on various hot-button political issues such as abortion, the separation of Church and State, discrimination, education, healthcare, etc.

In the 1980’s, when Americans began to receive tens of cable TV channels, the outrageously concentrated power and influence of the Catholic Church and media outlets such as the New York Times began to wane.

Indications of this include:

Prior to then, every year on Christmas day and Easter Sunday, the Pope delivered a speech televised on the three major TV networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. He was on all the channels. Present-day Americans have infinite educational and entertainment choices on these Christian holidays, around which crass commercialism, endless religious discussions, and stressful family gatherings revolve.
The New York Times‘ reviews- (of performing-arts productions, architecture, and other cultural goings-on in New York City among intellectuals) had extremely wide readership among influencers who would help attract or repel early attendees through word-of-mouth. This fed on itself to, say, close a show, or spur its longevity. The reviews were that influential. Fortunately, times have changed.

In another example, in the book from former American president Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, Koch wrote about how Trump bragged about meeting with the Times‘ lead reviewer of architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable. That meeting led her to write a glowing article that put undue influence on the City Planning Commission. In this way, in building Trump Tower, Trump received especially advantageous structural and financial terms and conditions from the city government, that other developers didn’t get. And future developers wouldn’t get them either, due to zoning changes.

With respect to financial help from the government, Koch believed poverty programs for instance, should have lent money to small businesses, regardless of the ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. of the parties involved, to provide equal opportunity for everyone who was economically disadvantaged. He thought of “affirmative action” as helping people who had suffered or were suffering discrimination, by making them aware of jobs and education programs, but not giving them favorable treatment through setting quotas for their acceptance or hiring.

Read the book to learn much more about the views of the cardinal and the mayor, in their time and place– the 1980’s.