Posted on 02/11/2004 6:20:50 PM PST by Fedora
Hi, all--long-time lurker trying to post my first thread here, so please bear with me if I screw up the formatting or post this in the wrong place :) I've seen threads discussing Kerry's pro-Sandinista stance during the Reagan administration, but didn't notice this particular piece of information, which I thought worth passing on. This is from S. Stephen Powell's "Covert Cadre", an expose of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a pro-Soviet/pro-Cuban think tank founded in the 1960s which was funded by the KGB and linked to the Black Panthers, the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, etc. Here is something Powell mentions about John Kerry's role in promoting the IPS' pro-Sandinista lobbying efforts during the Reagan administration:
From Chapter 14 of S. Steven Powell, "Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies", with introduction by David Horowitz, Ottawa, Illinois: Green Hill Publishers, Inc., 1987, ISBN 0-915463-39-3:
Pages 226-227:
When the $14 million aid package for the contras came up in spring 1985, Congress initially voted it down. Many congressmen said that, besides the PACCA report, reports of human rights violations had influenced them. . .Just forty-eight hours before the vote, Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) traveled to Nicaragua. Their celebrated meetings with Sandinista junta leaders, which captured the headlines and helped sway Congress, were arranged by Peter Kornbluh, a fellow at IPS. Within a week the Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega, flew to Moscow and secured $200 million in Soviet aid. Shocked and embarrassed, Congress reversed gears and granted $27 million in humanitarian aid to the contras.
Page 243:
IPS often acts as the ideological center and hub of activism of the autonomous groups in the [pro-Sandinista "CISPES"] Latin network. For instance. . .in early 1985 IPS brought together various players in the Latin network to compile "the Reagan record of deceit and illegality on Central America." "In Contempt of Congress" was a mishmash of contradictory data and not particularly persuasive. But then it was not intended to persuade, but to confuse and sow distrust of the Reagan administration. As with the PACCA report, it got wide circulation in Congress. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) offered his praise for it and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) called it "essential reading for every American who remembers Vietnam or Watergate." [Footnote cites: "In Contempt of Congress" (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1985), p. 70.]
Might be interesting if someone could dig up a copy of "In Contempt of Congress" and see if Kerry's mentioned or quoted there.
While I'm on this subject I'll mention two possibly-related pieces of info I've been looking into but haven't had a chance to write into a good summary for posting yet. One is Kerry's relationship at Yale with Harvey H. Bundy III. Bundy was a relative of an earlier Harvey Bundy, a close associate of Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter, who played a key role during the FDR/Truman years in setting up the Communist Party apparatus in Washington and in advancing the career of Soviet agent Alger Hiss. Harvey's son William--apparently Harvey H.'s uncle, from what I've gathered--contributed to Hiss' defense fund (and recently wrote a book attacking Nixon's foreign policy, "A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency"). William's brother McGeorge, who worked on the NSC under Kennedy and Johnson, had an aide named Marcus Raskin who co-founded the IPS at about the same time Harvey H. was rooming with Kerry at Yale. Kerry's website describes how he met Harvey H. and mentions, "One summer, Kerry and Bundy went to Europe, one trying hard to keep up with the irrepressible other. They drove all night to visit an acquaintance in Switzerland, arriving at dawn with hours to kill." (http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/clips/news_2003_1009e.html) Other sites describe how the Bundy family influenced Kerry's descision to go to Vietnam. It might prove enlightening to explore what role the Bundys and IPS may have played in this early stage of Kerry's career before he went to Vietnam. I'm particularly curious who Kerry and Bundy went to visit in Switzerland--their trip reminds me of Bill Clinton's college visit to Europe. . .
Also in relation to IPS, Kerry is quoted prominently in an old left-wing book attacking the Contras, Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, "Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central Ameria" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, ISBN 0-520-07312-6 (alk. paper) /0-520-07781-4 (ppb.), which has some passages implying a close link between Kerry and the Christic Institute, a Cuban intelligence front linked to IPS. I'm in the process of reviewing this; if I find anything noteworthy I'll post it.
EWWW! Check out these pictures of John Kerry (Rock band in Prep School & Yale Yearbook Picture) (Posts #40 and 41)
Swarthmore's "world peace foundation" lists HH Bundy Senior in it's membership, along with Alger Hiss (and George Plimpton?!?)
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG051-099/dg055wpf.htm
[SNIP]
During the 1920s, the WPF hoped to be the official agent in the United States for the sale of League of Nations publications, as well as the International Labor Organization, and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Its primary focus continued to be the dissemination to libraries of literature promoting world order. It worked closely with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to hold conferences about documentary and research problems in the field of international relations. In 1947, WPF began publication of a quarterly, International Organization, which dealt with issuea affecting the United Nations.
[SNIP]
After Hiss helped the State Department set up the UN he became President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1946 (for a reference see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss).
Also see:
Kerry's World: Father Knows Best
Richard Kerry's father, a Czech Jew, fled Europe. The son, by contrast, embraced it. As a law student at Harvard in the late '30s, he read continental philosophers like Kierkegaard and histories about Bismarck and Metternich; he traveled to France, where he took sculpture classes and met his wife. Hoping to parlay his love of Europe into a career, he chose international law as his law school specialty. After World War II, which he spent in the Army Air Corps testing new airplanes at high altitudes, he moved his family to Washington to take a spot in the Department of the Navy's Office of General Counsel, hoping that his proximity to the State Department might help him land a job there. Two years into his Washington stint, Kerry's relocation paid off. The State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs hired him to help work through the thicket created by America's adherence to a new set of postwar international agreements. According to Brinkley, the cosmopolitan Kerry was a true believer in the United Nations and the postwar promise of global government.
My emphasis on Kerry's father's Harvard Law School background here is meant to draw attention to the fact that Alger Hiss also came to Washington from Harvard Law during this period, courtesy of Agricultural Adjusment Administration general counsel Jerome Frank upon recommendation from Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter, who was acting covertly on behalf of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, also formerly of Harvard Law School (sources: Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937, A History, New York: Random House, 1986, 275-281; John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976, 10-12; Joseph P. Lash, Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal, New York: Doubleday, 1985, 111, 217-218; Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Oxford University Press, 1982; Garden City: Anchor Books, 1983, 33, 113-116. Cf. Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928-1945, annotator Max Freedman, Little, Brown and Company, 1967, 7-9).
Wow--that's quite interesting indeed. Thanks for posting this. Please let us know if you learn any more about that.
LOL! Well, hopefully you're connected via Kevin Bacon within a few degrees of someone who can offset the Kerry connection--ROFL!
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