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On March 28, 2021 an hour-long interview with General Thomas McInerney appeared online.
I do not know of the interviewer Nino, but the two seemed to get on well. Both support President Trump and both are sceptical of coronavirus vaccines.
General McInerney, 84, began his career in the Army then joined the Air Force. He completed his initial pilot training in 1960. In 1962, he flew escort missions in the West Berlin Air Corridor during the Berlin Crisis and escort reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In April 1963, he was one of the first forward air controllers assigned to South Vietnam with a Vietnamese army division. He was sent to South East Asia on three additional deployments.
After the Vietnam War, he completed studies at the Armed Forces Staff College and graduated from the National War College.
In 1974, he was stationed in London as the air attaché to the U.S. Embassy. Between November 1976 and October 1977, he was assigned to the Royal Air Force Station in Upper Heyford, England, where he was vice commander of the 20th Tactical Fighter Wing.
In 1979, he was stationed in Asia, first in the Philippines, where he commanded the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Clark Air Base, then in 1981, in Japan, where he commanded the 313th Air Division at Kadena Air Base.
In 1983, he was transferred to Hawaii, where he served as deputy chief of staff for operations and intelligence, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces at Hickam Air Force Base.
In 1985, he returned to Europe. He became commander of 3rd Air Force, Royal Air Force Station in Mildenhall, England. The following year, he became vice commander in chief, Headquarters US Air Forces in Europe, Ramstein Air Base, West Germany.
In 1988, he was reassigned to the United States, serving as commander of Alaskan Air Command, Alaskan NORAD Region, and Joint Task Force Alaska. In July 1989, when Alaskan Command was activated, he became its commander. In 1990, he commanded the 11th Air Force, the redesignation of Alaskan Air Command.
His last active duty assignment was as assistant vice chief of staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, DC. He retired from the Air Force in 1994, with the rank of Lieutenant General. Afterwards, he served on the boards of directors for several military contractors.
General McInerney endorsed Donald Trump both in 2016 and 2020. After the 2020 election, he supported the use of the Insurrection Act and all additional powers available. He was quoted as saying that he wanted President Trump:
to declare a national emergency, use the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus, set up military tribunals, and suspend the electoral college [vote for president and vice-president] on December 14 and the presidential inauguration on January 20.
A summary of the General’s interview with Nino follows. As one would expect in a conversation, the subjects ran together, so I have separated them below.
2020 election
At the 13-minute point, he said that Trump had 79 million votes to Biden’s 68 million. At the 15-minute mark, he mentioned the recount in Maricopa County and two more recounts in two other states. He believes that the Supreme Court did not want to hear any cases about the election because Chief Justice John Roberts is ‘compromised’ in some way.
He also thinks that coronavirus was engineered to steal the election and that someone cut a deal with the C C P.
The General said that President Trump should have appointed Sidney Powell as special legal counsel in December.
He said that, as nothing has been done:
Americans have got to take control over their country.
As to why Cyber Command did not report election irregularities on the night to the President, he said
I believe we have a Deep State.
He would like to know the reasons why Trump did not contest the election and made this assertion:
Trump had a lot of the Deep State around him.
He repeated later in the interview that Trump was surrounded by:
Deep Staters.
When asked about his former Vice President, Mike Pence, he said:
I think he is Deep State. He is part of the problem.
He was disappointed that the military did not do anything with regard to the election. He believes that Germany intercepted Dominion votes but took no action:
I think the military’s asleep at the switch.
He said that the United States needs:
a transparent audit that we’re all comfortable with.
He asserted:
Biden did not win.
He explained that votes exceeded voter rolls in all suspect states, a situation that, on a national level, was previously:
unheard of … a stolen election.
He said that Biden did not win through properly cast votes and that one would have to throw out mail-in votes as well as:
get the right people to look at them.
He thinks the focus needs to be on clean elections for 2022:
We’ve got to just keep banging away at it …
and if done fairly, Trump gets in for 2024.
As for the Q movement, he said:
I don’t know anything about the Q movement.
Coronavirus
With regard to coronavirus, at the 17:30 mark, the General said:
Do not take the vaccine.
He revealed that has already had one shot.
He explained that the vaccine is a prophylactic mRNA and that there will be no built-in immunity to COVID-20 and COVID-21.
Whether all the military have had it is still unconfirmed, he said.
He was and is clearly against lockdown. He added that a proper hydroxychloroquine protocol would have been sufficient and also suggested ivermectin. He believes that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) lied to President Trump.
He mentioned a Dr Northrop, whom he described as a well renowned physician, who says that Americans should stop taking the vaccine.
The General has strong feelings on this subject:
This is our Normandy, this is our Iwo Jima.
He believes that Dr Fauci:
has been part of this cabal.
He mentioned New York’s Governor Cuomo and deplored the nursing home deaths in that state.
On the other hand, he added, COVID-19 has a 99.2% survival rate and said of the American response:
We over-reacted.
Potentially, he said, Americans could go to ‘camps’ for refusing vaccines.
Conclusion
General McInerney said that Americans need to be realistic and resolute:
Hope is not a strategy.
He also foresees difficulties later in 2021, with serious problems starting:
this winter.
My readers wonder why President Trump is not doing more to oppose the Biden administration’s agenda. I am not sure that he can do much, if anything, at this point.
I will have more on the concluding days of the Trump administration next week which might help explain his current circumstances. I haven’t written about those final weeks. They have been too painful to consider.
The following video is likely to be the most important one you will watch this week:
Author and independent reporter Alex Newman explains in 30 minutes what is really happening in the United States after the election.
Please take time out of your schedule to view it.
Many Americans in power do not want President Trump to win re-election. This year was crucial in seeing that does not happen.
Hence the voter fraud that happened in several states last week.
The mass media narrative is important in keeping morale suppressed among Trump supporters.
There are various strands involved in seeing a coup succeed: government, intelligence agencies, the media, polling companies, those in charge of voting as well as big donors. Even if you already know this, it is worth watching him explain it in more detail.
Newman says that the legislatures in the states involved are mostly Republican and can take the decision not to accept their state’s result given the unusual vote counts and the many reports from vote watchers on the ground. As such, they can appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College.
Newman suspects that this dispute will linger for weeks. He says that things could get very bad during that time: reminiscent, he says, of the 1917 election in Russia which brought about the revolution there. Wealthy American donors and corporations at the time bankrolled the Russian Revolution. He says that what is going on in the US right now is not dissimilar.
Furthermore, he says, Trump must start getting rid of high-placed people in his administration: Bill Barr, Christopher Wray and Mike Esper (see update below). The first two are letting people who have committed serious crimes run around scot free.
The overall goal of people blocking Trump is to force him out of office. Newman says that some in the military are involved in the hope that they can turn the troops against the president.
Newman sees the possibility of greater violence in city streets while the election mess is being sorted out.
Newman has just come out with a new 167-page book — Deep State: The Invisible Government Behind The Scenes, which he says you can buy direct from the Liberty Sentinel website, of which he is a contributor. I do not see a link for buying the books, so perhaps the Contact page will be of use.
UPDATE — Monday, November 9 — President Trump fired Mark Esper:
Thank you to everyone who let me know via the comments.
On September 5, I posted ‘Today’s Democrats aren’t those your grandparents admired’.
One of my readers, H E, has given me permission to repost his comment, which is worthy of its own entry:
Very good writeup about the current ideology and tactics of the Democrat party. The Democrat party has been taken over completely by Marxist radicals, now calling themselves “Progressives” . The party is a monolith, there are no “Conservative Democrats” or “Centrist Democrats” represented in it. As you said, the current Democrat Party is not the party of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.
As a 62 year old American, I can look back and see that many of the actions of the today’s “Progressives” are not new, they go back 50 years to the late 1960s. At that time, radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers murdered policemen and blew up government buildings. But back then, there were countervailing forces in society that pushed back against the radicals and stopped them. In response, the radicals changed tactics. They infiltrated society in order to gain control of the levers of power and to neutralize any entities that might oppose them. Today we can see that they have mostly succeeded in this regard: the administrative and judicial branches of government are dominated by radicals, and the mass media, academia, mainstream religious organizations, and labor unions now serve the Progressive agenda.
In response to the Trump presidency, Progressives have dropped their façade and come into the open about their policies and goals.
One can no longer deny the following facts about American society:
-There is an entity which can be referred to as the Deep State comprised of unelected government officials, businessmen, and military officials who secretly manipulate and direct national policy in accords with the Progressive agenda.
-The Democrat Party is the political arm of the Deep State.
-There is little effective difference in the agendas of the establishment Democrat and Republican parties. Both parties serve the interests of the Deep State.
-The mass media is the propaganda arm of the Deep State. Its purpose is to broadcast the Deep State’s narrative of events and to shut down public discussions that go against the narrative.
-Academia and the education bureaucracy indoctrinate the youth into the values of the Deep State.
I could not agree more.
I am close to H E’s age and clearly remember the notional Progressives’ antics from 50 years ago. Who could have imagined that they would be at the forefront of American politics today with even more madness?
The one element I would add to this list is the infiltration of the Church by these people. That started over a century ago in the US with Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel and continued in the 20th century with the Communist Party’s ‘honeyed words to the church people’.
Decades earlier, in 1840, an Italian Jesuit coined the term ‘social justice’. In the 20th century and today, using Antonio Gramsci’s passive revolution tactics, a number of theologians and professors, such as the late Joseph Buttigieg — Democrat candidate Pete Buttigieg’s father — pushed for ‘social justice’ and ‘change’ in the Catholic Church.
There were secret agents in the clergy, too, in the decades preceding Vatican II.
Today, many Democrats — Catholic and Protestant — are working to help illegals via church agencies. Even the Salvation Army is at it, intimidating an Epoch Times reporter who was at the border earlier this year.
The Democrats are bad news.
In further coverage of what used to be called Operation — or Project — Mockingbird, the diffusion of certain headlines via the media is still alive and well.
On Thursday and Friday, August 2 and 3, 2018, the subject was QAnon, who must have hit a huge nerve among the powers that be.
Here’s the flurry of American headlines from last Thursday:
The following day, a contributor to 8chan’s Q Research board posted the following international stories, all of which are about QAnon fostering Trumpian conspiracy theories:
Anonymous e71061 (4) No.2430466>>2430476 >>2430709
Qanon MSM news exposure went global past 24 hours
Example for several countries
France
https://http://www.20minutes.fr/monde/2316919-20180803-qanon-groupe-pro-trump-adepte-theories-complot
Germany
Netherlands
https://http://www.ad.nl/buitenland/qanon-rukt-op-in-amerika-complotgekkies-of-wakkere-patriotten~aa24a2ab/
Norwegian
https://http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/konspirerer-om-at-trump-star-bak-en-kommende-storm/70069810
Spanish
https://http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-45053116
Austria
https://derstandard.at/2000084612925/Paedophiler-Tom-Hanks-QAnon-nutzt-uralte-Diffamierungstaktik
Poland
Italy
https://notizie.tiscali.it/esteri/articoli/usa-mistero-qanon-complottisti-che-adorano-trump-00001/
Hungary
https://http://www.express.hr/top-news/poremecena-sekta-za-trumpa-izmisljaju-teorije-zavjera-16966
Czech Republic
China
https://paper.wenweipo.com/2018/08/03/YO1808030018.htm
Russia
https://echo.msk.ru/blog/karina_orlova/2252088-echo/
Korean
https://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/08/03/2018080300118.html
I read only the French article and the comments. The latter were particularly interesting, as the readers were divided. Someone wrote a characteristically critical remark about President Trump and his supporters, to which someone replied, ‘Inform yourself a bit before commenting. Trump’s doing a great job, especially with the economy’.
Back to the 8chan comment. Q responded (message 1806), emphases mine:
Q !CbboFOtcZs d51ef9 (1) No.2430708
Full attack mode.
Washington Post leading?
[Sample Past 5hrs]
Who owns the Washington Post?
Amazon?
What ABC agency is heavily tied to Amazon?
https://http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-launches-secret-region-2017-11
https://http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/cia-tech-official-calls-amazon-cloud-project-transformational
Q
Why would the rest of the world need — or even want — to know about QAnon and Q-related boards, including Reddit’s greatawakening?
By design, this Nightingale’s song serves only to thoroughly discredit Trump’s followers. What if a false flag were to take place with a fake Q follower? These articles could set the stage. The world would say, ‘Oh, the QAnon story was in the papers. Yeah, crazy people’.
Therefore, this is important:
Interestingly, the Washington Post featured an editorial after the Trump-Putin Helsinki meeting: ‘God bless the “deep state”‘, an image of which is here. It begins with this:
Before this harebrained and reckless administration is history, the nation will have cause to celebrate the public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed “deep state” …
God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.
If you appreciate President Trump, please continue to pray for his safety and that of his family and administration.
In February, I published a guest post from one of my readers, George True, on the Parkland, Florida school shooting. If you missed it, please be sure to read it.
A few days ago, George True commented on ‘The bottom to top plan to save America’, which explains why we have not seen high profile arrests yet. (If you haven’t read it, please do, as it will put what follows in context.
George kindly granted me permission to use his eloquent, inspired comment as a guest post. Emphases mine below.
This is an excellent Christian perspective on what is happening in America right now:
I certainly hope this what is happening behind the scenes. Many American patriots, including myself, were expecting to see a number of high level arrests and prosecutions by now. The sheer number of crimes committed by high ranking members of the Obama administration is almost overwhelming to contemplate. And the in-your-face audacity of it all and them more or less daring anyone to do anything about it is breathtaking in its arrogance. The weaponizing of virtually all agencies of government by the prior administration against anyone, including common people, who had different political views is a level of evil that is so far beyond the pale it defies description.
This is by far the greatest government scandal in the entire history of the United States. And so far the perpetrators have gotten away with it scot free. If they are not indicted and prosecuted for their many felonies committed against the American people, then one can truly say that there is no law anymore in the former constitutional republic known as America, except the law of the jungle.
The Deep State is attempting to isolate Trump and get him before he gets them. The Republican establishment in particular is complicit in the attempt to bring Trump down. Never in my life have I seen one of the major political parties not even attempt to defend the leader of their party. Most of them are probably compromised, either through blackmail or having been bought off. And the travesty of Mueller, one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Uranium One scandal, investigating Trump on the bogus and fraudulent claim that his 2016 campaign somehow conspired with Russia is both disgusting and enraging to see day after day. If real justice were in effect, Mueller and his entire crew of virulently anti-Trump leftists, along with all of the main criminals of the Obama administration would be taken into custody by the Marine Corps and transported to Guantanamo forthwith, where they would await trial by military tribunal.
I am not a vengeful person. Yet my soul cries out to see justice done. Something on the order of seventy million American Christians who remember what our country used to be prayed daily and fervently to our God for deliverance from the criminal cabal that has had a stranglehold on every aspect of our government. Our prayers were answered in the form of President Donald Trump, an imperfect man, but one who also remembers what out country used to be and was willing to risk everything, up to and including his very life in order to restore our republic to we the people. I cannot believe that God would bring us this far only to have the Deep State take out our champion that He has anointed.
I still fervently pray, with all my strength and all my heart and soul that there is much going on behind the scenes that we do not know about. I pray daily for Donald Trump’s health and safety, and that things are proceeding according to plan. Let the corrupt media bray and spew their misinformation and deliberate disinformation. Let the Deep State think they have gotten away with it, even as the net slowly but surely encircles them. And let us all continue to fervently beseech God for justice, and to thank God for all that he has done and continues to do for each of us individually and all of us collectively. I want nothing more than to be a righteous man in a once again righteous nation – a nation that looks to God for guidance, protection, and love.
That is a perfect description of the egregious present and the God-fearing past in America.
I hope George seriously considers starting his own WordPress blog. His thoughts deserve a wide audience.
This post can be found on my Recipes / Health / History / Health / Trump page.
On Wednesday, January 24, 2018, the Revd Franklin Graham gave an interview to Todd Starnes on Fox News Radio.
Coup
On the coup, the Revd Graham told Todd Starnes (emphases mine):
I believe we are in a coup d’etat. There are people in this country who are wanting to destroy the president and take over the government by force.
Also:
Graham called on the nation to pray for the president and the vice president.
“We need to pray for those that surround the president that God will protect them and keep them safe,” he said.
“I believe that he’s the president of this nation because God allowed it,” Graham. “And I think on election night, God intervened. He wasn’t supposed to win – he was supposed to lose. And I think it was God who worked in a mysterious way on election night to turn the tables.”
Recall that I wrote about a plot last summer (Threat of plot against Donald Trump is real), a coup in December (The case for a coup against Trump) and once more last week (The case for a coup against Trump).
Media
Graham rightly says that the media are complicit in the coup. Speaking of those who want to take down the president, he said:
“They are not going to use bullets. They are using the media – to plant thoughts in people’s minds that he’s incompetent, that he’s dangerous, that you can’t trust him with nuclear weapons, that he is mentally unstable,” Graham said.
Trump
Another Fox News article about Graham’s interview stated that the president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse caught flak for what he has said about President Donald Trump:
Graham and other Christian leaders have been targeted in recent days by the mainstream media for their unwavering support of the president. Many have been accused of hypocrisy for backing a man who is accused of cheating on his wife and using profanity.
Among Graham’s critics is GOPe former party chairman Michael Steele, who turned out to be a bitterly disappointing leader after the 2008 election. He did nothing to bring his own and other minorities into the Republican Party. My hopes were high, only to be dashed. I haven’t trusted the Republicans since. That said, they are still better than Democrats.
Steele, a Catholic and fierce never-Trumper, appeared on television to criticise Graham and other pro-Trump pastors:
“I have a very simple admonition at this point,” Michael Steele said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “Just shut the hell up and don’t ever preach to me about anything ever again. I don’t want to hear it.”
Steele, the former head of the Republican National Committee, was furious at evangelicals.
“After telling me how to live my life, who to love, what to believe, what not to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter? The grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter? The outright behavior and lies don’t matter? Just shut up.”
The Fox News article explained the background to Steele’s comment went back to the 2016 campaign:
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, drew fire after he said evangelicals gave President Trump a second chance …
Both Graham and Perkins pointed out that Trump’s alleged sinful transgressions occurred long before he took the oath of office. On the other hand, Bill Clinton’s admitted indiscretions not only happened during his presidential term – they literally happened in the Oval Office.
Yes, they did indeed!
Back to Graham’s biblical explanation of his support of Trump:
“We are all flawed people,” he told the “Todd Starnes Radio Show.” “The president is a sinner. Franklin Graham is a sinner. We are not perfect people.”
He called the accusations against the president unfortunate and distracting.
“Has he had scandals in his life? Sure he has,” Graham told me. “These scandals happened a number of years ago. That doesn’t make it right. I don’t condone bad language. I don’t condone adultery.”
But for now – Graham said he still supports President Trump.
“He’s not perfect, but he’s our president,” Graham said. “He said he didn’t do it. I have to take his word over that of the media – that is trying to lynch him.”
Also:
However, should evidence come to light that Trump had engaged in such behavior while in office, Graham said he would speak out with condemnation.
Absolutely.
The reason I said Graham’s words about ‘flawed people’ are biblical is that they refer to the following verses, which also cite Psalm 14:1-3, with the same words:
Psalm 53:1-3:
53 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity;
there is none who does good.
2 God looks down from heaven
on the children of man
to see if there are any who understand,[b]
who seek after God.
3 They have all fallen away;
together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
Romans 3:10-12:
10 as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
Graham, who refrained from endorsing Trump or anyone else in 2016, concluded by saying:
“The only hope for this country is God,” Graham said. “I don’t have any faith in the Republican Party. I don’t have any faith in the Democrat Party. The only hope for this nation is God.”
That is true for the United States and true for every nation in the world.
I will have more on the media and the coup this week.
Earlier this week, I posted about an anti-Christmas message from 2014 that the Washington Post recycled this year.
There is more news about WaPo to tell.
A WaPo reader is upset
Jean-Marie Simon, who has read WaPo for 20 years, gave the paper information about her Christmas flight on United. Simon had bought a first-class ticket — seat 1A — only to find that she had been bumped by congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).
The Daily Mail has the full story with photos and Simon’s relevant Facebook posts. It is not surprising that WaPo did not want to cover it. What is surprising is that Simon, a schoolteacher, thought they would do so (Facebook post courtesy of Reddit):
Here’s another — albeit facetious — view of the situation. Courtesy of 8chan:
One wonders if Simon will continue to read WaPo after this.
Perhaps this incident red-pilled her.
The Post
In other WaPo news, a movie — The Post — made its debut before Christmas. The New York Post gave it three out of four stars.
This film documents how WaPo increased its national prominence as a newspaper.
The story is about the Pentagon Papers, which was a huge exposé in 1971 about how Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied about the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg was the Edward Snowden of his day. He had worked on the papers, a study officially called United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.
Ellsberg and a friend, Anthony Russo, photocopied the pages in 1969 and approached a few political luminaries to see if they would be interested in disclosing it. Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s national security adviser at the time, declined. So did two Democrat legislators.
In 1971, Ellsberg approached a reporter at the New York Times, giving him 43 volumes the following month. These were not published until June 13 that year. The excerpts were dubbed The Pentagon Papers.
The Nixon administration quickly tried — but failed — to stop the NYT from publishing another excerpt on June 14. Although one would have thought Nixon — a Republican — would have relished this as Johnson was a Democrat, Henry Kissinger told him that allowing the excerpts to continue would be dangerous, as nothing would prevent newspapers from publishing dirty laundry from his administration.
Oh, the irony — think Watergate, which WaPo broke with daily coverage from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Furthermore, the Nixon administration argued that Ellsberg and his friend Russo were guilty of a felony because they were circulating classified documents.
Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon obtained a federal injunction forcing the NYT to stop publication after three articles. The NYT appealed and the case New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713) quickly ended up in the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Ellsberg had given other portions of the study to WaPo reporter Ben Bagdikian, who took them to the paper’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee. WaPo began publishing the excerpts on June 18.
Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist asked WaPo to stop publishing, but WaPo refused. Rehnquist tried — but failed — to get an injunction issued in US district court.
Ultimately, the NYT won the case in the Supreme Court on June 30, 1971. Fifteen other newspapers began publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers. In 1973, all charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed — because of theft and bribery by the Nixon administration with regard to the case.
The Post shows how WaPo decided to publish the Pentagon Papers with all the drama involved.
The film also shows the male-dominated world of Katharine Graham, the only female publisher of a notable newspaper at the time. She was WaPo‘s publisher from 1969 to 1979. She then became chairman of the board and CEO before relinquishing the latter position in 1993. She continued to serve as chairman of the board until her death in 2001 at the age of 84.
Graham wisely put investigative reporting front and centre in a successful effort to ensure the NYT would not grab all the big Washington stories, such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
The New York Post‘s review says that, when this film was made, a female occupant of the White House was envisioned for 2017.
So much for that.
The present occupant makes much out of fake news, predominant in today’s WaPo and the NYT.
Philip Graham
Katharine Meyer Graham rose to the top at WaPo because she succeeded her husband Philip. Also of note is that her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in a bankruptcy auction in 1933. Philip Graham succeeded his father-in-law as publisher in 1946.
Philip Graham (1915-1963) was an interesting character with a lot of Deep State connections. Spartacus Educational has a well-researched entry on him. Do read it all, including the footnotes. A summary with excerpts follows.
He was born in a small town in South Dakota. His parents relocated to Florida during his childhood. Graham ended up attending Harvard Law School and edited the Harvard Law Review.
He married Katharine Meyer in 1940, during which time he was a law clerk for the famous Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Graham joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He worked for the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan. In 1944:
Graham was recruited into the “Special Branch, a super-secret part of Intelligence, run by Colonel Al McCormick”. He later worked under General George Kenney, commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific. Graham was sent to China where he worked with John K. Singlaub, Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Mitchell WerBell, Jake Esterline, Paul Helliwell, Robert Emmett Johnson and Lucien Conein. Others working in China at that time included Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley.
From this, we can see that he was incredibly well-connected to power.
After the war, as the publisher for WaPo, he expanded his network further with a group of men known as the Georgetown Set. They included:
Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.
Whilst this is showing my age, I grew up hearing and reading a lot of those names.
It is likely that Graham already knew some of those men from the war. Allen Dulles, to name but one, ran the New York OSS office.
Dulles headed the CIA during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Richard Bissell worked with him. Cord Meyer was in the CIA. Meyer was involved with Project, or Operation, Mockingbird, which used big media outlets to drive a government narrative:
According to Katherine Graham, her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends who had organized the ill-fated venture.
By the time of the 1960 presidential campaign, Graham did what he could to get Lyndon Johnson in the vice presidential slot for John Kennedy:
Graham met Lyndon B. Johnson in 1953. Graham believed that one day Johnson would make a good president. Graham told Johnson that his main problem was that he was perceived in Washington as someone under the control of the Texas oil and gas industry. Graham added that his attitude towards civil rights was also hurting him with liberals in the North. He was advised to go a “bit beyond (Richard) Russell and yet far short of (Hubert) Humphrey”.
Graham was a supporter of the Democratic Party and did what he could to get Johnson the nomination in 1960. When John F. Kennedy defeated Johnson he sent Clark Clifford to ask Stuart Symington to be his running-mate. Symington accepted the post but said: “I bet you a hundred dollars that no matter what he says, Jack will not make me his running mate. He will have to pick Lyndon”.
In the background Graham and Joseph Alsop were attempting to persuade John F. Kennedy to appoint Lyndon B. Johnson instead. Despite the objection of Robert Kennedy and other leading advisers, Kennedy decided to replace Symington with Johnson.
Once Kennedy was in the White House, Graham succeeded in persuading him to appoint his (Graham’s) buddies to administration positions: Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, Arthur Schlesinger (former OSS) as a presidential adviser and David Bruce as ambassador to London.
Graham was able to expand the Washington Post Company by purchasing a radio and a television station as well as Newsweek and two prominent art magazines:
The main person involved in arranging Graham’s takeover of other media companies was Fritz Beebe. He ran the law firm Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. This was the company owned by Al McCormick, who Graham met during the war. Averell Harriman was another one involved in these negotiations.
Behind the scenes, things were less rosy, Even before Eugene Meyer died in 1959, a rift was growing between Philip and Katharine — Kay, to her friends. Graham’s mental state was not very good, either. Meyer wondered whether he should turn the company over to his son-in-law:
The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly.
Katharine Graham’s biographer, Deborah Davis, posited that Graham was beginning to bother the CIA. After his second nervous breakdown he talked openly about how troubling he found Operation Mockingbird in terms of manipulating journalists:
He said it to the CIA… He turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and, strangely, silence. The word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted. Graham was actually under surveillance by somebody. Davis has noted that one of Graham’s assistants “recorded his mutterings on scraps of paper.”
Others suggest that Graham had been damaged from undergoing CIA and other psychiatric treatments involving mind-altering drugs.
Graham told one of his close friends, WaPo attorney Edward Bennett Williams, that he wanted a divorce and planned on rewriting his will to leave everything — including the Washington Post Company — to his mistress instead of to Kay.
Williams was able to delay a divorce, but Graham rewrote his will three times in the spring of 1963. The last version omitted Kay altogether.
Then, Graham addressed a newspaper publishers convention in Arizona in a tirade about the CIA and Washington:
even to the point of exposing his friend John Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer, the wife of a top CIA official, Cord Meyer (no relation to Katharine Graham).
Katharine heard about it and flew to Phoenix:
and snatched up her husband who was captured after a struggle, put in a straitjacket and sedated. He was then flown to an exclusive mental clinic in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md.
On the morning of Aug. 3, 1963, Katharine Graham reportedly told friends that Philip was “better” and coming home.
Suicides
That day in 1963, Philip Graham killed himself at home while Katharine was napping upstairs. The New York Post gives us this detail that other media outlets often suppress. He:
committed suicide at age 48 by shooting himself with a 28-gauge shotgun in 1963, days after being released from a psychiatric hospital following six weeks of treatment.
As he was not of sound mind when he died, his will was declared invalid. As he died intestate, Katharine assumed control of the Washington Post Company.
On December 20, 2017, one of the Grahams’ sons, William, 69, also committed suicide. He did not work at WaPo. He was a lawyer and law professor at UCLA. In later life, he turned to philanthropy. He died at his home in Los Angeles.
WaPo reported:
The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said his brother Donald E. Graham, a former Post publisher and chief executive.
Like Philip, William also left behind a wife and grown children. I hope they find comfort in the months ahead.
William did not live to see the national release of The Post.