ENEMIES: A HISTORY OF THE FBI - GLOSSARY ~ (SPOILER THREAD)

[Bryan]

Alger Hiss:

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Though Alger Hiss, a U.S. State Department official, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union and imprisoned, he was never convicted of espionage per se. Throughout his life, Hiss denied any involvement in espionage, and many historians have for years remained polarized on the question of Hiss's spying; some believe that declassified documents prove he did spy for the Soviets, and some still see these allegations as groundless.

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore and attended Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School. One of the most brilliant law students in his class at Harvard, Hiss was picked after graduation to serve as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He went on to work in the Roosevelt administration.

In the late 1930s Hiss was a key State Department official during the formative years of the United Nations. He eventually served as Secretary General at the 1945 San Francisco meeting at which the U.N. was founded. In 1939, however, Whitaker Chambers, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party, told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle that Hiss was a communist. Berle, under whom Hiss worked, scoffed at the charge. Soon, however, similar information came from French intelligence sources. Also, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet defector, charged that an individual in the State Department was a Soviet spy, and the FBI secretly began targeting Hiss as the suspect.

Hiss left the State Department to become, in 1947, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Within a year of Hiss's departure from the State Department, Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a fellow communist in the 1930s and had given him State Department documents that he passed to a Soviet official. Chambers's revelation followed the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, an admitted Soviet agent, who told the committee that she had passed documents from a nameless, high-ranking government official to the Soviets.

Denying the charges, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. To counter Hiss's charges, Chambers produced handwritten memos and typewritten summaries of State Department documents. A Woodstock typewriter was introduced into evidence. Experts testified that Hiss had typed both the summaries and personal correspondence on the typewriter. Hiss and experts on his side argued that the typewriter had been tampered with in order to produce the desired evidentiary results.

Chambers had held back from producing several strips of 35mm film and three undeveloped rolls. The existence of this additional evidence ultimately reached the Un-American Activities Committee, which prompted then U.S. Representative Richard Nixon to issue a subpoena for the materials. Under subpoena, Chambers guided congressional investigators to a pumpkin patch on his farm in Maryland. Hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin was what later became known as the "pumpkin papers"—several prints of State Department documents from the 1930s.

The pumpkin papers were introduced against Hiss in a perjury trial, at which he was accused of lying about having passed State Department papers to Chambers. Hiss was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, though he vehemently denied the charges for the duration of his life.

In 1996, shortly after Hiss's death, a collection of Venona decrypts was declassified. One of the messages, dated March 30, 1945, refers to an American with the code name Ales. According to the message, Ales was a Soviet agent working in the State Department, who accompanied President Roosevelt to the 1945 Yalta Conference and then flew to Moscow, both of which Hiss did. The message goes on to indicate that Ales met with Andrei Vyshinsky, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and was commended for his aid to the Soviets. Analysts at the National Security Agency have gone on record asserting that Ales could only have been Alger Hiss.
(Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/d...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss
https://files.nyu.edu/th15/public/who...
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...

[Bryan]

Dean Acheson:



Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893. He attended Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1915. Acheson served in the U.S. Navy during World War I and received a law degree from Harvard (1918). For the next two years, Acheson served as secretary to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and then joined the law firm of Covington and Burling in 1921.

He was appointed undersecretary of the treasury in March 1933 by President Roosevelt. Acheson soon resigned the position and returned to his law practice. During World War II, he helped draft the constitutional justification for the 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal and was subsequently appointed assistant secretary of state for economic affairs by Roosevelt in 1941; he served in that post until 1944.

In 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Acheson undersecretary of state. As a member of the Truman administration, Acheson chaired a committee on the international control of atomic energy (1946), helped formulate the Truman Doctrine (1947), and was highly involved in the formative stages of the Marshall Plan (1947). He stepped down from government service in 1947 but continued to lobby publicly on behalf of the Marshall Plan.

Acheson returned to the Truman administration in 1949 as secretary of state and held the post until 1953. As secretary of state, Acheson lobbied for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), supported the expansion of the armed forces through NSC-68 (1950), contested Senator Joseph McCarthy's allegations of communist infiltration of the State Department, and helped secure international support for military action in Korea.

During the Eisenhower presidency, Acheson became a vocal critic of the administration's reliance on nuclear weapons. He later served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and in 1968 advised Johnson to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. Dean Acheson died in 1971.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/tru...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Ach...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

John McCloy:



John J. McCloy was born on March 31, 1895 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1921 and practiced law on Wall Street. Perhaps his most important case, "Black Tom" was also the catalyst for his political career. In the "Black Tom" case, McCloy proved that German agents sabotaged a US munitions factory in New Jersey in 1916. After winning the law suit, he served as an advisor to every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Regean.

He was appointed Assistant Secretary of War on April 22, 1941. By 1945, McCloy was spending most of his time working on issues involving postwar Germany. With the Secretary of War Henry Stimson's health failing, McCloy became increasingly involved in the War Department.

McCloy was a key player in deciding whether or not to drop the bomb. He was one of the few civilians to know about the project. During a meeting on June 18, 1945, Truman approved the invasion of mainland Japan. McCloy pushed for an alternative diplomatic approach to achieve a Japanese surrender. He wrote, "everyone was so intent on winning the war by military means that the introduction of political consideration was almost accidental." On the advice of President Truman, McCloy took his ideas to Secretary of State James Byrnes, who rejected them.

The Committee of Three, composed of Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, and Joseph Grew, was assigned by President Truman to explore alternatives to make Japan surrender. McCloy wrote a proposed surrender demand that was incorporated into Article 12 of the Potsdam Proclamation. The original draft of the Proclamation included language that would have allowed Japan to keep its emperor, a condition that would have greatly increased the chances of Japan's acceptance of surrender. After the atomic bombings, McCloy believed for the rest of his life that "we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping bombs."

Between 1947 and 1949 McCloy served as president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). From 1949 to 1952 he served as US military governor and high commissioner for Germany and helped rebuild the country. In 1961, McCloy became President Kennedy's principal disarmament advisor. He negotiated terms for the resumption of East-West disarmament talks and drafted a bill that led to the establishment of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

McCloy died on March 11, 1989 in Stamford, Conneticut.
(Source: http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/libr...)

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http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTER...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._...

[Bryan]

Igor Gouzenko:



was a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected on September 5, 1945, with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the West.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Gou...
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/categories...

[Bryan]

Elizabeth Bentley:



In the late 1940s Elizabeth Bentley ’30 appeared in headlines across the country as she testified in front of the Committee on Un-American Activities at numerous investigations of alleged communists. Disregarded by some at the time as a pathetic, attention-seeking and relatively insignificant figure, “something about her,” claims her biographer Kathryn Olmstead, “touched the fears and fantasies of postwar Americans. Her media image revealed Americans’ concerns about gender relationship after the upheaval of the war. Her story became interwoven with the cultural, as well as the political, history of the Cold War at home.” This image persisted. At the time of her death in 1963 The New York Times claimed “the disclosures and accusations by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers helped to set the tone of American political life for nearly a decade,” and in 2002, The Wall Street Journal declared that Bentley’s testimonies “started a chain reaction that would transform American politics and culture.” Similarly, as a pivotal newsmaker, she represented a public face of Vassar College at a tense and crucial national historic moment.

Bentley was born in 1908 in New Milford, CT, to Charles Prentiss and Mary Charlotte Turrill Bentley. In 1926, she won a scholarship to Vassar, where she majored in English and minored in Italian, graduating in 1930. Of her time at Vassar, Kathryn Olmstead observes:

At Vassar, Elizabeth seemed uncomfortable among her rich, prestige-conscious classmates. She made few friends and took solitary bird walks at 5:00 A.M.

Elizabeth Bentley at Vassar

One former classmate, Elizabeth Bliss, described her as a ‘kind of a sad sack, plain, dull, very teacherlike. She didn’t have a single boyfriend, if I recall correctly, a pathetic person really. Everyone that knew her just called her Bentley. She was a sad and lonely girl.’

Refraining from much of campus life, with the exception of a short period of time when she joined the Vassar chapter of the League for Industrial Democracy, a student organization that supported the ideals of socialism, Bentley nonetheless later blamed Vassar for inspiring her turn to the Communist party.

After graduating from Vassar, Bentley continued her study of Italian on a fellowship to the University of Florence, where she briefly joined a fascist group, and she subsequently earned a masters degree in languages from Columbia University in 1933. She later said it was her exposure to the negative effects of fascism in Florence, which “revolted” her, inspiring her to join a Communist party cell at Columbia in 1935. At Columbia, Bentley contended, “for three and a half years I was indoctrinated with all the Communist beliefs” and those “indoctrinations…put blinders on me and I couldn’t see anything else…. They made a fanatic of me.”

In 1938, Bentley met and fell in love with Jacob Golos, a Russian-born American who conducted Soviet espionage through a Soviet-backed travel agency. Eager to share her disillusionment with Italian Fascism in Italy in order to promote communism, she joined the American League Against War and Fascism, and in 1941 she became a courier for the Communist party. Using the alias Helen Johnson she made weekly or bi-weekly trips between New York City and Washington, D.C., obtaining confidential documents and transporting them between the two cities. She collected stolen government documents from 37 employees of government agencies and wartime boards. She passed these on to Golos and Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist party in the United States, and they sent them on to Moscow.

Bentley later testified that she passed “a fabulous amount of confidential material” to the Russian communists. According to The New York Times obituary, “she told the Congressional investigators that she had received information on the production of aircraft and armaments, on a project to make synthetic rubber out of garbage and on the projected date for the invasion of Europe, among much else.” She also carried information regarding the date of D-Day and plans for the B-29, along with other information regarding wartime strategies and post-war plans.

After Golos’s death in 1943, Bentley’s interest in the party waned. She took issue with its leader, Earl Browder, and she later insisted that when she left the party it was dominated by “gangster types” and that she was driven by “a good old New England conscience” to turn to the FBI. “It was then,” she said, “that I realized where I stood, Instead of serving the cause of humanity I was a tool for the ensalvement of the people…. I decided this was my country and that it was a good country. I felt I had been on borrowed time.”

In July of 1945 she stopped paying her party dues, and in August she went to the FBI headquarters in New Haven to admit her involvement with the party and offer her services as a spy. Thereafter, she served as a double agent, continuing her work for the party while reporting back to the FBI. When the Communist party gave her a commendation and $2,000, she immediately passed both on to the FBI.

Bentley’s counter-espionage was eventually responsible for the conviction of 11 Communist party leaders. She testified publicly before House and Senate committees in the summer of 1948. In an op-ed in The New York Time, historian Timothy Naftali asserted, “From the moment Elisabeth Bentley…testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in July 1948, the hunt for Communists became a national obsession.”

Testifying before the House Committee

Olmstead concurs, noting that “The Alger Hiss case, the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party leaders, and Senator Joe McCarthy’s denunciations of State Department Reds all stemmed form Bentley’s decision to walk into that forbidding FBI office.” Bentley also testified as a Government witness at the Rosenberg trials. As one of the last major testifiers in that case, she has been blamed for being the ultimate cause of the Rosenberg’s conviction.

After leaving the Communist party and the FBI, Bentley converted to Catholicism. She characterized her embrace of the faith as a resolution of her lost faith in the Communist party. Bentley spoke about her involvement with communism and later her devotion to Catholicism as someone with intense need of a cause she could believe in and devote herself to. She told the house Un-American Activities Committee, “It never occurred to me that I was betraying my own government…. The mistake you make when you look at communism is that you take it as an intellectual process. It is not. It is almost a religion, and it gets you so strongly that you take orders blindly. You believe it blindly. That accounts for the fact that no real communist is religious or has any religion.”

But Bentley also blamed her turn to communism on a deficiency of religious as well as political education, for which she held Vassar accountable. Vassar, she said, “had gotten me to the point where I was a pushover for communism.” Speaking to some 1,400 Newman club students from six different universities in New York she claimed, according to Kathryn Olmstead, “she previously had adopted communism because of the materialism and widespread atheism encountered in her college years.” Thus, she concluded, “In 1934, when I met my first Communist, I was an agnostic and a pushover for any kind of a political philosophy.” Although she didn’t take any courses in religion at Vassar, Bentley identified “this tendency in most American institutions of higher learning, toward dullness and stiffness in an all-important matter of the teaching of religion.” She added that halfway through her freshman year, the college abolished compulsory chapel.

Bentley also said the educational institutions she attended had failed to provide her with sufficient education about American government. “I think the fault runs straight through the educational system,” she said, “because there are so many people like myself who have not the slightest comprehension of what America is really like or what it means to live in a democratic country under a democratic system.”

Bentley’s disparagement of Vassar placed an evident strain on her relationship with the college. When a reporter asked if she would be willing to speak at the college to defend her case, Bentley replied, “You bet your life I would.” The Vassar College Newman club toyed briefly with the idea of inviting her to speak about her Catholicism, but according to the president of the club, Patricia Bloomfield-Brown ’50, “the college authorities would not permit” them to invite Miss Bentley to speak at Vassar. In response to a question about her statements, a college spokesman stated simply that Vassar “declined to ‘enter into a controversy’” with Elizabeth Bentley.

In 1951, Elizabeth Bentley published Out of Bondage, an account about her involvement and disenchantment with the Communist party. She subsequently toured the country, speaking on the same subject. She eventually moved to a Catholic residence club for women in Connecticut and spent the rest of her life teaching high school languages—for five years at the Long Lane School for Girls, a state correctional institution in the Middlefield, CT—until her death in 1963.
(Source: http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alum...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabet...
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-fo...
http://vault.fbi.gov/rosenberg-case/e...
Kathryn S. Olmsted

[Bryan]

Clark Clifford:



Clark Clifford was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, on 25th December, 1906. After graduating from Washington University worked as a lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri (1928-1943).

During the Second World War Clifford joined the US Navy and served as assistant naval aide and naval aide to President Harry S. Truman. In 1947 Truman appointed him general counsel and in this post he helped draft the National Security Act.

After leaving the government in 1950 Clifford practiced law in Washington. Over the next few years Clifford represented several large corporations. His main role was to help them to navigate their way through laws and regulations. One of his major clients was Howard Hughes.

A member of the Democratic Party, he worked as an adviser to leading politicians such as Stuart Symington and John F. Kennedy. May 1961 Kennedy appointed Clifford to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Two years later he became its chairman.

Clifford remained in this post after Lyndon B. Johnson became president. In 1967 Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor went on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam. During this period Clifford was seen as a foreign policy hawk and advised Johnson that he could win the war if he increased the number of American troops to Vietnam.

Clifford replaced Robert McNamara as Secretary Defense in March 1968. McNamara had been urging the president to gradually disengage from the conflict in Vietnam. In contrast, Clifford advocated an escalation of the war. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his main objective was to guarantee to the South Vietnamese people the right of self-determination.
(Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Cl...
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist...
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ccli...
Clark Clifford

[Bryan]

Richard Nixon:



Schoolchildren absorb at least one fact about Richard Milhous Nixon: He was the first and (so far) the only President of the United States to resign the office. Before the spectacular fall, there was an equally spectacular rise. In a half-dozen years, he went from obscurity to a heartbeat from the presidency, winning a congressional race (1946), national prominence in the Alger Hiss spy case (1948), a Senate seat (1950), and the vice presidency (1952). John F. Kennedy interrupted Nixon's assent in 1960, winning the presidency by the narrowest margin of the twentieth century.

After losing a 1962 race for governor of California and holding his "last press conference," Nixon patiently laid the groundwork for a comeback. In 1964, he campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater at a time when other prominent Republicans were keeping their distance from the leader of the budding conservative movement. The Republican Party lost in a landslide that year but Nixon won the gratitude of conservatives, the growing power within the party. The GOP's huge losses in 1964 were offset in 1966 when two years of the Vietnam War and urban riots led to huge Republican gains in congressional elections. In 1968, Nixon won a presidential election almost as narrow as the one he had lost in 1960. He was then reelected in 1972 with a larger percentage of the votes than any other Republican during the Cold War.

Until the Watergate scandal led to his near impeachment by the House of Representatives and resignation in 1974, he was the dominant politician of the Cold War. As a Washington pundit once said, hers was not the Pepsi generation but the Nixon generation.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/nix...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presi...
http://nixon.archives.gov/

[Bryan]

House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC):

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War (1945-91). Established in 1938, the committee wielded its subpoena power as a weapon and called citizens to testify in high-profile hearings before Congress. This intimidating atmosphere often produced dramatic but questionable revelations about Communists infiltrating American institutions and subversive actions by well-known citizens. HUAC's controversial tactics contributed to the fear, distrust and repression that existed during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC's influence was in decline, and in 1969 it was renamed the Committee on Internal Security. Although it ceased issuing subpoenas that year, its operations continued until 1975.
(Source: http://www.history.com/topics/house-u...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un...
http://artandhistory.house.gov/highli...

[Bryan]

J. Parnell Thomas:



a Representative from New Jersey; born in Jersey City, Hudson County, N.J., January 16, 1895; attended the public schools of Allendale, N.J., the high school at Ridgewood, N.J., and the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia; during the First World War served overseas as a second lieutenant in Company B, Three Hundred and Sixth Infantry, and first lieutenant and captain in Headquarters, Regimental Staff of the Fiftieth Infantry, 1917-1919; engaged in investment securities pursuits 1920-1938 and in the insurance business in New York City since 1938; member of the borough council of Allendale, N.J., in 1925; mayor of Allendale 1926-1930; member of State house of assembly 1935-1937; elected as a Republican to the Seventy-fifth and to the six succeeding Congresses and served from January 3, 1937, until his resignation January 2, 1950, following conviction on charges of salary fraud; chairman, Committee on Un-American Activities (Eightieth Congress); editor and publisher of three weekly newspapers in Bergen County, N.J., 1951-1955; real estate solicitor in 1955 and 1956; defeated for the Republican nomination for Congress in 1954; engaged in investment securities; moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., where he died November 19, 1970; cremated; ashes interred in Elmgrove Cemetery, Mystic, Conn.
(Source: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Parne...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

Allen Dulles:



was an American diplomat, lawyer, banker, and public official who became the first civilian and the longest-serving (1953–1961) Director of Central Intelligence (de facto head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) and a member of the Warren Commission.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_We...
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

Karl Compton:



Karl Taylor Compton, 1887-1954, B.S. 1908, M.S. 1909, College of Wooster; Ph.D. in physics, 1912, Princeton University, was president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1948, then chairman of the Corporation until his death in 1954. He taught physics at Reed College, then at Princeton University, where he also was director of research at the Palmer Laboratory and chairman of the Physics Department. His areas of research included the passage of photoelectrons through metals, ionization and the motion of electrons in gases, the phenomena of fluorescence, the theory of the electric arc, and collisions of electrons and atoms.

In World War I he was assigned to the American Embassy in Paris as an associate scientific attache. At MIT Compton transformed both the administrative and academic structure, strengthened the scientific curriculum, and developed a new approach to education in science and engineering. He served as chairman of the Section of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences, 1927-1930, and in 1930 helped organize the American Institute of Physics. In 1933 President Roosevelt asked Compton to chair the new Scientific Advisory Board. When the National Defense Research Committee was formed in 1940, Compton became chief of Division D (detection: radar, fire control, etc.) and in 1941 was placed in charge of those divisions concerned with radar within the new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). From 1943 to 1945 he was chief of the Office of Field Services of OSRD and scientific advisor to General MacArthur. After the Japanese surrender, Compton went to Japan as part of the Scientific Intelligence Mission. In 1948 he was appointed by President Truman to head the Research and Development Board, formed to oversee scientific preparedness in the postwar period.
(Source: http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/mithis...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Tay...

[Bryan]

Vannevar Bush:



Vannevar Bush, the inventor credited with the principles underlying modern hypertext research, was born on March 11, 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts. He was a headstrong child who showed an early aptitude for math. After graduating high school he enrolled at Tufts College in Massachusetts to study engineering. While he was there he came up with his first invention, a land surveying device he called a "profile tracer." The device resembled a lawnmower, and as it was pushed over land it automatically calculated elevations and drew a crude map. The machine never caught on commercially, but it did teach Bush that in order for an invention to become successful, the inventor had to be somewhat of a politician as well.

Bush earned his B.S. and M.S. from Tufts in 1913 and worked for the General Electric test department. After briefly teaching mathematics at his alma mater and working for U.S. Navy Inspections, he earned Doctoral degrees in engineering, awarded by both Harvard and MIT. He married and served as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Tufts until 1919, when he returned to MIT as a professor of electrical power transmission. Through the next decade he stayed at MIT while he worked on submarine detection for the U.S. Navy (during World War I) and created the "network analyzer," a system for setting up miniature versions of large electrical networks. He and his MIT team also developed a prototype of the "differential analyzer," which Bush patented in 1935. The device, which provided solutions to differential equations, was used in World War II to calculate the ballistics table. In 1932, Bush was appointed Vice President of MIT and Dean of the School of Engineering.

In 1938, Bush was elected President of the Carnegie Institution. The position afforded him a highly visible platform for him to help influence the United States' scientific policy and strategy. At that time, the nation was about to enter World War II and was ill-prepared. On June 12, 1940, Bush met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to present his plan for mobilizing military research. He proposed a new organization he called the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). The President approved the plan and Bush was appointed Chairman of the NDRC while retaining his position at the Carnegie Institution. Soon after the NDRC was subsumed into the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development. From 1941 to 1947, Bush served as Director of the OSRD.

In 1944, Bush submitted "Science, the Endless Frontier" to President Roosevelt, and the ideas put forth in this proposal lead to the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950. At that time Bush was also focused on developing machines for automating human thinking. His idea for a "rapid selector" would store huge amounts of information on microfilm and enable a user to quickly select documents that could then be projected on screenÛit was one of the first attempts by anyone to create a personal information processor.

In 1945, Bush authored the article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly in which he first proposed his idea of the Memex machine. This machine was designed to help people sort through the enormous amount of published information available throughout the world. His article described a Memex as a "device in which an individual stores his books, records and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

This description, which was written about 30 years before the invention of the personal computer and 50 years before the birth of the public World Wide Web, lays out the notion of the modern link. The Memex was to be a storage and retrieval device using microfilm that would consist of a desk with viewing screens, a keyboard, selection buttons and levers, and microfilm storage. The machine would augment human memory by allowing the user to make links, or "associative trails," between documents. Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and Web through his descriptions of a new type of textuality. Bush's article greatly influenced the creators of what we know as "hypertext" and how we use the Internet today. (Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1967).

During the course of his inventing career, Bush also created the "Cyclops Camera," which would be worn on the forehead using instantly-developable film; a mathematical calculator, improvements to microfilm, and a "vocoder," or voice-activated typing machine. He served on the boards of several major companies such as AT&T and continued to work with the military, federal government, and educational institutions throughout his lifetime. In 1946, he was appointed Chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board of the War and Navy Departments. From 1947 to 1948, he was Chairman of the Development Board of the National Military Establishment. From 1957 to 1959, Bush served as Chairman of the MIT Corporation, and from 1959 to 1971 he was Honorary Chairman of the MIT Corporation.

Bush was honored with numerous awards including the Louis Edward Levy Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1928, the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1943, the Roosevelt Memorial Association's Distinguished Service Medal and the Marcellus Hartley Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1945, and the Hoover Medal in 1946. In 1948, he was dubbed "Knight Commander of the civilian division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire." Also that year, President Harry S. Truman presented him with a Medal of Merit. In 1949, President Truman honored him with a Medal of the Industrial Research Institute, and in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Bush with a National Medal of Science. Bush also earned Honorary Degrees from more than a dozen universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Cambridge, and Trinity College. He died on June 30, 1974.
(Source: http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/bush.html)

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[Bryan]

Meredith Gardner:



riginally from Texas, Meredith Gardner was teaching German at the University of Akron when the U.S. Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) hired him as a linguist in 1942. He quickly switched from the German to the Japanese problem, having learned Japanese in only three months. After World War II, this talented linguist learned Russian and moved to the Soviet problem. In 1946, he began working on VENONA.

VENONA was the final in a series of cover names for the project to exploit the cryptosystems used to protect Soviet diplomatic and spy communications. The messages were encrypted using a complicated numeric code that was then super-enciphered by adding a numeric key stream from a one-time pad to the code. Prior to 1943, the system was believed unbreakable and thus not worth the cryptanalytic effort. However, it was decided that VENONA was worth revisiting and in February 1943, a team was assembled to study the traffic.

Mr. Gardner proved instrumental in breaking the underlying code and led the efforts to reconstruct the codebooks. By identifying the "spell" and "end spell" indicators, Meredith Gardner was able to recover the portion of the codebook used for spelling English names and phrases in a message. He continued to build on his success, recovering more and more code groups. The first message was broken in February 1946. The value of his work was clearly demonstrated in July 1946, when he decoded a message containing encryption procedures for Soviet spies in Mexico.

Mr. Gardner decided that merely decrypting VENONA messages was not enough if the decrypts could not be put to good use. He sent a memo, "Special Report #1," to a small number of Army Security Agency (ASA) seniors in the summer of 1947, describing what sort of intelligence VENONA could provide. He also included samples of the material being recovered. Mr. Gardner's report helped the Army's leadership to recognize the value of VENONA, leading to cooperation between the ASA (later NSA) and the FBI in the identification of Soviet agents working in the United States.

Meredith Gardner returned to the VENONA project in the mid-1950s, where he worked until he retired in 1972. He died in August 2002.
(Source: http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_...)

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[Bryan]

Whittaker Chambers:



original name Jay Vivian Chambers (born April 1, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died July 9, 1961, near Westminster, Md.), American journalist, Communist Party member, Soviet agent, and a principal figure in the Alger Hiss case, one of the most publicized espionage incidents of the Cold War.

Chambers grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and attended Columbia University in New York City, where he studied alongside Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Clifton Fadiman, and Lionel Trilling and edited the university’s literary journal The Morningside (later The Columbia Review). Because he disliked his given name, in the 1920s he assumed his mother’s maiden name, Whittaker, as his given name. He joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s and wrote for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1927–29). He also wrote several articles for the Marxist publication The New Masses, of which he later became an editor (1931–32).

Chambers was asked to join the Soviet underground in 1932, serving first in New York. In the mid-1930s he moved to Baltimore after being assigned control of communists serving in and around Washington, D.C., in the U.S. federal government. As the Great Purge (purge trials, three widely publicized show trials and a series of closed, unpublicized trials held in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, in which many prominent Old Bolsheviks were found guilty of treason and executed or imprisoned) mounted, Chambers deserted the Communist Party in April 1938. With the announcement of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in August 1939, Chambers’s friends, including the journalist Herbert Solow and Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, urged and helped him to approach the administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to warn about communist infiltration in the U.S. federal government. A meeting with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle—a member of Roosevelt’s group of advisers known as the Brain Trust—in September 1939 produced only Berle’s meeting notes, which were filed away until they became evidence a decade later in the Hiss case.

In April 1939 Chambers joined Time magazine, where he held various writing and editorial positions before serving as special editor reporting to founder Henry R. Luce. Chambers helped articulate Luce’s policy toward communism in his cover story on Stalin (February 1945), followed by a sensational “fairy tale” essay—The Ghosts on the Roof (March 1945; reprinted in January 1948)—about the Yalta Conference.

In August 1948 Chambers appeared under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When questioned, he identified Alger Hiss as one of seven government officials who had formed part of a communist spy ring in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1930s. Speaking without congressional protection on the political radio talk show Meet the Press later that month, Chambers responded positively to the question of whether or not Hiss had been a communist. In September 1948 Hiss filed a $75,000 slander suit against Chambers in Baltimore. During pretrial proceedings, lawyers for Hiss requested evidence from Chambers to support his allegations. Chambers subsequently submitted the “Baltimore Documents” (also known as the “Baltimore Papers”)—consisting of approximately 60 typewritten pages and several handwritten notes by Hiss and Harry Dexter White, the former chief international economist for the U.S. Department of the Treasury—which Chambers claimed to have stored inside a “life preserver” that he had prepared a decade earlier when he was defecting from the Soviet underground. Hiss in turn had the documents submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice in hope of securing an indictment against Chambers. Upon learning that Chambers still had evidence, HUAC member Richard M. Nixon subpoenaed all remaining evidence from Chambers at the beginning of December. Chambers had stored the remaining evidence (35-mm microfilm) in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm to avoid discovery. The press subsequently dubbed these artifacts the “Pumpkin Papers.”

Discussion of the perjury trials and conviction of Alger Hiss and excerpts from a post-trial … [Credit: Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library]On Dec. 15, 1948, a grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury—one for claiming that he had never given any documents to Chambers, and the other for claiming that he had not met with Chambers after January 1937. A first trial ended in a hung jury (1949), and a second ended with his conviction. Key evidence in the second trial—in addition to Chambers’s testimony—were the Baltimore Documents, several of which contained Hiss’s handwriting and others of which had been typed on a Woodstock typewriter belonging to Hiss. Upon his conviction, Hiss stated, “Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.”

In 1952 Chambers published a best-selling autobiography, Witness, which was also serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and condensed in Reader’s Digest. Aside from working briefly in the late 1950s as an editor for the National Review at the behest of founder William F. Buckley, Jr., Chambers hardly appeared in print again. Selections from his diaries and letters, edited by Fortune magazine managing editor Duncan Norton-Taylor, appeared as Cold Friday (1964). Pres. Ronald Reagan awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. In 1988 the Whittaker Chambers Farm was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
(Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittake...
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/78890-...
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/78894-...
Sam Tanenhaus
Whittaker Chambers

[Bryan]

Thomas E. Dewey:



HOMAS E. DEWEY, the fifty-first governor of New York, was born in Owosso, Michigan on March 24, 1902. His education was attained at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 1923, and then at Columbia University, where he earned a law degree in 1925. He established a successful career as a public servant, serving as the chief assistant to the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, as well as serving as the U.S. attorney in 1933. From 1935 to 1937 he served as special prosecutor on the state’s organized crime unit that successfully convicted Lucky Luciano; and in 1937 he served as the district attorney of New York County. Dewey next secured the Republican gubernatorial nomination, and was elected governor by a popular vote on November 3, 1942. He was reelected to a second term in 1946, and to a third term in 1950. During his tenure, a labor mediation board was created; discrimination in employment hiring was abolished; state agencies were restructured; and the state’s unemployment and disability benefits were advanced. In 1944 and 1948 Dewey was an unsuccessful presidential candidate, losing respectively to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. After leaving the governorship, Dewey returned to his legal career. In 1968 he declined an appointment to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court bench as chief justice. Governor Thomas E. Dewey passed away on March 16, 1971, and was buried in the Pawling Cemetery in Pawling, New York.
(Source: http://www.nga.org/cms/home/governors...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E...
http://thecontenders.c-span.org/Conte...
(no image)Thomas E. Dewey and His Times by Richard Norton Smith

[Bryan]

Kim Philby:



was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a double agent before defecting to the Soviet Union. He served as both an NKVD and KGB operative.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu...

[Bryan]

Klaus Fuchs:



Klaus Fuchs was born on 29th December, 1911, in Russelsheim, Germany. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leipzig. A member of the Germany Communist Party, Fuchs was forced to flee the country after the Nazis gained power in 1933.

Fuchs moved to Scotland where he continued he studies. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Fuchs was briefly interned but was released when it was discovered that his knowledge of physics would be useful to the British government. He worked at Birmingham University under Rudolf Peierls, another German refugee physicist in England. In 1943 Fuchs was sent to the United States where he worked at Los Alamos on developing the atom bomb.

After the war Fuchs returned to England where he became head of the physics department of the British nuclear research centre at Harwell.

On 5th September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a KGB intelligence officer based in Canada, defected to the West claiming he had evidence of an Soviet spy ring based in Britain. Gouzenko provided evidence that led to the arrest of 22 local agents and 15 Soviet spies in Canada. Some of this information from Gouzenko resulted in Fuchs being interviewed by MI5.

Fuchs denied any involvement in espionage and the intelligence services did not have enough evidence to have him arrested and charged with spying. However, after repeated interviews with Jim Skardon he eventually confessed on 23rd January 1950 to passing information to the Soviet Union. Six weeks later Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

In 1950 the FBI arrested Harry Gold, who confessed to helping Fuchs in his espionage activities in the United States. As a result of Gold's testimony, other spies, including David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were arrested and convicted.

After his release on 24th June 1959, he went to East Germany where he became deputy director of the Central Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf. Klaus Fuchs died on 28th January, 1988.
(Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
http://vault.fbi.gov/rosenberg-case/k...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peo...

[Bryan]

Julius Rosenburg:



Julius Rosenberg was born on May 12, 1918 in New York City. He was the son of Polish immigrants. His father Harry worked in the garment industry and his mother Sophie took care of the couple's five children. As a boy, Julius attended Downtown Talmud Torah and then Seward Park High School where he graduated at 16. Although his father hoped Julius would become a rabbi, Julius enrolled at the City College of New York to study electrical engineering.

In college, Julius also pursued his interest in politics, joining the Steinmetz Club, the campus branch of the Young Communist League. There he would meet Morton Sobell, William Perl, and Joel Barr. Julius also became a member of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT), a rather radical union for professionals. Julius Rosenberg became so engrossed in his political activities that his studies began to languish. Rosenberg graduated in 1939, but was one semester behind the rest of his class. Later that same summer, Julius married Ethel Greenglass.

After leaving college, Julius did freelance work until the fall of 1940 when he was hired as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Julius was promoted in 1942 to the position of inspector. The new position allowed the Rosenbergs to move to a new three bedroom apartment. Around this same time, Julius and Ethel became full members in the American Communist Party. Julius was the chairman of Branch 16B of the Party's Industrial Division and held its meetings at the Rosenbergs' apartment. By 1943, however, the Rosenberg's dropped out of the Communist Party to pursue his espionage activities.

Early in 1945 Rosenberg was fired from his job with the Signal Corps when his past membership in the Communist Party came to light. Julius took a job with the Emerson Radio Corporation for a while and then in 1946 formed G & R Engineering Company with David Greenglass, Bernard Greenglass, and Isadore Goldstein. But this small machine shop was never a success. On June 17, 1950, Julius Rosenberg was arrested on suspicion of espionage after having been named by David Greenglass. Julius Rosenberg stoically maintained his innocence throughout the length of his trial and appeals. On June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg was executed at Sing-Sing Prison in New York.
(Source: http://www.mphpa.org/classic/SPY/ROSE...)

More:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_a...
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/f...
http://www.spymuseum.com/pages/agent-...

[Bryan]

Ethel Rosenberg:



Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg was born September 28, 1915 in New York City to Barnet and Tessie Greenglass. Her father ran a repair shop for sewing machines, but was barely able to provide for his wife and four children. The Greenglass family lived in a shabby tenement that was unheated. Ethel, the only daughter, showed that she was a strong willed and intelligent girl. Ethel attended a religious school, Downtown Talmud Torah, and then Seward Park High School, where she graduated at the age of only 15.

Ethel became a clerk for a shipping company immediately after finishing school. She remained at this job for the next four years until she was let go because of her role as the organizer of a strike of 150 women workers. Ethel was not just an activist at work, she was also interested in politics. Ethel joined the Young Communist League and eventually became a member of the American Communist Party. In addition to her clerk job, Ethel enjoyed singing, alone as well as with a choir. Ethel was waiting to go on stage to sing at a New Years Eve benefit when she first met Julius Rosenberg. The couple was married not long afterwards in the summer of 1939.

Although mentally tough, Ethel Rosenberg's body was weak. She was not healthy enough to work after the Rosenberg's were married. Instead, Ethel stayed home with their two sons Michael and Robert. By the summer of 1950, Ethel's younger brother, David Greenglass, had named Julius as a participant in the spy ring. The FBI questioned her husband and eventually placed him under arrest. On August 11, 1950, Ethel Rosenberg was herself arrested. At trial Ruth Greenglass, Ethel's sister-in-law, implicated Ethel in the atomic spy ring by testifying that Ethel had been the one to type the notes provided by David Greenglass. This testimony sealed Ethel's fate. She was found guilty of espionage along with Julius Rosenberg and on April 5, 1951 was sentenced to death. For the next two years, Ethel Rosenberg lived on death row at Sing Sing prison maintaining her innocence and hoping for leniency. It never came. On June 19, 1953, Ethel was put to death in the electric chair.
(Source: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...)

More:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_a...
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/f...
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

J. Howard McCrath:



James Howard McGrath was born on November 28, 1903, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He graduated from Providence College in 1936 and received a law degree from Boston College in 1929. McGrath was governor of Rhode Island from 1940 until 1945, but he resigned in September 1945 when President Harry S. Truman appointed him U.S. solicitor general.

McGrath resigned that post in October 1946 in order to campaign for the U.S. Senate. He won his election and remained in the Senate until 1949. McGrath was also the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1947 until 1949.

President Truman appointed him attorney general in 1949, and McGrath held that post from July of that year until April 1952. He ran unsuccessfully for both the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956 and a U.S. Senate seat from Rhode Island in 1960, working in the interim and thereafter as a lawyer in Washington, D.C. and Providence, Rhode Island. McGrath died of heart failure on September 2, 1966.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/tru...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Howar...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....

[Bryan]

Walter Beddell Smith:



(born October 5, 1895, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died August 9, 1961, Washington, D.C.), U.S. Army general, diplomat, and administrator who served as chief of staff for U.S. forces in Europe during World War II.

Smith began his military career as an enlisted man in the Indiana National Guard (1910–15) and in 1917 was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry in the U.S. Army. He fought briefly in World War I, and, advancing through grades, he served in the United States and the Philippines and taught in the U.S. Army Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia. In February 1942 he was named secretary of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. secretary of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff, with the rank of brigadier general. The following September he became chief of staff of the European theatre of operations and chief of staff to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, serving in those posts until Eisenhower’s departure from Europe after the war. He negotiated and accepted for the Allies the surrender of Italy (1943) and of Germany (1945).

On returning to the United States in 1945, Smith became chief of the operations and planning division of the War Department general staff. Shortly afterward he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, a post he held from 1946 to 1949. Later he commanded the U.S. First Army (1949–50) and was director of central intelligence (1950–53), becoming general in 1951. He retired from the army in 1953 to become undersecretary of state. In October 1954 he resigned from government service and entered private business.
(Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B...
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/29...
D.K.R. Crosswell

[Bryan]

Donald Maclean:



was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five who were members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond. He was recruited as a "straight penetration agent" (not a double agent) while an undergraduate at Cambridge by the Soviet intelligence service. His actions are thought to have contributed to the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin and the onset of the Korean War. As a reward for his espionage activities, Maclean was brevetted as a colonel in the Soviet KGB.

More:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.spymuseum.com/pages/agent-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M...

[Bryan]

James McGranery:



James Patrick McGranery was born on July 8, 1895, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a law degree from Temple University in 1928 and became active in Democratic politics in the Philadelphia area. McGranery was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936, remaining there until October 1943 when he became an assistant to the attorney general. In 1946, McGranery became a U.S. district court judge in Pennsylvania.

He stayed in that post until April 1952, at which time President Harry S. Truman made McGranery his attorney general following the resignation of J. Howard McGrath. McGranery remained in the cabinet until 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower ascended to the presidency. McGranery died in December 1962 while vacationing in Florida.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/tru...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P....
http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....

[Bryan]

William Rogers:



was born in Norfolk, New York, on June 23, 1913. He graduated from Colgate University in 1934, and received an LL.B. degree at Cornell Law School in 1937. While at Cornell, he was editor of the Cornell Law Quarterly. He became a member of the American, Federal, District of Columbia, New York State, and New York City bar associations, the American Judicature Society, and many other professional organizations.

From 1937 to 1938, he practiced law in New York, and from 1938 to 1942 was assistant district attorney for New York County. From 1942 to 1946 he served as lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. From 1946 to 1947 he returned to the district attorney's office in New York County, from 1947 to 1948 he was the chief counsel of the Senate War Investigating Committee, from 1948 to 1950 he was chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and from 1950 to 1952 returned to the private practice of law. Rogers served as Deputy Attorney General from 1953 to 1957 and was appointed Attorney General of the United States on November 8, 1957, by President Eisenhower. He remained until January 20, 1961. He was United States representative to the Twentieth General Assembly of the United Nations in 1967, and then resumed the private practice of law. In 1969 President Nixon named him Secretary of State, an office he held until 1973, when he again returned to private practice. He died January 2, 2001.
(Source: http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_...

[Bryan]

Herbert Brownell, Jr.:



was born in Peru, Nebraska, on February 20, 1904. He earned an A.B. degree from the University of Nebraska in 1924, graduated from Yale University School of Law in 1927, and was admitted to the New York bar that same year. He practiced law with the firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, & Ballantine. He served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a member of the New York State Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, and many professional and learned societies. Appointed Attorney General of the United States by President Eisenhower on January 21, 1953, he remained in office until November 8, 1957. After that he served as the United States member to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. He died May 1, 1996.
(Source: http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_....
http://millercenter.org/president/eis...

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

What a great job Bryan with this glossary. Bravo.

[Bryan]

Jimmy Doolittle:



Medal of Honor recipient, pioneering holder of speed records, leader of first aerial attack on the Japanese mainland, and famed World War II air commander.

James Harold Doolittle was born in Alameda, Calif., in 1896. James "Jimmy" Doolittle was educated in Nome, Alaska, Los Angeles Junior College, and spent a year at the University of California School of Mines. He enlisted as a flying cadet in the Signal Corps Reserve in October 1917 and trained at the School of Military Aeronautics, University of California and Rockwell Field Calif. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps' Aviation Section March 11, 1918, and served successively at Camp Dick, Texas; Wright Field, Ohio; Gerstner Field, La.; and went back to Rockwell Field, chiefly as a flight leader and gunnery instructor. He then went to Kelly Field, Texas, for duty first with the 104th Aero Squadron, and next with the 90th Squadron on border patrol duty at Eagle Pass, Texas.

On July 1, 1920 Doolittle got his regular commission and promotion to first lieutenant. He then took the Air Service Mechanical School and Aeronautical Engineering courses at Kelly Field and McCook Field, Ohio, respectively. In September 1922 he made the first of many pioneering flights which earned him most of the major air trophies and international fame.

He flew a DH-4, equipped with crude navigational instruments, in the first cross-country flight, from Pablo Beach, Fla., to San Diego, Calif., in 21 hours and 19 minutes. He made only one refueling stop at Kelly Field. The military gave him the Distinguished Flying Cross for this historic feat. In the same year he received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

In July 1923 he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology for special engineering courses and graduated the following year with a master of science degree, getting his doctor of science degree in Aeronautics a year later, and being one of the first men in the country to earn this degree.

In March 1924 he served at McCook Field conducting aircraft acceleration tests. In June 1925 Doolittle went to the Naval Air Station in Washington, D.C., for special training in flying high-speed seaplanes. During this period he served for a while with the Naval Test Board at Mitchel, N.Y., and was a familiar figure in airspeed record attempts in the New York area. He won the Schneider Cup Race - the World's Series of seaplane racing - in 1925, with an average speed of 232 miles per hour in a Curtiss Navy racer equipped with pontoons. This was the fastest a seaplane had ever flown, and Doolittle next year received the Mackay Trophy for this feat.

In April 1926 he got a leave of absence to go to South America on airplane demonstration flights. In Chile he broke both ankles but put his Curtiss P-1 through stirring aerial maneuvers with his ankles in casts. He returned to the United States and was in Walter Reed Hospital for these injuries until April 1927 when he was assigned to McCook Field for experimental work and additional duty as instructor with Organized Reserves of the Fifth Corps Area's 385th Bomb Squadron.

Returning to Mitchel Field in September 1928, he assisted in the development of fog flying equipment. He helped develop the now almost universally used artificial horizontal and directional gyroscopes and made the first flight completely by instruments. He attracted wide newspaper attention with this feat of "blind" flying and later received the Harmon Trophy for conducting the experiments.

In January 1930 he was adviser for the Army on the building of the Floyd Bennett Airport in New York City. Doolittle resigned his regular commission Feb. 15, 1930 and was commissioned a major in the Specialist Reserve Corps a month later, being named manager of the Aviation Department of the Shell Oil Company, in which capacity he conducted numerous aviation tests. He also went on active duty with the Army frequently to conduct tests, and in 1932 set the world's high speed record for land planes. He won the Bendix Trophy Race from Burbank Calif., to Cleveland in a Laird Biplane, and took the Thompson Trophy Race at Cleveland in a Gee Bee racer with a speed averaging 252 miles per hour.

In April 1934 Doolittle became a member of the Army Board to study Air Corps organization and a year later was transferred to the Air Corps Reserve. In 1940 he became president of the Institute of Aeronautical Science. He went back on active duty July 1, 1940 as a major and assistant district supervisor of the Central Air Corps Procurement District at Indianapolis, Ind., and Detroit, Mich., where he worked with large auto manufacturers on the conversion of their plants for production of planes. The following August he went to England as a member of a special mission and brought back information about other countries' air forces and military buildups.

He was promoted to lieutenant colonel Jan 2, 1942 and went to Headquarters Army Air Force to plan the first aerial raid on the Japanese homeland. He volunteered and received Gen. H.H. Arnold's approval to lead the attack of 16 B-25 medium bombers from the aircraft carrier Hornet, with targets in Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya. The daring one-way mission April 18, 1942 electrified the world and gave America's war hopes a terrific lift. As did the others who participated in the mission, Doolittle had to bail out, but fortunately landed in a rice paddy in China near Chu Chow. Some of the other flyers lost their lives on the mission.

Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, presented to him by President Roosevelt at the White House, for planning and leading this successful operation. His citation reads: "For conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life. With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, Lt. Col. Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland." In addition to the nation's top award, Doolittle also received two Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, Bronze Star, four Air Medals, and decorations from Great Britain, France, Belgium, Poland, China and Ecuador.

In July 1942, as a brigadier general - he had been advanced two grades the day after the Tokyo attack - Doolittle was assigned to the 8th Air Force and in September became commanding general of the 12th Air Force in North Africa. He was promoted to major general in November and in March 1943 became commanding general of the North African Strategic Air Forces.

He took command of the 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean Theater in November and from January 1944 to September 1945 he commanded the 8th Air Force in Europe and the Pacific, until war's end, as a lieutenant general, the promotion date being March 13, 1944. On May 10, 1946 he reverted to inactive reserve status and returned to Shell Oil as a vice president and later a director.

In March 1951 he was appointed a special assistant to the Air Force chief of staff, serving as a civilian in scientific matters which led to Air Force ballistic missile and space programs.

He retired from Air Force duty Feb. 28, 1959 but continued to serve his country as chairman of the board of Space Technology Laboratories. He also was the first president of the Air Force Association, in 1947, assisting its organization.

On April 4, 1985, the U.S. Congress advanced him to full general on the Air Force retired list. In a later ceremony, President Reagan and Senator Goldwater pinned on his four-star insignia, making him the first person in Air Force Reserve history to wear four stars.
(Source: http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bi...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Do...
http://jimmydoolittlemuseum.org/

[Bryan]

William C. Sullivan:



was former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence operations.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
William C. Sullivan

[Bryan]

W.E.B. Du Bois:



William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23,1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt. Haitian-born Alfred Du Bois was a barber and itinerant laborer who during the Civil War had enlisted and then deserted a New York regiment; he also deserted his wife and young son. Mary Silvina, a domestic servant, raised her son with the help of her extended family, which could trace its roots to a freedman, born a Dutch slave, who fought in the American Revolution. Young William received a classical, college preparatory education from the integrated schools in Great Barrington. A graduate of Fisk University (1888) and Harvard College (1890), W.E.B. Du Bois earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1895 with a dissertation entitled The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States. During these early years he also studied at Friedrich-Wilhelm III Universitat in Berlin and taught at Wilberforce University in Iowa, where he met and married Nina Gomer.

In 1896 the University of Pennsylvania appointed him "Assistant in Sociology" at its Wharton School in order to conduct a "study of the social condition of the Colored People of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia." Thus from August 1, 1896, until December 31, 1897, Du Bois went from house-to-house in this ward, extending from Spruce to South Street and from Seventh Street to the Schuylkill River. He interviewed some five thousand persons, prepared a statistical and empirical analysis of his questionnaire, and published his findings in the much acclaimed The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

After his year in Philadelphia, Du Bois served as professor of economics, history and sociology, Atlanta University (1897-1909), where he authored The Souls of Black Folk (1903), perhaps the most influential work of his generation on the African American experience. At the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, he warned the world, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." He became nationally prominent as cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and for twenty-four years, editor of its monthly publication, Crisis (1910-1934). Returning to Atlanta University (1934-1944), he published his last major work, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a sweeping reevaluation of the role of African Americans in the Civil War and the years which followed.

After his retirement from Atlanta University, Du Bois focused on problems of racism in the United States and world wide, working first with the NAACP and then the Council on African Affairs. After his first wife died in 1950, Du Bois married Shirley Graham, a leftist and the daughter of an old friend. Disillusioned with the progress being made in the United States, he grew increasingly radical. After joining the Communist Party in 1961, Du Bois traveled to the Soviet Union in 1962 to receive the Lenin Peace Prize from Nikita Khrushchev. At the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois and his wife had settled in Accra, Ghana, in 1961, so that he could direct the preparation of an "Encylopedia Africana." On August 29, 1963, shortly after he had become a citizen of Ghana in 1963, Du Bois was buried in a state funeral outside Castle Osu, which had once been a holding pen for Africans bound to a live of slavery in America.
(Source: http://www.archives.upenn.edu/people/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B....
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/autho...
http://www.duboisweb.org/chronology.html
W. E. B. Du Bois

[Bryan]

Thurgood Marshall:



Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was the grandson of a slave. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him from youth an appreciation for the United States Constitution and the rule of law. After completing high school in 1925, Thurgood followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, at the historically black Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway. Just before graduation, he married his first wife, Vivian "Buster" Burey. Their twenty-five year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1955.

In 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was Black. This was an event that was to haunt him and direct his future professional life. Thurgood sought admission and was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, who instilled in all of his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans. Paramount in Houston's outlook was the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson which established the legal doctrine called, "separate but equal." Marshall's first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Applauding Marshall's victory, author H.L. Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was "brutal and absurd," and they should not object to the "presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college."

Thurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America's oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these two former European colonies. After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues. Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, "none of his (Marshall's) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court." In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.

Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America's voiceless. Justice Marshall died on January 24, 1993.
(Source: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood...
http://vault.fbi.gov/Thurgood%20Marshall
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/...
Juan Williams

[Bryan]

Morris Childs:



In 1929 was selected by the Soviet Communist Party to attend the prestigious Lenin School in Moscow where he learned about the concepts of developing revolution and the fundamental principles of Communism. Among his schoolmates were future Soviet premiers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev and Morris Ponomarov who would go on to serve as a member of the politburo and as the international head of the Communist Party.

Childs headed the Illinois district of the American Communist Party, a key position and ran for the United States Senate seat under the political wing of the Communist Party. He gathered only 1,000 votes. Served as the editor of the Daily Worker, the leading communist publication in the United States. Was considered one of the leading figures in the he Communist movements in the United States. Was replaced in his position as editor of the Daily Worker due to political machinations between rival components of the American Communist Party. Was devastated by the movement and crumbled under the stress and strain, suffering a debilitating heart attack in 1947. Felt abandoned when no one from the Communist Party offered aid or comfort. A deep resentment over his ouster from his prominent position within the American Communist Party combined with his feelings of abandonment during his medical crisis caused an overwhelming sense of betrayal to brew within him.

After numerous raids on American Communist Party leaders in the United States by the FBI, the Justice Department sought to destroy the party from within by seeking disillusioned members of the group. Because of his ill health and his loss of his position, the FBI targeted Morris and his brother Jack as ideal candidates to work as informants. Morris was approached by FBI agent Carl Freyman who found that Morris was not only angry over his betrayal by the American Communist Party, but has also become disillusioned with the Communist mantra, especially in light of the egregious actions of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Morris agreed to work with the FBI to gather information about the Communist Party. The U.S. Government provided medical treatment for Morris and he soon regained his health. Was assigned the title Agent CG5824S but was referred to internally as "58." Because the hope was that Morris would travel alone into the Soviet Union in a quest for information, the involvement was deemed "Operation Solo."
(Source: http://www.spymuseum.com/pages/agent-...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_C...
http://www.jehooverfoundation.org/mor...

[Bryan]

Nikita Khrushchev:

[image error]

First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1953-1964. Certainly the most colorful Soviet leader, Khrushchev is best remembered for his dramatic, oftentimes boorish gestures and "harebrained schemes" designed to attain maximum propaganda effect, his enthusiastic belief that Communism would triumph over capitalism, and the fact that he was the only Soviet leader ever to be removed peacefully from office--a direct result of the post-Stalin thaw he had instigated in 1956.

A miner who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, Khrushchev was able to receive a technical education thanks to the October Revolution and became a true believer in the benefits of the workers' state. Rising through the Party's ranks, he became a member of the Central Committee in 1934 and of the Politburo in 1939. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev became the Party's First Secretary in the collective leadership that emerged after it had eliminated Lavrenti Beria and his faction. Subsequently, he used Stalin's established technique to divide and conquer his rivals, replace them with his own people, and emerge as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, with the difference that he did not kill these people, but had them assigned to such faraway and harmless posts as Ambassador to Mongolia.

In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev stunned the delegates with his so-called "secret speech", during which he denounced the excesses of the Stalin era and Stalin's personality cult for six hours. Until the speech, it was still considered taboo to say anything negative about Stalin. Khrushchev's speech seems somewhat mild in hindsight, now that the scale of the horrors of the Great Purges and the Gulag are well known. At the time, however, his revelations (limited only to Stalin's crimes against the Party, not the country at large) were earth shattering.

Khrushchev honestly believed in the superiority of Communism, and felt that it was only a matter of time before it would destroy the Capitalist system once and for all. He set bold (and ultimately unattainable) goals of "overtaking the West" in food production, initiating massive programs to put vast tracts of virgin lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under the plow with the help of thousands of urban Komsomol volunteers who brought little but their enthusiasm with them to the open steppes. Despite being hailed as an expert on agriculture, Khrushchev miscalculated when, after a trip to Iowa in 1959, he became a huge enthusiast of corn and decided to introduce it to his country, most of which has an unsuitable climate. On the industrial front, Khrushchev relaxed Stalin's emphasis on military production somewhat, resulting in a wider array of consumer goods and an improved standard of living for ordinary Soviet citizens.

Another one of the achievements of Khrushchev's post-Stalin "thaw" was a relaxation of the political climate, in particular censorship. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Solzhenitsyn's tale of life in the Gulag camps, was published in 1961 at Khrushchev's personal behest, and an entire dissident movement of writers and intellectuals appeared. While they were persecuted and had to function underground, this was still a major change, since any dissidents whatsoever simply would not have remained alive under Stalin.

Nikita Khrushchev (right) gives Eisenhower a replica of the Soviet lunar probe.In foreign affairs, Khrushchev also enthusiastically set lofty but often-unattainable goals, and enjoyed dramatically snubbing the West. He flew to a summit in London in a half-completed prototype of a passenger jet to demonstrate the advanced state of Soviet aviation (duly impressing his hosts, who did not have a comparable plane yet at the time). Communism's appeal spread rapidly throughout the decolonizing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the Soviet Union lavished aid for splashy projects such as dams and stadiums. The stunning propaganda coup scored by the Soviet Union in launching the first satellite, Sputnik, was followed by greater and greater achievements, such as the first dog, the first man, and the first woman in space. Many in the West began to fear that the Soviets really were catching up and soon would overtake them.

Khrushchev's enthusiasm for flashy gestures had not been liked by more conservative elements from the very start; many Soviets were greatly embarrassed by his antics, such as banging a shoe on the podium during a speech to the UN General Assembly. There were elements in the Party who were actively looking for an opportunity to oust him. Their opportunity came with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In yet another case of showmanship that he was unable to back up with deeds, in 1962 Khrushchev deployed nuclear missiles in newly Communist Cuba, within easy striking distance of most major American population centers. Thanks to intelligence received from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet double agent, the United States was aware that the missiles were still only partially developed and did not pose an immediate threat. President John Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff, and the latter was forced to remove the missiles from Cuba, with great loss of face both at home and abroad. Khrushchev never regained his prestige after the incident, and was quietly ousted two years later by opponents in the Politburo--significantly, with no bloodshed. He spent the rest of his life in peaceful retirement, and was the only Soviet leader not to be buried in the Kremlin wall after his death.
(Source: http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/bios/all_...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_K...
Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev
William Taubman

[Bryan]

Inga Arvad:



Inga Arvad was the successful Dutch journalist who was rumored to be JFK’s great love. She was also the great beauty who accompanied Adolf Hitler to the 1936 Olympics.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inga_Arvad

[Bryan]

Judith Campbell (Exner):



Mistress of US President John F. Kennedy and Mafia leader Sam Giancana, her disclosure of her relationship with the men diminished the near legendary stature of the deceased president by revealing a scandal during his administration. Born Judith Eileen Katherine Immoor, she was the daughter of a German architect in New York City. While still a young child, her family moved to Los Angeles, California, where she married actor William Campbell in 1952. Six years later, she divorced her husband after becoming involved with singer Frank Sinatra. On February 7, 1960, Sinatra introduced her to Senator and Presidential Candidate John F. Kennedy while Kennedy was visiting Las Vegas. There she soon became one of Kennedy's mistresses. Later, Sinatra introduced her to Sam Flood, the pseudonym of Mafia boss Sam Giancana. After Kennedy was elected President, she continued their affair. The FBI had her followed and recorded her telephone calls from Giancana's house to Kennedy. In 1962, when the FBI informed the President where her calls were originating from, Kennedy immediately broke off the affair. In an interview in 1996 with "Vanity Fair" magazine, Exner stated that she began the affair with Giancana, but broke it off when he proposed to her. She finally ended the JFK affair because she was "tired of being the other woman." She also claimed that she became pregnant with Kennedy's child, but decided to have an abortion to avoid embarrassing the President. She further claimed that she carried kickback money to the Kennedy brothers (including Robert F. Kennedy) from California defense contractors. In 1975, she married golfer Dan Exner, living in Newport Beach, California; the two were separated in 1988. Exner did not reveal her relationship with President Kennedy until it was revealed during the 1975 Church Committee investigation into Mafia ties to the White House. Although she had kept her role secret, somehow the Church Committee found out about her Mafia ties and subpoenaed her for testimony. Although the committee did not name her in their reports, her name was leaked to the press, and the resulting publicity both ruined her reputation and earned her the hatred from the many Kennedy supporters. She would write an autobiography, "Judith Exner: My Story" (1977), in which she would claim that her relationship with JFK was personal and that she was never an intermediary between Kennedy and the Mafia. Eleven years later, during an interview with "People" magazine, she would state that during the 1960 Presidential Election she would carry messages from Giancana to Kennedy, including some messages that discussed killing Cuban President Fidel Castro. Because of her often-changing stories, many people did not believe anything she stated, and most consider her stories after 1977 as extremely improbable. Judith Exner died in Duarte, California, from breast cancer.
(Source: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg....)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_E...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

Sam Giancana:



Gilorma (Sam) Giancana was born in Chicago on 24th May, 1908. At the age of ten he was expelled from Reese Elementary School and was sent to St. Charles Reformatory. This did not have the desired effect and in 1921 joined the 42 Gang. Over the next few years he was arrested for a variety of different offences.

In 1926 Giancana was arrested for murder. However, charges were dropped after the key witness was murdered. He was later sent to prison for theft and burglary. On his release he went to work for leading gangster Paul Ricca. By the 1950s Giancana was one of the leading crime bosses in Chicago.

In 1960 Giancana was involved in talks with Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), about the possibility of murdering Fidel Castro. It is claimed that during the 1960 presidential election Giancana used his influence in Illinois to help John F. Kennedy defeat Richard Nixon. The two men, at that time, shared the same girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner.

After becoming president John F. Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert Kennedy, as U.S. Attorney General. The two men worked closely together on a wide variety of issues including the attempt to tackle organized crime. One of their prime targets was to get Giancana arrested.

On 22nd November, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. Rumours began to circulate that Giancana and other gang bosses such as Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Johnny Roselli, were involved in the crime.

In 1975 Frank Church and his Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities discovered that Judith Campbell had been involved with both Giancana and John F. Kennedy. It emerged that during the 1960 presidential election Campbell took messages from Giancana to Kennedy. Campbell later claimed these messages concerned the plans to murder Fidel Castro. Kennedy also began an affair with Campbell and used her as a courier to carry sealed envelopes to Giancana. He told her they contained "intelligence material" concerning the plot to kill Castro.

Giancana was now ordered to appear before Church's committee. However, before he could appear, on 19th June, 1975, Sam Giancana was murdered in his own home. He had a massive wound in the back of the head. He had also been shot six times in a circle around the mouth.

According to Peter Dale Scott, in 1976, James Jesus Angleton "told an investigator that he knew which mob figures, from the New York and Chicago mafia families, had killed Sam Giancana. He also blamed the Church Committee for causing the death of Giancana and Rosselli, by demanding testimony concerning topics on which the mafia code of silence could not be broken."

On 14th January, 1992, the New York Post claimed that Hoffa, Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello had all been involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Frank Ragano was quoted as saying that at the beginning of 1963 Hoffa had told him to take a message to Trafficante and Marcello concerning a plan to kill Kennedy. When the meeting took place at the Royal Orleans Hotel, Ragano told the men: "You won't believe what Hoffa wants me to tell you. Jimmy wants you to kill the president." He reported that both men gave the impression that they intended to carry out this order.

In 1992 Giancana's nephew published Double Cross: The Story of the Man Who Controlled America. The book attempted to establish that Giancana had rigged the 1960 Presidential election vote in Cook County on John Kennedy's behalf, which effectively gave Kennedy the election. It is argued that Kennedy reneged on the deal and therefore Giancana had him killed.

In his autobiography, Mob Lawyer (1994) (co-written with journalist Selwyn Raab) Frank Ragano added that in July, 1963, he was once again sent to New Orleans by Hoffa to meet Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello concerning plans to kill President John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was killed Hoffa apparently said to Ragano: "I told you could do it. I'll never forget what Carlos and Santos did for me." He added: "This means Bobby is out as Attorney General". Marcello later told Ragano: "When you see Jimmy (Hoffa), you tell him he owes me and he owes me big."
(Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Gian...
Sam Giancana

[Bryan]

Fidel Castro:



Fidel Castro was the undisputed leader of Cuba from 1959 until 2008, when he stepped down after nearly 50 years in power. His revolutionary overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 was one of the great Marxist victories of the modern era. Castro was educated in Catholic schools and studied law at the University of Havana. In 1953 he was involved in a first unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Batista. Imprisoned, then exiled to Mexico, Castro returned to Cuba in 1956 to again lead a revolution. He joined forces with revolutionary Ernest "Che" Guevara and after a lengthy guerilla campaign, toppled Batista in 1959. Castro set up a Communist regime with himself as maximum leader, and spent the next several decades battling U.S. opposition (including assassination attempts and the famous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion ordered by John F. Kennedy), largely through the support of the now-defunct Soviet Union. On 31 July 2006, he had intestinal surgery and entrusted leadership to his younger brother Raúl Castro. It was the first time Fidel Castro had relinquished power. In 2008 he stepped down for good, announcing he would not accept reelection to the posts of president and commander in chief.
(Source: http://www.infoplease.com/biography/v...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Ca...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/
http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

[Bryan]

Rafael Trujillo:



ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.[1] He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, otherwise ruling as an unelected military strongman.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_T...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/d...

[Bryan]

John Eastland:



a Senator from Mississippi; born in Doddsville, Sunflower County, Miss., November 28, 1904; moved with his parents to Forest, Miss., in 1905; attended the public schools, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1927 and commenced practice in Forest, Miss.; also engaged in agricultural pursuits; member, State house of representatives 1928-1932; moved to Ruleville, Miss., in 1934; appointed on June 30, 1941, as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Pat Harrison and served from June 30, 1941, to September 28, 1941; was not a candidate for election to the vacancy; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1942; reelected in 1948, 1954, 1960, 1966, and again in 1972, and served from January 3, 1943, until his resignation December 27, 1978; was not a candidate for reelection in 1978; served as President pro tempore of the Senate during the Ninety-second through the Ninety-fifth Congresses; chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (Eighty-fourth through Ninety-fifth Congresses); was a resident of Doddsville, Miss., until his death on February 19, 1986; interment in Forest Cemetery, Forest, Miss.
(Source: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ea...

[Bryan]

Bay of Pigs:

was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency in the United States. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the invading combatants within three days.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_P...
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-...
http://www.foia.cia.gov/bay_of_pigs.asp

Howard Jones

[Bryan]

Freedom Riders:



In 1961 CORE undertook a new tactic aimed at desegregating public transportation throughout the south. These tactics became know as the "Freedom Rides".

The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional.

In the first few days, the riders encountered only minor hostility, but in the second week the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one of their buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff's office. With the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. John Lewis, a former seminary student who would later lead SNCC and become a US congressman, stayed in Birmingham.

CORE Leaders decided that letting violence end the trip would send the wrong signal to the country. They reinforced the pair of remaining riders with volunteers, and the trip continued. The group traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery without incident, but on their arrival in Montgomery they were savagely attacked by a mob of more than 1000 whites. The extreme violence and the indifference of local police prompted a national outcry of support for the riders, putting pressure on President Kennedy to end the violence.

The riders continued to Mississippi, where they endured further brutality and jail terms but generated more publicity and inspired dozens more Freedom Rides. By the end of the summer, the protests had spread to train stations and airports across the South, and in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules prohibiting segregated transportation facilities.
(Source: http://www.core-online.org/History/fr...)


More:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexper...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
Raymond Arsenault

[Bryan]

Robert Kennedy:



Robert Francis Kennedy was born on November 20, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the seventh of nine children and the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy. Robert, known mostly as "Bobby," attended Milton Academy and went on to receive a B.A. from Harvard University in 1948. During the summer following his graduation, he worked for the Boston Post as a war correspondent. In 1951, Robert Kennedy graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, serving for a short time thereafter as an attorney in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department.

He left in 1952, however, to manage his brother John's successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. Robert Kennedy became assistant counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). He quickly resigned in July 1953, however, as a result of disagreements over the subcommittee's procedures. Kennedy then rejoined the subcommittee in 1954 as chief counsel for the minority party Democrats, and he later became chief counsel for the racketeering committee investigating illegalities in the management of trade unions.

In November 1959, Robert Kennedy became manager of his brother's presidential campaign. Following the Kennedy victory, the President-elect tapped his brother, on December 16, 1960, to be Attorney General. In that capacity, Robert Kennedy exposed the racketeer control of labor unions. His work on behalf of civil rights led to passage of the Kennedy administration's civil rights bill in July of 1964 and to protections regarding the black American's right to vote. Kennedy also set his sights on antitrust prosecution and reducing the growth of crime.

As the brother of the President, Robert Kennedy also had a unique role as adviser to the commander-in-chief. Robert was John's closest aide, especially after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was included in the decision-making process for all major foreign and domestic policy issues. During the Cuban missile crisis, Robert was a member of the Excom, the specially assembled group organized to determine America's response to nuclear weapons in Cuba. The attorney general would eventually voice opposition to air strikes on the island, opting instead for a "quarantine."

He played a crucial role in securing Excom support for a blockade of Cuba. Robert Kennedy also played a crucial role, through back-channel conversations with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, in gaining the removal of the missiles. Robert Kennedy resigned the attorney general post in 1964, following his brother's assassination, and waged a successful campaign to become a U.S. Senator from New York.

In the Senate, he worked for the cause of the urban poor and emerged as an outspoken critic of President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy. Kennedy joined the race for the 1968 presidential election in March of that year, winning the primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, and California. On June 5, while campaigning in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Jordanian living in California. He died the following day.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/ken...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F...
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Exhibits/Pe...
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/The-Ken...
http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....
Evan Thomas

[Mark]

What a tangled web!

[Bryan]

Mark wrote: "What a tangled web!"

If you mean RFK and Cuba, oh, yeah, quite the mess.

[Bryan]

James Meredith:



James Howard Meredith was born on 25 June 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and raised on his family's eighty-four-acre farm in Attala County. After graduation from St. Petersburg (Florida) High School in 1951, he served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1960, including a three-year tour of duty at Tackikawa Airforce Base in Japan.

He returned to his home state determined to become the first African American to attend The University of Mississippi. He attended Jackson State College from 1960 to 1961, and applied for admission to The University of Mississippi in January 1961. The state took several measures to prevent his admission. In February, the University sent Meredith a telegram denying his admission. When Meredith's responses to this telegram went unanswered, he filed suit with the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund. After a protracted court battle, the United States Supreme Court ruled on 10 September 1962, that Meredith was to be admitted to the University. Governor Ross Barnett tried to prevent Meredith's enrollment by assuming the position of registrar and blocking his admission. On 30 September 1962, when a deal was reached between Governor Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow Meredith to enroll, a riot broke out on campus. A mob of angry whites confronted U. S. marshals stationed on campus to protect Meredith. The crowd assaulted the marshals with bricks and bullets outside the Lyceum, the university's administration building, until the arrival of federal troops quelled the violence in the early morning hours. Two bystanders died in the confrontation, 206 marshals and soldiers were wounded, and two hundred individuals were arrested. James Meredith was finally allowed to register for courses in October 1962.

Messages of support for Meredith arrived from all over the world, including from Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, and Langston Hughes. However, Meredith was ostracized by most of his fellow students at the University and needed twenty-four-hour protection from marshals. As a result, he described himself as "the most segregated Negro in America." The broadside "Rebel Resistance" was created by students, in collaboration with the Citizens' Council, to urge students to avoid any association with Meredith. Federal troops remained on campus for over a year to ensure his safety. In spite of these challenges, Meredith graduated with a bachelor's degree in August 1963. He went on to earn his LL.B in 1968 from Columbia University Law School.

A civil rights activist, businessman, politician, and author, Meredith has dedicated his life to supporting individual rights. Aside from being the first African American to attend The University of Mississippi, Meredith is noted for leading the 1966 "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson in protest of the physical violence that African Americans faced while exercising their right to vote. When Meredith was shot on the second day of the march, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped in to complete the march. Meredith campaigned on behalf of a number of black politicians in several states, and in 1972 ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat. In 1989, he joined the staff of North Carolina's arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms. In 1996, he led the "Black Man's March to the Library."
(Source: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/general_...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Me...
http://www.usmarshals.gov/history/mis...
http://www.jamesmeredithbooks.com/
James Howard Meredith

[Bryan]

Lee Harvey Oswald:

[image error]

Accused Assassin of 35th US President John F. Kennedy. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Robert Edward Lee Oswald and Marguerite Claverie. His father died of a sudden heart attack, and Lee was raised by a succession of step-fathers. Growing up, he was considered a loner, not very good academically, and dropped out of high school when he was 15. When he was 16, he took an interest in Communism, and applied to join the Socialist Party of America, but nothing came of the application. In 1956, he joined the United States Marine Corps, and was trained as an Aircraft Maintenance Repairman (despite stories to the contrary, he never learned to fire his rifle as an "expert" and was never trained as a sniper). He was stationed in El Toro MCAS, California, and Atsugi MCAS, Japan (near Tokyo). He was court-martialed twice, once for keeping a private weapon (pistol) in his locker without permission, and once for assaulting an NCO. During this period, he remained a loner, and upon receiving his discharge in 1959, he used his savings to travel to Russia. The Russians assigned him to a radio and television factory in Minsk, and treated him well, giving him the pay and an apartment equivalent to a plant manager, as they did with all western defectors. Despite this, he became disenchanted with the USSR, and in 1961, he decided to return to the United States. In March 1961, while waiting for permission to return to the US, he met Marina Prusakova at a dance, and they were married on April 30, 1961. In June 1962, he, his wife, and their daughter were allowed to leave Russia, and they returned to Fort Worth, Texas. Although disillusioned with the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald remained "Marxist," even though his understanding of the communist system was limited. After the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, he shot Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, killing him. Arrested for the death of Officer Tippit, and later charged with the death of President Kennedy, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby in the Dallas Police Station on live television, an act that shocked the already stunned nation. Despite the fact that the later Warren Commission declared that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy, and he acted alone, many conspiracies about the assassination abound to the present day.
(Source: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg....)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harv...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xU7Lh...
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/...

[Bryan]

Warren Commission:

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established on November 29, 1963, by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Its 888-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally, and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald. The Commission's findings have since proven controversial and been both challenged and supported by later studies.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_C...
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/...

[Bryan]

Mississippi Civil Rights Murders (1964):

On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers—a 21-year-old black Mississippian, James Chaney, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24—were murdered near Philadelphia, in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They had been working to register black voters in Mississippi during Freedom Summer and had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on trumped-up charges, imprisoned for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who beat and murdered them. It was later proven in court that a conspiracy existed between members of Neshoba County's law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to kill them.

The FBI arrested 18 men in October 1964, but state prosecutors refused to try the case, claiming lack of evidence. The federal government then stepped in, and the FBI arrested 18 in connection with the killings. In 1967, seven men were convicted on federal conspiracy charges and given sentences of three to ten years, but none served more than six. No one was tried on the charge or murder. The contemptible words of the presiding federal judge, William Cox, give an indication of Mississippi's version of justice at the time: "They killed one ni---r, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved." Another eight defendants were acquitted by their all-white juries, and another three ended in mistrials. One of those mistrials freed Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen—believed to be the ringleader—after the jury in his case was deadlocked by one member who said she couldn't bear to convict a preacher.

On Jan. 7, 2005, four decades after the crime, Edgar Ray Killen, then 80, was charged with three counts of murder. He was accused of orchestrating the killings and assembling the mob that killed the three men. On June 21—the 41st anniversary of the murders—Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter, a lesser charge. He received the maximum sentence, 60 years in prison. The grand jury declined to call for the arrest of the seven other living members of the original group of 18 suspects arrested in 1967.

A major reason the case was reopened was a 1999 interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard convicted in 1967 of giving the order to have Michael Schwerner killed. Bowers remarked in the interview that took place more than 30 years after the crime, "I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man. Everybody, including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else, knows that that happened." Bowers claims that Killen was a central figure in the murders and organized the KKK mob that carried them out. (Bowers is currently serving a life sentence for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi civil rights leader—another crime that took decades to successfully prosecute).
(Source: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjus...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississi...
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2007/...
http://vault.fbi.gov/Mississippi%20Bu...
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...

[Bryan]

Joseph Sullivan:

Joseph Sullivan was the FBI's Major Case Inspector in 1964 and the man who directed the effort to track down the killers of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. The codename for the FBI's investigation, "MIBURN" for "Mississippi Burning," gave the popular movie about the tragic killings its title.

Sullivan had worked for the FBI since 1941, after graduating from law school in the late thirties. By the early 1950's, Sullivan had joined the FBI's Domestic Intelligence division, whose responsibilities included keeping an eye on the KKK and other violent organizations. After heading bureau offices in Houston and Alaska, Sullivan was promoted in 1963 to the position of Major Case Inspector. It was a job that required him to be almost continuously on the road, but well suited to Sullivan who was at the time a widower with grown children. Sullivan quickly developed a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency.

In June, 1964, Sullivan was visiting FBI offices in New Orleans and Memphis to determine whether the agency was prepared to deal with an expected increase in Klan violence. Sullivan was still in Memphis on that fact-finding journey when he received word that the FBI had been authorized to investigate the disappearance the day before of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Sullivan flew to Meridian which would become his home for the next nine months of the investigation.

It soon became apparant to Sullivan that the Johnson Administration was determined to spare no costs to track down the killers. Sullivan reported that "the pressure from Washington for some solution..was really intense." Within weeks after his arrival in Mississippi, Sullivan was visited first by FBI Assistant Director Al Rosen, then by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who met Sullivan in Jackson. Sullivan's investigation was even assisted by the military, which sent busloads of sailors from the Meridain Naval Station to aid in the search for bodies in the snake and bug infested woods and swamps of east central Mississippi.

Sullivan reached the conclusion that he "would ultimately solve this case by an investigation rather than a search." The investigation was not made easy by tight-lipped Philadelphians. Sullivan said "They [the Klan] owned the place. In spirit everyone belonged to the Klan." Local residents would often delight in sending Sullivan's agents on wild goose chases. Eventually informants were developed that led to the uncovering of the central facts of the case. All the key informants were members of the Lauderdale County (Meridian) klavern, not the Neshoba County (Philadelphia) klavern, causing Sullivan to observe, "If the Neshoba klavern carried out the murders on their own, they would have almost certainly gotten away with it."

Sullivan undoubtedly derived great satisfaction from his success in the case. He repeatedly found himself disgusted with the racial attitudes of local law enforcement personel. When a local policeman expressed indifference to the plight of blacks at a local community center who were were being intimidated by gangs of white thugs, Sullivan grabbed the local lawman by his collar and said "You are a disgrace to your uniform."
(Source: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S...

[Bryan]

Gulf of Tonkin Incident:



A clash between naval forces of the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) in August 1964 marked a significant turning point in the Cold War struggle for Southeast Asia. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, grew concerned in early 1964 that the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), America's ally, was losing its fight against Communist Viet Cong guerrillas. The American leaders decided to put military pressure on Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese government in Hanoi, which directed and provided military support for the Communists in the South. Johnson, McNamara, and their advisors believed that naval forces could be used to help compel Ho Chi Minh to cease his support for the Viet Cong. The U.S. Navy armed the Republic of Vietnam Navy with Norwegian-built fast patrol boats (PTF), trained their Vietnamese crews, and maintained the vessels at Danang in northern South Vietnam. In covert operation 34A, which was designed and directed by American officials in Washington and Saigon, the PTFs bombarded radar stations on the coast of North Vietnam and landed South Vietnamese commandoes to destroy bridges and other military targets. Many of the missions, however, failed for lack of good intelligence about the enemy's key military installations, defensive forces, and operating methods.

Consequently, Washington ordered the Navy to focus more attention on the coast of North Vietnam in its longstanding Desoto Patrol operation. The Desoto Patrol employed destroyers in intelligence-gathering missions outside the internationally recognized territorial waters and along the coasts of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. In early August of 1964, destroyer USS Maddox (DD 731), under the operational control of Captain John J. Herrick, USN, steamed along the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin gathering various types of intelligence. Shortly before, the South Vietnamese PTF force had bombarded targets further to the south of Maddox's patrol area.
Fragments of machine gun bullets recovered from USS Maddox following 2 Aug 1964 attack North Vietnam's leaders, who knew from their own intelligence sources about the American connection to Operation 34A, were determined not to bend to U.S. pressure. Hanoi directed its navy, which had not been able to catch the fast PTFs, to attack the slower American destroyer. On the afternoon of 2 August, the Communists dispatched three Soviet-built P-4 motor torpedo boats against Maddox. Torpedoes launched from the P-4s missed their mark. Only one round from enemy deck guns hit the destroyer; it lodged in the ship's superstructure. The North Vietnamese naval vessels were not so fortunate. Shellfire from Maddox hit the attackers. Then F-8 Crusader jets dispatched from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (CVA 14) strafed all three P-4s and left one boat dead in the water and on fire. The action over, Maddox steamed toward the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin and supporting naval forces. The President and his national security advisors were surprised that Ho Chi Minh had not only failed to buckle under U.S. military pressure but had reacted to it in such a bold way. Johnson, Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp, the commander of American military forces in the Pacific, and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, decided that the United States could not retreat from this clear Communist challenge. They reinforced Maddox with destroyer USS Turner Joy (DD 951) and directed Captain Herrick to continue his intelligence-gathering mission off North Vietnam with the two naval vessels. On the night of 4 August, the warships reported making contact and then being attacked by several fast craft far out to sea. Officers in the naval chain of command and U.S. leaders in Washington were persuaded by interpretation of special intelligence and reports from the ships that North Vietnamese naval forces had attacked the two destroyers. More recent analysis of that data and additional information gathered on the 4 August episode now makes it clear that North Vietnamese naval forces did not attack Maddox and Turner Joy that night in the summer of 1964.

In response to the actual attack of 2 August and the suspected attack of 4 August, the President ordered Seventh Fleet carrier forces to launch retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam. On 5 August, aircraft from carriers Ticonderoga and USS Constellation (CVA 64) destroyed an oil storage facility at Vinh and damaged or sank about 30 enemy naval vessels in port or along the coast. Of greater significance, on 7 August the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which enabled Johnson to employ military force as he saw fit against the Vietnamese Communists. In the first months of 1965, the President ordered the deployment to South Vietnam of major U.S. ground, air, and naval forces. Thus began a new phase in America's long, costly Vietnam War.
(Source: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq1...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_...
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/N...

[Bryan]

Barry Goldwater:



a Senator from Arizona; born in Phoenix, Maricopa County, Ariz., January 1, 1909; attended the Phoenix public schools, Staunton Military Academy, and one year at the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1928; began business career in 1929 in family mercantile business; during the Second World War entered active service in August 1941 in the United States Army Air Corps, serving in the Asiatic Theater in India, and was discharged in November 1945 as a lieutenant colonel with rating as pilot; organized the Arizona National Guard 1945-1952; brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve in 1959 and promoted to major general in 1962; retired in 1967 after thirty-seven years service; member of advisory committee, Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior 1948-1950; member of the city council of Phoenix 1949-1952; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1952; reelected in 1958, and served from January 3, 1953, to January 3, 1965; did not seek reelection to the Senate in 1964; unsuccessful Republican nominee for President in 1964; elected to the United States Senate in 1968; reelected in 1974 and again in 1980, and served from January 3, 1969, to January 3, 1987; did not seek reelection in 1986; chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence (Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Congresses), Committee on Armed Services (Ninety-ninth Congress); awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on March 12, 1986; died May 29, 1998, at Paradise Valley, Ariz.; remains were cremated.
(Source: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Go...
http://thecontenders.c-span.org/Conte...