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Chapter 13
The 1976 Election and Conspiracy Fever
Chapter 14 Congress and the People(below)
To dramatize what might happen and probably did happen in 1976, this chapter has been prepared by assuming the attitude typical of today's innocent Americans. A new disease is sweeping America. No, it's not the flu; it's conspiracy fever.[1]
People afflicted by the disease imagine conspiracies everywhere. They believe, for example, that the CIA arranged for the takeover in Chile and the assassination of Salvador Allende. They even think Henry Kissinger had something to do with it. These poor feverish devils have the strange idea that J. Edgar Hoover was a fiend rather than a public hero. They imagine that he ordered a vicious campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King and a conspiracy against most of young America called Cointelpro. Some even think Hoover had King killed. There are some Californians with the west coast strain of this bug who imagine that the FBI and the California authorities created a conspiracy in San Diego and Los Angeles against black citizens. The California group also think there was something strange about Donald DeFreeze and the Symbionese Liberation Army. They suspect an FBI or California state authority conspiracy, complete with police provocateurs, double agents, faked prison breaks, and a Patty Hearst, alias Tania, all thrown in by our own government to create a climate that would make the public accept the prevalence of terrorism and demand a police state.
The disease spread to Congressmen as well. It does not seem to be limited, as it was before Watergate, to people under the age of 30. There are even Congressmen with a more virulent form of the malady who are convinced their telephones are still being tapped. They, along with thousands of others who suffer, no doubt reached this conclusion just because they were told by a CIA-controlled media that hundreds of telephones were tapped a few years ago.
Early forms of conspiracy fever are no longer considered to be dangerous. For example, all those sick citizens who imagined conspiracies in the incidents at Tonkin Gulf, Songmy, Mylai, the Pueblo and the Black Panther murders are now considered to be more or less recovered, since it turns out it was not their imaginations working overtime after all. Even the special variety of the fever which caused the impression that the CIA murdered a series of foreign heads-of-state is no longer on the danger list.
There is still one form of the illness, however, that is officially considered to be very dangerous, virulent, and to be stamped out at all costs. It is the version producing the illusion that all of America's domestic assassinations were conspiracies. Those infected believe the conspiracies are interlinked in a giant conspiracy to take over the electoral process in the United States and to conceal this from the American people. Some citizens are known to have this worst form of the fever. They include a Congressman or two. Others have come down with a milder form in which they imagine separate conspiracies in four assassination cases (John and Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace).
Members of the Ford Administration, particularly David Belin, Mr. Ford's staff member on the Rockefeller Commission, went along with an analysis made by Dr. Jacob Cohen, a professional fever analyst, that the disease has been spreading rapidly because of a small group of "carriers" traveling around the country who are infecting everyone else. Some of these carriers, called assassination "buffs", were thought to have contracted the fever as many as twelve years ago.
In the disease's worst form, the patient imagines that there exists a powerful, high level group of individuals, some of whom have intelligence experience. The highest level of fever in these patients produces the idea that this high level group, usually called the PCG, will eliminate presidential candidates not in their favor or under their control. Others imagine that Jimmy Carter has been brought into the PCG by threats against his children and careful briefings by George Bush.
It is worth analyzing the sick people with this domestic assassination conspiracy fever to see how far their imaginations take them. They calculate that the PCG, fearing exposure if any president is not under their control and influence, will go to whatever lengths are required to insure the election of the man they do control. The idea is that Gerald Ford was nicely in the PCG's pocket because he has been covering up for them ever since 1964. He has continued to help them through 1975 and 1976 by maintaining a steady cover-up effort on all four cases. Jimmy Carter was perhaps brought under control. The feverish "buffs" figure that the PCG would have been sure to eliminate Jimmy Carter unless he could be controlled.
The scenario continues into the future. The more control exercised by the PCG, the stronger they become and the more people in the executive branch become beholden to them to continue covering up the cover-ups.
So, wake up America. Wipe out this disease. It's just as dangerous as Communism, if not more so. Like the general in "Z", Americans must realize that such a disease has to be eliminated whenever and wherever it appears.
[1] "Conspiracy Fever" is derived from an article with that title by Jacob Cohen, a psychologist, in "Commentary" magazine, October, 1975.
Congress and the People
The last hope of the people to take back their government from the PCG is through Congress. The executive branch is a captive of the PCG. The legislative branch has no power in the situation. Where courts or judges do have some small measure of power, as in the hearings and appeals for a new trial for James Earl Ray, they have been controlled by the PCG. The ruling of the judge in the Ray appeals case, for example, was obviously a decision made for him by someone higher up. He ruled that Ray could not have a new trial after hearing a vast amount of evidence of conspiracy and solid evidence that Percy Foreman had duped Ray into pleading guilty.
Unless a people's revolution comes along, and that hardly seems likely, the only possibility left is to hope that Congress can do it. What are the odds? From what has been pointed out so far, it is obvious that if Congress is to expose the PCG, throw the rascals in jail, and wipe the slate clean to seize the country back for the people, a tremendous battle will be required. All of the forces of the PCG, including their friends in the House and Senate, will be focussed on preventing this from happening. A power base within both houses would have to be created that could not only do battle with the PCG but that would not be fooled by their myriad of fiendishly clever techniques, methods and stratagems. It would have to be a power base that protected itself from infiltration and usurpation of its own resources. It would have to somehow conquer the media control problem; otherwise, no American citizen would know what it was doing or what the battle was about.
How would such a battle start and such a power base be constructed? An important step would be to purify the special committee created by either resolution and to purify the staff. Preventing infiltration of staff by the PCG is especially important. As mentioned in Chapter 12, the Church Committee staff and the Schweiker sub-committee staff were infiltrated by the PCG, and specifically the CIA. A leading assassination researcher and former intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency who knew many, many CIA agents discovered two of them in the Church Committee staff offices in the fall of 1975. The other staff members had not been aware that these two men were CIA agents because they were "deep cover" agents.
This problem is rather complex because there is always great pressure from the House or Senate to create a balance on any appointed committee. Thus the Church committee was hamstrung by several of the Senators appointed to be on it: they were close friends and supporters of the CIA and FBI. Senators Goldwater and Tower, for example, fought very hard to block any efforts to have the entire committee investigate potential CIA or FBI involvement in domestic assassinations. This does not necessarily mean that Goldwater and Tower are members of the inner circle of the PCG. But it does mean that PCG members who know who killed John Kennedy and why can influence Goldwater and Tower to block such efforts.
The first step in the House or Senate might be floor voting because of the tight control exercised by the PCG over the committee procedure on resolutions. In the House, for example, the Rules Committee is allpowerful in determining which resolutions are brought to the floor.
Henry Gonzalez introduced his resolution HR204 in 1975 and sent it to the rules committee. Nearly a year passed. On March 18, 1976 Mr. Gonzalez, together with Mr. Downing, was tired of waiting for some action by Chairman Madden and they took the issue to the floor of the House for discussion.[1] By this time the two representatives had 125 co-sponsors for their two resolutions (an unusually large number). Gonzalez and Downing had taken over the floor of the House for two hours and had several supporting speakers. No one rose in opposition. Prior to that time, Representative Sisk from California and Representative Bolling from West Virginia had been vehemently outspoken in the Rules Committee against both resolutions. Madden, Sisk and Bolling all left the House before Downing and Gonzalez started speaking.
As a result of Gonzalez's and Downing's efforts, Madden was forced by Speaker Albert and other members of the House and by some of his own constituents to hold a formal hearing on the two resolutions on March 31, 1976. The PCG controlled the hearing through Sisk, Bolling and Lott. The resolutions were tabled, subject to future recall by the chairman. The vote was nine to six. Representative Bolling was called into the hearing from the House floor to cast the ninth vote at the last minute. He heard none of the arguments. He didn't have to. The PCG had instructed him on how to vote.
This event is described to illustrate how difficult it would be to overcome the control advantages on the side of the PCG. Only on the Senate or House floor might it be possible to equalize things. The two events, the two hour discussion on the House floor on March 18, reported by the "Congressional Record," and the hearing by the rules committee on March 31 illustrate another problem Congress has combatting the PCG. Not one of the major news media organizations reported either event. Two hours on the House floor is an incredibly long time for any subject. There were many reporters present from television, radio, newspapers and press services. Mark Lane saw to that. But nothing appeared on CBS, NBC, ABC, or in "Time," "Newsweek," or the "New York Times." Why? The answer is obvious. Very tight control over the news from the House is exercised by the PCG.
The larger implication is there for all to see who want to open their eyes. Seeing it and believing it are two different things. For nearly all Congressmen who still have faith in America, the whole point of this book, and the existence of a Power Control Group which included Ford, Nixon, Kissinger, the CIA, the FBI, the fifteen major news media management level people, plus nearly anyone else of importance in the executive branch and many Congressmen, is too much to swallow. They would rather have the whole thing go quietly away than face up to something that gigantic. And that is the real source of the PCG's strength, the unbelievability of it all.
Addendum to Chapter 14
Several truly historic and highly encouraging events occurred in the months of September and October, 1976 that could indicate a change in the tide and power and control described in earlier chapters.
First, on September 15, a coalition of representatives from the Black Caucus, Henry Gonzalez and Thomas Downing managed to get Resolution H1540 through the House Rules Committee. Mark Lane, Coretta King and others were responsible for creating pressures that finally convinced Speaker Carl Albert, Chairman Tom Madden of the Rules Committee and others that this was necessary and desirable. The new resolution, made up of parts of the Downing and Gonzalez resolutions plus input from Representative Walter Fauntroy from the Black Caucus called for a special 12-person committee to reopen the JFK and Dr. King cases and any other deaths that the committee might decide to investigate.
The Rules Committee voted nine to four in favor. Representative Bolling, who perhaps unknowingly had lent his support to the opposition in the earlier vote, was an important swing vote and actually introduced the resolution in the meeting. The position of the nine who voted for the resolution was more than vindicated two days later, when the House, by the extraordinary vote of 280 to 64, passed the resolution. History was made. On that day cheers should have gone up from several hundred dedicated researchers around the world, and the Power Control Group should have begun looking for rocks to crawl under.
The real war was only beginning, however. The "New York Times" barely reported the event, did not mention the vote, and buried the story in the middle of another story with one-half inch in one column. The "Washington Star" and "Post" carried larger stories and the "White Plains Reporter Dispatch" made it a first page headline story. The PCG's media control slipped a bit.
The next hurdle was for Downing, Gonzalez and Fauntroy to convince Albert that the chairman of the new committee for 1977 should be Mr. Gonzalez since Mr. Downing had announced his retirement. Because elections were being held in November, Mr. Albert named Mr. Downing as chairman for the balance of 1976, with Mr. Gonzalez as next in line. He also let it be known to the press that Mr. Gonzalez would be the best choice to head the committee next year.
Mr. Albert then named ten other members of the committee for the 1976 period. Four of them, Fauntroy, Burke, Stokes and Ford, were members of the Black Caucus. Stewart McKinney, Representative from Connecticut, is a well known supporter of the truth. Those five, together with Downing and Gonzalez, could probably be counted on to try to arrive at the truth. The other five representatives--Dodd from Connecticut, Preyer from Tennessee, Devine from Ohio, Thone from Nebraska and Talcott from California--were unknown quantities. If the PCG theory holds up, at least one of them, and perhaps two, will turn out to be PCG representatives.
The next event of significance occurred on October 4 when Mr. Downing named Richard A. Sprague, former district attorney from Philadelphia and fearless prosecutor of the Yablonski murderers, as executive director of the committee's staff. The main significance of this event was who was not named. Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., was in strong contention, but he was not selected because of suspicions that he might be a CIA agent and also because of conflicts of interests among his clientele. Fensterwald represented Otto Otepka, James McCord, James Earl Ray and Andrew St. George, among others. There is certainly a strong CIA flavor and PCG influence among his clients. Whether or not Bud Fensterwald himself works for the CIA or the PCG, his rejection as executive director was a healthy sign that the committee might be able to go through the purification process described as essential in Chapter 14.
Richard A. Sprague had his hands full attempting to separate PCG applicants for staff positions from non-PCG members. The PCG, during the same time period (September and October) these historic events were taking place, was very active in spreading its second line of defense information. "Castro did it in revenge" stories began popping up everywhere. Jack Anderson was revived to back up the strategy by publishing another of his "Castro did it" columns.
[1] House Resolution 204 -- Henry Gonzalez House Resolution 498 -- Thomas Downing