Fourth Reich Archaeology - Jerryworld 3: Boola Boola

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

In our most noided episode yet, we follow Gerald Ford to Yale University where he first worked as a coach before studying in the law school. He spent several formative years in New Haven, from 1935-1941, overlapping with such figures as CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Supreme Court Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White, and many more. We dig deep into the whole Yale milieu of the time - how curious that Jerry finds himself in the land of Boola Boola at the same time as many of the godfathers of the American intelligence apparatus. At Yale, Jerry joins the original America First Committee, networking with true American elites and situating himself politically on the opposite side of the Roosevelt administration. We'll reveal the surprising identity of the faculty advisor for the Committee - a name that will have true heads' jaws on the floor. (THANK YOU to TIMOTHY CLEARY for the incredible build-up music in that sequence!!) But Jerry wasn't spending all his time as a coach/law student in the library, he spent a good deal of time in NYC with his model girlfriend. Indeed, he dabbled in modeling himself. He dabbled in modeling so much, listener, that he got involved with one of the real godfathers of American modeling and publicity, a man with surprising links to intelligence of his own...

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Weston Way of Life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA.

He has a mile. He knows so long this is a night. I'm afraid of we'd never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a day. I'm not going to be a national global. Big that poor Reich is coming. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don.

And welcome. to Jerry World, episode three. We're so glad to have you with us, and we're so grateful for the response we've gotten so far on our little project. As a reminder, we welcome you to write us through email at forthrightepod at gmail.com or reach out on Twitter or Insta at forthrightepod.

If this is your first time listening in, be sure to listen to our previous episode. Last time we discussed Jerry Ford's humble childhood. We talked about his strong work ethic and his drive to success, pushed by his ambitious and class-conscious mother, Dorothy, and his stepfather, Gerald Ford Sr. We also talked about his jockish patriotic anti-communism, his thirst to ascend the ranks of American society, and his budding class resentment, driven largely by his wealth hoarding, spoiled, fail-son, father, Leslie Lynch-King, Sr.

We continued to track Jerry's rage issues and unpack some of the mythical elements of the mainstream version of his life story. We started identifying the contradictions in Jerry's life and his personality. The development of Jerry as an outward-facing person. personality versus Jerry's internal truth, including that he is the descendant of Lynch R. King. Still love that name so much. We jumped ahead in time a little bit last time to finish the saga of Jerry's earliest efforts at striking compromise. This was in the context of the dispute between his mother and his biological father over back child support and alimony.

Leslie King pulled out every trick in the book to shirk his child support and alimony obligations, something that biographers and Ford himself would credit as informing his approach to fiscal policy later in life. When we last left off, Jerry was moving out east to pursue a law degree. And where was he pursuing that degree, Dick? none other than Yale at Wall We are both extremely excited for this episode in particular because Jerry's time at Yale at Yale is one of these pieces of his life story where our original research turned up some pretty revealing information that I think

has not really been considered in other biographical works about Jerry Ford. And as far as we can tell, we'll be making connections that none of the Ford biographies have and really ratchet up the levels of spookiness in the Gerald Ford story. Right. At a very high level, Ford overlapped at Yale with some of the greatest names. These names will be familiar to the real parapolitics heads. It's unquestionable that the first contact Ford had with the real nationwide elites of that time left an indelible mark on him. And his biographers have grossly downplayed this, and if not outright denied it. We'll discuss these connections as we recount how Jerry got into that grind set and he hustled his way into Yale as assistant coach. He wouldn't take his first class at Yale law until two years after he moved into New Haven. We'll also discuss Jerry's political development over the course of his time at Yale, including his involvement in the original America First Committee, which spawned the America First. movement opposing U.S. involvement in the expanding European conflict that was taking shape over the

1930s. That was actually founded, as it were, by Jerry's Yale law classmate, Robert Douglas Stewart Jr., the heir to the Quaker Oates fortune. In that context of America first, on the eve of America's entry into World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor. It will discuss Jerry's ideological evolution from isolationist to internationalist. And we'll talk about how once again, Jerry's evolution in this regard provides a window into the dialectical development of the Fourth Reich itself. We'll take a stab at addressing that most thorny of questions, namely, how can the U.S. be the Fourth Reich if it sent so many men and so much treasure to defeat the Third Reich? So we're going to work with you, listener, to untangle that cognitive dissonance.

And today's episode is not going to be all about that boring, stuffy Yale. We'll also keep up with some of Jerry's social life, much of which was not centered around that sausage fest in New Haven. Remember, Yale was all male until 1969. Much of Jerry's social life at the time centered around New York City, baby. The Big Apple. You see, Jerry poured was a male model. I'm too sexy for my shirt Two sexy for my shirt

So sexy it hurts Despite graduating from Michigan in 1939 Jerry didn't earn his LLB from Yale Law Until 1941 And he became only the second president With an Ivy League graduate degree Yeah this was a surprise to me I would have thought there would have been more

But the only one before Jerry To have an Ivy League degree was Rutherford, Birchard Hayes. Ironically, Rutherford. Rutherford was another guy who was not really elected president, having lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden in 1876. So the two of them faced a deadlock in the electoral college,

and the original smoke-filled room gave rise. rise to an electoral commission in the House of Representatives, which came up with a backroom deal whereby Rutherford and the Republican Party agreed to terminate federal reconstruction in the South and withdraw all federal troops and, you know, permit the rise of Jim Crow in exchange for the White House. Another little tidbit that you numerologists out there may be keen to learn is that Rutherford Hayes was the 19th president. What's 19 times two, Dick?

Well, that's 38. And who was the 38th president, Dick? That would be Jerry Ford. It's probably nothing, but it's a funny coincidence nonetheless. Yeah, and it's funny just earlier today we're talking, like, Jerry was the second president with an Ivy League graduate degree. And then after him, what pretty much every president has had an Ivy League, except for... Except for Biden, Carter, and Reagan. I don't know what to make of that, but...

I think it's in line with the idea that U.S. is sort of full-bore fascist from Reagan on, that every post-Regan presidency, is just a variation on the Reagan presidency, you know, whether it's Clinton, like Democrat Reagan or George W. Bush, you know, stupid Reagan, Obama, African-American Reagan. You've got a sequence of Ivy League educated actors playing the actor who played the president. It's a real bodriar, simulation within a simulation, within a simulation. Right. I'm thinking just about Barbie dolls. You know that movie?

Oh, yeah. Except their presidents and their different types of Reagan. Yeah, exactly. But unlike George H.W. And unlike Clinton, Jerry really struggled to get his foot in the door at Yale. So the road to Yale is kind of convoluted Remember, he knew he wanted to be a lawyer from a very young age And what better place to get a law degree than Yale

But it's sort of a convoluted way how he got there In his last year at Michigan, he was actually $1,000 in debt And he had developed a reputation on his team And he, you know, as like a solid dude and a team player And so he goes to his football coach And he's looking for a job And, you know, the football coach knew him as a leader on the team and sort of his natural coaching abilities.

And he understood that Jerry understood the magic behind it, you know, what a team is and acknowledging everyone's various strengths and weaknesses and letting people shine where they're confident and also telling people that, hey, you should probably step aside because this other guy can do a better job. But unfortunately, his coach didn't have a job for him. At the same time, he said, hey, I got a buddy of mine. Yale and there's a potential job as a line coach. And so Jerry wanting to be a lawyer, he's sort of, this isn't really the opportunity he was asking for, but it's like goes beyond his wildest

imagination. And off to Yale, he goes. And immediately he's like a fish in the water, right? The athletic department immediately takes a shine to him. He starts out just as an assistant coach, but then starts doing like he's coaching football, he's coaching wrestling, he's coaching boxing, even though up until that point he had never boxed. And I think he lied in his interview, right, to get the job and then just sort of on the job training. Yeah, he would get in the ring with the members on the boxing team and would occasionally get the shit beaten out of him and come out of it, practice sessions with his face all bruised up. So you've got to support that grind set.

Hell yeah. You cannot knock the hustle on Jerry Ford. And the football program, too, we should say, even though Yale is not now known for its athletics, at the time it really was kind of a powerhouse in the burgeoning sport of American football. In fact, the university stadium, the Yale Bowl, when it was constructed in 1914, it was the biggest stadium in the world, except for the Coliseum in Rome.

Another kind of surprising fact, you think about Yale as sort of an effete place where much of the torture and physical abuse really takes place in the crypts of the skull and bones society, but there was, also a burgeoning culture of initiation by corporal abuse happening out on the field. Yeah, it goes back to what we were talking about, I think, our last episode, how football was at this time seen as like this gentleman's sport, remember, right? Like, for Yale, this was just another way for Yale to boast its superiority over all the other schools. Because it had this amazing football. Yeah, so Jerry is working his way up the ranks there, sort of his way up the ranks there, sort of as a coach, but that's not his goal. That's not what he wants to do.

He wants to go to law school, and time and time again, in his first couple of years coaching, He's unable to break in. The registrar and the dean, they hear him out, they look at his transcript, but they tell him no. Another bush kid, another bush kid. How about this girl? She's got boola. But does she have boola, boola? So we talked last time that he spent the summer of 36 at Yellowstone as a park ranger.

Well, the following summer, he went back. to U of Michigan, back to Ann Arbor, and took some law school credits there during the summer session. I believe he earned straight Bs, which, you know, fair deal, fair deal. Later on, the following summer, he took some law school credits at UNC in Chapel Hill, kind of an unusual place to choose. Not really sure what motivated that choice of location, but the fact is that eventually for the spring semester of 1938, Jerry finally convinced with some law school credits already under his belt that he could handle the role of law student. And as a matter of fact, he told the dean that, hey, Dean, don't worry, I'll give up my coaching job here. I'll focus on

my studies, I'll be able to get through it. However, that was also, like his claim to boxing experience, a Jerry Ford fib. He did not give up the coaching job and continued, you know, continued on that grind set. He just double-timed, worked hard, and made his way through law school while also coaching in these various sports full-time and getting that paper, getting that paycheck. Yeah, he didn't tell the academics that he was working and he didn't tell the athletics that he was going to school. So, you know, remember, one of the Ford family mottoes is tell the truth,

but I guess maybe fibs don't count or depends on what truth you're telling. Yeah, yeah, this one certainly turned out to be a whole, quite a lie as compared to some of the other whoppers that we will encounter as Jerry increases in age and in power. Nothing's true and nothing's right, so let me be alone tonight, because you can't change the way I am, are you strong enough to be my band? Ride to me, I promise I believe. Lie to me, but please don't leave.

Now, Jerry's classmates in Yale made up a real who's who of the post-war American elite. Yeah, this is, I'm going to read a little passage straight out of the Richard Norton Smith biography. So he describes the intellectually formidable class of 1940 that Jerry sought to join, in whose ranks were to be found, future Supreme Court justices, Potter Stewart and Byron White, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance Pennsylvania governors William Scranton and Raymond Schaefer Colorado Senator Pete Dominic Peace Corps Director and Vice Presidential Candidate Sergeant Shriver

Smith does not mention that Sergeant Shriver was also the brother-in-law of John and Robert Kennedy but listener you know that Back to Smith, best-selling Titanic author Walter Lord and Najeeb Halaby, director of the Federal Aviation Agency and father of Jordan's Queen Noor. So Yale was Jerry's first exposure to the real high society of America and the world, right? It's a much bigger world than the elite of Grand Rapids or even the likes of Leslie Lynch King. Bula, boola, mula.

Remember, Jerry was at Yale from 1935 all the way up until 1941, so he overlapped with a lot of big names in the Fourth Reich Rolodex. Yale is often credited as the recruitment pool for which the OSS and the CIA's founding fathers were drawn. For example, James Jesus Angleton graduated Yale in 1941 as an undergrad. Yeah, the whole vibe of Yale at that time is kind of captured, I think, in that movie The Good Shepherd. I don't know if you've seen that one, Dick, or some of our listeners, I'm sure we'll have seen it. Gentlemen, the CIA.

The nasty little secrets. No matter what anyone tells you, there'll be no one you can really trust. They're not-professionate's best stuff. How do I know if I can even trust you? You can take the gloves off. Tell me your real name. We don't have to be gentlemen anymore. It's not great, both as a movie and as a historical document,

but, you know, it does have, I think Matt Damon plays a stand-in for Angleton, sort of. This whole wing will be your part of the world, counterintelligence. Who knows, you might have a secret about me and that safe of yours. A poet scholar who gets recruited into the CIA. poetry is the music of mathematics. You have to look behind the words to understand the meaning. William Hurt plays a stand-in for Alan Dulles. You're going to have to learn as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The English system of intelligence, the black arts, particularly counterintelligence.

The uses of information, disinformation, and how their use is ultimate. is ultimately power. There's some good scenes. I remember one scene where all of the CIA guys like dress up and drag and put on a song and dance. You know, that type of bonding and that atmosphere from which this mentality of absolute loyalty and brotherhood

among the nation's tops books emerged. Right. remind you you have all taken an oath of secrecy you have been chosen to become members of america's secret society for over a hundred years skull and bones members have included a president vice presidents supreme court justices congressmen and senators captains of science and industry the very best of america you were both in skull and bones the secret society it's so That's a secret we can't talk about it. What does that mean for America?

The conspiracy theorists are going to go on. I'm sure they are. I don't know. I haven't seen the record. Number 3-2-2. Do you both were members of Spelling Bones, a secret society at Yale? What does that tell us? Not much because it's a secret.

Among the others who were at Yale at this time were the Bundy brothers. And I went down a little rabbit hole with the Bundy brothers. I'm talking, of course, about William Bundy and perhaps his better known brother Mick George Bundy, bearing one of the great first names of all time. I was, you know, a hair away from naming my own son, Mick George. The Bundy brothers graduated from Yale in 1939 and 1940, respectively. And I want to talk about them because,

their father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, Harvey came from no mean stock in Grand Rapids, being himself the grandson of a New York congressman. But the Bundy clan really got made when Harvey Bundy married the daughter of the Boston Brahmin William Lowell Putnam. As anybody familiar with Sus Boston will surely know. Lowell and Putnam are both big names out there in Beantown. So this young lady represented a real merger between two major clans. So Harvey Bundy left Grand Rapids behind and attended Yale. Unlike Gerald Ford, Harvey Bundy was invited. to and did join the Skull and Bones Society, and he graduated from Yale in 1909. So that would have made Harvey Bundy a senior bonesman at the time when young Averill Harriman

of Brown Brothers Harriman was a freshman inductee into the Secret Society. Perhaps Harvey Bundy Jacked off in front of Avril Harriman Through his wife's Blue-blooded connections Grand Rapids Harvey Bundy was hired at his father-in-law's white shoe law firm Putnam, Putnam, and Bell

out there in Boston And that is where he met And became very close with one Henry L. Stimson. And we could talk for hours about Stimson, a horseman of the Fourth Reich, no doubt, whose CV includes Governor General of the Philippines, Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover,

and Secretary of War under FDR. He's been implicated in the smuggling of Yamashita's gold, the administration of the Black Eagle Trust, the original Black Budget, and much, much more. All the while, his Grand Rapids-born protege was at his side. And if the listeners are interested in diving down that very, very deep rabbit hole, you might want to check out Sterling and Peggy Sea Graves, classic Gold Warriors.

Subtitled America's Secret Recovery of Yamashda's Gold, the author's right of the Black Eagle Trust, and its formation under the Truman administration, The treasure, gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems was combined with access loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This black gold gave the Truman administration access to virtually limitless, unvouchered funds for covert operations.

It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. It was not Truman's decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration was Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. By the way, he was a bonesman from Yale.

That's skull and bones. During the war, Stimson had a brain trust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. Back to the Bundy boys. Harvey's two sons, both went on, like their father, to join the skull and bones as well. They also, with their father's introduction,

went on to learn at the lap of Henry Stimson. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy ghost wrote Stimson's autobiography or auto-hagiography, however you want to call what bullshit rich people write about themselves. The Bundy brothers also went on to pursue careers mixing the covert and the overt, and that culminated in their enthusiastic role in the Democratic Party's ramping up of the war in Vietnam following JFK's assassination. The listener can certainly find a lot more about that, but that's where we'll leave it off.

Evil minds that plot destruction Sorcerer of death's construction In the fields of bodies burning As the war machine keeps turning Death and hatred to mankind Poisoning their brains their brainwashed minds Oh, Lord, yeah!

We wanted to include this abridged story of the Bundy clans move from Grand Rapids into the imperial court of the Fourth Reich to compare and contrast their story with Jerry Ford's trajectory, which intersects, obviously, Jerry being another son of, of Grand Rapids who spent time at Yale at the same time as the boys. But unlike Harvey Bundy,

not being a Yale undergrad, unfortunately, Jerry was not mixed in with the secret societies directly as far as we know. Although he certainly did mingle with Bonesman and members of its other competing secret societies at Yale, the two other big ones besides skull and bones that I think are lesser known are the scroll and key society and the wolf's head society. Also, in contrast to Harvey Bundy, Jerry Ford did not marry up. He didn't hitch his wagon to a given sponsor, and he did not take on the airs of an intellectual. Just like the protagonist of the Redyard Kipling poem, If that Dick so elegantly read into the record

in Jerry World episode one, Jerry was a guy who walked with kings and did not lose the common touch. Politicians hide themselves away. They only start. so as they go out to fight so as we continue through this trajectory keep in mind these questions is the reason Jerry Ford didn't become another Harvey Bundy because he chose not to

out of integrity and earnestness or was Jerry simply denied access to the inner sanctum because he came from a broken home. And finally, were Jerry's efforts of ascension in politics in the Masonic order in search of a workaround path in order to get into this intersaintdom? And if so, did he succeed in getting in? Folks, this gets a lot deeper and we will be tracking some further intersections between Jerry and the upper crust of the Yale student body in this very episode. So please stay tuned. Another of the names that stood out in researching Jerry's time and associations at Yale is one that I had never heard of before. But once you crack the surface on his life story, this is a fella who's as suss as his penchant-esque name implies.

and that name is J. Richardson Dilworth, a bonesman, the Rockefeller family's consiglieri, and lawyer, who graduated Yale Law just one year behind Jerry Ford.

Dick, you want to talk a little bit about Jay Richardson, his background? Yeah, sure. Dilworth, as I'd like to refer to, Dilworth was a double Yalee. He had his undergrad degree in 1938 and graduated the law school in 1942,

just a year behind Ford. Guys like him and Potter Stewart, which is the future Scotus Justice and also a double Yaley Bonesman, represent a level of entrenchment in student life at the law school that Jerry, student of society that he was, would certainly have caught on to.

Like Jerry, Dilworth also joined the Navy in World War II before glooming on to the Rockefeller family. It's a funny aside is that we haven't mentioned it yet, but when it came time for Gerald Ford to pick a vice president pursuant to the 25th Amendment of the Constitution after his appointment, Jerry Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and cyan of the John D. Rockefeller Standard Oil Empire, brother of David Rockefeller, who really anybody that's looked at conspiracies in this country will certainly be familiar with. And who was called upon to testify on behalf of Rocky, as Nelson Rockefeller was fondly known by his acquaintances, none other

than J. Richardson Dilworth. I like the story of Dilworth having a guy on the Warren Commission, right? He just had like a staffer or someone on the Kid Commission that he had. Yeah, and that guy on the Warren Commission was actually one of the real prominent, albeit not so well-known, black Republicans of the time, a guy by the name of William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., a Harvard Law graduate. So his placement on the Warren Commission was both beneficial to the diversity of that stayed body, and it was also a way for the Rockefeller family to have an inside man.

So really two birds with one stone there. Yep, and Coleman would end up as Ford's Secretary of Transportation, the first African-American to hold that title. Yes, sir. Okay, so let's just get back onto the main road, back with our hero, and make Jerry's Yale-era encounters with the upper crust a bit more concrete. Take it away, Don. Sure will. So the listeners are certainly familiar with the divide in American public opinion in the decade of the 1930s, whilst the Third Reich was on the rise, both first in Germany

and soon outside of Germany's borders into the rest of Western Europe. So on the one hand, you have the Communist Party USA. at the peak of its popularity, right? This is the Great Depression, people are impoverished, the death and destruction wrought by World War I with really no tangible reason or benefit to anybody at the sort of ordinary person level, and the momentum generated by Roosevelt's New Deal programs,

the first real major federal investments in infrastructure, the Works Progress Administration. These were kind of socialist tinged in their own right. And this was also a time when people in the U.S. could be excited about what was going on in the Soviet Union. You know, in the 1930s, there weren't really stories reaching the West of exaggerations of the crimes of the Soviet regime, or at least not nearly on the same scale as those stories would proliferate after World War II. So there is a strong left contingent that is taking a new view on, politics. Meanwhile, the world that was polarizing around fascism on the right end of the political spectrum, and here we ought not forget that Herbert Hoover and the self-same Henry L. Stimson

gave their hardy support to white Russians in their fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. These guys wanted to nip socialism right in the bud from the jump. So we have sort of two bands. And while American communists had already joined the budding global conflict between fascism and communism, for example, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades went to fight fascism on the side of the Spanish Republic against the Francoist fascist coup between 1936 and 1939. You also have some like the great black American communist Harry Haywood, who also fought against Italian fascism in its colonial war against Ethiopia. And mainstream society, and in particular American liberals were more hesitant than their sort of radical fellow lefties

about committing American blood and treasure to overseas wars. In fact, a lot of this sprung, like I mentioned, from American involvement in World War I. But contrary to the sort of mainstream liberal narrative, American involvement in World War I was not really few times. at all if you view that war, too, through the lens of the pinch-on quote that we read in episode one about war being a celebration of markets, right? Right. If you look at it purely as a marketplace, before World War I, America was a net debtor, and after it's a net creditor to the world, right? In fact, it's the largest creditor to the world. Secretary of State Robert Lansing and his nephews, the Dulles brothers,

ensured that U.S. capital would be flowing freely into Europe for reconstruction and even for reparations before being repatriated when European debtors purchased U.S. exports with their loans. Yeah, this is that old Nazi money go around, right? The U.S. banks lend money to Germany at interest. Germany uses that borrowed money to pay reparations to the allies in World War I, including the U.S., and Britain and France. And then those allies use the money that they've earned in reparations from Germany to call on U.S. companies that had come out unscathed. in terms of industrial capacity, like U.S. steel. You know, World War I was a phenomenal windfall for U.S. industrial manufacturing,

as well as, of course, the financial sector. Right. In any event, the liberals at this time, they thought that this same result, at least the liberals who really were in the know about how the world was working, they thought that they could achieve the same result in another European conflict, which became increasingly likely as the 30s wore on. But they thought they could achieve that result without sending any troops. And this belief that America could both profit from a world war

and keep itself safe and uncommitted to that world war, was the ideological baseline for the America First Committee founded at Yale Law School in 1939. It was founded by a handful of students at the Yale Law School and run by a national committee that at various times included General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears Roebuck, the head of the United States Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage. The automobile magnate Henry Ford, World War I Ace, Eddie Rickenbacher, Lillian Gish, the star of birth of a nation, and Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The committee soon had some 800,000 members in 450 chapters all across the country, the largest anti-war organization in the history of the United States.

Okay, let's talk about America. first. Robert Douglas Stewart, Jr., the heir to the Quaker Roads fortune, was the group's principal founder. But Jerry Ford was an original member of the group's executive committee and signatory to its letter manifesto. Other contemporary members at Yale included Sergeant Shriver, who would go on to marry JFK's sister, Eunice, and become the first head of the peace corps. Sergeant Shriver was not a bonesman himself. but he was a member of the scroll and key society, which was one of the principal other secret societies at Yale.

Its Ballyhooed members include Cyrus Vance, who would go on to become Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter. Also, Cord Meyer, the major CIA agent whose wife Mary was one of J.I. F.K's love interests, who herself was murdered under very suspicious circumstances. And another scroll and key member is a fellow by the name of J. Peter Grace, who was also a member of the Knights of Malta and who played a pretty substantial role through his family company in hiring Nazis after World War II to come. and work in the chemical industry.

Again, I digress here a little bit, but it's just that Yale is so fucking suss that it's impossible not to list off a little who's who of the additional Fourth Reich personalities who converge on that point. But now, Dick, let's get back to the America First Committee of which Jerry Ford was a founding member. Back to other contemporaries at Yale, Potter Stewart, the aforementioned Bonesman in Ford's graduating class who would become a Supreme Court Justice appointed by Eisenhower.

Kingman Brewster, what a name that is. Incredible. Kingman Brewster, another Boston Brahmin Mayflower descendant who would later become U.S. ambassador to the U.K. and then President of Yale University. And Eugene Locke, descendant of the philosopher John Locke, who was a Dallas lawyer who went on to become Texas Governor John Connolly's campaign manager and part of the U.S. diplomatic mission to South Vietnam and ambassador to Pakistan. That America First Committee over at Yale, a real who's who, some pretty prominent personalities. Real heavy hitters. And Dick, were there other chapters of the America First? committee besides the one at Yale?

I thought you would never ask. So over at Harvard, Joe Kennedy Jr. and his little brother, Jack, were members of American First. What's interesting to note is that, you know, in addition to JFK, whose naval service is well known, all of the Yale America First members that we mentioned, without exception, each one of them, Jerry Ford included as well, joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor. And this is something that I think a lot about, the Navy and Naval Intelligence, you know, everybody talks about the CIA, but naval intelligence has some pretty spooky shit going on there as well. Yeah, I like to think of it, you know, it's like the most blue-budded branch of the armed forces, right?

I think back to like the Revolution and the United States Navy defeating the Brits, right? John Paul Jones. The focus on like ancestry and lineage in America, right? You join the Navy because it has those roots back to the beginning. And one of the connections that Jerry Ford made through his association with the America First Committee, besides the litany that Dick just walked us through, as far as we can tell, has not been reported anywhere and is one that, When I saw it, I did like the Vince McMahon red eyes meme.

Yeah, listen, you're going to want to sit down for this part. You know, put the vacuum away, maybe pull over if you're driving. This is, it's going to, we're about to drop some heavy shit. Yeah, this is what we like to call a real Fourth Reich archaeology artifact. Yeah, this one's the big one. And it's direct. It's, you know, zero degrees of separate. So, this connection, dear, dear listener, concerns the faculty advisor of the America First Committee at Yale.

This gentleman was a rising professor of economics at the time. He finished his Ph.D. at Yale in 1939, almost concurrent with his involvement in America first, and he was a blue-blooded Yaleie through and through. This gentleman attended boarding school prior to matriculating at Yale at the prestigious Groton Academy out there Connecticut Way, and his tuition was paid in full up front in cash because his family had a sizable fortune, a sizable fortune made in the insurance industry. That's right, listener. This man's father was president of the Hartford, remains to this day one of the preeminent

insurance companies in America. This fellow, I'm talking here still about the faculty advisor of Yale's inaugural chapter of the America First Committee, was born in Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, very house out there Connecticut way, and he would go on to become one of the most important spymasters in the history of the CIA. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about a man who bore many monikers, one of which was the mayor of Area 51. Another was, the mayor of area 51. Another was, the godfather of the U-2 spy plane. Yes, listener, yes, listener.

We are. We are talking about Alan Dulles' one-time right-hand man and a key architect of both the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Dick, drop the name. That's right, dear listener. Gerald Ford's faculty mentor in his role on the Executive Committee of America First was none other than Richard Mervyn, Bissell, Jr.

Now, unfortunately, there does not appear to be any written record of Jerry Ford's interactions with Dick Bissell. However, we do know that there was a relationship. Dick Bissell's role on the America First Committee at Yale is reported in a little book that I pulled off of the noided bookshelf in preparation for this episode called Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, by Robin Winks. dear listener, we would never, we would never lead you astray. We like to check our facts and let you know when we are speculating and when we are reporting archaeological findings. So this is one such finding. And if we know anything about Dickie Bissell, we're talking about the guy who outmaneuvered,

no slouch of a figure as Dick Helms to get the seat at Alan Dulles's elbow. You see, Bissell was selected by Dulles to replace Frank Wiesner as deputy director for plans in the CIA. That's the person who's essentially in charge of all covert operations. The guy quarterbacked multiple coups data, including something we'll get into a lot in our Watergate episodes, that whole Bay of Pigs thing. He was not taking a passive role when he joined up with a bunch of law students on the America First Committee. A reminder to the listener here, the America First Committee would eventually expand astronomically and would attract, the likes of Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford, it was a vehicle to meet, influence, and network with really the rich and famous of the American elite. I mean, the names that we just mentioned,

the families that they come from, and that is Dickie Bissell's element. So this is a guy with his eye on the real prize who comes in there and we can surmise, dear listener, that, that I don't know if he subsequently took pains to erase his involvement in the committee because indeed it did become a bit gauche to bear that association after the U.S. gets involved in World War II. You know, to be clear, if we haven't said it already, the America First Committee dissolves immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But prior to that point, the man who was faculty advisor, we can only guess with a high degree of certainty that his level of involvement was substantial and that he indeed did interact with the entirety of the executive committee of the group, which was not a large executive committee and included among its ranks, Gerald R. Ford Jr.

And to understand Bissell's mentality and that influence that he might have had on Jerry Ford, I think, Don, we should take a little detour into what we'll call the insurance mindset. Remember, Bissell's daddy was the head of the Hartford. The insurance industry has always had a big seat at the table of power, and an examine of the insurance mentality makes it clear why that is. So I wonder, Don, if you could maybe lay out exactly what we mean when we say this insurance mentality and then maybe apply it to a historical example and we could see it at play. I will do my best, Dick. So, you know, the listener, like myself, may have a passing familiarity with the insurance industry, your car, your house, renters insurance, maybe life insurance.

What insurance companies do, in providing coverage is they collect information and quantify that information as to various elements involved in the insurance contract or policy. So, for example, the insurance company has got to quantify the value of the thing insured. You know, what's the value of your car? What's the value of your house. They also have to quantify the level of risk of loss of that insured thing. How likely are you to get into an accident? Where is your house? Is it in a hurricane zone? That type of information. It's gathered up and quantified. You put a number on it. And then, once they have that information, the insurance company quantifies the size of the group, amongst whom the cost of indemnified.

the risk can be spread, right? So if you have, for example, health insurance through your employer, the cost of your premiums will depend in part on the size of the group. So if you work for a very large company, that company can negotiate a better price because it's spreading the risks across a larger population. So that's, you know, any insurance industry professionals out there will please permit the amateur and very high-level approximation, you know, at the risk of over-generalizing what insurance companies do. Now, why does that matter here? Well, think about the CIA in the Cold War and how the insurance mindset might be applied. the CIA also collects information, and it also quantifies, in some respect, the inputs to any given policy consideration.

So, for example, the CIA would assign extremely high values to the interests of American assets owned by American capitalists. You'd think, you know, sugar plantations in Cuba, the banana plantations in Central America, the casinos in Cuba once again, oil fields in the Middle East or wherever they may be found, mineral resources, and on and on and on. Now, the CIA also assigns value, albeit a substantially lower value to the interests of the locals. in the so-called third world. You'd put a dollar value on every thousand casualties, say. You know, you can put a dollar value on the interests of the people of Guatemala in having a democratically elected government, right? And looking at these quantitative inputs,

the CIA qua insurance mindset looks to spread the risk of ensuring the assets under its coverage, right? So some of that risk can be borne by the companies themselves. For example, a company like United Fruit or ITT can pay the equivalent of insurance premiums by bribing officials in the destination country, or lending their commercial infrastructure to covert operations, something that we've seen again and again and again all over the world. Meanwhile, the bulk of the risk of any operation that the CIA may undertake, of course, is offloaded to the people of the destination country, right? I mean, the people that invaded the Bay of Pigs were themselves Cubans, the people they were shooting at were Cubans. And after that all went to hell, Castro

couldn't very well send Uncle Sam a bill to pay the cost of the operation, right? And in making those types of decisions and in securing those mechanisms to externalize the cost of operations, the agency, they will seek to minimize the risk borne by the agency itself. And that's not just monetary risk, but that's also the risk of any potential blowback. So they use middlemen. They keep certain parts of operations off the books. They try to keep themselves well upstream of the really risky aspects of any plan. All the while, you know,

They're continuously collecting additional information, quantifying that information, and factoring it in to account for any number of potential eventualities. So to use the Bay of Pigs example again, you know, the one eventuality, I think, was that the ground invasion fails and there would be a certain amount of risk offloaded from the CIA to the U.S. military and to the U.S. military. the U.S. President when Alan Dulles and Dickie Bissell ask JFK to send in air cover, right? He doesn't. He refuses to send in that air cover. And so we all know what the next step in that program was, but we'll get to that once Jerry Ford is on the Warren Commission. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

Yeah, it seems like we could do this a whole. whole episode on just this insurance mindset, right? I think we get back, let's get back to Bissell and his insurance ideological impact on the American Empire and possibly on Gerald Ford. So it's this idea of like what weighing the balance of harms involves more than just the pros and cons. It involves an analytical process of taking information. applying certain rules of reasoning to process that information

and outputting the results of that analytical process. Going back to our very first episode, this is the lens metaphor. The way you consume determines the output. It determines your worldview. Yeah, it's kind of like an algorithm, right? Like a mental algorithm. Yeah, exactly.

Inputs and outputs. Yeah, it's a formula, calculus. Yeah, like, people think of their brains as neutral computers, but the way that it processes information is completely colored by one's indoctrination, by one's position, you know, all of their lived experiences and their point of view. Right. Point of view. For example, this is an assumption that we, the capitalists, the value of our lives, is more. than the people of the so-called third world, right?

The cost of a capitalist life is going to be infinitely more than that of a communist life. So here you have a value base by which to process information, to value the way to make your decisions. Right. It's the fundamental assumptions that bear on how you view the world. And all of this, of course, is importing the racist, white supremacist world. view of colonialism and imperialism that has shaped the entire Western outlook. To Americans during the Cold War, the cost of any given third world country, quote unquote, going communist is enormous, right?

Almost infinite that would necessitate massive expenditure and put that expenditure as the highest priority to ensure the protection and preservation of the U.S.-led world order. And that's still the case today. It's absolutely, I think, borne out in everything we see in the current events. Just check out the historic relationship between insurance giant AIG and the CIA. And once again, if you don't have the right lens to understand what's going on around you, you will find policy discussions built around their own internal logic, which builds and turn off of all of these underlying assumptions, to just be nonsensical.

The output doesn't make sense. Every morning morning, people in the choice of man knocking on my door. Every Monday morning, boy, people, that insurance man knocking on my door. While not tell him to come back on a tune, because son and boy, I haven't made no money, you know. So back to the America First Committee, the whole purpose of this was to kind of see the America First Committee. as a networking opportunity for Gerald Ford to interact with multiple members of the American elite, people whose elite status would translate universally into substantial power. And I want to say something about the actual ideology of the America First Committee,

because I don't think we've quite situated it along the left-right spectrum, And probably the listener may be, like I was, inclined based on Donald Trump's appropriation of the America First framing and, you know, that slogan as sort of an extreme nationalist far-right concept to view the America First Committee as essentially a pro-Nazi or a far-right fascist, sympathetic organization. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America First, America First. I think that's a little oversimplified, right, Dick?

Yeah. America First was not necessarily a pro-Hitler Nazi organization. and its membership did not necessarily signify Nazi sympathies, even though many of its members, which peaked at 800,000. Is that right? Yeah, that's according to the, you know, the official literature on this. So even though many of America First members, they certainly would have harbored anti-Semitic or fascist beliefs. The organization was not necessarily a pro-Hitler.

Nazi organization. I want to make it clear that there were so-called progressive members involved in America first, like the former Wisconsin progressive governor Phil LaFaulette, we mentioned the Kennedys were involved, and these people were generally against war. Many are convinced that stopping Adolf Hitler is not worth the sacrifice of American lives. This time, America should keep out, and I know I will. I have decided to die here of European affairs. I think we should stay out of overseas Charlie. And all I ever should be made to keep out of the fight.

But you know the fight of our own battles. They mean nothing to rush. In fact, Henry Ford was kicked out of his role as a spokesman of the committee for being two Nazi adjacent. Meanwhile, of course, the Nazi file Charles Limburg was embraced and became the leader. and he was launched into that role with the help of an enthusiastic kingman Brewster. Over time, the influence of real right-wing Nazi- sympathizing fanatics kind of took over. And as the Nazi war march intensified over the course of 1939 and 1940 and 1941, one, it became harder and harder to oppose the war.

And so the rhetoric got more and more charged, and oftentimes that was reflected in anti-Semitism by the likes of Lindbergh and others. In selecting these three groups as the major agitators for war, I have included only those who supported essential to the war party. If any of these groups,

the British, the Jewish, or the administration, stop agitating for war. I believe there will be mental danger of our involvement. Another aspect to note about America first is that while it raised a ton of money and had many donors of that money, the bulk of its funds were supplied by a handful of millionaires

with connections to corporations in various industries. So a foreshadowing of the astro-turfed right-wing organizations out there today, and their motivations for sponsoring the organization probably varied. Everything from wanting to simply oppose Roosevelt, whom they saw as a dangerous leftist. Remember, there was a literal corporate coup attempt on Roosevelt back in 1934, the business plot.

and other corporate sponsors like the McCormick family of Chicago that own the Chicago Tribune were also very far right and probably had Nazi sympathies themselves. And I think at this point it's important to note that the geopolitical foes of the Nazis, as opposed to what we would consider the domestic targets of Nazi repression. The Jews, the gypsies, the gays, etc. Right. The geopolitical foes were the Soviets, the USSR. And remember, at this time, the good patriotic Americans had already come to hate the red menace, the godless commies.

There was certainly a dominant sort of anti-communist contingent. Right. Remember, we discussed this at length in our first episode. U.S. capitalists were eager to invest in Nazi militarization. during the 1930s, you know, not only did they want a good investment opportunity to make returns on, but also, you know, they saw those investments in German industry as a sort of insurance premium paid against the risk of the collectivist menace. To the extent there was any risk, it could be sort of externalized and borne by the Nazis. So I've got my insurance glasses on.

The risk of Nazi hegemony in Europe at a scale that could really infringe on U.S. capital interests, it could be held in check, right? If the Nazis get too big for their britches, the U.S. can up its insurance premiums a little bit in the form of lend lease programs, you know, military assistance to the old allies to put a check on. on the ambitions of Hitler's Third Reich. And all of that was being negotiated, mind you, in Europe at the time. We talked in episode one about Montague Norman. He was a close advisor of Neville Chamberlain, of appeasement fame, right?

So those boundaries are being negotiated, and there's a certain safety to it. Until, you know, the risk calculus changes, the U.S. is forced to put down a larger premium, but even U.S. investment of substantial American blood and treasure to the cause against the Axis powers is at the same time as it is an authentic attempt to militarily defeat the Axis powers, is at the same time as it is an authentic attempt to militarily defeat the Axis. right this is a celebration of markets right this is a ratcheting up of american military might of american military technology of the ability to use propaganda to mobilize the american people for war and even though he was making this critique from the right charles lindberg actually pointed this phenomenon out in 1941. They planned, first, to prepare the United States for foreign war under the guise of American

defense. Second, to involve us in the war, step by step, without our realization. Third, to create a series of incidents which would force us into the actual conflict. These plans were, of course, to be covered. and assisted by the full power of their propaganda. Our theaters soon became filled with plays portraying the glory of war. Newsreels lost all semblance of objectivity. Newspapers and magazines began to news advertising if they carried anti-war articles. A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention.

The terms of the columnists, traitors, nazis, anti-Semitic were thrown ceaselessly at anyone who dared to suggest that it was not for the best interests of the United States to enter war. And just like Dick, you were talking about the economic boon of World War I to the great American fortunes and the great American companies. Right. Well, World War II did the same thing on a much, much larger scale, right? It's pretty much accepted conventional wisdom that the Great Depression wouldn't have ended if it weren't for World War II, right? That's something that you're taught in grade school. Right.

The ratcheting up of industrialization, of all of the mobilization of the military might, I mean, they needed to spend some dollars. They needed people working. they needed to get the economy churning. So it was a business opportunity as much as it was a fight against the Axis. Right, and all the while, there are these sort of micro-negotiations taking place

throughout the entirety of the war. And the intelligence-gathering activities of the OSS will get a little bit more into this in future. episodes, but certainly go on to inform not only the U.S. military strategy vis-à-vis the access powers, but certainly go on to inform the U.S. position with respect to the Soviet Union and all of the partisan forces that would, after the war, make up the kind of extra-S. communist threat. And to add a little bit of further geopolitical ingredients to this too, the old world empires of

Britain and France, right, these are our allies on the European continent. These are joined together with the U.S. as that abstract grouping we discussed in episode one, Western civilization or Judeo-Christian civilization, right? And if you actually think about what those empires were, they're colonialist, white supremacist, genocidal record of, you know, committing atrocity after atrocity all over the world. By contrast, you know, these, they didn't differ all that. substantially from Hitler's imperial ideology. Really the only difference is, right, whereas the British Empire is conducting a Holocaust

on the Indian subcontinent against brown people, Hitler is conducting a Holocaust on the European continent against white people. Against European people. and that ain't cool why are the Nazis worse than the British Empire and if you kind of pick away at whatever

the response that somebody gives to that question there's nothing really left right because the British empire the French Empire they certainly are as morally culpable

I think as the Third Reich in sheer scale and scope of atrocity, murder. Some of the sun ain't coming home today. Some of the sunny ain't got no great. To the extent that listeners are not already acquainted with sort of the subject matter that we covered in that first episode.

You know, don't take our word for it. If you're interested in reading further, recommend checking out Christopher Simpson's book, The Splendid Blonde Beast, which is all about this contingent of U.S. policy makers, including the Dulles Brothers, and the ways in which they facilitated American capital investment in Nazi Germany. Even before that, that book came out in the 90s,

But way back in the 40s, this was being tracked. George Seldies, Facts and Fascism, Edwin Black's book, IBM in the Holocaust. I mean, it's extremely, extremely well documented. I know in my real life get a lot of sideways glances when I start talking about Nazis and people will think that perhaps I'm a paranoid or I've got something wrong with me. conspiracy theorist, but, you know, once you start to pull out the old bibliography that really sets forth this historical record in a lot of detail, there's not much that the... Well, you're in a safe space here, Don. I'll tell you what. And dear listener, you are also in a safe space. Because it's important to sort of question that...

stuff. And when you have the facts and you have the sources, your conclusions, they're not paranoid, are they? They're well supported. That's right. I mean, as Kurt Cobain said, right? Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Well, just because you see Nazis under every rock of, you know, the U.S. establishment doesn't mean that there's not a large degree of, again the word, continuity between the interests of Western hegemonic capital and the sort of antithesis of civilization that we know as the Third Reich. Yep. Okay, and so let's try it back now to his direct involvement, right from the organization. We know he signed the sort of initial letter from the organization and he was getting updates about recruitment efforts.

But I wonder, Don, if you could explain a little bit about what else do we know about Jerry Ford in America First? Yeah. So, according to Richard Norton Smith, Jerry left America first, you know, before its official dissolution after December 7th, 1941, right? A day that will live in infamy. So Jerry resigned his membership sometime in the summer of 1940. So he was involved in the committee for about a year. During his involvement, I did look through, you know, the records of the America First Committee, which are available. You can find them online, at least in as much as they exist.

And one letter that I looked at from November of 1939, from the committee to Charles Lindbergh, soliciting his endorsement and involvement in the group, it bore the signatures of some of these other fellows that we've been discussing. It had Douglas Stewart. It had Sergeant Shriver's signature on there. It did not have Jerry Ford's signature. there is some question in my mind, you know, whether he distance himself, whether he was playing a more behind-the-scenes role. But he was corresponding over this time period with Douglas Stewart, who, as it were, actually dropped out of law school to dedicate himself full-time to America first. And meanwhile, he was corresponding with Jerry Ford. You know, they were coordinating activities of the executive committee as the group grew in importance. But, you know, we know for

a fact that by 1940 through that letter correspondence between Stewart and Ford that Jerry had resigned. And the official reason that he gave was that he was concerned that his, you know, vocal political engagement would put at risk his coaching job sounds like bullshit yeah i mean for one for one i think we gave an explanation here about how the viewpoint of the america first committee was not marginal it was fairly mainstream you know it had affinities to both the political left, liberal side of the spectrum, as well as the political right. So it's not something that, you know, seems so out of the mainstream that would put somebody's coaching job in danger. And even so... And certainly not at Yale. Right, right. He's in good company. We just talked about it. He's in very

good company on this committee. And Richard Norton Smith casts further doubt on this excuse of his resignation, saying that by this point in time, Jerry was actually no longer relying on his coaching salary and that he had enough saved up at this point to get himself through law school without that salary. I don't think I agree with Smith about that because I think if Jerry is anything, as we've talked about in great detail, he's frugal, right? He's a penny-pinching guy. He's not trying to leave that money on the table. Right. So there's another, there's another theory of why he may have resigned. Do you want to get into that one, Dick? Yeah. And this sort of sets us up for what we're going to talk about next too. But at the time, Jerry was living in New York City

and sort of leading a swinging social life with his model girlfriend and her circle of jet setters. So what we'll talk about next is how Jerry was sort of introduced into the cool kids crowd in New York City through his girlfriend, Phyllis Brown. Among the things that was happening was Jerry was volunteering for the Republican presidential campaign of Wendellke, who would later support FDR's provision of U.S. support for the Allies via the Lend-Lease program. But Jerry was also sort of setting up, believe it or not, dear listener, a modeling career, which sort of comes, was certainly from left field for me, but when I heard it, I sort of believed it,

looking at Jerry as a young man. And so maybe you've got to think Jerry is in New York. city with the cool kids, the cosmopolitan crowd. He is sort of in the circle of jet setters, this social scene at the time, maybe that these folks convinced him that maybe fighting the Nazis was the cool thing to do. It's possible he just sensed that there was a change in the political winds, you know, that would make war inevitable. Whatever the case may be, he was sort of out of the loop. of this whole scene before there could really be any paper trail

that ties them back to any sort of Nazi sympathies of America first. Yeah. And I believe this is just one more great example of Jerry's almost supernatural attunement to the vibrations of history in the making. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, Jerry had mentioned

that he listened with great, emotion to Winston Churchill's May 1940 speech, kind of coming out hard against the Nazis. This is well after, you know, the Nazis had already launched the Blitzkrieg eastward and were on the march in a substantial way. I would say to the house, as I said to those who have joined the government, I have nothing to offer but blood taught. tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. To wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim?

I can answer in one word. Victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be. But without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized. no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire stood for,

no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages that mankind will move forward towards its goal. And Smith mentions around this time at some point that Jerry Ford Sr. was inquiring to his friend, the U.S. Senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg, about maybe getting Jerry a place in the Navy. And so, you know, even before Pearl Harbor, which is when Jerry actually does enlist in the Navy, at least his family had been putting out feelers to get Jerry into a plum job, you know, a plum position. We mentioned, you know, the Navy's sort of sense of a blue-blooded branch of the military. And so, you know, remember listener from our origins episode where we talked about Dorothy

and we talked about Jerry Sr. as being very driven by considerations of pedigree and upward social mobility. You know, they likely saw the inevitability of U.S. involvement in World War II as well in some capacity or other. So, you know, this idea of launching Jerry Jr., at some point, it becomes imprudent for him, not just to take a stance of America first, don't get involved in European war, but to really distance himself from any position that might not feel. fit within the mainstream of U.S. politics. And by this time, even Wilkie, the Republican candidate, defeated the more isolationist

candidate for the Republican nomination. And so the wind was a blowing. And our young Gerald Ford, he licked his finger. and like any Eagle Scout he held it up to the wind and he could tell from that sensation which way it was blowing Why don't we liberate

these United States we're the ones who need it worse let the rest of the world help us for change and let's rebuild America first Our highways and bridges are falling far Who's blessed and who has been cursed There's things to be done all over the world

But let's rebuild America first Okay so actually there's one more part of Jerry's time at Yale that we want to dig in So in the fall of 1937 Jerry was introduced to a real looker by the name of Phyllis Brown, a woman who was five years his junior, and then a student at Connecticut College. Recall, listener, that fall 1937, Jerry is fresh back to the Northeast after spending the summer taking law school classes at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and at this point in time he'd still not been. admitted to Yale as a law student and was simply working there as a coach. And this is a good point, Don. And I wonder if it was when he was back in Michigan or if it was just happenstance.

But the way he meets Phyllis Brown listener is that Jerry's got a lady friend back in Michigan, back from his Grand Rapids days. And his friend, she finds out that Jerry's out in New Haven and she says, there is a girl out there by the name of Phyllis Brown she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen now Yale was an all-male

school at the time so Yaleies were always looking elsewhere for female companionship and Jerry must have been so excited to hear that there was a potential lead on a girl by the name of Phyllis Brown

he doesn't directly meet her at first I think what he does is he asks around, you know, he asks some of his friends. And after getting confirmation by two other guys that, yes, Phyllis Brown is indeed the most beautiful woman that they've ever seen, that he decides to call her up and they hit it off. Jerry goes deep with Phyllis. She meets his family.

He meets her family. She goes to Grand Rapids. He goes back to Maine with her. Of course, they have a premarital sexual intercourse. The blossoming of the relationship is Jerry essentially being incorporated into New York City High Society. She's taking him out to see plays, to go out to nice dinners, a life that Jerry otherwise

would not have any access to. You know, he's whining and dining in New York City and in the social scene, so to speak. In interviews, Phyllis Brown has said that before Jerry met her, he was just some Midwestern hayseed. He doesn't own a suit.

is you know renting a sport coat to go out on dates right exactly and like yeah and they go skiing right they go out skiing and um so probably the suit that he was wearing in those photos that i posted from his childhood in grand rapids he dressed kind of sharply as a kid but once he's a big man according to phyllis he's without really the means to dress the part of uh of yale law man. The two have a passionate and what Jerry has called a torrid relationship. Jerry later in life will refer to her, of course, as a girl that he went out with, but also as his business partner at times. And the way this starts is halfway through college, Phyllis dropped out to pursue a career full-time modeling in New York City. Naturally, this led to Jerry spending more time in the

Big Apple as well. And what happened next, Don? Well, it just so happened that, you know, Jerry is a real square-jawed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, strapping athlete, right? He's got a real rugged look to him. The listener knows at this point that, I agree that Jerry is a real looker.

Yeah, he's got a certain, je ne se quo, about him, not the type of pretty boy look that most models of the time were sporting in the magazines and on the advertisements. It's a real... Rugged, rugged, the good look. Earthy, yeah. So Jerry, through Phyllis, gets into modeling on the side. He begins to work for the agency that she was working for,

which was called the John Robert Powers Agency. I believe it still exists as like a global franchise chain of finishing schools, like that, you know, teach you how to walk and stuff like that. I don't know if it's still active as a, as an agency. And, you know, at this time, through Phyllis, he also meets another. Another model, another model who was also working at John Robert Powers, a model with eyes bigger than simply working for another agent. I was just going to say he decided that maybe there was something more than being ridiculously, really, really ridiculously good-looking. Yes, and that fellow went by the name of Harry Conover.

So Conover was working for powers, but he was not really the type of guy to want to be an employee of somebody else. We'll get into his biography a little bit, given overview. But he was a brash sort of fellow. Very unique, very loud, strong-willed guy. He's got this crew of models around him, among whom is Phyllis and among whom is Jerry Ford. And so at some point in time, he presents the opportunity to Jerry to invest in a offshoot modeling agency, a new modeling agency. Remember that business investment that we teased in the last episode? Well, listener, that was an investment in this.

the Harry Conover Modeling Agency. How much did he give old Harry for the gig, Dick? $500 or $1,000 at the time. So between $11,000 or $22,000 in today's money, which is a good chunk of change. It's a real good chunk of change. Not like that. We've got to keep our little click, clicking at 1.30 BPM is not too slow.

We've got up and out, let's do it together. Let's all melt down together. We talked about the settlement that Jerry was working on between Dorothy and Leslie King and that Jerry wanted some quick cash to invest in a business. This was the Conover Modeling Agency, but apparently, as we concluded in the last episode, Jerry did not get any money from either Leslie King or from Dorothy once that settlement came into her hands. And so the either $500 or $1,000 investment that Jerry Ford made, and the reason why we don't know is because both numbers have been reported time and again, actually,

even in Gerald Ford's FBI file that was submitted during the course of the FBI's investigation into Ford, its background check when he was being nominated as vice president. Even that report at different parts mentions the investment being either $500 or $1,000. And it's of some moment because if it's $500, it's not implausible. I don't think that Jerry could scrounge up $500. I understand from the Smith book, he was making about $3,600 per year as a coach at Yale. Now, a lot of that went to pay off his debts. Remember, he paid back the fellow from, Grand Rapids South High School that had sponsored his undergrad education. He's paying for his

rent. He's paying for this affluent lifestyle that he is kind of starting to live in New York with Phyllis. So it's a substantial, I mean, just think about it this way, right? Listener, I don't know, you know, your financial circumstances, but you're going to, even if you are very well off, which, I mean, $3,600, it's not very well off. But you're not going to make an $11,000 investment in something without giving it a lot of thought and without having a high degree of confidence in that investment, right? So... I don't know. That sounds about how much I put into Dogecoin. What's the other one?

But Inu coin. I dropped like 11K on NFTs. I bought a 50% interest in a bored ape. But yeah, jokes aside, like that's a lot of fucking money. Yeah, it's a lot of fucking money. And that's something that we're going to come back to momentarily as to why that matters. And then they told me I could be somebody if I didn't let too much get my way. So, I tried so hard just to be myself, but I keep on fading away.

Oh, yeah, the lights went out. I didn't know what to do if I could fool myself, and maybe I'd fool you. One of these days, I'm going to pay it back, pay back, pay back, one of these days. So, Don, Jerry and Conover, they're like, they become very good friends, right? And Harry's background sort of paralleling Jerry's. Maybe you want to talk about that? Yes. So here in Jerry World, a lot of the inhabitants whom we've met come from, like Gerald Ford,

a sort of broken home. Harry Conover is no exception. Harry Conover was also raised by a single mother who, you know, his father was out of the picture early on. I'm not sure if Harry Conover's mother remarried, but the fact is that they were quite poor in Chicago, and Harry was working odd jobs throughout his childhood, just like Jerry. also like jerry harry's mother was a real strict disciplinarian who put a high value on her son's education and on her son's future economic prospects to that end she stretched what little means she had to send young harry to military school and he attended the peak skill military Academy, whose notable alumni include none other than L. Frank Baum, the author of the

Wizard of Oz series of books, talk about a guy with some interesting takes on Freemasonry, but that's for another day. And then where did Harry go, Dick? He went to Notre Dame University. Well, he was sent there to study the priesthood, but he never tried. checked in at the registrar. His mom sent him off to Notre Dame and he gets off the bus and almost immediately catches another to the Big Apple and he starts modeling. Right. Yeah. I think he had been working like working in restaurants and stuff. Kind of the classic going to New York to strike it rich and famous. He's working around town. He's he's making friends with other young people there and I believe that the story that he told was that a female friend of his

you know I do not have reason to think that this is Phyllis Brown but the the female friend is not named in the retelling of the story that I've seen but he he has this friend she wants to model she's going to an audition at the powers agency but she's very nervous about going in for the audition and she asks Harry to accompany her and Harry turns on the charm to 11 and as a result he not only helps his friend his lady friend get a modeling gig but he is hired as a model as well okay so where do we go from here you have the connection with Harry and he meets Phyllis and Jerry and They are now models in New York. Mm-hmm.

You know, Jerry's coming in from Yale. He's the football coach. I'm sure that all of these various sorts of artistic personalities can get a real kick out of this Midwestern kind of o'fish guy who comes in from Grand Rapids by way of Yale. It's just sort of a charming identity that he is embodying at this time, right? Like kind of a guy out of it. his element, but I'm sure turning on the charm in his own right.

Right. And now, according to Harry Conover's daughter, Carol Conover, who wrote a biography of her father slash autobiography called Cover Girls and, listener, please, please. We have not asked you for anything but your time and attention so far. I am now asking you, listener, if any of you have a lead on where I may be able to find a copy of cover girls, the story of Harry Conover by Carol Conover, please do email us at forthrightepod at gmail.com, because I have looked, listener, and I have not been able to find a copy of this book, and I really would like to. So I have seen only excerpts and reviews from the book but have been able to piece together some information, including Carol Conover's assertion that her father and Jerry Ford roomed together for a time in New York City. Just keep that fact in the back of your mind for now, listener, because Harry Conover is not just a guy,

like Gerald Ford, who is ambitious and working his way up. Harry Conover, like Leslie Lynch King, has a dark side of his own. Oh, cinnamon, where are he going to run to? Cinnamon, we're going to run to? We're going to run to all on that day. Will I run to the rock? now after harry conover with cash-in-hand from his buddy jerry ford found his own modeling agency he almost immediately begins to rapidly rapidly rise in the ranks of the modeling establishment

Indeed, I say rock What's the matter with you rock? Don't you see I need you rock? Lord, Lord, Lord. All on that day. So I write to the real. The listener may have guessed this from the title of his daughter's book, but Harry Conover is credited with creating the concept of a cover girl.

He had very new ideas. about modeling, about how to picture women in particular in publicity. If you think about the really old advertisements, right, Dick? You think about this drawing of like a wasp-wasted woman, almost unrealistically idealized, and striking very stylized poses for these images. The cover girl to Harry was, you know, not only a pretty face, but he looked for models that wore their emotions a little bit more on their outward appearance that had some earthy qualities about them.

Right. An X factor. Yeah, an X factor. He liked to put women outside in nature doing things. He liked to have an athletic woman. woman as a cover girl he thought it was important for models to be not only seen but also to have a personality and that they're having a personality would make them more interesting to look at so he's got this whole theory about the cover girl and it sounds as you're talking it sounds not just

innovation and modeling but in marketing yes in advertising and how to sell what it is is you have in front of the audience, the viewer. Indeed, it rhymes with the approach to marketing espoused and made famous by the godfather of American marketing. I'm talking, of course, about Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who came to New York City. The listeners may be familiar with Edward Bernays,

in addition to launching the Lucky Strike ad campaign to sell cigarettes to women, right, as something that had been previously taboo. He paid a bunch of women to go out in the streets of New York and smoke cigarettes as like an act of protest and burst onto the scene in that way, he would go on to work in propaganda. He worked for United Fruit Company in the lead-up to the coup that that company sponsored in Guatemala to sell the overwrought and completely fabricated communist threat of the nationalization of banana plantations

by the democratically elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arvinth, in 1954. And so this is the world in which Harry Conover's ideas around the cover girl strike like wildfire, right? The terrain is fertile for Harry Conover's ideas and his modeling agency to explode onto the scene. Some of his clients who worked for him and for whose career he's credited with launching include such Hollywood starlets. Starlet is even an understatement. We're talking massive, massive stars, Joan Caulfield, Shelley Winters, Constance Ford. He also hired models like CZ Guest, who, if any of the listeners have seen the recent show on Hulu about Truman Capote, The Swans.

Fashion scene. She's played in that show by Chloe Sevigny. She was like a huge part of New York upper, upper, upper society. So Conover reportedly rises to be. become a millionaire. You could think of him as the C.H. King of the American mind. Right.

Yeah. Right. The physical frontier is no more. But settlement must proceed. And thinking about the frontier of the mind, I'm reminded of Harry's

bride. Oh, yeah. Who was he married to? Oh, yeah. now. Now, listeners, once again, we ask you to exercise caution when hearing about Gerald Ford's connection to Dickie Bissell, you're going to want to do the same. Whatever you did last time, do that again. Take a deep breath because Harry Conover's wife was none other than Candy Jones. The darling supermodel radio host and M.K. Ultra Subject.

Okay. Now, a mind control courier who we referred to earlier and who we're going to talk about at some length right now was a woman named Candy Jones. Yes. If the listener is not familiar, Candy Jones was. reportedly subjected to hypnotic mind control techniques to turn her into a courier for the CIA of coded messages and she would have a repressed second personality which would be triggered by certain cues that could be delivered telephonically so she would go on these modeling gigs she'd get a phone call, then she would become not Candy Jones, but her alter ego. Now, a word of explanation, you're going to hear references to Candy and to Arlene Grant. Now, Arlene Grant is a second personality that was hypniprogrammed into Candy Jones by her CIA control.

When she was a child, she made up an imaginary playmate with whom she used to play, because I guess according to the book, she did not have a whole lot of playmates her own age. This imaginary playmate was a girl named Arlene Grant. Now, what her hypnoprogrammer and controller did was to program candy in such a way as that her intelligence functions were basically assumed by a woman named Arlene Grant. And it's worth noting that when candy was very frightened, one of the things she used to do when she was a little girl was to sort of have Arlene be her big sister and protector. So that Arlene in the hypnoprogrammed candy became the recipient of many of the strong and even aggressive qualities that, that Candy herself lacked or felt she lacked. You know, whereas Candy Jones was a very sweet, outgoing, kind person,

the alter ego was aggressive, mean, racist, programmed with, like, extreme racial prejudice, which I always thought was a very interesting aspect. This is all recounted in the book. Authored by a man named Donald Bain, B-A-I-N, he wrote a book called The Control of Candy Jones. That was published in both hard cover and soft cover by the Playboy Press and was copyrighted in 1976.

Oh, wind up doll, everyone knows. Wind it up and away it goes. It does the things it's taught to do. I guess I'm kind of. Candy, at least, according to this account, was not a bigoted individually. It was turned into a real hater and a hater of a number of different people, Jews, Italians, blacks, all kinds of people. And I think it's worth taking note of in this context that, at least to a certain extent, I think, to the extent that the federal intelligence agencies, the U.S. government, is involved in programming people in this fashion,

it represents, well, maybe the ultimate legacy of the Galen organization that we've talked about, where Nazi war criminals were brought into the country, incorporated into the intelligence system, and, well, they say big oaks from little acorns grow, and this would appear to be at least one of the trees that sprang up from that particular Nazi acorn. And it's worth noting here, too, note the stereotype and foul attitude towards black people.

Little springs and gears. I can show you one more trick. Break my heart. The mental faculties of black people and the CIA and federal government's efforts to control black people and to affect mind control on them were a major, major focus of activity. So Conover, Candy Jones, of course, if we didn't mention it,

was herself a superman. herself a supermodel. During the 1940s, Candy Jones was probably second only to Benny Grable as a pin-up girl for the GIs overseas during World War II. After the war, she became a very successful model eventually running her own model agency. She was one of these ubiquitous, ubiquitous supermodels. Imagine if she's married to the head of this massively successful agency, obviously she's going to be everywhere, right? And one little breadcrumb that I'd like to drop for the listener

is that Candy Jones was the cover girl on the advertisements for the whack, the Women's Army Corps. Nice. Which another resident in Jerry World, lady by the name of Sarah Jane Moore, would later go on to join. Perhaps, or perhaps not, having first seen the image of Candy Jones

calling young American women to service. Well, what does this all mean for Jerry Ford, Dick? What do we think? We've talked a great, great deal about the implications of the Jerry and Harry partnership slash roommateship. So why don't you take us back to that? Let's do some speculating. Yeah. Well, I think the first thing, in case it hasn't become obvious, Jerry was an investor in this modeling venture. He was a business partner. And the business was successful. And so Jerry is now tied in with the modeling scene

in New York City and essentially the country at the time. This is his ticket in, right? When we talk about the grind set mentality, this is his way up the ascension of the social ladder. He is mingling with high society at this point. And not through the skull and bones society and not through the elite Yalys that wouldn't really let him in the chambers of their most secret rooms. Or wouldn't they? Right. Or wouldn't they, right? Not directly. But maybe if he's there with a bunch of really good-looking ladies...

Who also are educated, who also are interesting, you know, both easy on the eyes and interesting to be around. for the student body of all-male Yale. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Remember, Yale is an all-male school. Jerry's got the inn on all these beautiful women. It's almost like a match made in heaven if you really sit down and think about it,

especially when you consider that these guys, otherwise they would not let someone like Jerry into their most secret settings. Right. Even though he got some cred from being the coach to a kingman Brewster, for example, right? He's going to see a coach, and that's the help, right? It does not appear necessarily. Well, this goes back to when he's in Michigan. The way Jerry gets into the fraternity is he's the guy at the frat party sort of helping around. And eventually the frat is like, hey, this Jerry fella, he's quite all right.

Let's have him join our fraternity. And then once he's in, he's the sober guy around while everybody else is drunkenly embarrassing themselves and getting into all kinds of hijinks, right? So he's he's also able to use that position to study the ways of society. I think that Gerald Ford was a phenomenal student of human behavior. Absolutely. And to the extent that it could become useful to keep secrets, right? To collect dirt on other people and to, I'm not saying, you know, blackmail people.

I don't know if you would have ever needed to blackmail people. But once you're in these networks, it's not as a simple case of if you don't do this, I will tell this. It's more like, hey, can I have this? and it's implicit that, you know, the person of whom you're asking the favor knows that you know their dirty laundry. Exactly. Right? Exactly.

What I was getting at is like this is sort of Jerry's M.O., right? So you have this series of events of him in Michigan and his fraternity, but then it happens again with him at Yale where he's sort of working as coach and then sort of becomes a student. And this is the way, I think, and now certainly with Kanova, this is the way Jerry sort of learned, like, hey, I might not get in

through the traditional standard way of joining a fraternity or secret society or whatever it may be to get into the room. In other words, by birth, right, in this case of skull and bones? Absolutely, right. There are other ways. He picks up pretty early that

these members of the higher society, they do have the same proclivities towards the pleasures of the world. And he exploits that. Or at least this is our theory. Yeah. So we're not exactly saying that Gerald Ford was pimping. Because again, the models, I don't think that it's fair to imply that they were prostitutes. But that being said, I have seen some articles insinuating that Harry Conover was involved in pimping. Indeed, he's quoted as saying, right in my own office, we have the very thing that every man looks for, works for, fights for, and dies for. He was even excommunicated from the Catholic Church. And there is, is reporting, like when I was looking at some of the Yale student newspapers and New Haven

newspapers from around the time of the America First Committee, right? That was being reported on. That was a known commodity. And in those same papers, if you look outside the article about America First, you'll find reference to orgiastic drunken revelry that had become kind of a problem among the Yale student body in the late 30s and the early 40s. And so the ability of one to bring beautiful girls to such a place, it certainly creates a tremendous amount of social capital, could put it that way. Right. There's some value to that. And to bring it back to the investment, either Jerry knew that this investment was going to be a wise one, or, you know, I think another possibility that you and I have discussed, Dick, is that perhaps some of that

cash he was fronting for others with whom he might have interacted in Yale. It's not really clear. Right. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you know, his rich kid. friends right right who may have not wanted their name on the business right jerry fords i mean it's it's all documented that he was a partner even even though the exact amount of his investment is in controversy it is well known that he's a partner in the business so in that respect it's not uncommon for extremely wealthy people to want to use a middleman to front their in investments in more unseemly or risky ventures. And so that's another possibility.

And all of this dear listener is informed by the literature and the sources we've consulted, but is not stated with absolute certainty. And we'll leave the listener as well to make up your own mind about what you think about this whole arrangement. but recall that among the potential money guys, we are talking about some of the most spooked up sorts of guys in the history of this country, right? And we know that the second wife of Harry Conover was recruited into the CIA.

Now, to be clear, the timeline of Candy Jones recruitment, actually post-dates her divorce from Conover. So I originally was wondering if it was under the egos of her marriage to Conover that Candy got involved in intelligence, but that does not appear to be the case. It appears that there may have been some initial conversations, who knows, but as far as the meeting that she credits as her initial recruitment, that was after they had had a very bad divorce, and in fact, one of the reasons for their divorce was entirely incapable of sexual chemistry. Now, they had children together, but according to

Candy, Harry came out to her as bisexual, and he would never be intimate with her unless he was totally fucked up, like drunk off his ass. And he would insult her. appearance. He would specifically tell her that he hated her breasts, that he was disgusted by female breasts. And that bisexual label, I tend to think it's perhaps a 1930s way of saying gay. Right. Which again, were they roommates, Jerry and Harry? And if so, we'll let the listener or think about that as well. Again, we're not making any claims here, but all of this just bears consideration.

Right. And is certainly, I think, interesting material to chew on. To close out the Conover saga, Harry's drinking really took the better of him, and he lost control of his life and his company. Candy took over the business and divorced Harry, and he died at the young age of 53 years old in the mid-60s. So while he was an abusive guy,

he may have been a procurer of women to the rich and powerful, it is unfortunately unclear whether he himself had any involvement with the CIA or in supplying models as spies. But we do know that the intelligence agencies have used models you know model is somebody that takes orders very well right and they've been a source of the CIA's assets you know it's not just there's some truth to not to come back to Zoolander but yes absolutely there's some truth to it so why male models think about it derrick male models were genetically constructed to become assassins they're in peak physical condition

They can gain entry to the most secure places in the world. The most important of all, models don't think for themselves. They do as they're told. That is not true. Yes, it is, Derek. Okay. Absolutely. And the circles that Harry Conover was moving in, regardless of whether he had any role in Candy's recruitment,

Harry Conover was involved with a lot of these overlapping circles between high society, the art world, right, the modeling world, the literary world. So these are areas of society that opened up to Jerry, thanks to his eagle scout instincts and putting that moist digit to the wind, right? Putting the finger in the wind and figuring out a way into the room. That's right. our man Jerry. Now, we're going to bid you farewell here, listener. Do you have anything else on this, Dick? No, just to say, join us next time on Fourth Reich Archaeology, where we dig into Jerry's

proclivity towards the intelligence community, and we find that Jerry actually does have this will to join intelligence, and he enlists in the Navy and goes off to war. again. I'm Dick. Don't know where. And I'm Don't know where. Saying farewell. But I know we'll meet again some sunny day.

And please do we keep on digging. Keep smiling through just like you always do. blue skies drive the dark clouds far away. So will you please say hello to the folks that I know tell them I won't belong. They'll be happy to know that as you saw me go. I was singing this song. We'll meet again. Don't know where.

Don't know where. But I know we'll meet again some sunny there. We'll meet again. Don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll be again some signing day.