Fourth Reich Archaeology - Jerryworld 6: Carousel

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Here we go! In our last episode, Jerry bought the ticket to Congress, and in this episode, he takes the ride. Already aboard the ride and two years deep into their own nascent political careers were fellow Navy combat vets Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, whom we cover in this episode.This week, we pick things up with Jerry during the first term of his Congressional career. He's the classic outsider candidate turned people's Congressman. You know Jerry is on that grindset, and once he is in office he works round the clock for the people. His constituent services are top-notch. He's chasing down social security checks. He's finding jobs at the pentagon for recent college grads. The people of Grand Rapids, and everywhere else, love him.  And, we call this episode "Carousel" because the people, events, and themes that come up in JW6 will come up again and again in significant ways. In other ways, "Carousel" is apt because here we see, yet again, that time is a flat circle. For example, in this episode, Jerry says goodbye to his mentor, Senator Vandenberg, who now views Jerry as the man who will be his legacy—the new man of the people for Michigan. With Vandenberg's death, the student becomes the master.   We don't mean to get too folksy about it, after all, Jerry is not just a folk hero congressman. He is cutting his teeth as an insider, too.  For starters, Jerry had no personal reason to campaign in the 1950 election cycle, as he was hot stuff and the shoo-in incumbent. There were even murmurs that Jerry would be the obvious choice for Senate in 1952. And so he didn't have to put any effort into campaigning to keep his seat. So, he campaigned for his political allies. And in the process, caught the eyes and ears of very important people. And then, of course, we dive into what we call our "bizarre love triangle." The budding friendship of Jerry Ford, Jack Kennedy, and Dick Nixon during their early years in Congress. Well, Jack was more of a frenemy to Jerry. The real bromance was between Jerry and Dick. A friendship that would bear fruit for both Nixon and Ford in more ways than either could ever imagine and which would eventually see them both embroiled in the assassination and cover-up of their one-time friend, Jack. A man they got to know as a shy but confident playboy bachelor, complaining to them in his Boston-Brahmin drawl about how boring it was to be a lowly Congressman... We also take a brief contextual detour into the sociopolitical scene at large during the late 40s and early 50s. The battle between communism and capitalism was under way, fueling (and providing propagandistic moral cover for) the rise of American imperialism worldwide. The national security state had just oozed onto the scene. On the domestic front, politicians were building their careers and their political platforms around the "Red Menace." Dick Nixon was just one such politician. Hand-selected by the likes of Nazi-funder and dynastic patriarch Prescott Bush, and ideologically aligned with … well, another dynastic patriarch, and ... er Jack's dad, Joe Kennedy.We hope you enjoy this week's episode. And if you do, please consider sponsoring our cause on Patreon.

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. where you were 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 a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the 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 Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA. No, he has a mile.

He knows so long as to deny freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. insecure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent?

This is Foyt, I am. This is a model. And I'm Dick, Fort Reich is coming. Bigth and Fourth Reich, Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm done. Welcome back to our returning listeners.

And if this is your first time tuning in, please stop now and go to our first episode. Jerry World is a long arc, and we really think you'd enjoy it best if you start from the beginning. We're very appreciative to all of the listeners out there who've reached out to us and welcome any listeners to do so if you haven't yet. We are at Fourth Reichpod at gmail.com, and we're also on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reichpod. Folks, we want to take a moment for a shameless plug for our Patreon. We are actively seeking recruits and endorsements and patronage. Please, if you believe in us, send us some money. And if our listeners have not already heard, Dick and I did our first podcast guest appearance of our entire lives recently with a friend of the show, Isaac, Eager, on his podcast, Coexist, Inc.

So check him out. Check out the work that he does. He's interviewing a lot of great guests and bringing to light a lot of contemporary issues, and among those issues is the one that we talked about, namely how to hone your conspiracy literacy and tune up that bullshit detector, because if you're listening to this podcast, chances are you already sort through a good deal of misinformation, disinformation, modification, modified limited hangouts, shick coats, and the

whole nine yards out there in the media sphere. Yeah, and not to always bring it back to Jerry, but all week I've sort of been thinking about how Jerry's also like the original target of shit coating. Being casted away as like this bumbling

buffoon relegated to the footnote of history in reality. There's so much more to him. Yes. So last week, in fact, the last couple of weeks, we released a two-part episode under the title, Love Slash Machine. Now, of course, the love component of that episode title dealt with the love of Jerry Ford's life, Betty Blumer Ford. We discussed Betty a great length in part one of that episode, and won't re-recap it here.

But the machine portion of the equation really involved Jerry's entree into the political machine. Now, we'd been building up to that moment with his formation at Yale Law School, with his service in the Navy during World War II. But last week, we finally followed Jerry into politics officially when he beat the longtime incumbent Barney Junkman or Yankman for the Michigan 5th Congressional District seat in the House of Representatives. Now, taking up, Yonkman meant taking on the Frank McKay political machine as well. And Jerry was able to do so through a real dedication to that grind set and to that ground game. And we discussed how not only did he rely on his own efforts at politicking, but he also counted on the unworked.

wavering support of two important men in his life whom Jerry was able to count among these various mentor figures, right, Dick? So one of those was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, and we took a deep dive into him. And there was another as well, and I'll pass it over to you, Dick, to pick it up from there. Right. The other was Julius Amberg, a partner at the Butterfield Keeney and Anberg firm, where Jerry was working as an associate. Jerry was sort of living the yuppie life in Grand Rapids in the late 1940s, and Amberg took him under his wing. Amberg would show him around town, take him to those benefits, those galas, those rooms that were hard to get into. He sharpened Jerry's appetite for power. That's right. We dug deep into

Amberg's background, revealing that he was the sion of the first recorded Jewish family to have settled the Grand Rapids area. His grandfather even once held the congressional seat that Gerald Ford occupied. And not only were individuals like Vandenberg and Amberg, instrument in the launch of Gerald Ford's political career. Institutions played a substantial role as well, and the role of some of these institutions became solidified shortly after Jerry was sworn into the Congress when he was inducted into the Free Masonic Order.

This week's episode is called carousel. And we're calling it that because it represents the moment Jerry got on the ride. This week we'll get an introduction of a cast of characters that will come back round and round again. And now we're at the big show. We introduce you to our heavy hitters. JFK, Nixon, Truman, Eisenhower. These are names that are tied to the most significant moments in post-war American history, and three major touchpoints of Jerry's life, the Warren Commission, Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal. We'll start catching up with Jerry in the early 1950s, late 1940s, at which time he is a freshman member of the Congress. And once again,

people are automatically drawn to Jerry's rising star. Now Grand Rapids is in the rear view mirror. And while Jerry certainly has an operation in Grand Rapids and never leaves it fully behind, once he's got his foot in the door, his whole body through the door of the Capitol, Jerry is looking firmly up to bigger and better things than whatever he could have gotten

from just being a local representative. So he's hitting the national campaign circuit, right? He really doesn't need to campaign to keep his seat in Grand Rapids in that very firmly Republican district. And so he's mixing it up with the rest of the Republicans in the House. He sets his sights on what he says was his ultimate goal to become speaker of the House. and he's quickly, quickly on track to become a Washington insider. And we couldn't talk about the closing years of the 1940s and the early years of the 1950s

without identifying the rumblings of the new big, bad villain in the global theater. This time it was the Red Menace. You had communist China, you had proxy wars in Korea. You have the Soviets. You have Vietnam. That's right. And all those wars going on overseas in the early 1950s and even in the late 1940s are brought home in the form of the red scare and the real hardcore turn in American domestic politics on both sides. of the aisle, which would see any ideology that could even remotely be perceived as sympathetic

to communism being purged. And that's the milieu in which Jerry Ford bursts on to the national political stage. Right. He's seeing his colleagues essentially making a name for themselves, establishing a career out of identifying, persecuting, investigating people for being communists and calling them out, right? You have Nixon's prize game, Alger Hiss. So it was happening in real time in Jerry's world. And Jerry is watching all of this, digesting it, student of human behavior that he has always been. and modeling his own political identity,

which heretofore had really been much more open around the turn to the extreme right. And we'll leave you on the verge of Jerry inheriting the most important role of his early political life. So without further ado, let's get digging. Okay, so picking up like a ducing up like a ducing up with the throids in the night. Okay, so picking up with the Fords in Washington, D.C. Jerry and Betty are living in their apartment on 2,400 Q Street.

It's a large brick complex at the edge of Georgetown. They didn't stay for an excessive amount of time in Georgetown, but they were there right at the beginning, and it's funny to think. So they're at 2,400 Q Street, and just three blocks away was, Alan Dulles's house where these types of meetings at the highest levels of the CIA were taking place. And within, let's say, a one, one and a half mile radius walking distance around Dulles's Q Street Manor were the homes of the other members of this Georgetown set, which we discussed in my interview with Matt Farwell, right? So you've got Frank Wisner, Joe Alsup, Phil and

Catherine Graham, the publishers of the Washington Post were right around there. And there's no evidence that Jerry and Betty were mixing it up with the Georgetown set. But it is interesting to consider that geographically they had this proximity at the same time that Jerry was aspiring to become a part of that elite. And it was kind of one of these so close and still so far types of arrangements that it, in flights of the imagination, I find myself wondering, you know, whether on any of those walks around Georgetown, Jerry would have ever bumped into any of these other snobbier, more elitist, more esoterically involved folks. Yeah, like maybe held the door opened for them.

or ask them for the time or something, right? And it's about a three-mile drive to Capitol Hill. Jerry takes it by foot twice a week. He's also hitting the gym regularly at the house. Got to maintain that college bod. Especially if, like, Jerry, your reputation as an athlete precedes you to the Congress. So yeah, Betty and Jerry were new to town. They didn't really have a big network. I don't want to call them Roobes, but, you know, they're from Grand Rapids. This is their first real entry into like the prudish political environment of Washington, D.C. So they've got their work cut out for them. Yeah, I think I think Richard Norton Smith mentioned that a lot of the other tenants in that apartment complex were,

like functionaries at the Pentagon. So that's kind of where they're falling on the hierarchy. Yeah, exactly. And in those early days, you know, it's almost like no sooner do they get there that they get word that Betty's mom is sick. She suffered a stroke and, you know, they have to return to Grand Rapids. Unfortunately, Hortons passes away. But then, you know, there's no time to grieve, really.

They're just basically right back to D.C., right back to the grind set. Ford developed quite the reputation for the way that he ran his office. His office was number three, two, one, and he ran a tight ship. He was there early. He was tried to be in by 8 a.m., and he was out late. He was usually there on the weekends, too. And Betty was with him. she would just show up sometimes would help with like file keeping or clerical work

sometimes she'd just be hanging out but she wasn't ever on the payroll right jerry i think was always very he was very clear about that he was against this idea of nepotism well actually funnily dick i just happened to reread this passage earlier today jerry at one point in time asked his chief of staff if he could put Betty on the payroll but it was actually not Jerry but it was

what was it Milanosky was that the guy's name? Yeah Milanosky is that the way it goes yeah yeah it was Milanosky that was like no Jerry we better keep on the up and up and don't put Betty on the payroll you know

you don't want to have to answer questions about that later on and that was That was prescient on Milanooski's part. Yeah, my mistake. I guess, I mean, well, ultimately, she wasn't on the payroll. That's right. But maybe she should have been, honestly. Right.

Because when she wasn't doing the file work, she was out there moving and shaking. So Jerry had an excellent constituent services game. Totally a man of the people. He would respond to letters the day he got them. He would aspire to sign. And he did sign every letter that he responded to. In his office, he had this photo op set up. He had like a Polaroid camera ready to go for any of his constituents that would visit.

They could take a photo with him and they would inevitably go home with some kind of jerry merch, whether it's bumper stickers or pins or the he would give the ladies the Republican congressional cookbook. Make about what you will. Really putting Barney Yonkman to shame. yeah he would like take them to lunch if he was able to he would take them to lunch in the congressional restaurant for members of the house or they would get if jerry was not able to the visitors would get maybe a tour by jerry jerry's wife betty ford and then it was weird the smith book mentioned this other thing that visitors were welcome to do was take a tour of the fbi but you know in those early years and i'm not sure how long he held this record, but he had a 98.4% attendance record. He was basically the most dependable congressman that you could think of during that 1948 to 1950 term. Right. It's consistent with what he stated was his goal at that time, which was to become Speaker of the House. So he's like, you know,

think about the sports metaphor, right? He is just maxing out his stats in order to get that favorable trade up, right, to get that next rung on the ladder. He wants to build his CV. Right. He's hitting all the reps, right? Like missing social security checks, got you. You know, uh, you need an SBA loan. Got you. You know, like, oh, your son graduated Gallaudet University needs the job, got you. Anything for the people of Grand Rapids, you know? Yeah, and it also involved ingratiating himself with the higher-ups, not only in the Republican Party, but in the Democrat Party as well. Not to overstate it, as is all too common, to refer back to a golden era of, you know, good, politics of classic functional democracy as compared with what we have now, I don't mean to

romanticize, but it is simply true that there was a great deal more cooperation in the legislature for better or for worse, right? The same sort of money to interest were still operating behind the scenes, absolutely. But Jerry Ford, for example, was a huge admirer of the sitting president, Harry S. Truman. You know, Harry S. Truman, as we mentioned last week, brought with him that 33rd degree Masonic mastery. And he was also kind of a right-wing Democrat, at least compared to FDR in his economic policies and in his foreign policies, obviously taking the fight to communism in the Korean War. And so Jerry was absolutely fond of Truman. She's not shy about it. He sidled up to Truman and two top-ranking Democrats and at the same time did the same for the Republican caucus.

Yeah. I mean, it would be hard for him to take a position against Truman, I think, at that point, based on where he had laid the rest of his chips. He's also like lieutenant commander in the Navy at a time of Truman was the commander-in-chief, right? So there is this reverence, I think, coming out of the war. And Nixon, who we'll talk more about later, also had a pretty strong affinity for Harry S. Truman. He was a very good politician. He knew that the Republicans had an overwhelming majority in the House and in the Senate. He needed Republican votes. At this particular point, however, having read about him as being somewhat uneducated, rather crude, and rather limited, I was impressed with the fact that he had a sense of history. He spoke not in a dramatic way, but almost in a matter-of-fact way,

that the most difficult decision he'd ever made was to drop the atomic bomb. dropped the atomic bomb, a decision which I think, incidentally, was his greatest decision, the most courageous one, and was totally right. But you're also seeing a tectonic shift within the Republican Party. And I think a lot of the across-the-isle alliances that were made were seeing are coming out of necessity, right? You have the Southern Democrats sort of working closer with the more conservative Republicans. Yeah, that's a great point.

Like, for example, the Speaker of the House, I think at this point, was Sam Rayburn from Texas. I think he still, to this day, holds the record for the longest time as Speaker of the House. He was 17 years as Speaker. Not all consecutive, but it's not at all surprising that it was a Dixie Krat, right? A guy who held both. these sort of populist economic politics, a aggressive sort of imperialist foreign policy, and racist beliefs on civil rights and things like segregation. Right. Although not the most extreme, to be fair to Rayburn, right? He's not,

he's not Eastland. He's not Strom Thurmond. But you could guess. what his sort of personal outlook was. Nevertheless, he's got a big house office building named after him to this day. And these are characters that I don't think figure into the American political imagination if you're not like really following the inside baseball at all. But certainly for Jerry Ford, like these were the people who you had to get on their good side or you'd fall right through the cracks. Right. And there were some that Jerry and others, as we'll see in this episode, targeted, right? There was John Rankin of Mississippi, who was in the Republican Party, but nonetheless notorious bigot that drew the ire of Jerry Ford

and others. It's interesting, the Smith book, so it sort of seems like it's looking back in almost like a Monday morning quarterback trying to find the plays. The Smith book identifies that, like, Jerry was very much a civil rights warrior in that first term and supported legislation for fair employment practices and supported prohibiting segregation in veterans' hospitals. The one that really caught my eye was that in that first term, Jerry introduced legislation to increase Hoover's salary. The other one that I really liked was he spent that first term urging

stiffer penalties for deadbeat dads who cross-state lines to avoid child support. Sound familiar? And this one is good because it comes back up when he's president and it's like it's like a cause of his um and i mean i love that that's classic jerry short title the fuck you dad act yeah yeah the hoover salary thing is incredible i mean talk about knowing who to butter up especially because you have by all accounts jerry is like very much an austerity guy, right? And he's one of the things that he hates is overspending.

Yeah, although, like most people in both parties, especially Republicans who have espoused a similar political outlook to government spending, Jerry Ford also had a massive blind spot for, well, it's not a blind spot, right? it's conscious. It's conscious for military spending. It's it's austerity on everything but military spending. And that continues to this day. But even back then, Jerry was always promoting additional military spending. That's the trajectory of his international that we spent so much time talking about last week, it feeds into a lifelong belief in

loaded military budgets as a purported deterrent to the Soviet Union to communist China later on and never figures into the discourse around government waste or around spending beyond our means. Right. It's exempted. But I digress. So Jerry's on the up and up. He is moving and shaking, just like you know our man is moving and shaking in Washington, D.C. he is well aware that many of his voters, many of his constituents do not come to Washington, D.C.

So what does he do? He sets up the Ford Caravan and literally drives around town in Grand Rapids just so that he can listen to his constituents. If they've got a gripe, They can raise it with him. If they've got a request, they can ask him for something. He's truly a man of the people.

La la la la la la. La. Yeah, the caravan has all my friends. Yeah, they'll stay with me until the end. his his way down we're old tell me everything I need to know

La la la His mentor Senator Vandenberg Is now much older I think he's still a senator But he's suffering from cancer And has pretty much been Basically living in his

Grand Rapids home, he is also, like, maybe addicted to morphine at this time because his doctors were, like, feeding him morphine. Cool. But nonetheless, Jerry is one of the few people that Vandenberg is seeing in private, and Vanderberg seems comfortable sort of bearing all to Jerry. He is. I'll just clarify the factual point. He does remain in his Senate seat until his death in 19.

So he's, you know, at this point, he's in his last term. Like you said, he's at the end of his life. He never, he never leaves his Senate seat. And even, I mean, in consideration with this discussion about his late in life, almost deathbed conversations with Jerry Ford, Jerry Ford is on deck, so to speak, as a potential successor for Vandenberg in the Senate, which would be the next step, right? And we'll get into this in a minute with, you know,

what some of his other contemporaries in the House, how they approach the House as a political stepping stone. But notably, even though Jerry does have this opportunity to be sort of Vandenberg's hand-picked successor, he declines to step in to that role and to seek a spot in the Senate. Yeah. I'm not like particularly a Star Wars head or anything, but it's sort of like that scene. I think it's an empire where Luke Skywalker, or it's in R. Return of the Jedi. That's how big of a Star Wars fan I am.

Soon will I rest? Yes. Forever sleep. Where Luke Skywalker returns to Yoda, right? And Yoda's all sickly. And they're talking about the way of the Jedi. But I need your help. I've come back to complete the training. No more training do you require? Already know you. That would you need. Okay. But so basically what's happening is that Vandenberg is essentially looking at Jerry as like the person that is my political protege. And I got to think how awesome. Here's this guy that Vanderberg basically was mentoring his father. Like right? Like Vanderbue was talking about Jerry's senior about Jerry Jr's life and giving him. tips on, you know, which high school to go to and what's like the best route for him and all that stuff. Yeah, remember we mentioned in an earlier episode, Vandenberg had also, at Jerry Senior's

request, put in a good word for Jerry Jr. to the U.S. Navy way back in 1940. So he's like, it's not a coincidental or just like doing the bare minimum, a sort of constituent services thing. This a real relationship, sorry to interrupt. No, but that's exactly right. It's like, at this moment in Vanderberg's life, it's got to be very powerful for him on a personal level to see this all come to fruition. And it's got to be very powerful for Jerry, too. So this is like just another sort of stroke, layer in shade in Jerry's early years as a congressman is this passing on of the torch because shortly

you know it's no surprise Vanderberg passes away but beware anger fear oppression the dark side are they

once you start down the dark path forever will it dominate your destiny but back to Jerry back to his early days, I'd like his first assignment as a junior congressman, which was on the committee on public works.

I was first put on the committee on public works, and I was the most junior member of the minority, and that's way down the line. And his whole life, Jerry was sort of like, he wasn't against doing the shit work, but he wasn't ever looking for the shit detail. But this is like pretty much as shit of a shit detail as you could get on Congress. Right? Like you're literally talking about like beach erosion. Yeah.

Maybe some opportunities for to get a little pork, right? To get a little pork for the district. Yeah, of course, right? Michigan's got plenty of beaches. Plenty of rivers. So yeah, I mean, yeah, like the public works is basically in charge. of making sure the country is slapped together correctly. One of the things that was coming up at the time

was the state of the White House. Fortunately, had jurisdiction over the White House, and President Truman moved out of the White House because it was falling down, literally falling down. The White House was essentially in disrepair. Jerry did a tour of the White House and saw these sagging walls. And there was a piano, apparently a piano that was threatened and crashed through the ceiling of the East Room.

And so our committee had to pass judgment on whether it should be torn down entirely and rebuilt, whether the walls on the outside should be retained and the inside gutted. Yeah, this White House renovations tip brought Jerry Ford into direct contact, with 33rd degree master Mason, President Truman. So Mr. Truman had our committee down to the White House in 1950, and we got a personal tour. What did you think of Truman? Well, he was one of my favorites, particularly in foreign policy.

I admired his strong action in meeting the communist aggression in South Korea. I favored his decision to proceed with the nuclear bomb program. I applauded his action to end the war in the Pacific with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and I strongly supported his Marshall Plan because it was important

that we move ahead to rebuild Western Europe and not make the same mistake we did after World War I. And you got to wonder whether it might have put that twinkle in Jerry's eye for presidential aspirations. Just do a quick shout out to Betty, who was also in D.C. at the time and stayed with Jerry and was doing the politicking on a whole another level. She was engaging with contemporaries like Pat Nixon, Lady Bird Johnson, Muriel Humphrey. She was having tea at the Blair House, which was, you know, the temporary home for the president and first lady, best Truman.

So she was out there hustling, grinding just as much. much as Jerry. Putting all of that cultural knowledge that she had obtained in her studies with Martha Graham, right, all that sophistication that a lot of these other political wives, you know, they might not even, I'm sure they looked up to Betty in that respect. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, she was, I am going to just go on a limb and say, Betty, was probably the life of the party. People found her to be interesting, no doubt. And I don't want to, so we've been going on and on about Jerry not to make it seem like super hokey that it was like his first term and he was really going for the people and, you know, he was an idealist and all of that stuff. He was very much a political operator, I think, from the get-go. And one of the points I'm not sure that many listeners know is that his neighbor in Congress for his office neighbor was none other than John F. Kennedy. By pure happenstance, Hugh, I got to know Jack Kennedy very well.

So when I was assigned in office, I was over in what was then called the old house office building. by luck my office was right across the corridor from jack kennedy's and right next to lloyd benson's so very often for the next four years i would walk back and forth to the house chamber when a vote came up with jack kennedy we'd walk into the house chamber and he'd go on the democratic side and i'd walk on the republican side So he, and actually, JFK spent a lot of time in Office 321, usually to gossip, right? And so Jerry cultivated this friendship and cultivated colleagues that you wouldn't think of. He would otherwise keep around. Right. And the Massachusetts delegation was pretty important. It always has had, given, you know, the role of Massachusetts in the founding myth and the Plymouth Colony and the Pilgrims and all that bullshit, a outsized role in American culture.

And Massachusetts politically has therefore exerted a disproportionate influence over America. politics on the whole. So it would not have been lost on Jerry Ford that, especially coming from a real political family, right, that JFK was somebody to know. He was charismatic. He was young. He was rhetorically gifted even in his house days. And, you know, he was, he was riding that carousel, but it was always pretty clear that JFK, at least as far as the carousel was limited to the house of representatives, that he wasn't going to be riding that carousel for very long, that he wanted to get on a bigger roller coaster, so to speak. I think it's going to carousel, trying to catch up to you.

Riding along on a carousel, will I catch up to you? I think it's called the moon shot, is the carnival roller coaster I'm thinking of. That's right. That's right. And JFK. You know, even in that first term, he had two years on Jerry. JFK, like the next fella that we're going to talk about, old Dick Nixon, was initially elected in 1946, and were part of the first tranche of veterans of World War.

to be elected into the U.S. Congress. When you got to Washington, one of the other members of the freshman class elected in 1946 was John Kennedy of Massachusetts. Did you have any dealings or contact with him as fellow freshmen? A substantial number, considering the fact that he was a Democrat and I was Republican.

He was very intelligent. He was very personal. However, I sensed that he was very shy, frankly as I was. I rather thought that we were alike in that respect. We were very different in many ways. But he had a very great sense of privacy. I think that's one of the reasons perhaps we hit it off by him. About foreign policy where Kennedy and I saw the world pretty much alike,

he was anti-communist, I was anti-communist. He was for foreign aid under proper circumstances I was. for reciprocal trade in our ways. We had a lot of things in time. And that was a pretty big deal, right? Obviously, you could imagine that combat vet status conferred a great deal of cachet onto somebody running for. for office. And especially in Kennedy's case, you know, like Jerry Ford, he had served in the Navy.

Like Jerry Ford, he was in the Pacific Theater. And even beyond Jerry Ford, Kennedy had his big battle stars from, you know, saving his shipmates' lives after. after an attack, and, you know, the story is Kennedy lore, right? But not only was there that Kennedy lore, there was also the lore around Joe Kennedy, JFK's dad. This is the first time I met Joe Kennedy, and he said, I just want you to know how much I admire you for what you've done in his case and in this anti-communist activity of yours.

he said if jack doesn't get it i'll be for you joe kennedy of course had been the u.s ambassador to great britain in the lead-up to world war two in the roosevelt administration and here's where i think this episode has its fourth some of its fourth rike hallmarks right so so joe kennedy was very close with the british banking elite when he was over there in london serving as the u.s ambassador and the British banking elite at that time was the same circle that Montague Norman was running in, a fellow who we mentioned in our very first episode, who was head of the Bank of England and was besties with the head of the Reichs Bank, Yalmar Schacht. And as a result of his social circles and their very strong political affinity for the anti-communist National Socialist Party coming into power in Germany, it became so extreme that Joe Kennedy was eventually withdrawn as ambassador by FD.

are. He got on the bad side of Winston Churchill, right? In the in the Churchill-Neville-Chamberland divide, Joe Kennedy was definitely well on the Chamberlain side. And I think people forget about this as the Kennedy family myth is rewritten to lionize every member of the entire dynasty. Joe Kennedy, had Nazi sympathies. And Joe Kennedy really, when you think about JFK in the 1940s as a fresh-faced freshman or, you know, sophomore here, a member of the House of Representatives, he didn't really have a political identity distinct from his dad. I saw Joe Kennedy later, incidentally, that same year.

I was on my way to California. by plane. And he was on the same plane with a beautiful girl. Oh, she was a raving beauty. And so I saw him and I shook hands and he introduced her to me as his niece. I don't know whether he had a niece out there or not, but she was a beauty. And I think it's interesting to consider that when you ponder this friendship that Jerry Ford had with JFK. Right. And like I had mentioned earlier, you know, the two of them had very different outlook on what it meant to be a member of the House of Representatives. So whereas Jerry Ford wanted to parlay his election to the House into an eventual role as speaker, J.F.K. just saw the House as a stepping stone.

How did he describe it again, Dick? Yeah. I mean, as you're talking, I'm just thinking, like, you know, Jerry Ford is like your Leslie Knope character. who's just eager for the administrative process. And JFK is going to be like your Job Bluth or, you know, like Walt Goggins' character in vice principals. But I like that point where, you know, it's like he's basically just like a rich kid that is in his job that his dad made him do, right? and he's disaffected and so yeah it's kind of no wonder and to bring it to the personal level in that respect it's no wonder that it would have been more fun for him to cross the hall and go and kick it with the football star exactly exactly and he like comes and commiserates with jerry

like in one of the exchanges that is in the smith book right where he comes to jerry and he's basically like we're just worms here that's so good right like you can't get anywhere unless you've been here forever so let's just kick it and at the time jfk is a bachelor right don't forget that um he comes in as this young bachelor He was probably actually getting laid less than he would later be after his nuptials. Yeah, but I mean, all's that to say, like, it's remarkable. Jerry is neighbors, essentially, with JFK,

who, of course, posthumously becomes such a big part of Jerry's life. But our friendship became, I would say, very warm and very enduring. And that friendship made it very difficult when I was subsequently made a member of the Warren Commission and had to analyze the facts about his assassination in 1970. Tell me a little bit about that. Right. I mean, the listener probably knows this by now.

We've mentioned it several times throughout the series, and it will be the focus for a kind of a series within a series coming up here on Fourth Reich archaeology. But Jerry Ford will later be involved in the cover-up of the assassination of his friend Jack. right so when we think forward in time to jerry's psychology in his role on the warren commission investigating kennedy's assassination it will never be far from his memory the time that the two of them spent together in the 1949 to 1951 period during which they were office neighbors, right? Right. And not to do too much of a spoiler alert, but listener, Jerry Ford becomes president because his other friend, Dick Nixon, keeps asking questions about what? happened to Jack.

It was a dark day in Dallas, November 63. A day that would live on in infamy. President Kennedy was a right line. Good day to be living and a good day to die. He led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb. You see, wait a minute, boys. men of boys you know who i am of course we do we know who you are then they blew off his head while he was still on the car so it's really like a bizarre love triangle that starts budding up right here

a hundred percent a hundred percent and i actually think when you and i you and i to just zoom out to the meta-jerry world for a second, right? When you and I were talking about all these issues in the pre-podcast days, this stood out as something that is so strange and so under-explored in all of the explorations, even those from a critical perspective,

even those from annoyed critical perspective on the 20th century, that you have these three fellas, young, junior congressmen, that come together and later interact in various ways and bump into one another and clash and one of them gets killed. I mean, it's very cinematic. Something straight out of a novel, right? Like a Russian novel.

And it's something that we hope you, listener, will be as enthusiastic about as we are. Nixon, Nixon. Should we get into Dick, Dick? I'm for Nixon. I'm for Nixon, too. Absolutely. Let's get into Dick

Richard Nixon is for you Purrits to make decisions Cool and prices too Experience Nixon is for you Nixon Nixon Nixon Nixon Nixon

I'm for Nixon So this is actually another little Just basically what you were just talking about Like this is another little nugget that really blew me away When I found out that

Dick Nixon was actually Jerry's boy from day one. Mm-hmm. So by the time Jerry lands on the scene in Congress, Nixon is now a sophomore congressman, and he's making a name for himself for the investigation into Alger Hiss. So remember that red scare, right?

Right. I think that's where I'm going with it. It sounded like maybe you want to pick it up. No, I was just going to contextualize for the listener, right? I think there's all these different titles that get thrown around about this period of time that's known as the Red Scare. Well, one of the most important institutions involved in perpetuating and perpetrating the Red Scare was the House Un-American Activities Committee, right? So the first word in it being House, it consists of members of the House of Representatives. This is before the Senate committee that was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy,

and it really sets the stage for the McCarthyite sort of leveling up. of the Red Scare. But on this ground floor, so to speak, you have another personality that's kind of coming into the spotlight as the Grand Inquisitor of Hewack. And that Grand Inquisitor is our boy, Dick Nixon. Let's do a little bit about Dick Nixon

from Whittier, California. I love Nixon as a character because he's basically the bizarro Jerry Ford Not exactly like opposite But like antimatter, right? Yeah He was born in a strong Quaker family That stuck together

He doesn't have any stepdad Growing up where Jerry was like the cool kid That everybody wanted to be around Nixon was the loser that everyone hated. Jerry joins the football team becomes captain. Nixon joins the football team and everyone's like, what the fuck are you doing here? Why is that weirdo dweeb Nixon on the team? They were both born in 1913. Jerry, born in July, is a cancer. Nixon, born in January, is a Capricorn. For any of you, astrology heads,

they're essentially polar opposites. They both went to law school. Jerry, of course, went to Yale. Nixon couldn't cut it for the Ivy League and landed at Duke. Interestingly here, too, I'll say one other thing they had in common. They both had the opportunity to go for the Ivy's in undergrad, right? And they both turned it down, both for similar reasons, namely poverty. like i think nixon was accepted into harvard and he was even offered an academic scholarship

for his tuition to harvard but his family couldn't afford the room and board and he had to live at home and that's why he went to whittier college in undergrad and kind of similar to that sherry ford right stays in the state of michigan rather than taking a football scholarship at Harvard that he was offered for similar reasons and stays in Ann Arbor. Well, I was just going to say, you know, in short, everybody loved Jerry and Jerry knew it. Everyone hated Dick Nixon, and Dick knew it. So they hit it off, I think, pretty early on, right?

I think it's like one of the orientation things that they're doing for Congressman, and Dick Nixon's there since he's been there for a term already. And he just straight up introduces himself to Jerry and says, Dick Nixon. You know, one thing that they both had in common was they were on that grind set. They were trying to climb that ladder. They had different ways of doing it. Nixon from the get-go was on the payroll.

Everyone knew he was on the payroll. And he was a trickster. I mean, you know, tricky dick was his nickname. That's right. And another interesting distinction between them, right? We talked about how Jerry Ford had the wheels greased for his entry into politics by sort of local figures. Julius Amberg, Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican Homefront Organization, this kind of grassroots group of guys in Grand Rapids. Well, Dick Nixon, he didn't have a local entree supporting his run for office.

No. I'm here for a deal like any other kind of thing. You'll pretend we're walking home because your future's at stake. Dick Nixon was sitting there raising his hand and waiting for the powers that be. to call on him. And I think it bears taking a moment to discuss the circumstances under which Dick Nixon made his 1946 run for the Congress, because it intersects with yet another dynasty of the Fourth Reich. Namely, the Bush dynasty, right?

So in Whittier, California, this is like sort of Central Valley, like very agricultural place, pretty poor, kind of reflective of Nixon's own upbringing, right? the sitting member of Congress, who I think had been in for at least 10 years, a guy by the name of Jerry Voorhees, Democrat. And Jerry Vorhees was very concerned with taking on monopolistic corporate power, including those corporate powers that had profited from. collaboration with the Nazi regime. And so that put him directly at loggerheads with all these American businesses that we've talked about here on Fourth Reich archaeology that were

collaborating with the likes of IG Farben. So we're talking about the banking interests. We're talking about IBM. We're talking about the oil companies, right? And those interests begin to organize among themselves to oust Jerry Voorhees. And the author Russ Baker, in his real toome of a family biography on the Bush's, Family of Secrets, gets in to how in 1945 a group of financiers, led by or he does not assert with certainty that it was led by, but he provides evidence suggesting that this group was led by Prescott Bush. And Prescott Bush, having been directly responsible for and invested in financial entanglements with the Nazis,

is clearly a guy with a personal stake in, avoiding any congressional scrutiny. And so he kind of gets into this group of rich guys, right, your old smoke-filled room, and they start looking to recruit somebody. Another family that was very involved were the McCormick's who owned the Los Angeles Times. And before they had bought the Los Angeles Times, the McCormick's were an oil family. so once again we see corporate extractive industries purchasing their own propaganda apparatus and then purchasing their own politicians as well and that's where Dick Nixon enters the political stage this bitter young man

with a chip on his shoulder that could sink a small craft Right. Covered in the viscera of a corporate sludge. Exactly. Exactly. And this dynamic of Dick Nixon as frontman for capital will follow him throughout his entire career. But it's worth noting that at stage one, he is fronting essentially financial interests with, entanglements that go to the Third Reich directly. And in both of his campaigns, you mentioned the dirty tricks. Like, even in his campaign against Vorhees, he apparently had people from his campaign just making blind phone calls anonymously going through the phone book and Whittier and calling

people and saying, Jerry Vorhees is a secret communist and then hanging up. Yeah, exactly. the same thing against Helen Gahagan Douglas when he leveled up to the Senate in 1950 and for good measure threw in a little anti-Semitism and suggested that she was, you know, somehow in thrall to Jews as well as communists playing back up that old Judeo-Bulshevism myth that the Nazis were so fond of. So we're never too far from the Third Reich when we're talking about Dick Nixon. And from like an outside perspective, you got to stop and wonder like knowing Jerry,

this guy is like anathema to anything Jerry would stand for. But Dick, does Jerry treat him like an anathema? No, that's exactly what we're going to talk about next, right? Like he weirdly looks up to him, right? Mm-hmm. Like the opposite of an anathema. Maybe it's like game, recognized game, or, you know, maybe Jerry sees that Nixon is so ambitious that he will one day, no doubt, make it to the highest office in the land. And so he decides to cultivate that friendship early on.

one example of how you can sort of tell that Jerry strangely looked up to Nixon was this little happening in early 1950 I think it's like 1951 Vanneberg's still alive and he's organizing a talk in Grand Rapids for this Lincoln Day event ordinarily Vanneberg himself would give the talk but he's basically on death's door and he needs a national name. He turns to Jerry, and wouldn't you know it, that Jerry turns to his buddy Nixon, who just had become a senator and had established a national name for himself

because of the his hearings that he parlayed into a Senate seat, essentially. And so Jerry, he gets Nixon to come to Grand Rapids, Nixon gives the talk. They go out. They have a romp in good time. They don't want to end the nights. Jerry invites Dick back to his parents' house. I think at the time Dorothy was, they were in Florida or something.

But the reason I say this, I'm telling you this story is because Dorothy, ever the clout chaser, after Dick Nixon becomes vice president, above her guest bed, she has a plaque that says the vice president slept here. But bottom line, like, the reason Jerry had Nixon there in Grand Rapids to give that talk on the Lincoln Day event was because they were voiced. Back from the beginning their time in Congress, they essentially had what I would describe as a congressional fraternity. Yep. not a secret society, but an invite-only order of what they described as an old boys network for not-so-old boys. This is, of course, the Chowder and Marching Club, as Jerry would say, they never ate Chowder, and they never went marching.

But this club would eventually grow to nurture three U.S. presidents, five vice presidents. dozens of senators, governors, cabinet members, judges. So you could say that Nixon and Jerry were tight from the beginning. Yeah. The Chowder and Marching Club, I mean, it's very puzzling why they pick that name. Really can't decipher the meaning. Sound off in the comments, listeners, about what you think chowder and marching might signify. But what stands out to me is it really echoes.

today in these sort of religious groups right like there's you know listeners you might have heard of the family i think it was started by that guy dug co who's kind of like a cristo-fascist imperialist type guy who has even a house in dcccc where he posts up right-wing republican members of Congress, and they host the prayer breakfast. There's a book and a documentary about it by Jeff Charlotte. That's pretty good. Very creepy type of stuff. And I think about Chowder and Marching Club as kind of a Cold War predecessor of the family, right? It's Republican. It's somewhat insular, invite only, but not totally secretive, and openly engaging in this kind of what you might call conspiracy. I mean, they are, after all, colluding about politics.

Right. Operating behind closed doors. Yeah. Yeah. And so Dick and Jerry were doing that, you know, on the heels of World War II. This is the launch of the American century, right, of American unipolar hegemony that comes in the wake of World War II. You have two Navy combat vets who start this little club for other younger guys, and they both eventually will become president largely on, well, Jerry's never elected, but Nixon, at least, his political wagon is hitched up to the horse of extremist, anti-communist imperialism. And Jerry's riding shotgun. I'm round and round and round we spend to weave a wall to help us in it won't be long

it won't be long I and he were political opponents we were personal friends and I come here today with my wife to join with thousands of others and through the medium of television and newspapers and radio millions throughout the world to pay tribute to a gallant warrior. That's right, he's sitting shotgun,

but he never takes the wheel. So remember, Jerry is existing in Congress at a time where the whole country had an anti-communist sentiment. You had the liberal wing of Congress, and their viewpoint was more like painting the communist as someone who's disloyal and an infiltrator and someone who's maybe backwards and irrelevant, so we shouldn't really worry about that threat.

And then on the far right, on the other end of the spectrum, you had your Nixon's and your McCarthy's, who would resort to this ugly tactic of exposing and punishing communes. Ford, to his credit, never really took a vocal role, which he very well could have against communists in the same way that McCarthy or Nixon, for that matter, did. Right. In this regard, we could see him as maybe more of a keen political operator than he's given credit for.

Maybe he had that sort of that long view of how it would look for. for him to be essentially on these witch hunts. And they were. Don't forget that at this point, you had things like the Hollywood blacklist. Hundreds of artists had essentially been exed out of their careers. He had the Rosenberg trials, right? Right. So Ford, while he did make his stance on communism clear, right?

He did support legislation that would outlaw the Communist Party. He supported legislation that would authorize wiretaps. for criminal cases involving national security, but he never really took part in the grand inquisitions that were occurring at the time. Right, and it is interesting to kind of speculate about his motivations for keeping a more even keel. Perhaps it owes, in some respect, to Betty's influence.

Eddie, after all, was a outspoken woman on a range of political issues and would certainly, I think, throughout Jerry's career, exert a moderating influence on what might have been the further right-wing policies that he supported. it might have also had to do with the fact that he saw himself playing a behind-the-scenes role. Like you just mentioned, those pieces of legislation, in effect, were extremist, right? They were repressive in a major and a substantial way. But he's not the spokesman for those policies. You don't think of Jerry Ford's name when they come up. And whether by design or by happy coincidence, that would be valuable to him in the long term because of the way that McCarthy kind of discredits the overreach of the anti-communist

crusade in his crashing and burning with the Army McCarthy hearings just a few short years later in, you know, what is it, 53 when it all comes crashing down on him. So Jerry doesn't get any blowback from that crash of McCarthyism. And when the 70s come around, he's not remembered as a crusader or as a John Bircher or as an immoderate Republican. But behind the scenes, in addition to supporting all that legislation, remember, and we've already, Jay Edgar Hoover's name has come up a couple of times in this episode, you know, in the context of Jerry's congressional office taking grand repidians on tours of the FBI headquarters in terms of Jerry supporting legislation to increase

Jay Edgar Hoover's salary as FBI director, and that all can be traced back to Jerry's application. Remember, we talked about in episode four, part one of the war episode, where Jerry applied to be a special agent of the FBI. And so he does support all this stuff in the back room, right? Behind the closed doors, he's absolutely on board for the anti-communist trajectory of the American government. And I wanted to read this telegram that when Richard Nixon is taking heat during the 1952 presidential campaign, where he is selected as the vice presidential candidate, the fact that he is using funds from a sort of slush fund

that's seated by a consortium of wealthy businessmen. Jerry Ford is one of the guys that sends him a telegram of support, and it's quoted verbatim in Richard Nixon's memoir. which I just thought I'd read to the listeners, they may get a kick out of it. So Jerry wires Dick. Over radio and newspapers, I am in your corner 100%. Fight it to the finish just as you did the smears by the communists when you were proving the charges against Alger Hiss.

All Michigan representatives feel as I do. I will personally welcome you in Grand Rapids or in any other part of Michigan with my best personal regards. And so he's supportive. He's supportive without challenging Dick for the spotlight. And Jack Kennedy was also supportive of Dick Nixen, upon the occasion of Nixon's nomination to the VP slot, Kennedy wrote him,

Dear Dick, I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for the VP. I was always convinced that you would move quickly ahead to the top, but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were an ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength. Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you. Cordially, Jack Kennedy. And this seems like a good place as any to leave you this week, dear listener. As we head into the 1952 election in which Dwight Eisenhower takes on Adelaide Stevenson.

The Great Nerd of History. Join us again next week as we dive in to Jerry's. foray into the main stage, his political inheritance, you would say, as he becomes a key member of the House Appropriations Committee. That's right, listener. With the ascent of Eisenhower and Nixon into the highest offices in the land, with the Dulles brothers right in their inner circle and the American national security state just coming into its own, Jerry Ford will be one of the hand-picked select few to control the

purse strings. For now, I'm Don. And I'm Dick. saying farewell, and keep digging. Madman drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat in the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps is way into his hat. With a boulder on my shoulder feeling kind of older, I trip the merry ground with this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing the cliope he crashed to the ground some old hot hat shot was hit in for eyes spot snapping his fingers clapping his hands and some flashed by mascot was tied to a lover's night with a whatnot in her hand

and now young scott with a slingshot finally found a tender spot and froze his lover in the sand And some bloodshot Forget me not whispered Daddy's with an ear shot Save the ball shot Turn up the van And she was blinded by the light Oh cut loose

Like a deuce another runner in the night Blinded by the light She got down But she never got tight But she'll make it All right Thank you.