Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 4: John Sherman Cooper - A Kentucky Gentleman in King Kennedy’s Court

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Our long time listeners will know that we at Fourth Reich Archaeology are big fans of a love story. Whether it's a romance (like between Jerry and Betty Ford), or a bromance (like between Jerry and Richard Nixon), or a platonic love story about the paternal bond between mentor and mentee (like between LBJ and Dick Russell), we love it all. That’s why we can hardly contain ourselves this week, as we explore what may well be the most unexplored love story between two people who are eternally tethered by the events of November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy and John Sherman Cooper. And the best part is that this love story comes complete with a fall from grace and a grand betrayal. In this episode, we take you back to the night of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration ball. In the wee hours after the event, Kennedy heads over to Joe Alsop’s place and links up with his friend and beloved mentor, John Sherman Cooper. The two spend hours talking about the future and Kennedy’s vision for his presidency. Indeed, Cooper and Kennedy were long time friends and as close as any two politicians could be. They came up on the Georgetown scene around the same time, and were both seen as very eligible bachelors. They even went on double dates with the women who eventually became their wives. Kennedy, the young, charismatic president, admired Cooper, the elder statesman, for his integrity and his unwavering commitment to principles. We tell the inspiring come-up story of Cooper’s life from Somerset, Kentucky, to Georgetown, to India, and back to the upper echelon of the power elite in Washington. Yet he never gave up the Kentucky Gentleman sincerity that made him so trustworthy and beloved.The close bond between these two is perhaps the very reason why LBJ picked Cooper to be on the Warren Commission. Much like with Hale Boggs, LBJ likely saw Cooper as a threat and felt that he needed to bring Cooper in the fold in order to keep him quiet. We can only speculate on Cooper’s state of mind, but to us, what began as a sense of duty to the country soon became an unbearable tension between Cooper’s commitment to the truth and the political pressures that sought to suppress it. Cooper, despite his own reservations, reluctantly agreed to participate in the whitewashed version of events ultimately reduced to writing. It was a decision that we can't help but think would forever haunt him, as he knew he had allowed the forces of power to rewrite history at the expense of the man he once called a dear friend.Grab your tissue box. This one’s a tear jerker. Credit: the author who reported former Cooper aide Morris Wolff’s recounting of Cooper’s confidential Warren Commission critiques is Mark Shaw, and you can find more here: https://markshawbooks.com/assets/docs/New-Evidence-Proving-Warren-Commission-Corruption_Oct-26-2023-1.pdfHis full talk at the Commonwealth Club is here: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/video/mark-shaw-60th-anniversary-jfks-assassination-retrospective

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 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 on. 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 one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mouse.

He knows so long as to die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. insecure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is not going to see.

I am. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for for tuning in. with all of the feedback we've gotten. We'd like to remind you once again that we are always glad to hear from you via email at forthrightepod at gmail.com

or on Twitter and Instagram at forthrightpod. Do give us a shout. And if you're feeling generous, listen, we aspire to be completely user-funded. We'd like for this. operation to be 100% ad-free without any corporate interests. And to that end, if you like what we're doing here, you want to hear more, you want to make

sure that this little project survives for the long term, do you think about perhaps giving us a little money on Patreon. That's right. If you like what you hear on Fourth Reich Archaeology, just think that represents what Dick and I are able to squeeze in to the wee hours of the night and the early morn. This week we're coming back with another installment of our series within a series, the Warren Commission decided. and this week's episode will focus on a senator from Kentucky by the name of Sherman Cooper but before we talk about what this week's episode's about I don't know maybe Don you could give us a recap of where we are so far in this series about the great cover-up

sure thing so we started out the series really with the goal of bringing to the surface a lot of the aspects of the JFK assassination that maybe are less sensational and less well-trod. So from the jump, we started focusing on the assemblage of the Warren Commission, and we set our sights on this mythic idea that LBJ came up with the idea for the the Warren Commission and wanted to use the Warren Commission as an authentic, bona fide investigation into President Kennedy's assassination. Now, we've taken the position and supported it with a good deal of evidence that that is a bit of hogwash, as old Lyndon might call it. In fact, the idea for the

Commission was really pushed on an unenthusiastic LBJ by what we've referred to as a cabal of gentlemen with close ties to the CIA. And their goal in promoting the idea of a blue ribbon presidential commission was not so much solving the crime, but rather to calm the public, control the narrative, and provide a sense of closure that the preordained conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK was, in fact, a trustworthy frame to understand the situation that the country found itself in after November 22nd, 1963. And Dick, maybe you want to give a highlight reel of who's part of that cabal that we know of? Yeah, the listener will recall that the whole thing

that kicked this off was the series of phone calls that LBJ's office received from the Dean of Yale Law at the time, fellow by the name of Eugene Rostow. Now, Ross Dow was one of two brothers, his brother Walt, of course, and from Eugene's point of view, he prescribed the solution, sort of like your cleric, or I think Don, you mentioned maybe the Benny Jesuit, explaining that in a situation like this, when you have the bastard dead, what you got to do is put the together at Blue Ribbon Commission. In this situation, with the massive chills. On the other end of this is Joseph Alsop. Alsup was a columnist at the Washington Post.

And Alsup represents the fourth branch of the government, the media. The corporate media machine, to be exact. And from Alcip's point of view, what he does is he essentially is he essentially threatens LBJ and says, look, the paper is going to put out this column where we're going to say that the president should have a Blue Ribbon Commission, and there should be an investigation, and essentially strong arms LBJ. And friendly is going to come out tomorrow morning with a big thing.

When you turn internally into LBJ's own organization, you have Nick Kotsenbach, who was deputy AG at the time, much like Alice. Also, Katzenbach is a blue-blooded Yankee with roots dating back to the American Revolution. You have to believe that he also felt duty-bound to make sure that the narrative about what happened was controlled. That's right, and Katzenbach had, for our purposes, the good sense to commit to writing the goal of the whole affair right at the outset, right? on November 25, 1963, just a day after Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Katzenbach puts down this memo saying, essentially, that we need to convince the public that Oswald acted alone, and he insinuates in the same memo that perhaps there was a conspiracy,

either a communist conspiracy or a right-wing conspiracy, but that, exposing such a conspiracy at this fragile time for the nation would invite all sorts of instability. And so even if the output of this machinery that is at work is a cover-up of a murder-most-fowl, as Bob Dylan called it, at the time the way that Katzenbach is pitching it, and the way that LBJ in turn goes on to pitch it to the commissioners is something that anybody could get behind, right? Nobody wants a nuclear World War III. Nobody wants the government of the United States to fall to potentially nefarious elements out there at the ready who were able to pull off the hit of the century.

That's right. Nobody wanted it. And from the commissioners, at least for what it's worth, several of them as we saw last episode, didn't really have a choice to participate, right? They learned pretty much after the fact that they would be serving on the commission. Right. And we'll talk about the fellas that we covered

in the last episode in just a second. But before we do that, I wanted to point out one other member of this cabal, or as Eugene Rostow, put it, this party that was behind the promotion of the idea for a Warren commission. And that's Dean Acheson. We haven't talked too much about him yet, but he was Truman Secretary of State and continuously played a leading role behind the scenes of United States Cold War foreign policy, and his role here in the Warren Commission is of a piece with that legacy. Right. And in fact, he might have been involved in compiling the list of names that Lyndon Johnson

ultimately has in hand by November 29th when he starts his outreach. to the would-be commissioners. Right. And with the starting point, which is the ending point, which is the conclusion that they want to find, right, that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, pretty much everyone who is on there has some tie to either JFK or the deep state military. industrial complex, intelligence apparatus, or both. Last week, we covered three of the congressional commissioners, as well as the chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren.

We explained that Warren was chosen basically because the fact that he was the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court lent some gravitas to the commission, of course, Warren's name is what's on the Warren report and the commission. Yeah, and we talked also about how LBJ used his browbeating of Earl Warren as something of a bragging point to others that he told folks how he dressed Earl Warren down, he made him cry, he fat shamed him and said, you know you put on your uniform for world war one fat as you are right and you're going to serve your country again right that was the only guy that lbj bullied into joining the commission yeah turning to the actual members of the commission the commissioners the first one we should

talk about of course is dick russell lbj's man on the commission is your classic entrenched Dixiecrat, white race warrior, who opposed integration with every fiber of his being. He was selected to be on the Warren Commission because of his deep background in the military and the CIA through his congressional committee roles, but more importantly, he also served as somewhat of a mentor to LBJ earlier on. Of course, LBJ famously said, well, you know, I learned more from you than my own mama. So it's sort of LBJ's incentive here is to have someone on the inside to keep him abreast of what's going on. Yep. We then went over to the House of Representatives and first stopped by the second district of Louisiana, which is New Orleans, and covered Congressman Hale Boggs.

And while like Russell, a Democrat from the South, Hale Boggs was not a offensive pick by L.B.J., but instead a defensive. one, because Hale Boggs was very publicly talking about forming his own commission through congressional action. He was very much a fan of JFK, and after the assassination happened, first thing he publicly said was that this must have been the work of right-wing extremists. And to nip that in the bud, LVJ, decides to bring him in the fold. Last but not least, of course, is our boy, Jerry Ford from Michigan's fifth congressional district, a at the time Republican member of Congress. Now, we talked about how Jerry Ford's appointment was really like a Roershack because it meant different things to the different stakeholders involved in the decision to put him on the Warren Commission.

So we hinted at, and we'll continue to develop this over the course of the whole series, but we lean towards the idea that Jerry Ford's name came into the running and got on to LBJ's radar from the Dulles faction, right? from this Georgetown cabal that once the framework was decided as having representatives from both parties from both houses of Congress, the obvious choice for Republican member of the House would have been a Jerry Ford as a reliable figure that could be counted upon based on the Dulles Brothers' experience with Jerry Ford in the case of John Foster Dulles, their travels through Asia together back in 1953, and in the case of Allen Dulles, through their work together

on the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Intelligence. And in fact, LBJ specifically stated in his phone conversation with Jerry Ford on November 29th, that he was selected because LBJ needed a guy who knew the CIA. So that's sort of the ostensible reason why Ford gets on to the commission. LBJ also doesn't think highly of Ford's intellect and believes that he won't cause any problems because in LBJ's view, he's really too dumb to do anything about it. But we also know, and we discussed this, that Jerry was an FBI guy,

eager to please and serve the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. His first act as a member of Congress was to introduce legislation to raise Hoover's salary, and eventually, as will be the subject of a future episode, Jerry Ford serves as Hoover's agent on the Warren Commission. That's right. And turning to this week and really the next couple of weeks episodes and no shade to those that came before, certainly no shade to Jerry Ford.

But the next three commissioners were going to be discussing, each of them, they're going to get their own episode. Because each, in his own right, is emblematic of the Fourth Reich. It's rise from the ashes of World War II and its contrast with Hitler's third right. Next week, we'll scratch behind the well-known resume of Wall Street lawyer John J. McCloy and dive deep on the man himself

in what he tells us about the Fourth Reich. And of course, last but not least, we will get to perhaps the best-known commissioner, the notorious Alan Welsh Dulles. Now, today's episode will focus on the final congressional commissioner, the one we didn't get to the last time, and perhaps the least well-known member of the commission. That's Republican Senator from Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper. Superficially, you sort of see that he does have connections with the Georgetown set. It may seem like Sherman Cooper was a offensive pick, but after digging into it, it actually seems like he is also a defensive pick. Farewell to old Kentucky, the plains where I was born and great.

The place where he was born and brain. We'll get into the why behind that, but by way of preview, Cooper spent inauguration night, 1961, chatting with Kennedy, after Kennedy had just been inaugurated. I think they actually had that chat at Alsup's house, which is perhaps even more fitting. There was just a couple blocks away from Cooper's house. But without further ado, I think we should just pick up the shovels and get digging.

He has no friends to help me. Today establishing a presidential commission proposed seven distinguished Americans headed to the Chief Justice Supreme Court of the United States. This commission will be established before the end of the day by executive order. Its functions will be to receive and evaluate information obtained by all sources

and executive branch to satisfy itself and truth is known as far as we can know it and report its findings and conclusions to meet to the American people and to the world. I think that's fine. Now, I want you to go on that commission. What? Yes.

Well, if you want me to go on it, all good, of course. Thank you, my friend. Yes, sir. Bye. Don't say a word about it. No, sad thing. Bye. Bye.

in the state of Kentucky, what Lyndon Johnson liked to call a border state between the north and the south. And in fact, Cooper himself really embodied that sort of dichotomy. You'll probably not be surprised to hear that the Cooper family traced its roots back to westward settlers that came in the trail of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and all them, and they settled down in Somerset, Kentucky. Their roots in that area went all the way back to the 18th century. What you may be surprised to learn is that notwithstanding their deep southern roots in Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper's grandparents were staunch abolitionists who strongly opposed the expansion of slavery.

Now, his father was also named John Sherman Cooper, and the Sherman in his name was in honor of the famous Civil War General, William Ticomsa Sherman of the Union Army. And that name will probably be familiar to most of our American listeners. He's known for his total war scorched earth campaign through the south, right? Sherman's March to the Sea. And there was a great deal of truly venomous hatred for William Sherman among the Southerners because to them, right, he destroyed civilian infrastructure. He probably killed and maimed a lot of civilians. You know, he was a slash and burn type of a general. And so carrying Sherman in the name of first John Sherman Cooper's senior and our John

Sherman Cooper Jr. was a real powerful signifier of the rejection of the antebellum South of slavery and in Cooper's lifetime of segregation, the remnants of racial apartheid. I can imagine Dick Russell thinking about Sherman Cooper, John Sherman Cooper, and thinking about Sherman's March to the Sea and what that man did to Georgia. Oh, man. Yeah. And funnily enough, actually,

John Sherman Cooper and Dick Russell, they both had that sibilant s. And kind of whistled when they talked. My father has my mother both been born in the country on farm. Happiness is the best word. Nothing is really jarred, I think. And that's part of it. Oh, the sun shines bright.

I'm old Kentucky home. Sherman Cooper Sr. owned coal mines in Harland County and was able to provide quite a plum upbringing for his seven children. Nevertheless, Sherman Jr. worked throughout his childhood, including apparently in those very same coal mines. We've no more, my lady. Then I worked one summer at a coal mine, because it wasn't my father's coal mine up in Holland County. I didn't work in the mine.

I worked outside laying track. There was before there was any union strife. For my old Kentucky home far away. People were happy to work with mine and I looked back upon it It was a very happy experience because the first time I'd ever been up in that type of concrete. It was very clean, then mountains were pretty, dreams were pure, people were fending. In high school, he was the class poet, the class president, and graduation speaker, having finished second in his class. I think the greatest thing my father did for me is that he gave me a set of, when I was quite young,

Boy's book written by English author, The Stories of England, and of course, praising all its historical background, as great leader, King, and its political leaders, and particularly his military leader. I learned a good deal about the world history from the standpoint of the British, at least, another boy. Not. No, we've no more today. We sing one song for my old Kentucky home, for my old Kentucky home by way. But that didn't stop him from gaining this work ethic and grindset mentality that, of course we see in Jerry it as well. So for college, John Sherman Cooper started local, but after a year transferred to Yale. And wouldn't you know it? He was inducted into the Skull and Bone Society in his senior year.

Jerry World fans will be just tickled to learn that John Sherman Cooper also played football. at Yale, albeit this was well before Jerry's time. And he was a bit of a jock. He played basketball as well, and while in college was voted most popular and most likely to succeed. In short, he was a real success story coming out of Kentucky. At that time, I suppose my father told me to go to Tim Buck, too, and made arrangements for it, I would have gone.

I've never been out of Kentucky except to Cincinnati, Ohio. I've always went to play some athletic club there and been to Chattanooga Tennessee when I was in high school where he played the Chattanooga High School football team. Yeah, I mean, if he didn't have the Silver Spoon in his mouth before arriving at Yale, I feel like he came to Yale with the mentality of a provincial guy, albeit a well-to-do provincial guy, and he left Yale with obviously a very well-attuned

understanding of the upper, upper class. He probably thought, well, that he'd see what I could do in a larger community, in different communities. I have to think that he was thinking a lot about me and wanted me to do well, but he wanted me be a good man too. Right. For my old Kentucky home by way. Certainly his classmates at Yale and his fellow bonesmen would have come from a much higher rung on the social ladder at a national level. So maybe in Kentucky, he was a big fish in a small pond. And at Yale, he saw what it took to be a big fish in a big pond.

That's right. Not unlike Jerry, right? He sort of comes out of some regional promise and ends up in the mainstream, on the main stage, which really accelerates his life and his position. so after yale john sherman cooper goes off to harvard law but didn't finish his law degree there his father took ill and revealed at that point that he had lost most of his money and died so john goes back to kentucky takes the bar exam without a law degree which you could do at the time passes the bar and goes on to kentucky and goes on to to work and pay for his six younger siblings to go off to college. This is the first look that we'll have at sort of John Sherman Cooper, the altruist. In 1929, he stood for and won election as a county judge in Pulaski County, Kentucky.

and this altruist streak that Cooper had to him really came out in this his first elected role. Now, 1929, obviously we're talking about the verge of the Great Depression that kicks off in October of that year. And so in the wake of the stock market crash, more and more, the people that come through the Pulaski County Courthouse in front of Judge Cooper are largely poor folks who are being evicted, maybe they're committing petty thefts to put food on their table, and other sorts of crimes of poverty common in a depression. While John Sherman Cooper showed that he was not well suited to the bench, he was a man of real integrity, and he would even empty out his pockets and offer money from his own funds to help out some of the litigants that he felt were being unfairly brought into court just. just on account of their poverty. After a while of this, he just couldn't take the psychological toll of watching the system work to keep the impoverished down.

They used to tell me I was building a dream. And so I followed the mob. When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. And he had sort of a nervous break down that caused him to take a long-term leave of absence and seek psychiatric treatment for a deep, deep depression. So, you know, he's a sensitive guy. And seeing that the judiciary was not suited to the types of changes that he wanted to see in the world, John Sherman Cooper went in

politics. Now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Or he tried to go into politics, but his first run for political office was a run for the governor of Kentucky. And in what would be the first in a long career of lost elections, he did not pull that one out. Right. John Sherman Cooper, much like Earl Warren in this respect.

It was a chronic loser in politics. Hey, don't you remember, I'm your pal, buddy, can you spare a dime? Now, get this. During World War II, he enlists as a private at age 41. How crazy is that? He shuns the offer of an officer's commission. Instead, he enrolls in an officer training school, and then graduates second in his class,

and earns the rank of second lieutenant. Yeah. That's crazy. You'd say, oh, he's got a Yale undergrad degree. He's spent time at Harvard Law. He's been a judge. He's 41 years old. Clearly, this guy should be an officer.

And he's like, well, no, because you know what? I don't know anything about commanding a military unit. And so just like he worked in those minds as a kid, right? he wants to see things from the bottom up. Wow, what a stand-up dude. And ultimately, once he does get his commission, he is shipped off to the European theater, right? Yeah, under General Patton.

Yeah, so he's serving as a courier in the Third Army, and he's in France, I think in Luxembourg, maybe Belgium, just kind of around that part of Europe, and moving eastward. and eventually he makes his way to the Buchenwald concentration camp. We got off on this small side of road to Bukenval, and... After it was liberated... Our troops had just overrun it.

They hadn't been in battle because the S.F. ran off and had control of the concentration camp. But there are a number of dead inmates lying around in the ditches, both inside and outside, and you didn't know whether they tried to escape and been shot or what. There weren't many. But once in there, I saw it and stayed there all together three days because I was ordered to get all the information I could about in the following. And he's there close enough in time that there's still some survivors around, and he's really able to witness firsthand the destruction wrought by the Nazis

and the Third Reich. Well, they had 20,000 eminent sent it, and I saw the furnaces. I saw the carts racked up with dead, about three of them. I think they'd let them starve to death, and then just burn them up. The people in the lying in these barracks were so weak, they could hardly talk. And while I was there, then General Patton came up, and he made everybody in Vimar able to walk to walk out through the camp. And turned out these enmes, the inmates were so weak they didn't say anything to demonstrate against these Germans. against these German people or anything.

German people just say we knew nothing about it. There are many smiling faces, and according to observers, at first the Germans act as though this was something being staged for their benefit. They did have shrunken heads where they had the heads of victims that had been shrunken. They did have things made out of their skin tanned and all that. On a table for all to gaze upon is a lampshade made of human skin,

made at the request of an SS officer's wife. Large pieces of skin have been used for painting pictures, many of an obscene nature. There are two heads which have been shrunk to one-fifth their normal size. These and other exhibits of Nazi origin are shown to the townspeople. The tour of the world. continues with a forced inspection of the camp's living quarters where the stench, filth, and misery defied description. And these people are compelled to see what their own government

had perpetrated. Oh, I'm sure they were aware of it. Six miles away from there. I don't see how possibly they could have failed to know that something was going on up there. They could have smelled the stench of the burning bodies from that distance. I always remembered that was one of the worst sights I ever saw and had good ill influence on my later thinking in Congress. Another interesting anecdote from his military service is that Cooper apparently hit and killed a pedestrian in his car. And I don't know if he had any confirmed kills in combat. As a courier, it would be unlikely.

But he did get that taste of the power over life and death. And his reaction to that was to never get behind the wheel of an automobile ever again. Anybody who's listened to Jerry World knows that this is the start of a tragic narrative

that ends in moral degradation and decadence. Okay, so at the end of the war, John is charged with reorganizing and denazifying the courts in Bavaria. It doesn't seem like he was a Nazi or had any Nazi sympathies at the time, but, and this is something that will come up again when we get to McCloy, he did have this firsthand experience of seeing these Germans in their degraded post-war state. That combined with his natural sympathies for

mankind and the underdog that likely left the mark on him okay but the war is over and it's really from here that John Sherman Cooper's star begins to rise now we're in 1946 where John Sherman Cooper won a special election for a seat vacated by a fella by the name of Happy Chapman. Happy, of course, left to become baseball commissioner. And what happens just two years later? Unfortunately, for our boy, John Sherman Cooper,

there's a normal election for that full six-year term and Cooper loses. Right. But when God closes a door, he opens a window and John Sherman Cooper, he doesn't go back to Kentucky. This time he sticks around. He commits to being a DCI and joins a law firm and gets into private practice and does a little government work on the side, right?

He was appointed delegate to the UN General Assembly and later joins Dean Atchison. Name sound familiar. as a special assistant at the conference for the creation of NATO. Yeah, and this is kind of remarkable because, for one, remember, the appointing president now is Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, and John Sherman Cooper was a lifelong Republican who had just left the Senate where he served as a Republican. But thanks to the fond view that his fellow Harvard law alum, Dean Atchison, had towards him, he is picked out as a guy with real diplomatic chops. Time and time again, people talk about Cooper as a real Kentucky gentleman, a guy who could get along with anyone. And so that is the auspices under which he's selected for this entry into foreign policy establishment

and into the diplomatic merry-go-round representing United States interests abroad. Now, a few years later, Cooper's old electoral opponent, the one who had defeated him in the 1948 election kicks that old bucket. He takes a long hay nap in 1952. And so there's another special election, and Cooper is on hand to run and win it. Once again, it was a short ride. And some said that Cooper lost because Kentucky voters didn't trust an unmarried man.

Cooper was unmarried, but it wasn't for lack of trying, right? In D.C., he had been slowly gaining a reputation as a Bachelor on the Prow, paling around with his buddy, Jack Kennedy, and other unmarried senators in the Washington, D.C. social scene. Yeah, Cooper, just like Jack Kennedy, was on Joe Alsup's guest list for those famous terrapin soup gatherings in Georgetown. And when they weren't hanging around in the house party scene, they were partying at the discreet and very private Cosmos Club in DuPont Circle.

At this point, they had gained a nickname and were called the extras, because the female dinner party hosts would invite these fellas whenever there was an unattached woman on the guest list. So they were essentially the most eligible bachelors in this social circle. And before too long, Jack Kennedy and John Sherman Cooper started gravitating around two of the stars of that social scene. one of them would be Jacqueline Bouvier as well as a good friend of hers who gained quite the reputation as a Georgetown hostess in her own right Joe Alsop said her salons were the place to be and now's a good time to take a little detour to introduce this lady You see, Mrs. Cooper had been a friend of mine before she used to ask me to dinner parties when I was still either in my last year in college in Washington or the year or so, I worked on the newspaper.

When I met my sweet Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine, Arnold, Rowan, Macadoo, McAdu, Shevlin, Cooper. That's a mouthful. Well, let's just call her Lorraine Cooper for short. Why, I love my sweet Lorraine. In the first place, I've always liked politics. Always been interested in travel. Traveled a lot before I married my husband. John Kennedy was a great friend of mine, too.

And Kennedy was explaining that he thought he'd come down in a helicopter and come to send something. I thought that sounded wonderful. That no one will steal her heart away. When he got the nomination, I told Jackie, I thought poor girl she doesn't know. That won't come home. Now Lorraine is as important a figure in John Sherman Cooper's life and legacy as the man himself. And I think we can paint a bit of a picture of who Lorraine was by taking a tour through her litany of surnames.

So her first surname, Rowan, comes. from her father, Robert Rowan. And he had the nickname in his time as Bob the Builder, the original Bob the Builder, who's a preeminent real estate tycoon in early 20th century Los Angeles and Pasadena. He converted a small fortune gained in real estate and farming from his family inheritance, into quite a large portfolio of holdings that would today, you know, be worth easily billions of dollars. But sadly, Rowan died at the young age of 43, and his little daughter Lorraine was just

13 years old. But then Lorraine's mother gets remarried to Principe de. Dominico Napolione Orsini of Italy's black nobility. The Orsini clan produced countless popes and cardinals dating back to the earliest days of the Roman Catholic Church. Yeah, we might have to keep churning the research on Principi Dominico Orsini because I'm sure there's something there, but they're a very private family. and there's not a good deal about them in the American press. But for Lorraine's purposes, all that really matters is that her mother and the prince move to Rome.

And she sort of goes with them, but is really kind of on her own from age 13 onward. You know, getting passed around among European. boarding schools, but she would throughout her whole life say that she never had an education. But she clearly became educated in the ways of the world, especially that cosmopolitan aristocratic jet set that exposed her to a variety of languages and cultures. And she did have a very sharp intellect, and she picked up a number of European languages and became a real expert in social arts. By the time she turned 19, she had her hooks in the grandson of President Woodrow Wilson, a older fellow by the name of Robert Hazlehurst Macadoo, who was in his own right

a real dandy and made his bones in the investment banking business as so many sions of political families are wont to do. Robert McAdoo was hardly ever known by the name Robert. Instead, he was known fondly as Ribs Macadoo. I don't know about you, Dick, or you, listener, but that name just gives me real warm and fuzzy pinch-on feelings. His father, Senator William Gibbs McAdoo was an economically progressive Dixiecrat who married Woodrow Wilson's daughter after helping to run Wilson's campaign in his capacity as vice chairman of the DNC. So President Woodrow Wilson, Mr. 14 points himself, was Ribs Macadoo's granddaddy and was just a phone call away from the young Lorraine Rowan McAdoo at this point in time.

Now, it should also be noted that Senator McAdo, that's Lorraine's first father-in-law, had also been Secretary of the Treasury in the Wilson administration, in which capacity he oversaw the establishment of the federal reserve system. That's a favorite. We're not going to say anything more about it, but just putting that out there so that you know that we're talking big here. Right. And I guess long story short, Lorraine got bored of having ribs every night and

divorce the guy. and the very next day married a fellow by the name of Tommy Shevlin Jr. Ribs's ribs were not strong enough to protect his broken heart. Maybe he ate too many ribs, but for whatever the case, he died. He died at the age of 36 just weeks after his divorce from Lorraine. Now, Shevlin was a jet-setting, rich boy, son of his namesake, who had been a Hall of Fame football star at Yale. Bula-Bula! Shevlin's father was a multimillionaire lumber baron from the Midwest.

But either way, Tommy also got boring for Lorraine. while he was a looker and a charmer, he didn't really have any brains, so she started seeking out more extracurricular pursuits in foreign affairs. With support from her good friend Nelson Rockefeller, she participated in the UN convention after World War II in San Francisco and made high-level friends and connections among the global power elite. She also grew into a sophisticated internationalist.

She leaves behind Ribs Macadoo, she leaves behind Tommy Shevlin, and she sets her sights on Washington, D.C. She hides in an addict concealed on a shell. Behind her eyes. She catches the political bug out there at the U.N. Convention and decides that she really wants to make her life in the center of international politics. So what does she do? She buys herself a massive bachelorette pad smack dab in the heart of Georgetown. She was assisted in house hunting by her friend Marie Harriman,

wife of Averill Harriman. We mentioned him on the pod. He was the heir to the fortune of the railroad robber baron, E.H. Harriman, who grew his family fortune even more through the investment banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman. And softly she will explain, just exactly who was the flame, causing me to go insane, to finally blow out my brain, sweet law rain.

And that, if the listener doesn't recall, was one of these Wall Street firms that really set itself. on the golden path during the rearmament of Germany after World War I and the rise of the Nazi party. And the Brown Brothers Harriman partner who did a lot of that legwork was none other than Prescott Bush, father of George H.W. Bush. So Lorraine and the haremans were great friends, Lorraine was often found lounging around in the Harriman swimming pool on 30th and End Street in Georgetown with a martini in her hand. And the home that she eventually purchased for herself was a 1792 built federal townhouse,

if you could call it a townhouse. I mean, it is massive at 2,900 N Street Northwest. And from there, she very quickly insinuated herself right into the middle of the middle of this middle of this. Georgetown set. Besides Marie Harriman, she was also besties with Washington Post publisher Catherine Graham and her husband Phil Graham, with Polly Wisner and her husband, the CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner, whom we've talked about a great deal.

and Evangeline Vangey Bruce, who was the wife of Ambassador David Bruce, another OSS veteran who ran the OSS station in England during the war, and went on to serve as ambassador to France, West Germany, and again England after the war, with that home base in Georgetown, never going up for sale. Obviously, there was more as well, but this was the social milieu in which Lorraine Cooper was moving. These ladies that I just mentioned, apparently would talk on the phone, do a round of phone tag every single morning.

And I think they made up a pretty respectable cabal in their own right. That's right. So Lorraine is now established a reputation among the Georgetown set in the Georgetown community. One contemporary calls her the mother confessor of Georgetown. She knew how to put people of all stripes at ease and get them spilling their secrets, which perhaps she was more willing to use as leverage than John Sherman Cooper was. So we're in D.C. Lorraine is hosting these swarets at her grand mants.

And in doing so, inevitably, it brings her into the acquaintance of a silver-haired John Sherman Cooper, a distinguished older gentleman now once divorced from a nurse who he had taken us as his wife. during and after the war. Now, at first, Sherman Cooper is reluctant to tie the knot, given that he was living pretty high on the hog as this eligible bachelor, and also given that he was somewhat ashamed that he lived in a meager apartment while Lorraine lived in this massive Georgetown mansion. A southern gentleman oughtsington pose on a lady in such a way is what he thought. Well, wouldn't you know it that to the rescue comes none other than John Foster Dulles?

In 1955, after consulting with President Eisenhower, Foster Dulles approaches John Sherman Cooper to be the U.S. ambassador to recently independent India. But Foster suggested that it wouldn't do to be a bachelor as an ambassador. So why not propose to Lorraine? And don't worry about the awkward living situation. For now, you can post up at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. on the taxpayers dime and we're worried about all that a little later this of course is appealing to john sherman cooper who's ever the social climber so he takes the job he marries lorraine

and takes her on and off they go to india yeah and i think it's so funny first that foster dollar this grimacing sort of evil, cold, calculating guy is here playing matchmaker, which is just a hilarious role for him. And then you realize why, right? He is appointing not just John Sherman Cooper as ambassador. He is really appointing John and Lorraine as a package deal, right? because the Dulles brothers are aware of Lorraine Cooper.

I mean, she is a big deal in their social world. She knows everybody's secrets. She has that ability to get everybody's secrets. And I'm sure they would have known, as we'll mention in a second here, that among her close friends, Lorraine counted Edwina Mountbatten, Eddie Mountbatten, who was probably known to the Dulles brothers at the time was Jowarlal Nehru's mistress

and the wife of the last viceroy to India. Right, and so this is no accident. Right. To set the stage a little bit for the listener, 1955 is kind of a key moment in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people of the so-called third world. In April of that year, the Bandung Conference was held in Indonesia, and it practically coincided with the beginning

of the Cooper's ambassadorship to India. Now, why does that matter? Well, the Bandoom Conference, which was organized jointly by largely Prime Minister Nehru of India, by President Sukarno of Indonesia, and also by the Chinese Premier and the purpose of this Congress was to bring together leaders from 29,

Asian and African formerly colonized countries that represented between them some 54% of the world's population. The town of Bandung is an attractive place high up in the hills of Western Java. It's here that the Afro-Asian conference is being held and worldwide attention is drawn to the scene of this unique meeting. 29 countries have sent delegates representing more than half the population of the globe. Communists, anti-communists, and neutralists, they quickly agreed their agenda and got down to their discussions on a wide variety of subjects. You know, they had just come out of World War II.

It was a moment for decision of what path the former colonies were going to take, whether they would pursue something like the radical, independent communist path that China had set for its own. after the Communist Party won the Civil War there, or, you know, you still have countries like Vietnam at this time, which are very much under the colonial yoke and working to free themselves through armed resistance. And India was sort of in the middle. It had gotten its independence from the British way back in 1947. It became an independent state in 1950, and it was a big enough country

that it had a little bit of leverage between the two superpowers. You have the U.S. and the Western Bloc on the one hand, which obviously the remnants of the British Raj favored India to, align itself with. And then you have the Soviet Union that promised a more independent path of development if India were to shun the Western empires. India's prime minister, Mr. Nero, played a leading role throughout the meeting.

So did Mr. Chouin-Lai, communist China's premier. The premise of Bandung, in short, was a unification of, the third world peoples against colonialism and Western domination. And of course, the United States and the Dulles brothers knew this. So they did what any respectable Fourth Reichman would do. They launched a no-holds-barred attack into the psychological operations against the conference and its participants. attempting to control the media narrative about the event.

The Philippines General Romulo denounces communism as super barbarism and the West scores a victory at the Bundung Conference. The Dallas thought that it was immoral for Erru not being an announced Democrat. but he always said he was not a communist, he wasn't. Dulles, disliked very much the idea that he would not form with other countries and an alliance, like in Europe. A large part of this involved shaping the opinion of intellectuals

who in turn shaped the opinions of the masses through interventions in the media or the academy. Remember that cabal of Eugene Rostow and Joe Alsup? All of this involves disseminating some sort of left liberal or even socialist viewpoints. And the purpose of this is to demarcate or limit the discourse, to mark out what's fair game. And of course, implied in that is beyond this would not be acceptable. It would not be good to venture off beyond what is demarcated. In brief, this is using socialism or social democracy as a bulwark against communism. Now later on, and this again will come up in our episode about John J. McCloy, this idea of using sort of a left

framework to fight against communism and to stave off the rising influence of the Soviet Union and communist China, that would be considered by our real hardcore cold warriors like Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover to be taboo, right? they would shun even the shadow of leftist sympathies. And meanwhile, liberal cold warriors, like Dean Acheson and John Sherman Cooper, saw a need to meet people where they're at and then manipulate them covertly into adopting an anti-communist worldview that ultimately culminates in this kinder gentler form of world domination marked by the illusion of democratic control.

And that's really what we're talking about when we talk about the Fourth Reich. And that was certainly the sort of that enlightened neo-colonial attitude. That was certainly at work in the U.S. Embassy, in India, where both propaganda operations and more sinister black ops were being run. It's hard to tell what, if any, involvement John Sherman Cooper or Lorraine had in running or facilitating the ops, at least for John Sherman Cooper's part, likely a good deal, given his closeness to the CIA head honchos through his Georgetown social connections. Yeah, I mean, could you really imagine?

Lorraine hosting these salons in the embassy with all of the CIA guys out there and them not getting a little insight into the action at the minimum. I mean, I think it's pretty unbelievable that the boarding school educated spooks running around in Asia would miss out on such sports. blended fetts. That's right. You can kind of think about this as a right-hand, left-hand operation of U.S. Cold War imperialism, right? The right hand, you have the diplomatic approach.

That is John and Lorraine, charming Nehru, they're charming, his daughter, Indira Gandhi. they are making themselves liked, and they are, in turn, building trust for the American government among their host nation. And that's ostensibly above board, right? Cooper was a huge advocate for using the carrot. He petitioned Washington frequently to secure foreign aid for India in the form of food aid, monetary aid, you know, development aid, and, yes, military aid as well. And meanwhile, the left hand is the covert operators that are scurrying around behind the scenes.

and using any means at their disposal. Now, I don't know if we have too much insight into what they were doing in India, but for example, right, you could say it was a left-hand grab when Operation Ajax in Iran removed the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh and installed the dictatorship of the Shah. So you have both options on the table and they work largely together

and they work together in part to build this bigger picture of kind of take the carrot or get the stick. And I think if you compare India, which largely took the carrot, right? It did not go the communist route. It kept its social programs moderate with the other major organizer of the Bandung Conference, Sukarno in Indonesia. In Indonesia, by contrast, the United States overthrew President Sukarno and installed Suharto as their strong-armed dictator. They provided him and his forces with lengthy lists of suspected communist-friendly, quote-unquote, subversives,

and initiated CIA-backed purges killing millions of people. The book Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins tells that story. And so that's always lurking there in the background, even while the Sherman Coopers of the world are operating on this diplomatic plane. this diplomatic party and that party comes to an end in nineteen fifty six when yet another Kentucky senator dies and who do they call up what's my theme music but John Truman Cooper and he's elected again to fill the vacant seat and sometimes bad and it sometimes acts of food and this

time his tenure lasts a bit longer and finally in 1960 during a normal election he wins a senate seat and john and lorraine return to Washington DC and now nobody cares that they move into the house that technically belongs to Lorraine right because they're coming back from the ambassador they've already cohabited they've been married for actually quite a short time i mean just over a year but it's the taboo is broken enough that they set up shop there on end street right and they have that sweet smell of success about them right yeah but i hope you won't begrudge me one more little nugget of information from their transition out of India. Oh, please, by all means. So I just couldn't leave this one off because Lorraine obviously is engaged in redecorating throughout their tenure there

and planning for the construction of a brand new embassy compound in New Delhi. And that compound breaks ground just a couple of months after the Cooper's leave right around the time of John Sherman Cooper's election. And I just wanted to say that the man who lays the cornerstone of this new embassy compound that had been planned with the help of the Cooper's was none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren, who would go on to serve alongside John Sherman Cooper in the Commission, which is the subject of our series here today. It's a small world. It seems like a limited cast of characters when you really start digging into this stuff.

Anyhow, so here we are. It's 1960. Lorraine and John have come back, are back in DC. They're shacking up in Lorraine's epic Georgetown Mance. And really, they're just a few blocks from the Kennedys, the Harrimans, the Alsop's, the Wisner's, the Grams, the Dullesis's, and on and on. Stranger's arms reach out to me. As we mentioned at the top, Lorraine had been tight with Jack and Jackie. Yeah, they used to double date all the time in the 50s before the Coopers went to India. I mean, they were like real couple friends, even though Sherman Cooper was quite a bit older

than Jack Kennedy. I was interested in Jack and the Coopers were sort of going out together. I mean, you were sort of, you know, courting the same. same time, getting married at the same time. Yeah, you were sharing a lot of the same experiences. Well, I mean, yeah. And so, you know, the relationship was sort of a mentorship relationship where the Coopers were provisioners of advice to the younger Kennedys.

I guess I like all for them, I like him. He was all younger than I. I remember they came to the first dinner party I ever had when we were married. They were fascinated. Is that all I couldn't do? I remember so many things with President Kennedy that were known and funny ones. Your sweet love sees me through. They're not that many senators who get to be your private friends as a couple.

Right. It is. Well, he was one of them, and he remained one. He'd devote like he wanted to. And I think I did too, so we formed a kind of a friendship, although we had a difference in our ages, of course. And my wife and his wife, they had a friendship too. too. And they used to come here, and we go there. He's always lively and full of life. So is she.

You know, I never like to say enjoy the social life, because I think that sounds trivial and frivolous. This is being done for history. That's just something I think it's helpful to understand their relationship that, they're kind of from different generations, but nevertheless, get along so well that they are one of the first go-toes for advice, despite being from a different political party. Right. And you can see that JFK really trusted John Sherman Cooper, right? We mentioned at the top of the hour. On inauguration night, you know, the Coopers were at Joe Alsop's place, and they were having Joe Alsup was having an inauguration party or whatever and none other than the president himself JFK shows up to that party after leaving the inaugural ball and JFK and John Sherman Cooper chatted up

until like four in the morning and you know he trusted him because after JFK was elected he actually asked Cooper to go to Moscow and take the sort of the temperature of the Russians on the Kennedy's election. Cooper clears it with Eisenhower and Dulles and ultimately takes the trip, only to learn that the Russians didn't see much daylight between a Kennedy presidency and a Nixon presidency and believed firmly that the U.S. remained the greatest threat to peace in the world. And when he gets back to D.C. and JFK asks him, you know, JFK asks Cooper, you know, what did the Russians think of him? Cooper pithily replies, they're not impressed. And so JFK relied on Cooper to give him this sort of, you know, tell him this hard truth.

Right. And I think it's a good point to sort of point out that notice how many of these. people who are on the commission have close personal connection to JFK at one point or another. Remember, Jerry Ford had his congressional office right across the hall from JFKs, and the two would walk together to the chamber for house sessions. Nixon also had a friendly relationship with Kennedy, and so did Hale Boggs. He said he loved him dearly, and you might recall from the last episode, it really sounded like he meant it. Yeah.

Well, here we have Cooper, who was even closer to the slain president. Yeah, and Lorraine tells the story how when they were inaugurated, when they moved into the White House, Jackie still wanted to come and hang out. And indeed, the first night out of the White House that JFK and Jackie Kennedy spent was dining at a small gathering of friends at the Cooper residence over in Georgetown on 29th and N. And Lorraine planned the ceremonies down to the last detail with plenty of African-American servants. actually executing her vision for the feast, cooking the food, preparing all of the facilities, and, of course, cleaning up. I want to make sure that their labor does not go unrecognized in this Georgetown set, lest we should think that Lorraine, the hostess with the mostus, ever actually cooked a dish in her life, she did not. Now, at this time, John Sherman Cooper was actually pretty

far to what we'd consider the left of Kennedy on foreign policy. So unlike Jack, who had really campaigned as a aggressive cold warrior, you know, banging the drum about the missile gap and what have view, Cooper was very staunchly anti-war, and he was also unequivocally, unlike his Democrat counterpart on the Warren Commission, Dick Russell, a advocate of integration and civil rights, even criticizing Kennedy for moving too slowly on civil rights. So I think when we think about John Sherman Cooper's foreign policy outlook. You could kind of imagine it this way. He had been through World War II. He had seen the horrors of the concentration camps. He was also aware of the possibilities inherent in a nuclear war, the destructive capacity of those weapons. And he set

himself firmly against anything that would risk another repeat of a world war that could take in an instant millions and millions of American lives. And at the same time, he was amenable to the Dulles Brothers outlook that it was necessary to take the gloves off, behind the curtain, the cloak and dagger side of things that his good friends, right, Frank Wisner and Jim Engleton, a frequent dinner guest as well, were espousing in order to stave off such a global conflagration, right? You could almost see it as manipulation by the likes of the Dulles brothers and their ilk, who I think had a much more calculating sense of securing global markets for exploitation by capital. I think a do-gooder like Cooper didn't see things through such

a market-oriented lens. It's very difficult, I think, for people to look behind what we now see in hindsight as the evil consequences of the actions of the CIA, because we know today that the CIA's actions in Indonesia killed millions, that the CIA's actions in Guatemala led to a genocide that also killed so many people. And on and on and on, the list continues all over the world, and you come to understand that whether or not it's staved off a global conflagration, millions of lives were destroyed as a result of what is kind of misleadingly called a Cold War. And so I think Cooper, in that respect, is a great lens through which to view the way in which the Fourth Reich sets its hooks in even the well-intentioned.

Am I making sense to you, Dick? Oh, yeah. Really, I've been chewing on this for days. I'll take a second here to drop some of the sources that have gone into the informational side of this, right? One is this book, The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club by C. David Heyman. and also the University of Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper Oral History Project with hundreds of hours of recordings of interviews with Cooper and his circle.

Not to mention, you know, the usual other noided books that sit there on the shelf, but a lot of those are pretty silent on John Sherman Cooper. And I think the reason why is that at the surface level, it's hard to talk about him. It's hard to analyze him. But that's what we hear on Fourth Reich archaeology aspire to do. Right. He is this person that is a stark example of this grand contradiction. On one hand, you have someone who presumably upholds the ideals of anti-war and the spread of democracy and justice and freedom and all of that stuff. But at the same time is primed to serve whatever ends the American regime wants

precisely because he fully believes in those ideals of freedom and democracy and the American way and either wittingly or unwittingly serves as another agent in this Fourth Reich machine. Now, we're talking about the 1960s and you can't be a Senate foreign relations guy in the 1960s and not have a take on Cuba. Right. That recently liberated island nation just 90 miles from Miami. Right. Sometimes the cloak and dagger shit works,

and other times it fails. And still other times, as in the Cuban example, it fails and it fails and it fails again and again and yet again. And why do we mention this, Dick? Well, because it all comes back to Kennedy, right? I'm talking about Cuba. Cooper's views on Cuba largely tracked with those of Kennedy himself. Now, in fact, Cooper was at the White House in the White House living quarters with Jack on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the night when the crisis was averted, I should say. All the while Cooper is, of course, praising Kennedy's resolve and independence.

This is how close the two men were. Now, as a Foreign Service guy and a Georgetown set dinner guest, Cooper also must have been in the know on many of these plans, the plots by the CIA to kill Castro. And obviously, this fact is relevant to his service on the Warren Commission because the CIA's Cuba operations overlap intensively with the Pennsylvania. path of Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the Texas School Book Depository. And all of this brings us back to where we started this episode. The Warren Commission. And President Johnson's picks to be on that commission. Much like Russell, Cooper's name was on Johnson's list early and often.

He consistently got mentioned and was described to J. Edgar Hoover this way. I thought Russell could kind of look after the general situation and see that the states in their relationship. Russell would be an excellent man. And I thought Cupper might look at the liberal group. Who that? Cuppor, Kentucky. Oh, yeah.

So they wouldn't think that he's a pretty judicious fellow. Yeah. He's a pretty liberal fellow. I wouldn't want Cadex or some of those on it. A Javitt's placed the front page over. Cooper, Cooper is kind of border state, yeah. It's not to south. No, that's right.

And we mentioned this at the top of the hour. This is another defensive pick from Johnson, right? Cooper was as close as friends with Kennedy as anyone in Washington could be, except for, of course, JFK's brother, Bobby. They quartered their wives together. They went on double dates. They surely shared some secrets from their bachelor days. and you know when jack gets capped his boy isn't going to just stand idly by and let j edgar hoover keep

total control over the investigation you could think of cooper you know it happens in cooper thinking this time it's personal right we kind of nodded to that dichotomy between the liberal cold warriors like Cooper and who they considered an extremist and sort of a closed-minded and almost to the point of being anti-American authoritarian like J. Edgar Hoover. And so Johnson gives his outward-facing reasons for picking Cooper, which are in their own right coherent and logical enough, right? He's a Republican, he's in the Senate, he's from a border state, and he is seen as a liberal. And Johnson says that over and over again when he's describing his reasons for picking Cooper.

And it's funny, they all, everybody seems to pronounce Cooper, the, the double O sound, including the man himself, Cooper, Cooper. But I think we want to venture to speculate here that inward, the real reason why Cooper gets on Johnson's list is thanks to his friend Dean Atchison. And that combination that Atchison was a part of with the Rostow brothers, maybe the Bundy brothers, although Cooper and McGeorge Bundy had no love lost between them because, like we said, whereas the Bundy brothers are seen as hawkish, John Sherman Cooper is the opposite.

But nevertheless, he is seen as a guy that needs to be in the circle, so to speak, on the leash along with the other members of the Warren Commission, to keep him close to the vest, right? I think it's a very absurd that I have a rash, investigations. Well, the only way we can stop them is probably to appoint a high level and to evaluate your report and put somebody that's pretty good on it from that I could select out of the government and fill a house and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation. Yes. Because we get up there and get a bunch of television going and I thought it'd be

bad. It'd be a three ring circuit. He and Lorraine were ultimately choke points of the flow of information going through this Georgetown set. We know that Joe Alsup was already overseeing the composition of the Warren Commission. We've played his calls with LBJ on that subject, but putting Cooper on the commission would enlist largely this entire Georgetown set into a pact of secrecy around the assassination, or at least that's what we're speculating that Lyndon Johnson would have hoped to gain through naming Cooper to the commission. And there is, I think, in retrospect, reasons both to buy into that, that Johnson was right about that, and to doubt it. So on the one hand, you know, Johnson was kind of right because Cooper never out and out stated that the Warren

Commission was a cover-up and that it was a fix from the jump, right? He never went that far. And indeed, if you listen to the hours of oral history provided by John Sherman Cooper, time and time again he's asked about different historical figures including the presidents of the United States who overlapped with his political career and time and time again he refrains from speaking ill of them with the logic that well in Johnson's case he did choose me for that commission so I can't say anything too bad about him. Or with Dean Atchison, who was the person who had selected him, recall to attend the NATO summit in Paris in 1949, right? Well, I think that Dean Atchison was great, and I wouldn't ever say anything too ill about him because he gave me that

wonderful opportunity. I mean, he is the Kentucky fucking gentleman to his bones. And so Johnson, you know, in that sense, his instincts to the degree that he was relying on Cooper to not get too far ahead of his skis and looking into the facts of the assassination independently, he was right. And so in that respect, you know, Johnson has also the goal of simply putting Cooper on the commission where Dick Russell can keep an eye on him, report back to LBJ what he's saying, and keep him in line, towing the party line. That's right. But did he do that, Dick?

Well, no. I mean, I think you'll see that there's a can. of the commissioners yes there were disagreements that certainly did not tow the party line on the assassination and Cooper was one of them I think it was serious one of one of what comes to me most vividly of course was a question of whether or not the first shot went through President Kennedy and then through Governor Connolly who was sitting on the jump seat in front of him and he would early in vocally discuss how the single-bullet theory was impossible.

I heard Governor Connolly testify very strongly that he was not struck the same bullet, and I could not convince myself that the same bullet struck because I'm a little an expert who said it could. You mean that you yourself weren't convinced about the single-bullet theory, which... No, I wasn't convinced by it. Neither was Senator Russell. Now, to be fair, I think there were... others, including I think Dick Russell, and even LBJ, who thanks to these phone calls and their transcripts that have been released, we now know that many of these guys didn't

really believe the single bullet theory, but they were nonetheless willing to accept it. Yeah, at the end of the day, they all played some role in ushering in that Fourth Reich that really solidified its preeminence after November 22nd, 1963. He was working in your eyes and don't believe. He was working in that school book, The Power Store, you know, and secret service news there. And I don't know why they didn't ever watch him closer, or closer. It made more difficult to say that Oslo was a so assassin because the shots were there has been very close together and it would have to be in a very good marksman but anyway. Several of these people have already started writing books about conspiracies and claiming that they're other shop.

And we all have them there on the oath. Some of them are still writing. They had no proof. We've all said that if someone can find something that we didn't, we want it to be found because the truth. is what we want. But I think all of us believe, and I know I still believe, even after the last investigation of the House, that our decision will stand.

Right, and Morris Wolf, in addition to knowing both Kennedys, I mean, and knowing them so well that he was their goal between, he then was the legislative. assistant to Senator John Sherman Cooper, who is a Republican from Kentucky, who is on the Warren Commission. That's right. So Morris Wolf then says, well, we did that, and by the way, there are a few things that Senator Cooper told me, and I wrote these down as quickly as I could. LBJ Cooper told Morris Wolf, put me on the commission because I am a distinguished senator, one respected by my colleagues, my appearance will give the impression.

investigation will be beyond reproach but there's something very wrong with the investigation the Commission members say the Oswald a conclusion is good for God and country but there is internal corruption and I don't know why it's more than Oswald but Hoover and Chief Justice Earl Warren keep pushing the Oswald alone conclusion As a post you don't believe in me, I can see it in your eyes you don't believe. When I left a post script to John Sherman Cooper,

his narrative was by no means tragic when viewed through his own perspective. He kept giving parties at the N Street mansion well into his old age along inside his doting wife, Lorraine, whining and dining and exchanging secrets with the people that he knew, at least in some respect, had been like him, involved in the cover-up of the president's murder. However, when viewed from the perspective of the Fourth Reich archaeologist, His narrative is somewhat tragic.

He went from a do-gooder to the guy who gave a political start to another senator from Kentucky, one Mitch McConnell, a guy who would go on to unapologetically assist in some of the worst excesses of the Fourth Reich. into our current century, a guy who is apparently being chased by a tulpa, who he sees every so often, causing him to freeze up in front of the cameras, and maybe, or maybe not, defecating himself in the process. Perhaps he's seeing some of those ghosts of the people that the American Empire has laid to waste. Hey, careful, Don, it's not good to speak ill of the dust. dead

no matter if they are reanimated corpses okay I think that's a good spot for us to break off for this week's episode join us next week when we will be digging

into our next commissioner John J. McCloy and what's What's that J in his middle name stand for? It stands for J. But for now, I'm Dick. And I'm Don.

Saying farewell. And keep digging. Well, four boats and slahs break, started down the road, started down the road. Ballihead started down the road. And that in this world we've got on the door And that'll be the way to get along Well, poor boys, all he had, family come in the land