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          Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?

                            by Daniel Brandt

     When Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic
convention on July 16, 1992, it didn't contain any surprises, nor were any
expected. There were the usual feel-good platitudes: he wanted to talk
with us "about my hope for the future, my faith in the American people,
and my vision of the kind of country we can build.... This election is
about putting power back in your hands and putting the government back on
your side.... It is time to heal America." Any speech writer could have
pulled boiler-plate from the files and pasted together something similar.
Speeches for occasions like this one aren't meant to be long on specifics.

     Toward the end of the speech Clinton mentioned that "as a teenager
I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at
Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll
Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the
history of the world because our people have always believed in two
things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us
has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."

     This was not the first time that Clinton had paid tribute to the
memory of his Georgetown professor. A few days earlier, a story on
Clinton's background mentioned that he had never forgotten Quigley's last
lecture. "Throughout his career he has evoked [this lecture] in speeches
as the rhetorical foundation for his political philosophy," according to
the Washington Post, which offered another Clinton quotation praising
Quigley's perspective and influence.[1] A kindly old professor appreciated
as a mentor by an impressionable, idealistic student? This is how it was
interpreted by almost everyone who heard it, particularly since Quigley's
name was not exactly a household word.

     But in certain rarified circles among conspiracy theorists, Clinton's
reference to Quigley was surprising. Now that Clinton had one foot in the
White House, the conservative Washington Times soon ran an item that tried
to clear matters up. Professor Quigley, according to the Times,
specialized in the history of a secret group of elite Anglo-Americans who
had a decisive influence on world affairs during the first half of this
century. Quigley, in other words, was a conspiracy theorist -- but one who
had an impeccable pedigree as "one of the few insiders who came out and
exposed the Eastern establishment plan for world government." These words
belong to Tom Eddlam, research director for the John Birch Society. As
someone who had sold two of Quigley's books, Eddlam knew plenty about
Quigley. But we can't have a Democratic draft-dodging liberal candidate
who admires a Birch Society conspiracy hero, so the Times quickly resolved
the issue by noting that Quigley wanted the conspiracy to succeed, whereas
the Birchers wanted it to fail.[2] Thus the Times summed matters up, in
six column inches.

     Clinton's supporters depict him as an intellectual, someone whose
heroes traffic in solemn ideals. If so, Clinton presumably read Tragedy
and Hope, Quigley's best-known book, which appeared while Clinton was at
Georgetown. At any rate, Quigley's work is well worth looking at, along
with Clinton's early career, for its possible clues to Clinton's thought.

     Reading Quigley may turn you into a student of high-level conspiracy,
which is exactly what many influential people around Clinton and elsewhere
say you shouldn't be. Almost all of the 3,000 members of the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) will go on record ridiculing any of the conspiracy
theories that, according to all polls, are taken seriously by large
majorities of average people. CFR member Daniel Schorr will tell you again
and again that Oswald was a lone nut, and CFR member Steven Emerson will
write article after article debunking Pan Am 103 and October Surprise
theories. It's not that people in high places know better, it's simply
that they have more to protect and cannot afford to be candid.

     As new research is published about the JFK assassination, for
example, it becomes clear that virtually all the high-level players, from
LBJ on down, assumed it was a conspiracy from the moment the shots were
fired. It took until recently for dedicated researchers to dig this fact
out.[3] But thirty years later many journalists still find it useful to
defend the Warren Commission or belittle its critics.

     Carroll Quigley was a conspiracy historian, but he was unusual in
that he avoided criticism. Most of his conspiracy research concerned the
role of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups in Britain from 1891 through
World War II. His major work, Tragedy and Hope (1966), contains scattered
references to his twenty years of research in this area, but his detailed
history of the Round Table was written in 1949. The major reason he
avoided criticism is because his work wasn't threatening to people in high
places. Quigley's research was too obscure, and too much had happened in
the world since the events he described. Quigley was also an insider, so
his criticisms of the groups he studied are subdued. He did his
undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard, where he received a doctorate
in 1938. He later taught at Princeton and Harvard before settling in at
Georgetown's conservative School of Foreign Service in 1941, where he
remained for the rest of his career. He was a consultant for the Brookings
Institution, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the
Navy,[4] and taught western civilization and history. In 1962 the Center
for Strategic and International Studies was established on the Georgetown
campus, where it maintained close ties with the School of Foreign Service.
CSIS included a number of people on its staff who had high-level CIA
connections. Quigley moved in these circles until his death in 1977:

     I know of the operations of this network [the Round Table Groups]
     because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two
     years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.
     I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of
     my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have
     objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies,
     but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to
     remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant
     enough to be known.[5]

     In his 1949 detailed look at the Cecil Rhodes - Oxford - Alfred
(Lord) Milner - Round Table nexus, published posthumously in 1981 as
The Anglo-American Establishment, Quigley was more forceful with his
criticism. While endorsing this elite's high-minded internationalist
goals, Quigley wrote that "I cannot agree with them on methods," and added
that he found the antidemocratic implications of their inherited wealth
and power "terrifying." This is as tough as he got with his comments:

     No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group
     accomplished in Britain -- that is, that a small number of men should
     be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be
     given almost complete control over the publication of the documents
     relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence
     over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and
     should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the
     teaching of the history of their own period.[6]

     Quigley also avoided criticism because his books are the product of
years of painstaking research into primary diplomatic sources. To qualify
as a critic of his analysis, someone would have to duplicate that research
-- and so far no one has. It also helped that Quigley was doing most of
his work at a time when conspiracy theories were considered curious and
quaint, but not threatening. Clinton, at any rate, had no reason to feel
uneasy about citing the virtually unknown Quigley in his convention
acceptance speech.

     But serious researchers can hardly afford to pass over Quigley's
potential significance so lightly. The Washington Times, to begin with, is
clearly mistaken to brush Quigley off as simply one more liberal elitist
one-worlder. Certainly he is no streetcorner agitator, whether of the
right or left. But his understated critique of his elite colleagues is
nevertheless a searching one.

     In the years following the publication of Tragedy and Hope in 1966,
writers on both the right and left began to recognize this. For example,
New Left writer and activist Carl Oglesby came to realize that some of his
ideas about elite power in the U.S. had been anticipated by Quigley.[7]
On the far right, meanwhile, Quigley found a convert in W. Cleon Skousen,
a former FBI agent who later became a star of the John Birch Society's
lecture circuit. In 1970, Skousen published a book-length review of
Quigley's Tragedy and Hope that was titled The Naked Capitalist. It
quoted so heavily from Quigley's work that Quigley threatened to sue for
copyright infringement.

     Skousen chose to emphasize Quigley's mention of subterranean
financial arrangements between certain Wall Street interests and certain
groups on the U.S. left, in particular the Communist Party.[8] Oglesby,
meanwhile, shared Quigley's interest in the challenge posed to Wall
Street's Eastern elite by newer oil and defense-aerospace money
concentrated in the Southwest.[9] But as Oglesby recognized, Quigley's
meticulous research into elite power shaded insensibly over into the study
of "conspiracy":

     Am I borrowing on Quigley then to say with the far right that this
     one conspiracy rules the world? The arguments for a conspiracy theory
     are indeed often dismissed on the grounds that no one conspiracy
     could possibly control everything. But that is not what this theory
     sets out to show. Quigley is not saying that modern history is the
     invention of an esoteric cabal designing events omnipotently to suit
     its ends. The implicit claim, on the contrary, is that a multitude of
     conspiracies contend in the night. Clandestinism is not the usage of
     a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class
     in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the
     normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.[10]

     But it's a bad word for polite editors, so the issues surrounding the
"C" word are almost never discussed in print. One needs to tease out
Oglesby's observation that there is a qualitative difference between the
way that the left and right in the U.S. have addressed this issue. Both
tendencies can at least get together on which groups deserve attention:
the Council on Foreign Relations, which became the American branch of the
Round Table in 1919; Bilderberg, which has held secret meetings in Europe
for select participants since 1954; and the Trilateral Commission, a group
that began in 1973 and now has 325 members from Japan, Europe, and America.
CFR consists of Americans only, whereas Bilderberg adds the Europeans and
TC also adds the Japanese. The Americans in Bilderberg and TC are almost
always members of CFR also.

     But some leftists and left-liberal sociologists prefer to take the
curse off their interest in such groups by calling their investigations
"power-structure research." The implication seems to be that tracing
interlocking directorates, let's say, belongs to science in a way that
tracing Lee Harvey Oswald's intelligence connections never could. Still,
G. William Domhoff, the most prominent of the "power structure"
researchers, admits that attempting to maintain this quarantine can itself
become unscientific:

     Critics of a power elite theory often call it 'conspiratorial,' which
     is the academic equivalent of ending a discussion by yelling
     Communist. It is difficult to lay this charge to rest once and for
     all because these critics really mean something much broader than the
     dictionary definition of conspiracy. All right, then, if 'conspiracy'
     means that these men are aware of their interests, know each other
     personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to
     hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate or react to events and
     issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to
     mention in the Committee for Economic Development, the Business
     Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence
     Agency.[11]

     And what makes Domhoff's middle ground on the problem of conspiracy
so difficult to maintain is precisely the existence of inconveniently
concrete cases like Oswald's. If there was a conspiracy and cover-up, then
it was carried out by interested individuals rather than by blind social
forces. The best that Domhoff can do with the JFK assassination is to
ignore it, which he does.

     But this won't do for Michael Albert, editor of the leftist Z
Magazine and a Domhoffian "structuralist," who has attempted to finesse
this problem. His argument on the JFK assassination, as best I can
understand it, goes something like this: JFK was a predictable product of
established institutions; these institutions wanted a war in Vietnam; it's
inconceivable that JFK would have disagreed with this because his behavior
was determined (that is, he could not have changed his mind), and
therefore, the assassination of JFK, conspiracy or not, made no difference
to our history and is unimportant. The problem with Albert's approach is
that he's fairly close to vulgar Marxism, which by now has been thoroughly
discredited.

     To my thinking, the reason why the JFK assassination is so important
is this: It's one thing to believe that there are rich people who become
richer because their environment tells them to behave that way, and quite
another to believe that there is a powerful, secret government that
doesn't have to play by the rules. If you can prove that the assassination
was a conspiracy, then the first notion becomes silly and insignificant.
Essentially, conspiracy theories restore notions of freedom and
responsibility that have been stripped from from the "value free" social
science establishment. Quigley is between Domhoff and Oglesby on our
spectrum, which is not a left-right spectrum but rather a conspiracy
spectrum. Oglesby deals seriously with the JFK assassination while Quigley
does not. But Quigley at least follows the money trail and believes that
human agency and individual actors are important forces in history.
Domhoff, on the other hand, is more interested in class distinctions and
general behavior.

     Skousen is much more conspiratorial than Oglesby. He applies
conspiracy thinking to complex issues where a middle ground would be
productive (such as CFR, Bilderberg, and Trilateralism), and treats them
in an either/or fashion as if they were similar to the JFK assassination.
It doesn't work very well. The New World Order may be a bad idea, but to
assume as a starting point that it's a Communist plot doesn't help us
understand the who or why behind it.

     Before returning to Clinton, it will help to fill out our spectrum a
bit. So far we have Domhoff, Quigley, and Oglesby in a line, and Skousen
off further on the pro-conspiracy end. On the anti-conspiracy end we
should add Erwin Knoll, longtime editor of The Progressive. According to
Knoll, "none of the conspiracy theories we have scrutinized meets the test
of accuracy -- or even plausibility -- we normally apply to material
published in The Progressive, so none has appeared in the pages of this
magazine.[12] Knoll's advisory board includes three members of the Council
on Foreign Relations, so this fits okay. There's also Chip Berlet, who
berates unwitting leftists for falling prey to conspiracy theories that
the devious right has conspired to foist on them. He isn't critical of
conspiracy thinking on the basis of the evidence, but waits until the
theorist can be shown to have incorrect political associations.[13] Berlet
doesn't fit anywhere on our spectrum; he's running his own show.

     A conspiracy bookseller named Lloyd Miller[14] is farther out than
Skousen. Miller is aware of Quigley and sells his books. While Oglesby is
toying with an American ruling-class Yankee-Cowboy split that goes back a
generation or so, Miller dwells on a split between the Knights of Malta
and the Knights Templar going back to the year 1307. The modern derivative
of this struggle provides his hypothesis that "the overt and covert organs
of the Vatican and British Empire are locked in mortal combat for control
of the world." In Miller's theory, Jesuit-controlled Georgetown is the
Vatican headquarters on the American front, and Quigley is a Vatican agent
exposing the Anglo-American connection. Miller is more sophisticated than
this description allows, but I have difficulties with him. On a case by
case basis, the theory produces as many questions as answers. More
importantly, perhaps, my historical interests and imagination don't extend
much beyond the last 100 years.

     Miller is mentioned because there are similarities between his
analysis and the theories of Lyndon LaRouche. For anyone who wants to
figure out what LaRouche is talking about, it is necessary to be
conversant with esoterica concerning Freemasonry, the Knights of Malta,
and British imperialism. The alternative is to see all of the above as
code words for Jews, and LaRouche's enemies -- namely Chip Berlet, Dennis
King, and the Anti-Defamation League -- tend to take this easy way out. I
don't believe that right-wing globalist conspiracy theories in general, or
LaRouche's theories in particular, can be dismissed by claiming that they
are disguised anti-Semitism -- that is to say, code-word versions of the
old international Jewish banking conspiracies. While there is some
anti-Semitism on the right, it is no longer the driving force it might
have once been. Most right-wing theories are more sophisticated than
Berlet, King, or the ADL are ready to believe.

     I don't consider any of the people I've mentioned as crackpots,
because I'm convinced that there are vital issues at stake. All of them
are doing their best with checkered evidence, and for the most part I
share their instincts if not always their conclusions. Regardless of where
we decide to place Bill Clinton on the spectrum, which will be discussed
after a review of his career, at least two other former (and future?)
presidential candidates have staked out positions. Ross Perot believes
that there is massive corruption and occasional conspiracies in high
places; he belongs somewhere close to Quigley. Pat Robertson is a less
hysterical version of Skousen, modified for post anti-Communism, and
should also be taken seriously. Along with Ross Perot's movement, some see
Robertson's Christian Coalition as a populist challenge to our one-party
Republocrat system.

     Most of Pat Robertson's latest book, The New World Order (1991), is
a popularized yet articulate presentation of recent American history as
controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission,
Bilderberg, the Federal Reserve System, and Wall Street. Several pages
are spent on Quigley's theories, which provide the background for an
understanding of the Rhodes Trust, CFR, and the foundations with their
"One World agenda." Unfortunately, the only mention of this book in the
left press ignores the analytical material that Robertson draws on, and
dismisses "its more bizarre conspiracy theories such as those targeting
mainstream figures as dupes of the Devil."[15]

     Yes, Robertson finally couches his theories in a Biblical context
(after keeping the Bible out of it for the first two-thirds of the book),
and most of us don't find the Bible necessary or compelling. But when
leftists skip to the end in order to belittle his critique, at a time
when they have lost the capacity to provide an alternative critique, this
is self-defeating. My main objection to Robertson is that he doesn't
deserve to have a monopoly on these important issues; his vision is too
apocalyptic and too narrow. Unlike the politically-correct "progressive"
press, however, I consider him potentially closer to populism than to
fascism.

     Robertson spends several pages recounting the 1976 campaign of Jimmy
Carter, and describes how he concluded that Carter's strings were being
pulled by the same Trilateralists who created him. A similar analysis --
much more detailed and convincing -- can also be found from a leftist
perspective.[16] It wasn't too many years ago, before politically-correct
thinking carried the day, that the left took Trilateralism seriously.
Since 1980, the only left perspective on Trilateralism has been written by
a Canadian professor.[17] His Gramscian categories tend to be academically
overbearing, but he took the trouble to interview 100 Trilateral
Commission members.

     The Jimmy Carter story is depressing. Hamilton Jordan reportedly
said, "If, after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state
and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say
that we failed." That's exactly what happened, and seventeen other key
members of the administration were also Trilateralists. For his entire
administration, every move on foreign policy was cleared with the
hard-liner Brzezinski.

     Robertson's book was written just one year before Clinton's name
became a household word. One wonders how Robertson reacted to Clinton's
reference to Quigley in his acceptance speech. And then what Robertson
thought when he learned that Clinton checked off on almost every group
you care to name: he is a Rhodes Scholar, a CFR member, a Trilateral
Commission member, a Bilderberg participant, and most of his appointees
are at least one of the above. If Clinton's mention of Quigley in July
1992 had been an isolated case, then one might interpret this as simply a
ploy to disguise his elitist loyalties. But Clinton has mentioned Quigley
many times over the years, and I suspect that on this he is sincere. Then
again, it's hard to believe that Clinton is unaware of Quigley's
anti-elitist tendencies. What's going on here?

     After shaking John Kennedy's hand, they say that William Jefferson
Clinton never doubted that he was headed for the White House. A band major
in high school, he was favored by his school principal, who encouraged him
to run for class offices and to participate in a leadership program that
sponsored his trip to Washington. He attended Georgetown from 1964-1968,
majoring in international affairs and immediately running for student
office ("Hello, I'm Bill Clinton. Will you help me run for president of
the freshman class?"). When he wasn't listening to Quigley or networking
and glad-handing his way through a student council election, he was
working in the Senate Foreign Relations Office of Senator J. William
Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and former Rhodes Scholar who started
criticizing the CIA and Vietnam policy in 1966. During his first two
years, Clinton was a trainee in Georgetown's ROTC unit, and could be seen
around campus in Army fatigues.

     Between Quigley and his Georgetown connections, Fulbright and his
Rhodes Trust connections, and Clinton's keen interest in his own political
power, it's not surprising that the big, bearded, amiable Clinton became a
Rhodes Scholar in 1968 and went off to spend two years at Oxford. Another
power behind Clinton was Winthrop Rockefeller (1912-1973), two-time
Republican governor of Arkansas, who reportedly functioned as a father
figure. At Oxford, Clinton participated in one or more demonstrations
against U.S. policy in Vietnam in front of the American embassy, and used
his connections to stay out of the draft. After Oxford he went to Yale Law
School. In the fall of 1972 he directed McGovern's campaign in Texas. He
ran for Congress in Arkansas in 1974 after finishing Yale, but barely
lost. Then he taught law in Arkansas until 1976, when he was elected state
attorney general after running unopposed. That year he also headed up the
state campaign for Jimmy Carter. Two years later he won the race for
governor.

     The anti-war sentiments among Clinton's Oxford colleagues did not
produce an antipathy toward the CIA. Robert Earl, later an assistant to
Oliver North at the National Security Council, was one of these
colleagues. And while governor, Clinton was aware that an airfield in
Mena, Arkansas played a major role in secret contra logistics involving
gun and drug running. Clinton's security chief is being sued for an
alleged Mena-related frame-up, and many believe that there were cover-ups
by both state and federal agencies.[18]

     Bill Clinton is promoted as the first baby boomer and anti-war
activist in the White House. Yet I was also these things, and I cannot
identify with Clinton at all. In order for this piece to make any sense,
it's important that I show how two different anti-war protesters might
have stood together in a demonstration for different reasons, after
arriving from different directions.

     To begin with, one has to divide the student movement into two
periods, before and after 1968. This year was pivotal: the McCarthy
campaign, the RFK and MLK assassinations, the police riot in Chicago.
Anti-war protesters on conservative campuses such as my University of
Southern California and Clinton's Georgetown, were almost always bona fide
prior to 1968. There was no percentage in it otherwise, as the polls were
overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At USC I organized
a peaceful draft card turn-in ceremony in 1968. We were physically ejected
from the campus by fraternity boys, and had to continue in a church across
the street, where the frat rats feared to tread. A poll by our student
newspaper showed that most students agreed with the fraternity. At USC,
and the same was probably true of Georgetown, a student politician
couldn't get more than a handful of votes by taking an anti-war position.

     In 1969 everything suddenly changed. Major anti-war organizing
efforts appeared on campus, coordinated through national networks. I
guessed that these new activists, who seemed to come out of nowhere to
organize the Vietnam Moratorium, were former McCarthy-Kennedy campaign
workers. Although I had been co-chairman of our SDS chapter the previous
year, these were all new faces to me. I was astounded and a little
suspicious. Everything had turned around completely: now no student
politician could hope to win without the long hair, the beads and sandals,
and speaking at freshmen orientation by abandoning the lectern and sitting
on the edge of the stage, "rapping" to them movement-style.

     When it came time to confront the draft, these same student
politicians used their mysterious connections to get out the easy way.
Sometimes they pulled strings to secure a place in the overbooked National
Guard, but most got out clean. Almost half of all undergraduate men were
released when the first lottery was held at the end of the year, which
of course brought our anti-draft movement to a halt. I now refer to my
1969 experience as the "Sam Hurst syndrome," after the articulate and
good-looking student body president who sat on the edge of the stage and
rode into power on the post-1968 wave. It's my euphemism for slick,
well-disguised self-interest and a great head of hair.

     I noticed that new students could not tell the difference between Sam
Hurst's activism and mine. Students with safe lottery numbers sadistically
inquired about my number -- they would find it amusing if my number was
also safe, now that I had been convicted for refusing induction. It was
every man for himself. Then it got worse. By September 1970 the big
movement on campus centered on Timothy Leary's old colleague Richard
Alpert, who now called himself Baba Ram Dass and told overflow crowds that
the best way to do revolution was to sit in the lotus position and do
nothing. Soon Rennie Davis of Chicago Eight fame was spending his time
puppy-dogging a teenaged guru from India. Within another year there was no
discernible movement at all, just embarrassing burnouts like the Weather
Underground and eventually the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped
and brainwashed Patty Hearst.

     Bill Clinton is even slicker than Sam Hurst. His anti-war activism,
as well as everything else he did, developed from a focused interest in
his own future. After 1968 it would have been unthinkable for Clinton to
ignore the anti-war movement and face political obsolescence -- not
because of his revulsion over carpet bombing, but because it was time to
hedge his bets. Clinton is not an intellectual, he's merely very clever.
A clever person can manipulate his environment, while an intellectual can
project beyond it and, for example, identify with the suffering of the
Vietnamese people. But this involves some risk, whereas power politics is
the art of pursuing the possible and minimizing this risk. Almost
everything that happened to the student movement is best explained without
conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence
that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn't amount to
much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening --
the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had
decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and
control:

*    Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that
     in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which
     had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with
     SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the
     upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but
     the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war
     with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.

*    Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against
     those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted
     as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he
     was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]

*    The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also
     evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within
     the counterculture.[22]

*    Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein
     both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the
     National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until
     exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam
     Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24]
     (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his
     activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton's,
     didn't hurt his career either.)

*    Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have
     been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by
     elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]

*    The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international
     organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that
     if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international
     jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not
     compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

     The major point here is that by 1969, protest was not necessarily
anti-Establishment. When thousands of students are in the streets every
day, and the troops you sent to Vietnam are deserting, sooner or later
it's going to cut into your profits. If you can't beat them, then you have
to co-opt them. Clinton's mentors and sponsors realized this, Clinton
himself sensed the shift, and until more evidence is available it's fair
to assume that his anti-war activity was at a minimum self-serving, and
perhaps even duplicitous.

     How else can we explain why he has recently embraced the very
organizations who got us into Vietnam in the first place? He joined the
Council on Foreign Relations in 1989, attended a Bilderberg meeting in
1991, is currently a member of the Trilateral Commission, and has
appointed numerous Rhodes Scholars, CFR members, and Trilateralists to key
positions. These are the very groups whose historical roots, according to
Quigley, are essentially conspiratorial and antidemocratic. A cynic would
say that Clinton appropriated from Quigley what he needed -- which was a
precise description of where the power is -- and ignored those aspects of
Quigley that did not fit his agenda. He may have read a book or two by
Quigley, but he didn't inhale them.

     On February 2, when Clinton's nominee for CIA director was asked some
polite questions, Senator John Chafee (R-RI) joked about what he called
"a Mafia that's taking over the administration."[26] Be sure to smile when
you say that, Senator. The new director, R. James Woolsey, was an early
supporter of the contras and served as defense attorney for Michael Ledeen
and Charles E. Allen, he has Georgetown-CSIS connections, and he's a
Rhodes Scholar, CFR member, and Yale Law School graduate, several years
ahead of Clinton. Yale, of course, is thick with CIA connections.[27] The
new CIA director was close to Brent Scowcroft at the Bush White House, and
is a director of Martin Marietta, the eighth-largest defense corporation,
whose contracts include the MX missle and Star Wars weapons.

     It's becoming clear that on inauguration day we merely had a changing
of the guard. But it's still the same old team at headquarters, wherever
that is, and you won't find any television cameras there. Ultimately,
then, Clinton's references to Quigley are worth as much as his anti-war
record. And both are worth nothing at all.

 1.  David Maraniss, "Bill Clinton: Born to Run...and Run...and Run.
     Washington Post, July 13, 1992, p. A1.

 2.  "Clinton a Bircher?", Washington Times, July 22, 1992, p. A6. For a
     more useful discussion of the right and Quigley, see Frank P. Mintz,
     The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy and
     Culture (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 145-51.

 3.  This conclusion in inescapable after reading Dick Russell, The Man
     Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992).

 4.  Who's Who in America, 1976-1977 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1976).

 5.  Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
     (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 950.

 6.  Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in
     Focus, 1981), pp. xi, 197.

 7.  Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley Publishing,
     1977), pp.6-7.

 8.  Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pp. 945-9.

 9.  Ibid., pp. 1245-6.

10.  Oglesby, p. 25.

11.  G. William Domhoff, "Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?" In
     David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War (New York: Monthly
     Review, 1969), p.34.

12.  Erwin Knoll, "Memo from the Editor," The Progressive, March 1992,
     p. 4.

13.  Chip Berlet, Right Woos Left (Political Research Associates, 678
     Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 205, Cambridge MA 02139), July 28, 1992,
     $6.50.

14.  A-albionic Research, P.O. Box 20273, Ferndale MI 48220.

15.  Kate Cornell, "The Covert Tactics and Overt Agenda of the New
     Christian Right," Covert Action Quarterly, No. 43, Winter 1992-93,
     p. 51.

16.  Laurence H. Shoup, "Jimmy Carter and the Trilateralists: Presidential
     Roots"; Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, "Shaping a New World
     Order: The Council on Foreign Relations' Blueprint for World
     Hegemony, 1939-1945"; and several other relevant articles. In Holly
     Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite
     Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980).

17.  Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (New
     York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

18.  Association of National Security Alumni, Unclassified, February-March
     1992, pp. 6-9.

19.  James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College
     Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970), pp. 130-1.

20.  Steve Weissman, Big Brother and the Holding Company (Palo Alto CA:
     Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 298-9.

21.  AP in San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 1986.

22.  Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the
     Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).

23.  Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American
     Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-4, 727.

24.  Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the
     Liberal Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1985).

25.  Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow,
     1990), p. 337.

26.  Douglas Jehl, "CIA Nominee Wary of Budget Cuts," New York Times,
     February 3, 1993, p. A18.

27.  Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961
     (New York: William Morrow, 1987).