Scandalizing Conspiracies

  

Scandalizing Conspiracies

Peter Schultz

 

                  Drawing from material in John Prados’ book Lost Crusader, after William Colby became DCI the question of assassinations came up, fed by President Ford’s apparent “gaffe” at a luncheon when he “blurted out that CIA operations included every sort of thing up to assassinations of foreign leaders.” [301] This led to Daniel Schorr of CBS asking Colby, “Has the CIA ever killed anybody?” To which Colby responded, “Not in this country.” After that exchange, Schorr asked more questions that Colby refused to answer. But because Schorr “decided he had secured confirmation for the substance of … Ford’s luncheon gaffe, [he] made assassination the subject of his CBS broadcast the next day.” [ibid] And Prado reports that “One acute observer judges this ‘a report that was to transform the “year of intelligence.”’”

 

                  That is probably true, but the acute observer didn’t ask how the year of intelligence was transformed. As Prado puts it, “Suddenly the West Wing’s perception was of U.S. intelligence completely out of control.” [ibid] It is fair to say that Washington was scandalized by the fact that the CIA had engaged in assassinations of foreign leaders. So, the CIA was perceived as the culprit because it was “completely out of control” and “the public felt dismay at the CIA’s seemingly unlimited actions.” [ibid]

 

                  Take note what happened as a result of possible CIA assassinations becoming the focal points of concern, viz., a scandal was created that hid or disappeared other, more important political questions such as the effect of an institution like the CIA has on the American political order. The report referred to by Schorr transformed the year of intelligence by making certain issues disappear. In defining the issue as whether the CIA was completely out of control or not implies that that agency is not or should not be an issue except when it is out of control, e.g., except when it is assassinating people. Because scandals are seen as aberrations, they make more basic political issues disappear. The assassination scandal then occurring deflected attention away from, hid a more basic issue, that is, the issue of the CIA itself and whether it can coexist with what is reputedly a free society. The CIA could have a deleterious effect on a free society even when it is not out of control. At least, that was what Harry Truman argued a month after JFK’s assassination in a Washington Post guest editorial.

 

                  So, that “President Ford carefully selected the commission he set up under Nelson Rockefeller” to investigate the assassination issue wasn’t as important as the fact that the commission would be investigating, not the CIA itself, but just one of that agency’s practices. It was predictable then that Ford would conclude that this practice could be adequately dealt with by a presidential order banning such assassinations. Which is sort of like what Kurt Vonnegut told his children: “Don’t ever engage in massacres.”