Mae Brussell interview (1974): "About Women..."
By Jama on Thursday 27 September 2007, 02:26 - Permalink
If some people think they can ignore the warnings from history, ignore doing their own history research, ignore forming an opinion using their own mind and present and defend it, like we have been doing for too long... let her be an inspiration! Society needs people like that more than ever, but even more importantly it needs people who listen and care about these people. Don't let them down.
About Women...
(from Playgirl magazine, August 1974)
At a time when many writers and thinkers are seriously questioning the official accounts of the political assassinations, kidnappings, and "dirty tricks," a housewife-turned-social-theorist offers her own frightening, but well-researched, explanation.
BY STEPHANIE CARUANA
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PHOTOGRAPH BY SAM SILVER |
Mae Brussell is a researcher who has spent ten years
studying political assassinations and conspiracies in the United States. On
July 11, 1972 she wrote the first article to give a reasonable explanation for
the break-in and arrest at the Watergate – three weeks after the event. The
article, "Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?" was published in The
Realist.
Meanwhile, the establishment press was sweeping the
Watergate story under the rug, to the accompaniment of the "Third-rate Burglary
Chorus." But the story – and Mae Brussell – wouldn't go away. In December,
1972, she published a second long article in The Realist. But
Watergate was still, in the words of President Nixon's tape transcript, "an
unpricked boil," and this story, too, was left to the alternative press.
For three years, Mae Brussell's weekly hour-long live
radio news analysis show, Dialogue: Conspiracy, has been broadcast
over KLRB-FM, in Carmel, California. The show is also currently heard in
Sacramento, Boston, Syracuse, and San Francisco. She also teaches the first
accredited university course entitled "Conspiracies and Assassinations" at
Monterey Peninsula College.
In April, 1974, I asked her: "Who or what is the
S.L.A., and why
did they kidnap Patricia Hearst?" Her answer, "Is S.L.A.'s Cinque the First
Black Lee Harvey Oswald?" appeared in the Berkeley Barb. Her theory is that the
S.L.A. is a conspiracy involving top intelligence agencies. Mae
Brussell believes she knows who is manipulating the course of American history
by means of "bullets and blackmail" – and why. She believes that plans for the
military takeover of the United States and the imposition of martial law sit on
governmental desks like time bombs, waiting to go off when the time is right –
and that only immediate public awareness can avert a national disaster with
echoes of Nazi Germany, Greece, and the Philippines.
Of course – she could be wrong. In spite of her
painstaking analysis of hundreds of books and thousands of articles, letters,
and other documents; in spite of her staggering perception of a Gestalt, a
pattern, in which puzzling, wearying daily news stories emerge as expected
details to be slipped into the overall framework – she could be wrong. She
could be simply a modem Sherlock Holmes, exercising a brilliant
capacity for deductive logic on events which in reality have no
interconnection. Even so how happy I would be to sit at her feet like a modern
Dr. Watson, with no pipe to chew on to hide my comic consternation at having
missed the point again. Sometimes I become so involved with the
exhilaration of the chase the mental process of tracking down the game that I
almost forget this is real life we are talking about. Real people are being
murdered, while other real people are being framed and railroaded into real
prisons. The "arch enemy" in this game isn't Professor Moriarty, "the most
fiendish criminal mind the world has ever known," but, after all, a fictional
character safely on the wrong side of society's pale; it is the intelligence
agency complex of the United States.
Oh yes, Baker Street Irregulars, know how you feel –
you with your Inverness capes, sleuth caps, and meerschaum pipes, as you slouch
through a world of fantasy – but can you guess how I feel? With a
whole new unwritten library of mystery stories before me in the person of a
lively, charming, lovable mother of four, who currently shares a rambling,
casual, suburban home with two daughters, two kittens, a rabbit, and a blond
cocker spaniel? A potential shelf of contemporary history books that I myself
may help to write? I feel lucky.
Mae thinks back to what her life was like
before she began her research, and laughs. "Did you ever see a movie
called The Garden of the Finzi-Continis? It's about a wealthy Jewish
family living in Italy during the emergence of Fascism. We weren't quite that
wealthy; let's say we were 'comfortable.' My activities were centered around my
husband, our children, and our home. I was also reading the newspapers,
watching the cold war: the Rosenberg case, and the Alger Hiss case. I was
watching Nixon. "I had a strong philosophy about raising children
before I began studying political assassinations. The two are related. You
can't make the world safe while you are raising a bunch of mad
bombers.
"I went to Stanford University and got married
a few weeks before graduation. I majored in philosophy. We studied Plato,
Nietzsche, Emerson, and Thoreau – yet the professors didn't seem to understand
anything about real life. Those were the war years, 1940 to 1943. Hitler was
raising a holocaust all over Europe – but we were upper middle-class children,
so we studied medieval history. We spent a lot of time learning to distinguish
between Rembrandt, Degas, and Picasso. It was as if the world outside didn't
exist.
"Before that? I grew up in Beverly Hills and went to
Beverly High. We sat around swimming pools with movie stars' kids, played
backgammon, and went to polo games. All of a sudden, there was Hitler, killing
Jews. My father is a rabbi, but we never discussed Jewishness until after
Hitler was gone. Like most cultural groups in the United States, we were never
encouraged to respect our own cultural heritage. Yet the Jews have made many
important contributions.
"People sometimes wonder how an ordinary
housewife like me could get so interested in the John F. Kennedy assassination.
But nothing just happens. There has to be a time when you begin to think and
feel – an emotional climate of caring about people, a nurturing place where you
give a damn. If you repress your children, slap them, ignore them, dump them in
front of the TV, go away and leave them with strangers, you are not nurturing
them to be sympathetic to other people. That's where my head was when Kennedy
was assassinated. I was worried about my children and what sort of society we
were living in where this murder could take place.
"I didn't believe the official reports, because there
were too many discrepancies. I was taking the morning and evening papers then;
I also had a number of magazine subscriptions. I clipped and saved articles
from the day Kennedy died. Gradually, I increased my newspaper subscriptions to
include such papers as the New York Times and the Washington
Post. Now I take eight newspapers a day. I get a better perspective on
what is happening all over the country. Stories that are left out of one paper
often get into another one.
"In September, 1964, the Warren Commission Report came
out, and I read it very carefully. Lee Harvey Oswald interested me.
Twenty-three adjectives were used to describe him in the Warren Report. They
said he had no friends, no meaningful relationships, couldn't hold a job, and
so on. But the evidence all pointed in the opposite direction. So I bought the
twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission hearings and began studying
them.
"My husband never tried to discourage me; in many ways,
he helped me. I could have any book or magazine subscription that I wanted. But
my new interest in political assassinations definitely drove a wedge into our
marriage. He couldn't see why it was so important to know who murdered John F.
Kennedy. And I think most men would begin to resent the time I withdrew from
entertaining our friends and devoted instead to what became serious, full-time
research. We were divorced four years ago.
"I had gone through a drastic role change. But people
do change partners today, when their interests change. If your mind
leads you to follow a new belief, and your mate goes with you, that is
beautiful. Otherwise, you need the courage to go it alone, or you will meet
someone who is on the same trip, and so you continue on that trip with
him.
"The people I admired most were Frank Lloyd
Wright, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, Emerson, and Thoreau.
They cared about people – how they live, and how they relate to each other.
They were calm and placid; they served humanity, and they tried to turn people
on to the truth."
"It seems like a long jump from philosophy to
the Warren Commission hearings," I said.
Mae nodded. "Yes, but it's a question of
survival. I studied the hearings for two years. And I perceived a
certain way of questioning witnesses, so that they never got to the point. It
is the same technique that was used in the Watergate hearings: you don't push
too hard, because you might elicit something that you don't want others to
know.
"Albert Jenner was on the Warren Commission, and he is
now busy helping as Nixon's counsel on impeachment procedures. Other members of
the Warren Commission team that covered up the JFK assassination conspiracy ten
years ago are in power now.
"I developed a cross-filing system, which grew as I
went through the twenty-six volumes of testimony. I personally believe the JFK
assassination was an intelligence operation, and that Oswald was a government
agent. I'd like to do a book on Oswald, showing how our society can
take a person into military service, train him, set him loose, and use him –
then turn its back, lock him up, or kill him when he has done his
work. Oswald was expendable; he was a 'throw-away person.' If you care
for my view, he was framed, defamed, and then murdered.
"I will do another book called Decoy into
Patsy, about Oswald, and Arthur Bremer, the alleged would-be assassin of
George Wallace; and Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Charles Manson, and Juan
Corona. All of these are political assassinations, conspiracies. Would you
accept the supposition that they all follow similar patterns? Once you have
solved the first one, it is easy to figure out the others. The most
difficult thing for people to understand is the use of the prison system to
bury the living human evidence of political conspiracies. Yet once the concept
is understood, it provides the key to unlock every case.
"Even though there is a wide pattern of
conspiracies, it doesn't involve a large number of people. Fewer than one half
of one percent of the population is involved. The biggest problem for the
researcher is that the average person can't even conceive of the possibility of
conspiracies. But if enough people realized the truth, they could end the
devastating process that has kept us constantly at war to protect the financial
interests of a small group of people. It has driven 50,000 of our
young men into permanent exile and killed another 50,000 American soldiers, as
well as countless thousands of innocent people in other countries. It has
ruined our economy, and is now leading inevitably to a bloodbath in our own
country."
I asked whether she thought Nixon's tape transcripts
would have some effect on people's thinking.
"Of course. They follow the same pattern as the Warren
Commission hearings. Evidence has been chopped up, destroyed, deleted,
shredded, or deep-sixed. This is what they did with JFK's autopsy. X-rays were
never developed, the original autopsy papers were burned, the car interior was
destroyed immediately, and JFK's brain was hidden away so that researchers
couldn't find out about the bullets. Remember Sally Harmony and her shredding
machine, L. Patrick Gray destroying the contents of Howard Hunt's desk, and
Mrs. James McCord burning typewriter ribbons from the White House while a
C.I.A. agent stood 'innocently' by? The only reason you destroy these things is
to hide the fact that you have done something illegal. For the guilty, the
crime of destroying evidence is less serious than the crime you are
hiding."
"It seems difficult for many people to take
what you are saying seriously," I ventured.
She laughed again. "There are many reasons why
people won't examine these questions. Some people feel they lack the capacity
to understand what is happening. Others believe they are just doing their job
and don't want to get involved. Another group fear they would be in danger.
They don't realize that whether they like it or not, America could be like
Vietnam for the next ten years. An elite group feels that changing the system
might be bad for their profits.
"But while there may be little profit in
investigative work, there is no poverty in it. I can go out and
lecture on what I have learned about conspiracies. Woodward and Bernstein won a
Pulitzer Prize for taking a position against the whole administration. There is
money in truth these days, although for years, you couldn't give it away.
I think people are hungry for truth, and bored with
lies."
I asked whether she had any suggestions for women who
might want to get more involved themselves, but didn't know where to
start.
"A woman could start with her morning paper, like I
did. She has to throw away the programmed assumption that because she is a
woman, she can't figure things out. She could learn more about the things that
interest her, write to her congressmen, and correspond with prisoners.
It is up to women to force society to change, because the men aren't
doing it.
"I began with one book and gradually built up a
collection of information so comprehensive that people come from all over the
world to see it. And I am not endowed with any special brains. I just sat back
and asked myself, 'What is life about? And what do I want out of my life?' What
I want is to know the truth about the world my children and I live
in."