American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (3 page)

Which doesn't solve whether Booth was intentionally silenced before he could stand trial—and possibly implicate some higher-ups beyond the Confederate fanatics. Back in 1937, an amateur historian named Otto Eisenschiml published
Why Was Lincoln Murdered?
, maintaining that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was involved in Lincoln's death. In more recent years,
The Lincoln Conspiracy
(1977) put forth a similar scenario.

For sure, Stanton hadn't started off as a big fan of Lincoln's. A year after the election, he'd spoken of “the painful imbecility” of the president. It's contended by a majority of historians that his contempt had eventually given way to respect and that Stanton became staunchly loyal and was always urging Lincoln to accept bodyguards. So, while a lot of the charges against Stanton don't seem to have a legitimate basis, from my reading it seems that some of them are worth considering.

First of all, to me, the planning of an assassination isn't going to be carried out by common everyday citizens who are unhappy with the rule of their country and take it upon themselves to change it. When you look at who killed Caesar, it was the Roman senators. If there is a conspiracy involved, it's going to include the highest levels. You always need to ask the question, who profits the most? I wouldn't rule out the Confederates, because you could understand the motive of revenge. Certainly the list of whom they'd most like to see die would be the people who directly led to their losing the war. But I tend to think there would also be some kind of help from the Union side. They can have ulterior motives, because politics is the name of the game. When you look at the two political parties today, they can be very cutthroat within their own ranks. Why would you expect anything different back then?

During the Civil War, Stanton was the second most important official in Washington—but somehow he wasn't included on Booth's target list. After the assassination, he not only made himself acting president but took charge of the investigation right away. “While others sat sobbing, he ordered a furious dragnet in which civil liberties were ignored and dozens of people were falsely arrested—none of whom had in any way aided the assassin.”
²⁰
In the wake of what had happened, that's not too surprising. What does raise my eyebrows is that, only a few hours after the assassination, seven names on Stanton's to-capture list were part of the earlier kidnap plots. Which leads you to conclude that the War Department must have had prior knowledge, at least about those.
²¹
And if they did, how come nobody had been arrested already?

Then there's the matter of Booth's diary. Yup, Oswald and Sirhan weren't the first assassins to set down their thoughts ahead of the deed. Booth's little red book was supposedly removed from his body after he was shot. The diary was taken to Washington and ended up in Stanton's custody, at which point it disappeared for awhile. When it was located in time for the conspirators' trial that summer, Lafayette Baker—the fellow who gave the diary, intact, to Stanton—said somebody had removed eighteen pages. Others who'd seen the diary testified that the pages had already gone missing when Stanton received it. But those were all underlings of Stanton's at the War Department.

With Nixon, we'd have the infamous eighteen-minute gap in the White House tapes that his secretary Rosemary Woods, “accidentally” erased. In the same vein, who could have “erased” those eighteen diary pages of Booth's? One story that surfaced about this came from a congressman, George W. Julian, who said that when he got summoned to the War Department ten days after the assassination, he discovered Stanton pacing back and forth and saying, “We have Booth's diary, and he has recorded a lot in it.” Julian claimed that Senator John Conness from California showed up and, as he was checking out the diary, started mumbling: “Oh my God, oh my God, I am ruined if this ever gets out!” Then, according to the congressman, Stanton issued instructions to put the diary in his safe.
²²

What's interesting is, Senator Conness was one of the so-called Radical Republicans, who wanted a much tougher Reconstruction policy toward the South than Lincoln was willing to go for. It was alleged that an envelope linking Conness to George Atzerodt, one of the conspirators, had been found in Atzerodt's room, but Stanton didn't choose to follow that up.
²³
When Stanton died on Christmas Eve, 1869, it's pretty likely that a lot of secrets went with him.

This much we know for certain: Eight Lincoln conspirators were found guilty before a military court on June 30, 1865, and four of them were hanged—Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt. She was the least directly involved of any of them, but she owned the boardinghouse and tavern where the conspirators gathered—and she knew enough to have alerted the authorities about what was up. Her son, John Surratt, was a different story. He'd been deeply involved with Booth in the kidnapping plot. At first Stanton offered a $25,000 reward for Surratt's capture but, after his mother's hanging, seems to have lost interest. Surratt got to Europe before the Vatican corralled him, but he escaped. Eventually he did get caught and came back to be tried in a civil court. But the government didn't have the evidence to convict him on a murder charge.

So where did Surratt end up? As a respected tobacco farmer in Maryland who earned extra money giving lectures and married the second cousin of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” Surratt lived to the merry old age of 74, when he died of pneumonia in 1916. He is said to have burned the manuscript of his autobiography a few days before that.
²⁴

One of the recent books has Booth portrayed as a rebel agent who, after Richmond fell, turned his thoughts from kidnapping to killing. A Confederate plot that went at least as high as their secretary of state, Judah Benjamin (who burned all his papers before he escaped to England and never returned), is today the most accepted of all the conspiratorial possibilities.
²⁵
The “lost confession” of Atzerodt, talking about Booth's knowledge of a Confederate plan to blow up the White House, was discovered in 1977 and bolsters that theory.
²⁶
Still, I wonder if it's a little too pat—kind of like the idea today that Castro had Kennedy assassinated in retaliation for the plots against him.

There are some other “out-there” theories, like Booth being a hired gun of big international bankers such as the Rothschilds, who didn't like the president's monetary policies. Or that the Vatican did it, because the totalitarian Popes considered Lincoln their enemy. If that piques your interest, you can try to find
Democracy Under Siege: The Jesuits' Attempt to Destroy the Popular Government of the United States: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln's Death
.
²⁷
(I didn't look into that one.)

Even if Booth's was the only smoking gun, we can safely say that the first presidential assassination in American history involved much more than first meets the eye. Almost a century and a half later, historians are still uncovering new evidence about the plot. Clearly, with the conviction of eight other coconspirators, who knows how far it went? That was just where the buck happened to stop.

Just like it did a hundred years later with Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.”

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

I would think that a coup to overthrow our government and turn us into a fascist state ought to make it into our history books. That way, we could read about it and hopefully learn from it, so that we don't live to repeat it. But this certainly wasn't taught in any public school curriculum that I saw. You learned about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Never did I hear about leaders of business during that era literally setting out to have a coup! I don't consider myself dumb or not well-read, but researching this book is the first I've come across this story. That was when I came across a book originally published in the Seventies called
The Plot to Seize the White House,
¹
by an investigative journalist named Jules Archer. Yet back in the 1930s, the plot had been fully documented in congressional hearings, although in the end they decided not to name certain names. It was also documented by some of the big media, even though they downplayed the whole thing.

I find it interesting that we do learn about some traitors in American history—Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr come to mind—but, once again, they're more of the “lone nut” variety. Rich and powerful titans of finance wouldn't stoop to such a thing, right? Well, if it hadn't been that they tried buying off the wrong man to be their puppet, quite possibly we'd have been living in a country not that far removed from Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy. That man was Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the great unsung heroes in our history—but he's not exactly a household name, is he?

A little background first: FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers. FDR went even further and started talking about raising their taxes to help pay for these programs. So the oligarchs of finance hated him and everything he stood for on behalf of the common man. They considered the new president a traitor to his own class, namely them. Within a year of FDR's taking office, they'd started hatching a plan to get rid of him.

The plotters' idea was to enlist a military man who was popular with veterans from the First World War. Many veterans were disgruntled because they'd never been paid the bonuses promised them when the war ended. When their “Bonus Army” protested by camping out in Washington in 1932, Smedley Butler had shown up to support their cause. He was the most decorated Marine in American history. And when another general, Douglas MacArthur, led a charge to destroy the veterans' tent city under orders from President Hoover, Butler got so pissed off that he switched parties and voted for FDR in the election that year.

But maybe the coup-makers didn't know that when they decided Butler was the man to lead their takeover of the government. Or maybe they figured that, with enough money and the temptation of running the country, anybody was corruptible. The idea was to create havoc by Major General Butler leading a veterans' march on Washington. Pressured by these events, FDR, so they thought, would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a Secretary of “General Affairs” or “General Welfare” (Homeland Security would have to wait awhile longer). Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and would become a ceremonial figurehead.

The whole notion seems pretty far-fetched today, especially given what we know about the integrity of Roosevelt through the Depression and World War II. Apparently though, the Wall Street group thought they could pull it off. But they sure didn't do enough homework on the military man they thought would play along, Smedley Butler. He'd grown up in a politically prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania, and gotten his baptism-under-fire with the Marines at Guantánamo during the Spanish-American War. During his distinguished service, he would come under fire more than 120 times and receive 18 decorations, including three Medals of Honor.

As a good soldier, Butler followed orders. The Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua, which he later admitted doing. In what was then called “dollar diplomacy,” Butler also helped American business interests maintain their hold on other Latin American countries. If that's all they knew about Butler, it's understandable that the conspirators against FDR might figure he'd play along.

But he'd given a speech to an American Legion convention, the year before FDR was elected, that clearly showed he'd had a change of heart. When the Legion first formed in the 1920s, most veterans had no clue that big corporations were backing it to use later in breaking strikes. It turned out that one of the Legion's main founders was Grayson Murphy, who ran one of Wall Street's big brokerage firms along with being director of a Morgan bank, Guaranty Trust. His name would soon surface as one of the financiers who wanted to remove FDR from power.

In his speech, Butler decided to give the Legion veterans some insight into how things worked.

“I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” Butler said. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

“In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.”

In another talk, Butler told veterans that war was “largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know—I've been in eleven of these expeditions.” Butler also told the vets not to believe “the propaganda [that] capital circulates” in the controlled press. In 1932, the year after he gave that speech, at the age of fifty, Butler retired to civilian life. He handed out maps to his house to Marines who'd served under him, in case they ever needed anything.

Butler speculated privately that the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Roosevelt a few weeks before his inauguration might have been orchestrated by a big-business cabal. Now members of that same elite circle decided that Butler, not MacArthur, was the military man best able to lead their coup attempt. One day, they had a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approach him. Butler quickly smelled a rat, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. Over the course of some months, Maguire courted him. His employer turned out to be Legion sponsor and financier Grayson Murphy.

There were some important people, MacGuire told Butler, who wanted to establish a new organization in the U.S. They had money, lots of it, $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million that could be tapped into. Butler realized the truth of this when some captains of industry came together and announced formation of a new American Liberty League in September 1934. The organization said its goals were “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews. Also two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John W. Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts). At first Butler couldn't believe even Smith could be involved, until he suddenly published a scathing attack on the New Deal.
²
(I guess you could say not a whole lot has changed with our two-party system.)

Butler had once served with a fellow named Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a wealthy banker. He now paid a visit and put forward more of the plan to Butler, who remembered Clark saying: “You know, the President is weak.... He was raised in this class, and he will come back.... But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does.” So Butler was their choice to lead the takeover.

I view Smedley Butler as someone who'd read the Constitution and followed the law. He didn't have to be in FDR's camp to realize that what he was being asked to do was wrong. FDR was the commander-in-chief of the country, and we have a system for how we exchange our leaders. That system is the vote and the election.

Butler brought a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn't be just his word against the plotters. Together they worked together on gathering more background. Around Thanksgiving in 1934, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives took Butler's testimony behind closed doors. The next day, the
New York Times
ran a two-column headline on the front page: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot' To Seize Government by Force.'” Butler was struck by how the paper played it. The gist of his charges was buried deep inside, while most of the article consisted of denials and outright ridicule from some of the prominent people he'd implicated.
Time
magazine followed up with a front-page piece headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” It caricatured Butler riding a white horse while asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said snidely. (Are we surprised that FDR started his “Fireside Chats” so he could go straight to the people, and over the heads of media barons like Luce and Hearst?)

The House committee went ahead and commenced a two-month-long investigation. It verified an $18,000 bribe offer to Butler, and came up with a number of other facts to verify his story. The VFW Commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he had
also
been approached by “agents of Wall Street” to lead a Fascist dictatorship. Even
Time
, which twelve weeks before had made fun of the plot idea, came out with a small-print “footnote” that the committee was “convinced ... that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.”

After that, though, the committee's investigation came to a sudden stop. They never called any of the big financiers for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committee's interview with Butler appeared, all the names he'd named were deleted. Some said that the names were omitted at the request of a member of FDR's cabinet, who didn't want to embarrass the two former Democratic presidential candidates that Butler identified. FDR never made any comment on the plot, so we can't know what he might have said behind closed doors. Maybe he figured, now that this was public knowledge, he didn't need to pursue it further. Maybe he dismissed the plan as a preposterous idea. For whatever reason, the Justice Department avoided any steps toward fuller investigation. That caused Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to issue an angry statement: “Not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime.” (Does this remind anyone of the current administration not wanting to prosecute the Bush people for their involvement in torture?)

When Jules Archer interviewed John McCormack in 1971, the former House Speaker claimed he couldn't remember why his committee had stayed away from implicating the bankers and corporate presidents. McCormack did say: “If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there's no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn't have told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did.... The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction. Mass frustration could bring about anything.”

Even though this happened more than 75 years ago, it's worth paying attention to where the plot came from—and how its would-be perpetrators haven't necessarily gone away but only taken on different faces. Let me start to explain that by telling you about a book called
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
. It was written by a Georgetown University professor named Carroll Quigley, a well-connected academic who had many friends and associates among the “elite” class. One of his students was Bill Clinton. In
Tragedy and Hope
, Quigley wrote: