June 17, 2010How Gloria Steinem's CIA Role Was Censored
FLASHBACK TO 1976
by Nancy Borman
Reprinted from the Village Voice May 21, 1979, pp. 117-122. Abridged by Henry Makow
At Random House on March 15, 1976, "Feminist Revolution" was just another women's book in production. It consisted of a multifaceted analysis of the women's liberation movement edited by members of Redstockings, an early radical feminist group. A self-published edition released the previous fall had stirred up controversy with its indictment of liberals, lesbian pseudo-leftists, and foundation grant feminists. 5000 copies had sold out.
Part of the book-some say the most interesting part-was titled "Agents, Opportunists and Fools." It attempted to link the CIA and the corporate establishment to several individuals and institutions connected with Ms. Magazine... Feminist Revolution had passed an initial libel reading by Random House's legal department on March 2nd, and a contract was signed in the office that March morning. 20,000 copies of the book were scheduled to hit the stores in June.
That afternoon, an unannounced visitor appeared in the citadel of the free press. A presumably angry Gloria Steinem asked to see Random House president Robert Bernstein. She was there to hand-deliver a letter from her attorney threatening to sue for libel unless the chapter on the CIA was removed from the book.
No one knows what Steinem and Bernstein said in their private meeting, and it may have been just coincidence that, within weeks Random House was blitzed with similar threats from other people and groups mentioned in the CIA chapter: Clay Felker, Women's Action AlIiance, Warner Communications, Franklin Thomas, the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, and Katherine Graham.
But, in any case, publication of Feminist Revolution was delayed nearly 3 years; the printing run was cut to 12,500, despite 13,000 advance orders; and when the book was finally released last month, the chapter on Gloria Steinem and the CIA had been deleted in its entirety. Somehow, the word "abridged" on the cover fails to answer the question: What happened?
CENSORED
On March 21st, of this year, 6 weeks after Feminist Revolution was finally published, 5 members of Redstockings held a press conference to argue that their book would be better described as "censored." Katie Sarachild, Colette Price, Carol Hanisch, Sherry Lipsky, and Jane Barry said that at first they had been astonished that Random House caved into pressure to ax the chapter.
But they also laid the blame on Steinem and her associates for using "libel" claims to stifle debate within the women's movement and to suppress embarrassing information about themselves. Price pointed out that the Zenger trial, which launched the American tradition of freedom of the press, was a libel case.
The near-total blackout on the Steinem/Random House censorship story is reminiscent of the level of enthusiasm Redstockings encountered when they first tried to get coverage for the story of Steinem and the CIA.
Their 16-page tabloid "press release" charging that Steinem had covered up a 10-year association with the CIA and that Ms. magazine, which she had founded, was endangering the women's liberation movement struck the 1975 MORE conference like a new war coming over the wire. The hotel was abuzz and people snatched up the releases, but when it came to actually writing the story, nearly everyone bowed out.
One reporter criticized the women for not obtaining Steinem's side of the story before publishing the release. Others skimmed the
material and dismissed it as old news, which was partially true. Still others
thought it was McCarthyistic both in tone and casual conclusions.
In 1967 both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts' expose of CIA funding of the National Student Association and other organizations. Steinem was the founder and director of one of those groups, Independent Research Service, for which she had solicited and obtained CIA money to carry out covert operations at Communist youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. Unlike most of the other principals in the scandal, who had repudiated their past work with the agency and turned over information to the press, Steinem defended her secret deal with the CIA, calling the undermining of the youth festivals "the CIA's finest hour."
Random House first learned of Feminist Revolution in January 1976, when Betty Friedan mentioned it to her editor James Silberman, also Random House vice president, publisher, and editor-in-chief. Random House eagerly bought the manuscript, offering the authors a $12,000 advance and a June publication date, pending the outcome of a libel reading by an outside law firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
Of the lawyers' few objections, the only one that involved the chapters on the CIA was Redstockings' charge that a particular police agent had conceived of and pushed black community activists into a conspiracy to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Redstockings submitted further documentation on each point and no further issue was taken with any part of the book before the contract was signed on March 15. An editorial fact sheet was drawn up for the company's sales conference confirming the June 1976 pub date, and on March 18 the authors were paid half of their advance...
MS MAGAZINE FUNDED BY CIA
Without anyone saying how they had heard about the book, or specifically what they felt should be changed, a flurry of letters arrived at Random House from some of the city's most powerful law firms on behalf of several people and groups involved in the Steinem/CIA chapter.
*Women's Action AlIiance, a tax-exempt information-gathering organization founded by Gloria Steinem in 1971. WAA's attorney, Jeanne Drewson, of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, said in her letter that permission to reprint a WAA form letter was denied, "to preserve any rights of the Alliance or persons associated with the Alliance to pursue their legal remedies for defamation and libel arising out of the publication of Feminist Revolution."
Although Drewson was pressed for specifics by Random House general counsel Gerald Hollingsworth, there seems to be no record of any further details.
*Clay Felker then publisher of New York magazine. Felker, too, had attended the World Youth Festival in Helsinki and had edited the Independent Research Service's Helsinki Youth News, a CIA-funded daily newspaper. Felker claimed that he did not know about the CIA funding of the newspaper at the time, but as he told the Daily News, in 1975: "it was my understanding that this was an anti-Communist effort. I was an anti-Communist and I remain an anti-Communist today."
Felker's attorney, E. Douglas Hamilton of Hall, McNicol, Marett and Hamilton, wrote to Hollingsworth, warning that "the essence of the charge in the article is that Mr. Felker and his magazine [New York] were working for the CIA," and that this is "false and libelous." He says now he dropped the correspondence because he only meant to convey that the material about Felker was "exaggerated."
*Ms. magazine, founded by Steinem and others. Ms, was criticized in the Steinem/CIA chapter for having "substituted itself" for the "original,
authentic activists" of the women's liberation movement, and for pushing an
alternative to radicalism, Nancy Wechsler of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst
represented both Ms. and Steinem in their dealings with Random House.
*Warner Communications, which invested $1 million in Ms. (virtually 100% of the capital although they took only 25% of the stock). Redstockings cited the Warner deal as an example of the "curious financing" of Ms. Warner was also represented by Paul, Weiss. Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.
*Franklin Thomas, a board member of Women's Action Alliance (and recently named president of the Ford Foundation). Redstockings pointed out that he was the same Franklin Thomas who participated in the prosecution of the notorious Statue of Liberty bombing conspiracy case in 1975 that sent three black activists to prison. Thomas, who is also black, now says that he had nothing to do with the investigation of the case, and that he would not have authorized the threat of suit. He also says he doesn't remember how he learned about the book, but as Steinem's frequent social escort, it would not have been difficult for him to find out.
*The Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, which conducts international seminars for women in Asia and Latin America. OEF was identified in a 1975 article in Counterspy as allegedly helping the CIA obtain dossiers on individuals and women's groups in those regions. They issued a denial at the time. Redstockings used information from the Counterspy story to show the CIA's interest in the international women's movement, without reporting in the book OEF's denial. Hollingsworth talked to Marilyn Richards in the OEF office in Washington, D.C., to try to pin down what parts of the book the fund considered libelous. According to the correspondence files released to Redstockings by Steinmetz, no libel specifics were ever made.
*Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek, described on a cover of Ms. in 1974 as "the most powerful woman in America." Feminist Revolution brought up the $20,000 she had initially invested in Ms. to support their contention that Steinem was installed as a spokesperson of the women's movement by the "rich and powerful." Graham sent off a note to Bernstein, which was characterized by a Random House spokesperson as "personal." ....
OVERTHROW JULY 1979
It is noteworthy that at the first American Writer's Congress at the end of
1981, ex-CIA operative Gloria Steinem was prominent on the dais; that all
present nodded affirmatively at her threats of libel suits against those who'd
questioned the propriety of a leading feminist spokesperson having so
notorious and open a CIA background; and that not a single writer present rose to speak up for the Redstockings point-of-view.
It was as if the very possibility of a critical alternative on the Left had
been erased, obliterated by four years of Carter. First by enlisting the
Left's acquiescence during the '76 campaign, then by offering clemency and indicting a few token FBI agents, Carter's centrist strategy concluded
startling political penetration of the Left which split WUO, Prairie Fire,
their entire following.
The majority were induced to 'lay down their arms,' to
refrain from 'counterproductive' agitation in hope of future reforms by a
visibly unsympathetic administration. Significantly, before 1977 was out, 5
members of the "R.C." (anti-'Inversion') faction of Prairie Fire/WUO
(including Clayton Von Lydegraf and cadres in in Houston and L.A., were
arrested during the government-sponsored Houston International Women's
Conference for plotting to blow up the house of L.A. State Sen. Briggs,
sponsor of the Calif. anti-gay initiative.
----
Related- Gloria Steinem- How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society
Gloria Steinem:
How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society
March 18, 2002
by Henry Makow Ph.D.
"In the 1960's, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."
Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.
Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970's by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950's and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In "The Cultural Cold War," Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
The CIA's "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950's," writes Deborah Davis, in her book "Katherine the Great," the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."
I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent's generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60's drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950's the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.
According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA's use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980's, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.
I won't attempt to analyze the CIA's motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don't realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.
Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.
Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.
Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes." This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O'Donnell are advanced as role models.
All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.
Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.
Women's oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950's importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father's income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.
Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.
Posts
