Outline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Production_Board

Soviet intelligence penetrated the War Production Board, including several members of the Perlo group and its head Victor Perlo. The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy in 1995 referred to this as a serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union, with considerable assistance from an enemy within. The head of the Silvermaster group, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster also penetrated the agency. The following list are American citizens who were engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union while working for the War Production Board. Its code name as deciphered in the Venona project is the "Depot".

Edward Fitzgerald

Harold Glasser

Harry Magdoff, Chief of the Control Records Section of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management

Victor Perlo, Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board

William Remington

Nathan Gregory Silvermaster

The Venona Project was initiated in 1943, under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. Clarke.^[1] Clarke distrusted Joseph Stalin, and feared that the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace with the Third Reich, allowing Germany to focus its military forces against Great Britain and the United States. Code-breakers of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service (commonly called Arlington Hall) analyzed encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic intelligence message intercepted in large volumes during and immediately after World War II by American, British and Australian listening posts.^[2]

This traffic, some of which was encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets—reusing pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages, some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis.

It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock, working on Soviet "Trade" traffic (so called because these messages dealt with Soviet trade issues), who first discovered that the Soviets were reusing pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of Trade traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process.

The decrypted messages gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage^[5] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.^[6] Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and Donald Maclean, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services,^[7] and even the White House.
The decrypts show that the U.S. and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Alger Hiss; Harry Dexter White,^[8] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,^[9] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,^[10] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services.

The identification of individuals mentioned in Venona transcripts is sometimes problematic, since people with a "covert relationship" with Soviet intelligence are referenced by code names.^[11] Further complicating matters is the fact that the same person sometimes had different code names at different times, and the same code name was sometimes reused for different individuals. In some cases, notably that of Alger Hiss, the matching of a Venona code name to an individual is disputed. In many other cases, a Venona code name has not yet been linked to any person. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the Venona transcripts identify approximately 349 Americans who they claim had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence, though less than half of these have been matched to real-name identities.^[12]

The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies.^[13] Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Office of War Information, included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees. In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage.^[14]

According to the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the complicity of both Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White is settled by Venona.^[15]^[16] In his 1998 book, Senator Moynihan expresses certainty about Hiss's identification by Venona as a Soviet spy, writing "Hiss was indeed a Soviet agent and appears to have been regarded by Moscow as its most important."^[17] However, some current authors consider the Venona evidence on Hiss to be inconclusive.^[18]

For much of its history, knowledge of Venona was restricted even from the highest levels of government. Senior Army officers, in consultation with the FBI and CIA made the decision to restrict knowledge of Venona within the government (even the CIA was not made an active partner until 1952). Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, concerned about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project. The president received the substance of the material only through FBI, Justice Department and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. He was not told the material came from decoded Soviet ciphers. To some degree this secrecy was counter-productive; Truman was distrustful of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, and suspected the reports were exaggerated for political purposes.

The dearth of reliable information available to the public—or even to the President and Congress—may have helped to polarize debates of the 1950s over the extent and danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. Anti-Communists suspected that many spies remained at large, perhaps including some that were known to the government. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose communists felt that these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Public access—or broader governmental access—to the Venona evidence would certainly have affected this debate, as it is affecting the retrospective debate among historians and others now. As the Moynihan Commission wrote in its final report:

"A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the Venona messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying."

(Note: See 1954 - Cox-Reese Commission hearings on un-American activities of tax-exempt foundations - "just doing what the government told them to do).

KGB Archives
Perlo Group

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlo_group

Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in Haunted Wood, a book written from an examination of KGB Archives in Moscow, report the KGB credits the Perlo group members with having sent, among other items, the following 1945 U.S. Government documents to Moscow:

February

Contents of a WPB memo dealing with apportionment of aircraft to the USSR in the event of war on Japan;
WPB discussion of the produciton policy regarding war materials at an Executive Committee meeting;
Documents on future territorial planning for commoditiies in short supply;
Documents on a priority system for foreign orders for producing goods in the United States after the end of the war in Europe;
Documents on trade policy and trade controls after the war;
Documents on arms production in the United States in January 1945;

After November’s elections, Senator John McCain, former Congressman Dick Armey and others called for a return to the principles and policies of Ronald Reagan. At the time these policies were first advanced, many observers believed they constituted a revolution. But how did Reagan himself come to these views and where did he learn to translate them from one man’s vision into governmental policies and acts?

In my book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism, I trace Reagan’s evolution from liberal to conservative, from actor to politician. The changes took place during the time when he served as host of the General Electric Theater on television. His contract also called for him to spend a quarter of his eight years (1954-1962) with the company touring the forty states and 139 plants of GE’s far-flung decentralized corporate domain, addressing 250,000 employees and their neighbors.

When he joined GE in 1954, Reagan was a Democrat and a self-described “New Dealer to the core.” One of the early photos in the book shows him at the White House – the Truman White House -- where he was thanked by the president for his strong support in the 1948 election. He had been a leader and organizer of California’s “Labor for Truman.” He was then serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, which opposed “Right-to-Work” laws. Two years later, he supported Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U. S. Senate contest against Republican Richard Nixon. In 1952, he backed the Republican candidate for president, but as a Democrat for Eisenhower.

As one of Reagan’s “traveling aides” pointed out, “This was the period that brought into being Lemuel Ricketts Boulware.” When the nation was paralyzed by a seventeen-week strike in 1946, in which almost all of the country’s corporations were brought to their knees, the 16,000 workers who produced annual revenues of $150 million for the GE subsidiaries which did not use the corporation’s name (e.g. Hotpoint and Carboloy), did not go on strike at all. They were managed by GE vice president Boulware. As a result, Boulware was placed in charge of all of GE’s labor, public and community relations.

In 1947, flushed with success of the national strike, Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers, proclaimed that “unions can no longer operate as narrow pressure groups concerned with their own selfish interests.” Trade unionism, he maintained, must now “lead the fight for the welfare of the whole community.” The gauntlet was down, and Lemuel Boulware issued a response. He saw a great gulf between the political ambitions of union officials and the economic interests of their members. This was a crucial contest, with “our free market and our free persons” at stake. But before battle could be joined, “every citizen had to go back to school on economics individually … to learn from simple text books … to study until we understand” our democracy and our free market system. In his call to arms, Boulware was describing what became the education of Ronald Reagan.

Boulware believed in “going over the heads of the union leaders” directly to the employees. He did this primarily through four publications and a series of book clubs. He also created a new position, Employee Relations Manager, and 3,000 of them joined with 12,000 supervisors to bring the company’s message home. The ERMs used skills that the company had developed in the manufacture and sale of its products to win the hearts and minds of its workers. Boulware called this “job marketing.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schwarz_Strauss
...In the wake of this defeat, Strauss was elected Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Although emboldened by their success in the Congressional elections of 1974, the Democrats had no obvious front-runner for the presidential nomination in 1976. While remaining studiously neutral in the struggle for the nomination, Strauss carefully rebuilt the party's finances and planned a tightly disciplined national convention in New York City to erase memories of the chaotic gatherings of 1968 and 1972. By the time the Democrats met at Madison Square Garden, the nomination had been secured by an unexpected candidate, former Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter.

Strauss returned to his law firm's thriving Washington office. His experience as Trade Representative made him a sought after expert on international trade matters.

Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, was to face difficulties of his own. His efforts to resolve another hostage situation led to the Iran-Contra affair. Many of the President's supporters believed that the aggressive management style of his Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, was making matters worse, but the President remained loyal to his Chief of Staff and would not consider replacing him. The President's adviser, Michael Deaver, and First Lady Nancy Reagan made a discreet approach to an experienced outsider they believed might be able to persuade the President: Robert Strauss. Others had told the President what he wanted to hear, that the controversy would blow over and that Donald Regan was more useful than not. Robert Strauss, who had closely observed the workings of two other presidential administrations, told the President the painful truth, that Donald Regan had become a liability, and that the White House needed a Chief of Staff who could mend fences, especially with Congress. Among others, Strauss recommended former Senator Howard Baker, a Republican respected on both sides of the aisle for his competence and integrity. Reagan was visibly annoyed with Strauss's suggestions, but a few days later, Donald Regan submitted his resignation and the President appointed Howard Baker to replace him. Baker skillfully managed the President's recovery from the controversy, and President Reagan left office with his popularity restored.

Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W. Bush, won election to succeed him. The first President Bush also found need for the counsel of Strauss. In the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to reform the communist system and forge a new relationship with the United States. His efforts faced opposition from hard-liners within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while newly elected leaders in the Union's constituent republics agitated for more and more autonomy. President Bush appointed Strauss to serve as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, in hopes that Strauss's proven skills as a negotiator would ease the transition to a new era.

In August 1991, only weeks after a state visit by President Bush, conservative members of the Communist Party and a few high-ranking officers of the military and KGB attempted to seize power and restore the old dictatorship. The coup collapsed, but Gorbachev's leadership had been fatally injured. Strauss presented his credentials to President Gorbachev only hours after Gorbachev resigned his post as Chairman of the Communist Party. While Strauss served in Moscow, the first elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, emerged as the most powerful figure in the fragile union. With the agreement of the elected presidents of the other constituent republics, the USSR was officially dissolved and replaced by a loosely associated Commonwealth of Independent States.

In December, Gorbachev resigned the presidency of a super-state that had ceased to exist. Strauss was quickly re-appointed as Ambassador to the largest of the Soviet Union's successor states, the Russian Federation. With Strauss's assistance, President Yeltsin quickly established amicable relations with the United States. Strauss resigned this post shortly after the 1992 presidential election in the United States and returned once again to private law practice with Akin Gump.

Apart from his law practice and government service, Robert Strauss has long been a popular public speaker and lecturer, and has written on law, business and public affairs for professional journals, magazines and newspapers across the United States and abroad. He has served on the boards of major corporations including Xerox and the Archer Daniels Midland Company. In the academic world, he has occupied the Lloyd Bentsen Chair at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, where he lectured to students of law, business and public affairs. Now in his ninth decade, he serves as Chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Threads for Research How Communists Came to Control Our Government
1942 Roosevelt - War Production Board http://www.ndu.edu/inss/McNair/mcnair50/m50c6.html http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/179.html Roosevelt's Executive Order establishing the War Production Board on 16 January 1942, granted Nelson as Chairman broad powers: to exercise general direction over the war procurement and production programs, to determine policies, plans, procedures and methods of the several federal departments and agencies in regard to war production and procurement, to grant priorities for construction, and to allocate vital materials and production facilities. And while Nelson was the "Chairman" of the War Production Board, the rest of the board only existed to advise him. He could accept or reject its advice. (Note 45) Nothing in Nelson's charter indicates he was to be involved in grand strategy formulation. Nelson did not want to know anything about war plans. He limited himself to filling the materiel requests of those responsible for formulating grand strategy. If the services' plans called for a specified quantity of a system that industry could not produce, however, Nelson would inform the leaders. (Note 46) This board grew into a bureaucracy of 20,000 people(Note 47) and remained in existence through the war and even into the post-war period under another name (Civilian Production Administration). Although the media pronounced Nelson the "arms czar" and "dictator of the economy" and "the man who had to tackle the biggest job in all history" the organization was superseded in 16 months when its authority was severely diluted by the creation of the Office of War Mobilization. Roosevelt did not give Nelson the support he needed to succeed, Nelson was not strong enough to demand both the president's support and noninterference from competing agencies (especially the Army and Navy), and he refused to seize all of the levers of power he needed in order to flourish. (Note 48)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Production_Board Soviet intelligence penetrated the War Production Board, including several members of the Perlo group and its head Victor Perlo. The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy in 1995 referred to this as a serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union, with considerable assistance from an enemy within. The head of the Silvermaster group, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster also penetrated the agency. The following list are American citizens who were engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union while working for the War Production Board. Its code name as deciphered in the Venona project is the "Depot". Edward Fitzgerald Harold Glasser Harry Magdoff, Chief of the Control Records Section of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management Victor Perlo, Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board William Remington Nathan Gregory Silvermaster
Venona Project (add to Operation Paperclip) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project The Venona Project was initiated in 1943, under orders from the deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (G-2), Carter W. Clarke.^[1] Clarke distrusted Joseph Stalin, and feared that the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace with the Third Reich, allowing Germany to focus its military forces against Great Britain and the United States. Code-breakers of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service (commonly called Arlington Hall) analyzed encrypted high-level Soviet diplomatic intelligence message intercepted in large volumes during and immediately after World War II by American, British and Australian listening posts.^[2] This traffic, some of which was encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets—reusing pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other messages, some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis. It was Arlington Hall's Lt. Richard Hallock, working on Soviet "Trade" traffic (so called because these messages dealt with Soviet trade issues), who first discovered that the Soviets were reusing pages. Hallock and his colleagues (including Genevieve Feinstein, Cecil Phillips, Frank Lewis, Frank Wanat, and Lucille Campbell) went on to break into a significant amount of Trade traffic, recovering many one-time pad additive key tables in the process. The decrypted messages gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage^[5] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.^[6] Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May and Donald Maclean, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services,^[7] and even the White House. The decrypts show that the U.S. and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Alger Hiss; Harry Dexter White,^[8] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,^[9] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,^[10] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. The identification of individuals mentioned in Venona transcripts is sometimes problematic, since people with a "covert relationship" with Soviet intelligence are referenced by code names.^[11] Further complicating matters is the fact that the same person sometimes had different code names at different times, and the same code name was sometimes reused for different individuals. In some cases, notably that of Alger Hiss, the matching of a Venona code name to an individual is disputed. In many other cases, a Venona code name has not yet been linked to any person. According to authors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the Venona transcripts identify approximately 349 Americans who they claim had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence, though less than half of these have been matched to real-name identities.^[12] The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies.^[13] Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Office of War Information, included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees. In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage.^[14] According to the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, the complicity of both Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White is settled by Venona.^[15]^[16] In his 1998 book, Senator Moynihan expresses certainty about Hiss's identification by Venona as a Soviet spy, writing "Hiss was indeed a Soviet agent and appears to have been regarded by Moscow as its most important."^[17] However, some current authors consider the Venona evidence on Hiss to be inconclusive.^[18] For much of its history, knowledge of Venona was restricted even from the highest levels of government. Senior Army officers, in consultation with the FBI and CIA made the decision to restrict knowledge of Venona within the government (even the CIA was not made an active partner until 1952). Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, concerned about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project. The president received the substance of the material only through FBI, Justice Department and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. He was not told the material came from decoded Soviet ciphers. To some degree this secrecy was counter-productive; Truman was distrustful of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, and suspected the reports were exaggerated for political purposes. The dearth of reliable information available to the public—or even to the President and Congress—may have helped to polarize debates of the 1950s over the extent and danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. Anti-Communists suspected that many spies remained at large, perhaps including some that were known to the government. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose communists felt that these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Public access—or broader governmental access—to the Venona evidence would certainly have affected this debate, as it is affecting the retrospective debate among historians and others now. As the Moynihan Commission wrote in its final report: "A balanced history of this period is now beginning to appear; the Venona messages will surely supply a great cache of facts to bring the matter to some closure. But at the time, the American Government, much less the American public, was confronted with possibilities and charges, at once baffling and terrifying." (Note: See 1954 - Cox-Reese Commission hearings on un-American activities of tax-exempt foundations - "just doing what the government told them to do).
KGB Archives Perlo Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlo_group Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in Haunted Wood, a book written from an examination of KGB Archives in Moscow, report the KGB credits the Perlo group members with having sent, among other items, the following 1945 U.S. Government documents to Moscow: February Contents of a WPB memo dealing with apportionment of aircraft to the USSR in the event of war on Japan; WPB discussion of the produciton policy regarding war materials at an Executive Committee meeting; Documents on future territorial planning for commoditiies in short supply; Documents on a priority system for foreign orders for producing goods in the United States after the end of the war in Europe; Documents on trade policy and trade controls after the war; Documents on arms production in the United States in January 1945; Victor Perlo, Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of Treasury; Brookings Institution Harry Magdoff, Statistical Division of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, United States Department of Commerce
Ronald Reagan http://www.uh.edu/hti/cu/2005/8/06.pdf During his Hollywood years, he became active in the Screen Actors’ Guild and served as president of the Hollywood local. In World War II he was assigned to a film production unit that made training films for the army. After the war, he continued his Guild activities. This was the era of investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into alleged Communist activity and attempts to insert Communist propaganda, messages and values into Hollywood films. Although Reagan did not give the committee names, there is evidence that he was an F.B.I. informer at this time (Edel 308). Eventually, he was too old to be convincing in the type of roles in which he had been cast and his movie career ended. He moved to television in 1954 and served as the host for the General Electric Theatre, a very popular hour-long drama series. This position led to his becoming a spokesman for the General Electric Company. In this capacity, Reagan had to travel to all the General Electric factories and speak to audiences both at the plants and in the towns and cities in which the facilities were located (Tygiel 73). In his appearances, he delivered a talk that stressed the importance of business. It is during this period that his move toward the Republican Party began. Other television appearances included acting in several episodes of Wagon Train and serving as host for the weekly series Death Valley Days (Tygiel 80). These last two programs gave him the opportunity to be associated with action programs, a genre in which he had been unsuccessful in Hollywood (Tygiel 67). The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023113/0231138601.HTM "If you believe, as Ronnie does, that everything happens for a purpose, then certainly there was a hidden purpose in Ronnie's job for General Electric." —Nancy Reagan, from My Turn, 1989 (her favorite color was red - became called "Reagan Red") "This work confronts directly the everlasting question about why Ronald Reagan shifted so abruptly from Hollywood liberal and union leader to General Electric spokesman and anti-union activist. I know of no work that explains that transition and its implication for conservative leadership in America more effectively. In short, a major contribution to Reagan scholarship and presidency analysis." —James MacGregor Burns Thomas W. Evans, a lawyer and avocational politician, has supervised a successful New Hampshire presidential primary and established a national citizens' campaign organization. He has served as adjunct professor of education and administration at Columbia University's Teachers College. He was chair of the Reagan administration's national symposium on partnerships in education and counsel to the Points of Light Foundation under George H.W. Bush. Reaganomics Revealed http://www.american.com/archive/2007/february-0207/how-reagan-became-conservative ... businessmen were in poor repute for being greedy and ruthless. Unions were newly empowered by a combination of ardent socialist and communist leaders. Strikes were frequent and damaging. GE itself suffered a major strike in 1946. Surprisingly, none of the seven GE units Boulware was supervising at that time struck. Boulware then became GE’s vice president for employee and community relations. More than simply a shrewd executive, he brought with him a masterful and comprehensive approach to his job. Boulware's approach was to treat his workers as customers rather than simply as strike-threatening workers who were pawns of their union leaders. Communications about the company and economics education became a permanent, intelligent, and intensive campaign, directed not only toward the employees but also to their spouses and the community leaders who might affect the corporate climate. (Note: What's good for the company is good for you - this message persists in the public's mind even as our economy is being crushed by these multinational corporations.) The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism http://hnn.us/articles/32681.html http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev011907a.cfm streaming audio After November’s elections, Senator John McCain, former Congressman Dick Armey and others called for a return to the principles and policies of Ronald Reagan. At the time these policies were first advanced, many observers believed they constituted a revolution. But how did Reagan himself come to these views and where did he learn to translate them from one man’s vision into governmental policies and acts? In my book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism, I trace Reagan’s evolution from liberal to conservative, from actor to politician. The changes took place during the time when he served as host of the General Electric Theater on television. His contract also called for him to spend a quarter of his eight years (1954-1962) with the company touring the forty states and 139 plants of GE’s far-flung decentralized corporate domain, addressing 250,000 employees and their neighbors. When he joined GE in 1954, Reagan was a Democrat and a self-described “New Dealer to the core.” One of the early photos in the book shows him at the White House – the Truman White House -- where he was thanked by the president for his strong support in the 1948 election. He had been a leader and organizer of California’s “Labor for Truman.” He was then serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, which opposed “Right-to-Work” laws. Two years later, he supported Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U. S. Senate contest against Republican Richard Nixon. In 1952, he backed the Republican candidate for president, but as a Democrat for Eisenhower. As one of Reagan’s “traveling aides” pointed out, “This was the period that brought into being Lemuel Ricketts Boulware.” When the nation was paralyzed by a seventeen-week strike in 1946, in which almost all of the country’s corporations were brought to their knees, the 16,000 workers who produced annual revenues of $150 million for the GE subsidiaries which did not use the corporation’s name (e.g. Hotpoint and Carboloy), did not go on strike at all. They were managed by GE vice president Boulware. As a result, Boulware was placed in charge of all of GE’s labor, public and community relations. In 1947, flushed with success of the national strike, Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers, proclaimed that “unions can no longer operate as narrow pressure groups concerned with their own selfish interests.” Trade unionism, he maintained, must now “lead the fight for the welfare of the whole community.” The gauntlet was down, and Lemuel Boulware issued a response. He saw a great gulf between the political ambitions of union officials and the economic interests of their members. This was a crucial contest, with “our free market and our free persons” at stake. But before battle could be joined, “every citizen had to go back to school on economics individually … to learn from simple text books … to study until we understand” our democracy and our free market system. In his call to arms, Boulware was describing what became the education of Ronald Reagan. Boulware believed in “going over the heads of the union leaders” directly to the employees. He did this primarily through four publications and a series of book clubs. He also created a new position, Employee Relations Manager, and 3,000 of them joined with 12,000 supervisors to bring the company’s message home. The ERMs used skills that the company had developed in the manufacture and sale of its products to win the hearts and minds of its workers. Boulware called this “job marketing.” Two of the publications that emanated from Boulware’s operation were distributed weekly: one went into the local plant papers, side by side with bowling league results and coverage of the Miss GE competition, designed for consumption by GE’s blue collar workers; the other weekly was a newsletter to GE supervisors and to local “thought leaders,” who could influence municipal and state elections. A slick monthly magazine often tied Reagan’s GE Theater news to ideological messages. And a defense quarterly, featuring GE’s efforts in the field, was enhanced by commentary from leading experts (e.g. well-known academics and occasional Cabinet officials) on military and geopolitical matters.The evidence is compelling that Reagan read all of these. The frequent question periods after his talks with GE workers insured that he would be asked about them. They influenced his foreign policy as well as his domestic views. An article in the defense quarterly presaged the Reagan Doctrine and contains the earliest mention of what later became the strategic defense initiative. (Note: Evans in a prepared talk on his book to the Heritage Foundation said that the article was one written by Robert Strauss, QE Quarterly, January 1963 and that it became the Reagan Doctrine.) Boulware - War Production Board - Reagan's Mentor http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009499 Thomas W. Evans, a lawyer who served in the Reagan administration, has composed an elegant history of Reagan's "studies" with General Electric. Much of "The Education of Ronald Reagan" is devoted to rediscovering Lemuel Boulware, Reagan's mentor at GE and the dynamo behind both the company's PR efforts and its labor-negotiation policy. Boulware believed that at the start of contract talks, GE should make an offer it viewed as fair to stockholders, workers and customers and then stick with it, allowing for almost no changes. This "take it or leave it" approach was so successful (strikes became almost unknown at GE) that it entered the lexicon of labor relations as "Boulwarism." But Boulware, who had served his labor-relations apprenticeship as deputy director of the War Production Board in World War II, also believed that the policy would work only if executives went over the heads of union officials and educated the workers directly about why they had a stake in GE's prosperity. Mr. Evans notes that "a worker who learned that GE's profit margin was much smaller than he had been led to believe or that union officials had not been truthful with him" was unlikely to join a picket line or insist on over-the-top demands. Thanks to his outreach to workers, and his workers' surveys, Boulware was "reputed to understand blue collar workers better than anyone in the country." "Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left. While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another, they both march in the same direction." -- Paul Proctor
GE Quarterly, Robert Strauss - article January 1963 (per Thomas Evans) became Reagan Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schwarz_Strauss A high-powered Texas political figure, Strauss’s extensive political service dates back to future president Lyndon Johnson’s first congressional campaign in 1937. By the 1950s, he was closely associated in Texas politics with the conservative faction of the Democratic Party led by Johnson and John Connally. He served as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee between 1972 and 1977 and served under President Jimmy Carter as the U.S. Trade Representative and special envoy to the Middle East. Strauss was selected by President George H.W. Bush to be the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1991 and after the USSR's collapse, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1991 until 1993. Strauss has closely advised and represented U.S. presidents over three administrations and for both major U.S. political parties. His extensive business activities have included serving on the Texas Banking Commission and as Chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council. Among many awards and accolades, Strauss was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 2003 and was recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, on January 16, 1981. He is also a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and The Forum for International Policy, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security And Law http://www.robertstrausscenter.org/Press/2007_March20.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schwarz_Strauss ...In the wake of this defeat, Strauss was elected Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Although emboldened by their success in the Congressional elections of 1974, the Democrats had no obvious front-runner for the presidential nomination in 1976. While remaining studiously neutral in the struggle for the nomination, Strauss carefully rebuilt the party's finances and planned a tightly disciplined national convention in New York City to erase memories of the chaotic gatherings of 1968 and 1972. By the time the Democrats met at Madison Square Garden, the nomination had been secured by an unexpected candidate, former Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter.		Reagan & Strauss
Strauss expertly managed the convention. At the 1972 convention, party infighting had delayed candidate McGovern's acceptance speech until late at night, when the television audience had gone to sleep. Strauss made sure that Carter's acceptance speech ran in prime time, and the convention ended with a memorable tableau: the leaders of the party's opposing wings, conservative George Wallace and liberal George McGovern, flanking candidate Carter with clasped hands upraised. The Democrats entered the fall campaign united for the first time in years. Credit for this accomplishment was awarded to the Party's Chairman, Robert Strauss, and candidate Carter quickly asked Strauss to chair his election campaign as well. The national election was closely contested, but Carter emerged victorious. Strauss was acclaimed as a political kingmaker. After ascending to the presidency in 1977, President Carter named Strauss as U.S. Trade Representative. The position enjoyed cabinet level status, while allowing Strauss to apply his considerable negotiating skills to America's troubled relations with its trading partners. As Trade Representative, Strauss successfully completed the Tokyo Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, and secured the agreement's ratification by the United States Congress in the Trade Act of 1979. Strauss returned to his law firm's thriving Washington office. His experience as Trade Representative made him a sought after expert on international trade matters. Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, was to face difficulties of his own. His efforts to resolve another hostage situation led to the Iran-Contra affair. Many of the President's supporters believed that the aggressive management style of his Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, was making matters worse, but the President remained loyal to his Chief of Staff and would not consider replacing him. The President's adviser, Michael Deaver, and First Lady Nancy Reagan made a discreet approach to an experienced outsider they believed might be able to persuade the President: Robert Strauss. Others had told the President what he wanted to hear, that the controversy would blow over and that Donald Regan was more useful than not. Robert Strauss, who had closely observed the workings of two other presidential administrations, told the President the painful truth, that Donald Regan had become a liability, and that the White House needed a Chief of Staff who could mend fences, especially with Congress. Among others, Strauss recommended former Senator Howard Baker, a Republican respected on both sides of the aisle for his competence and integrity. Reagan was visibly annoyed with Strauss's suggestions, but a few days later, Donald Regan submitted his resignation and the President appointed Howard Baker to replace him. Baker skillfully managed the President's recovery from the controversy, and President Reagan left office with his popularity restored. Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W. Bush, won election to succeed him. The first President Bush also found need for the counsel of Strauss. In the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to reform the communist system and forge a new relationship with the United States. His efforts faced opposition from hard-liners within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while newly elected leaders in the Union's constituent republics agitated for more and more autonomy. President Bush appointed Strauss to serve as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, in hopes that Strauss's proven skills as a negotiator would ease the transition to a new era. In August 1991, only weeks after a state visit by President Bush, conservative members of the Communist Party and a few high-ranking officers of the military and KGB attempted to seize power and restore the old dictatorship. The coup collapsed, but Gorbachev's leadership had been fatally injured. Strauss presented his credentials to President Gorbachev only hours after Gorbachev resigned his post as Chairman of the Communist Party. While Strauss served in Moscow, the first elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, emerged as the most powerful figure in the fragile union. With the agreement of the elected presidents of the other constituent republics, the USSR was officially dissolved and replaced by a loosely associated Commonwealth of Independent States. In December, Gorbachev resigned the presidency of a super-state that had ceased to exist. Strauss was quickly re-appointed as Ambassador to the largest of the Soviet Union's successor states, the Russian Federation. With Strauss's assistance, President Yeltsin quickly established amicable relations with the United States. Strauss resigned this post shortly after the 1992 presidential election in the United States and returned once again to private law practice with Akin Gump. Apart from his law practice and government service, Robert Strauss has long been a popular public speaker and lecturer, and has written on law, business and public affairs for professional journals, magazines and newspapers across the United States and abroad. He has served on the boards of major corporations including Xerox and the Archer Daniels Midland Company. In the academic world, he has occupied the Lloyd Bentsen Chair at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, where he lectured to students of law, business and public affairs. Now in his ninth decade, he serves as Chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
1981 - U.S. Mexico Binational commission 1983 - La Paz Agreement 'Reagan's Vision - 'Free Trade Trojan Horse' http://www.channelingreality.com/News/free_trade_Trojan.htm Final Days: Everything Must Go http://www.channelingreality.com/News/final_days__everything_must_go.htm Public-Private Sell Out of America http://www.channelingreality.com/News/public_Private.htm Russian Connection http://www.channelingreality.com/The_Coup/cday_minus_20.htm Center for Strategic and International Studies - working on the North American Union since 1985. http://www.channelingreality.com/NAU/NA_Future_2025.pdf National Endowment for Democracy The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was launched in the early 1980s, http://www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.html Origins In the aftermath of World War II, faced with threats to our democratic allies and without any mechanism to channel political assistance, U.S. policy makers resorted to covert means, secretly sending advisers, equipment, and funds to support newspapers and parties under siege in Europe. When it was revealed in the late 1960's that some American PVO's were receiving covert funding from the CIA to wage the battle of ideas at international forums, the Johnson Administration concluded that such funding should cease, recommending establishment of "a public-private mechanism" to fund overseas activities openly. By the late 70's, there was an important model for democracy assistance: the German Federal Republic's party foundations, created after World War II to help rebuild Germany's democratic institutions destroyed a generation earlier by the Nazis. These foundations (known as "Stiftungen"), each aligned with one of the four German political parties, received funding from the West German treasury. In the 1960's they began assisting their ideological counterparts abroad, and by the mid-70's were playing an important role in both of the democratic transitions taking place on the Iberian Peninsula. Late in 1977, Washington political consultant George Agree, citing the important work being carried out by the Stiftungen, proposed creation of a foundation to promote communication and understanding between the two major U.S. political parties and other parties around the world. Headed by U.S. Trade Representative William Brock, a former Republican National Committee Chairman, and Charles Manatt, then serving as Democratic National Committee Chairman, by 1980 the American Political Foundation had established an office in Washington, D.C. from which it provided briefings, appointments, and other assistance to foreign party, parliamentary, and academic visitors to the U.S. Two years later, in one of his major foreign policy addresses, President Reagan proposed an initiative "to foster the infrastructure of democracy--the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities--which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means." He noted that the American Political Foundation would soon begin a study "to determine how the U.S. can best contribute--as a nation--to the global campaign for democracy now gathering force." Delivered to a packed Parliamentary chamber in Britain's Westminster Palace, the Reagan speech would prove to be one of the central contributions to the establishment of a U.S. democracy foundation. The American Political Foundation's study was funded by a $300,000 grant from the Agency for International Development(AID) and it became known as "The Democracy Program." Its executive board consisted of a broad cross-section of participants in American politics and foreign policy making. The Democracy Program recommended establishment of a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation to be known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The Endowment, though non-governmental, would be funded primarily through annual appropriations and subject to congressional oversight. NED, in turn, would act as a grant-making foundation, distributing funds to private organizations for the purpose of promoting democracy abroad. These private organizations would include those created by the two political parties and the business community, which would join the regional international institutes of the labor movement already in existence. "Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left. While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another, they both march in the same direction." -- Paul Proctor NED's four trojan horses -- four horseman of the apolypse - Chamber of Commerce, Unions, Republican Party, Democratic Party - to foment unrest and revolution around the world. NED's creation was soon followed by establishment of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and the National Republican Institute for International Affairs (later renamed the International Republican Institute or "IRI"), which joined the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI) as the four affiliated institutions of the Endowment. (FTUI was later reorganized as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, also known as the "Solidarity Center.") This structure had been recommended by the Democracy Program for three basic reasons: first, because of the wide recognition of the parent bodies of these new entities as national institutions with a public character, an important asset for this non-governmental foundation; second, because they represent sectors of political life fundamental to any strong democracy; and third, to insure political balance. The Endowment would serve as the umbrella organization through which these four groups and an expanding number of other private sector groups would receive funding to carry out programs abroad. For an example of how NED's programs benefit from a multisectoral approach the encompasses many different experts and approaches, see "Variety of actors, programs supports change in Indonesia."