Paul P. Kennedy, NY Times Foreign Correspondent Was Enigma, But Book May Shed Light on Republican Solution To Jobs

"Russia has very little that we would want to buy.....Same with China.  Even if we opened trade with Red China, I doubt that there would be much trade." - Illinois Senator Charles Percy citing the Rockefeller brothers penchant for long-range planning.  1958 interview with Mike Wallace.

"Paul Kennedy became something of a journalistic legend in the years that he covered Mexico and Central America for the New York Times.  From 1954 to 1965 he regularly supplied readers of the Times trenchant reporting on the area.....Often encouraged to write an account of his years in Mexico and Central America, Kennedy, like many newsmen kept putting it off....The fact that the book is now in print is as much due to Ross as to Kennedy.  The result is a useful, first-hand account of many of the major events that took place in Mexico, Guatamala and El Salvador during Kennedy's years there."

- by James Nelson Goodsell (The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Nov., 1974, p 736)


Guarding History

 By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

     No one was more knowledgable of the US military adventures in Central America and Cuba than Paul P. Kennedy whose wife, Diana Southwood Kennedy would become, like Julia Child whose husband worked for the CIA, a noted cookbook author and food historian. Diana, originally from England, helped open Fonda San Miguel in Austin, Texas, the restaurant where George Walker Bush reportedly proposed to his wife, Laura.   Diana Kennedy would also travel to San Miguel Allende a favorite Mexican destination for Americans before the current bloody street battles between Mexico's warring drug cartels. 

     In December 2010, La Familia, one of the biggest cartels that had been significantly diminished by the arrest and imprisonment of its leader was calling for a Christmas truce between members and the Gulf Cartel and its offshoot, the Zetas, credited with killing of American, David Michael Hartley. Hartley and his wife from Brownsville, Texas jet skied on Falcon Lake near Laredo, Texas during the attack.  The call for the truce came from Diana Kennedy's hometown of Zitacuaro, Michoacan where she lives a very private life.

     Just as the Eisenhower adminstration was handing over the reins of the U.S. government to John F. Kennedy and as Castro was breaking off relations with the U.S., on January 10th, 1961 Paul P. Kennedy's story about a secret CIA base in Guatamela on it's Pacific coast made the NY Times' front cover.

     Paul P. Kennedy's untimely death meant that though he was around to cover the Cuban/Castro revolution and training of the Bay of Pigs invasion team in Central America, he would not be around to cover Iran-Contra.  Is Paul P. Kennedy a member of the famed Boston Kennedy clan?  This writer isn't sure, but it seems likely.  Was his life's story, Middle Beat: A Correspondent's View of Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador a sanitized version of what he knew about foreign affairs in Central America in the 50's and 60's?  In the Stanley Ross edited Middle Beat, Ross adds an addendum titled "The Base at Retalhuleu" the Guatemalan training ground where the Bay of Pigs invaders prepared.  "His involvement was not an unmixed blessing since it earned him the denunciation of the official Guatemalan newspaper, critical singling out by the president of the United States and a rather jaundiced view of his journalistic efforts by two recent writers on the affair." (p. 219, Middle Beat by Paul P. Kennedy).  This was before Wikileaks, so Kennedy would have been hailed a master journalistic sleuth by todays standards as evidenced by the absence of the Retalhuleu base's story in most modern histories and a complete loss of this important reference in most Google searches on "Retalhuleu" or "Bay of Pigs".  Was this a Kennedy connection to the President that put him in a particularly precarious position with the U.S. military establishment?" asked Juan Carlos Caballero.  "A confidential report to Commander Ramiro Valdes' Mendendez reported on Paul P. Kennedy's reports to the New York Times on page 18 of the confidential communique...(see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/19610112-trans.pdf )" said Caballero.


     This reporter asked Juan Carlos Caballero, the secretive owner-correspondent of Costa Rica's underground newspaper La Historia y Mythos.  "Who published Paul Kennedy's book?" asked Caballero whose great grandfather joined the resistance to William Walker's filibustering in Central America in the mid-1800's only to see the nation later become headquarters for the CIA linked United Fruit Company.  "Columbia University," he said.  "And the Teacher College Press at Columbia is now headed by Carol Saltz.  She serves on the board of the Maxine Green Foundation with Chicago Seven Minuteman, William Ayers, whose father was a major U.S. industrialists and put in charge of his son's rehabilitation.  But more importantly, all the biographical information on Mr. Kennedy is not archived with his publisher at Columbia, but with Bell and Howell in Skokie, Illinois just outside Chicago.  Bell and Howell is the same company that made the camera that was used by Mr. Zapruder in Dallas, the camera used to film the JFK murder.  What a wonderful cover for hiding the story that Paul P. Kennedy was never able to fully tell.  Now, I am not a communist. Farthest thing from it.  I am a freedom loving Costa Rican who cherishes individual initiative and business savvy.  How else do you think my little newspaper has survived all these years?  But I think that there's a very good chance that Mr. Kennedy's book would have been significantly different had he been able to write it himself.  Stanley Ross at the University of Texas may have had an enduring interest in homogenizing the bland titled story.  The University of Columbia?  Remember that the head of its Journalism Department was Fred Friendly, formerly CBS before Friendly's well publicized resignation when CBS chose not to air a Vietnam War era program by Friendly and Edward R. Murrow and showed an I Love Lucy rerun instead. Columbia's Sociology Department was ground zero for political showdowns and home to renegade Texas and military industrialist critic, author of The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a descendant of Civil War General Braxton Bragg.  Mills died prematurely, too.  Remember that William Walker wanted to expand Southern slavery into his conquered territories.," said Caballero an authority on the expansion of the Golden Triangle after America's Civil War.

Juan Carlos Caballero's flow chart from recent article Rio de Deception

     I asked Caballero if there was any significance to Bell and Howell housing Paul P. Kennedy's biographical material.  He said, "Like hiding the Iran-Contra papers in the bowels of the Bush Library?  Senator Charles Percy, President of Bell and Howell, was clearly a power elite.  Appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower as a representative to South and Central America, his daughter Sharon would marry David D. Rockefeller IV better known as Senator "Jay" Rockefeller from West Virginia.  I had met her once through Abigale Rockefeller Mauze who had married a minister's son in San Antonio, Texas," said Caballero.

     Caballero noted that Paul P. Kennedy's wife, Diana Southwood Kennedy, used Fran McCullough as her editor.  McCullough is perhaps best known for editing the long awaited journal of Smith College alumnus and novelist, Sylvia Plath.  Plath, daughter of a notable Russian Jewish immigrant had written The Bell Jar and had been outspoken in her views on nuclear weapons, the Rosenberg trials and other post World War II issues.  This novel has been seen by many as an expose of early CIA mind-control techniques which leaves the victims feeling as if they are under a bell jar....not unlike the comedic "cone of silence" from Mel Brook's Get Smart television show, but where the victims experience a psychological melt-down.  Plath's mentor at Smith, from which Barbara Pierce Bush graduated, was Olive Higgins Prouty whose "Vale novels" poked satirical fun at the Boston Brahmin's inbreeding and ideological constipation.  In an interview Prouty was asked why she had joined the Daughters of the American Revolution just as black women like Marion Anderson were being forbidden to sing the National Anthem at Boston's Feneil Hall in 1939, an event that triggered Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the organization.  Prouty said that her work was an indication of her support of all people.  Indeed, her novel Now, Voyager, which was made into a major film staring Bette Davis, Claude Reins and Paul Henreid....French freedom fighter, Victor Laslo,  from the classic war time blockbuster, Casablanca....by Jewish movie director Hal B. Wallis whose film begins with a piercing critique of the direction that the Brahman philosophy had taken.  "My daughter is no more sick than a mountain canary," said Mrs. Vale, the domineering Vale matriarch in the opening scene.  "Mountain canaries are sent into coal mines to provided an early warning to miners of a toxic environment," said Caballero noting, too, that within short order the Brahman philosophy of exclusivity was being defended by a most unusual champion....Roman Catholic friend of the Kennedy Clan and sociopath politicizer......Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Caballero also noted the influence of leading Jewish thinkers like Louis Nizer on the 1941 Yale Political Union Debate that was led by William Gardner "Ted" White. White was the tail gunner in George Herbert Walker Bush's Avenger torpedo bomber airplane that crashed near Chichi Jima in the Pacific.  Nizer would become chief legal counsel for the Motion Picture Industry Association which for years was headed by Jack J. Valenti whose close Texas associations included Houstonian, Jack Trotter,  and Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Boston Kennedy clan.
     Caballero who laments the inability of Capitalism to provide justice and Communism's inability to provide freedom said...."I'd say that U.S. politics isn't much unlike politics here or anywhere else, only better hidden.  If a network of people can homogenize the truth, use suicides as opposed to street gun battles, then you stay in power by controlling the propaganda sources.  Remember that Harry Truman was critical of Dwight D. Eisenhower for having beaten the Nazis in Germany and having aligned himself with them in America in the Post-War years.  Who told Harry the truth about that? I'd bet is was folks close to General Smedley Butler who wrote War Is a Racket. If Prescott Bush and his son George Herbert Walker Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs as reported is it likely that George Walker Bush would choose Fonda San Miguel, the restaurant of the reporter's wife, Paul Kennedy's wife, the one who spilled the beans on the Guatemalan and Bay of Pigs secret as a romantic place to propose marriage?   Of course!"

     Caballero took a sip of his gaspaucho at Austin's Fonda San Miguel Restaurant made famous by Paul Kennedy's widow.  "One thing's for sure.  I wouldn't want to be anywhere near this place in an election year in the U.S. if I had any knowledge of these connections and was thought to be a security risk....particularly in the same transition period between administrations.... November 2000 and Janurary, 2001 especially, when GWB... son of Operation Zapata's mastermind... was in a Supreme Court battle over the election problems that should never have happened.  I know people died during that time of very mysterious causes....people close to the truth of these earlier and other events.  You're likely to commit suicide. Five shots to head and cleared by the coroner as super depressed," said Caballero with a wink.  "The Republicans are now moving back into power in the U.S. and they bring the promise of new jobs.  Do you think that they are as clairvoyant as Charles Percy and the Rockefeller's were about China in 1958?  Just pray your new job is not in a new coalition called the Knights of the Golden Circle, because the Tea Party's biggest backers are the Koch brothers and their German Nazi connection places them in the middle of Truman's caution to Eisenhower.  And Ike only critizied the American Military Industrial Complex after it had provided him with a nice elite living," said Caballero who added, "Make love, not war and stay thirsty, but for the right stuff."


     For the full Charles Percy interview with Mike Wallace and the key Republican's view of where the jobs would be in the future see...
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/percy_charles_t.html

For a summary of the life of Stanley Ross, editor of Paul P. Kennedy's book, himself a graduate of Columbia University and whose works were frequently distributed in Latin America by the U.S. Information Agency see...http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2001-2002/memorials/Ross/ross.html.  George Herbert Walker Bush's head of the U.S. Information Agency was Texan, Henry Catto, who had served as Ambassador to El Salvador from 1971-1973 shortly after Paul P. Kennedy was reporting on events there.

Was Senator Percy's remark to Mike Wallace that China had nothing the US wanted a lubricating of the doors to future trade based on transfer of US technology to cheaper, state controlled labor markets under communism?   What role did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger play in this reopening of the China Trade that had been closed during WWII? By the time that Senator Percy was serving on the US-India Technology Transfer Committee of the U.S. he had already endorsed the transfer of some technology to Russia for the purposes of completing the Soviet-European Urengoi oil pipeline.  By 2010 Bell & Howell had long ago seen its production facilities shipped to China with mergers with foreign producers.  See http://books.google.com/books?http://books.google.com/books?  See http://books.google.com/books?id=C1PrkwC4a-UC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=charles+percy+technology+transfer&source=bl&ots=m5_4gA_bOr&sig=i2thH74rEF6SyElj1-5AsQNZMWA&hl=en&ei=kuMkTbyODYiq8Abl0-C8AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=charles%20percy%20technology%20transfer&f=false