Romancing the Stoned

USN Navy Commander, Commando, SEAL: The Evolution of America’s Premier Special Forces Unit

By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

     The winners write history.  Then they rewrite it to consolidate power.  They rewrite it again to defend that consolidated power and they rewrite it, still again, to project power into unclaimed areas of potential exploitation.  It is called human nature.  The truth is, as Winston Churchill has said….having practiced well the art of it, that “the truth is always covered with a swarm of lies.”

     Following the death of Bin Laden and the assault on Somali pirates, the nation stands in salute of it special forces units….Green Berets, Delta Force, U.S. Army Rangers, and especially the Navy SEALS.  The SEALS are unique not only because they are trained for sea, air and land combat, but because they, like no other branch of the U.S. military, have the security and intelligence reach of the U.S. Navy.  Key leaders of U.S. Intelligence are disproportionately chosen from the U.S. Navy…  Poindexter, Inman, Hayden and others.

     With the recent apparent murder-suicide in Coronado, California, home of the U.S. Navy SEAL training base along with actions by Navy SEALS in Pakistan and Somalia, new attention is being paid to the origins of the SEALs.

     SEAL history would have remained sealed were it not for the answer to a riddle....a quiz.  The entertaining American movie, Quiz Show, asked the $64,000 question, then answers it with fraud.  The fraud of Charles Lincoln Van Doren.   Born in 1926 into a prominent American literary family his mother, Dorothy, was once editor of The Nation, sometimes called "The Flagship of the Left", but with special interest in peace. She was also a novelist.  Charles' uncle Carl had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Benjamin Franklin.  Charles’ father had also won a Pulitzer for his poetry and wrote a landmark book on the life of the New England Brahmin’s literary star, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
     Author Kent Anderson who wrote the book Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals notes that Van Doren lived in Connecticut next door to James Thurber.  Van Doren's family galaxy of friends included Joseph Wood Krutch, Franklin Adams, Mortimer J. Adler, Clifton Fadiman, Morris L. Ernst and Sinclair Lewis.
     Mark Van Doren, Charles' father, was a professor at Columbia University where Dan Wakefield's book, New York in the 50's explains "Columbia was in the heart of the City where everything happened first."  Wakefield also notes that people would make their way there to hear lectures by Van Doren, Charles' father, and by C. Wright Mills, the radical Sociologist from Texas whose book The Power Elite had rattled so many cages that most felt his latest heart attack while on a commuter train was helped along with some undetectable concoction.

     Charles Van Doren graduated from St. John’s College in America's premier Navy town, Annapolis, Maryland, alma mater of Francis Scott Key, in 1946.  Four years later in 1950 Jac Holzman would create Elecktra Records in a St. John's dorm room. A decade and a half later Holzman's company would sign a California rock group with substantial ties to the U.S. Navy...The Doors.  A bright and ambitious young academic, Van Doren joined with historian Ralph Joseph Roske to co-author the first book to really identify William B. Cushing as the first U.S. Navy commando.  The title was simply, Lincoln’s Commando.   Before that Cushing had simply been Commander William B. Cushing.  Not long after this project Charles Van Doren was paid to write for the U.S. government a pamphlet titled What Is American Culture?  It's a good question!  Co-author of Lincoln’s Commando, Ralph Joseph Roske, went on to write a history of California titled Every Man’s Eden as well as a pictorial history of Las Vegas, where sadly, Roske's grandson, a student at UNLV, was killed in a motorcycle crash in March, 2011, by a driver making an unauthorized u-turn.

   William B. Cushing’s brother was Howard Birmingham Cushing, a West Point classmate of George Armstrong Custer, and because of circumstances surrounding his death as an Indian fighter in Arizona he became known as “Arizona’s Custer”.  It was said that he was always trying to live up to his brother William’s image, but a book published in 1892 by John Gregory Bourke titled On the Border With Crook, shed a very favorable light on Howard's “herculean and more notable work."   Few had more Indian kills than Howard Cushing according to Bourke.  Advancing civilization justified the slaughter of the Apaches who were, according to Bourke, initially friendly... Cochice even supplying firewood to the U.S. Army...with tales like the Apaches' ill-treatment of Indian women or of their bizarre ceremonials and healing rituals.  Bourke recounts one story of an attractive Indian woman whose Apache husband had cut off her nose. Bourke does not overlook the atrocities of men like John Joel Glanton whose exploits in Mexico and Arizona were the subject for Cormack McCarthy's book, Blood Meridian.  According to Bourke, beyond scalping Mexicans town folks and collecting a bounty from their own Mexican mayor who counted their scalps as proof of dead Indians, Glanton's hospitality was extended to friendly Indians who were invited to  hot meals laced with strychnine.

     William and Howard Cushing were not the only Cushings important to this riddle of the SEAL's evolution.  Robert J.C. Young in his book, Freud’s Secret: The Interpretation of Dreams Was A Gothic Novel, shows how Sigmund Freud, whose liberal use of morphine and cocaine is well documented, was beholding to Frank Hamilton Cushing.   Through Bourkes' writings we are also introduced to British writer Thomas De Quincy.  De Quincy whose place in British society gave him an intimate understanding of the China Trade, had written Confessions of An English Opium Eater, but Freud was indebted to De Quincey for more than an introduction to exotic drugs.   Frank Hamilton Cushing, on the other hand, would become an important person at the Smithsonian Institute and his personal papers would be domiciled at Yale University.  

     Young writes of the relationship between Freud and De Quincy:  “It is striking that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud represses all reference to his greatest literary precursor the Romantic Gothic writer, Thomas De Quincey, or to the remarkable Confessions of An English Opium Eater and Susperia de Profundis, another of De Quincey's books which together constitute the first example of the genre of autobiography through dream analysis.  It was De Quincey who invented the term ‘sub-conscious’ which often,  even today, people think they employ when they are making a ‘Freudian’ analysis."

Frank Hamilton Cushing

     In 1891, Bourke summarized his anthropological studies in a esoteric book titled Scatologic Rites of All Nations. A Dissertation upon the Employment of Excrementicious Reemdial Agents in Religion, Therapeutics, Divination, Witch-Craft, Love-Philters, etc. in all part of the Globe.   The book was distributed only among selected specialists.   Later revised in a version by Friedrich S. Krauss, Scatologic Rites of All Nations was published posthumously in 1913. In it was a preface by Sigmund Freud. Freud praised Bourke, who had owed his research in anthropology and perhaps his introduction to Howard Cushing and the U.S. Army's quartermaster in Arizona Territory, J.J. Cushing and to Frank Hamilton Cushing who had been a type of Jeremiah Johnson living among the Southwest's indigenous peoples. Frank H. Cushing had extracted their secrets for which they would eventually turn on him just as the Chinese would do on the British and Americans for dope dealing, that led to their physical and spiritual enslavement.  Freud wrote of Bourke: “He was recognized in his own time for his ethnological writings on various indigenous peoples of the North American Southwest, particularly Apachean groups.”
     Freud made no reference to the work of the America China Traders upon whose shoulders Bourke's studies had rested.  Bourkes' description of a Zuni ritual presented by a dozen Zunis in Frank Hamilton Cushing's living room would have sent shivers down many a spine in the sitting rooms of Boston and New York.

On The Border With Crook
by Gregory Bourke

    One needs to remember that opium smuggling during the early development of the China Trade was not illegal and opiates, as with alcohol, had been a remarkably stable currency. However, its effects like the ulceration of skin, loss of will and purpose, criminality, as well as the rotting of teeth, constipation and so forth, needed no law to join these potential medicinals with serious ethical and moral issues.

      Back to the riddle...the quiz.  Charles Van Doren is remembered best for the television fraud associated with the game show The $64,000 Question, but he should more correctly be remembered for the elevation of William B. Cushing. Most historians avoid digging into the connections of Lincoln's commando with the Boston Brahman Cushing family, but William and Howard's mother used her connections with the Secretary of the Navy to gain William's placement which raises the issue.   Beyond this, there was William's marriage to the Boston Brahman, Kate Forbes, which decries the understatement of William's connections to his Boston clan.
     It was the Ambassador to China appointed by Franklin Pierce, the ancestor of Barbara Pierce Bush, Caleb Cushing, who negotiated the first treaty between the U.S. and China on July 3, 1843 laying the groundwork for the foray into the opium trade.  That trade had previously been controlled by the British.  William Cushing's grandfather had been a Massachusetts ship builder.
     In the summer of 1851, Caleb Cushing, New England's premier opium and slave trader brought Jefferson Davis to Boston to strategize over the quickest land route to the Orient.  Whether this meeting included plans for the U.S. Civil War, just as Cushing had promoted the United States' war with Mexico as a push for control of the flatter rail route to the Pacific is conjectured on defensible grounds.  It has been well noted that the co-founder of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forest, the Southern cavalry officer with a clear assessment of General Braxton Bragg's compromised loyalty, was conscious-led to threaten to kill General Bragg.   Bragg had been strategically at the center of the opening and closing battles of the Civil War....the battle of Forts Donnelson and Henry which opened the entire Southern river system to Northern gun ships and the Battle of Fort Fisher where William B. Cushing gained notoriety.
    Caleb Cushing endorsed Albert Pike, the head of the Scotttish Rite Masonry in the South while Jefferson Davis made Pike the Confederacy's chief Indian agent.  Scottish Rite Masonry was, however, not the same as the Masonic Order as that of George Washington and the Founding Fathers.  In fact, Scottish Rite Masonry evolved out of the Tory-supporting Scots of the British Empire through their minions in the United States following the American Revolution.  Pike would move to Little Rock, Arkansas, but he would write for Blackwood Magazine the Edinburgh Scotland Tory publication created by William Blackwood.  This magazine would take several weeks to reach America, but was widely read by Scottish Rite Masons and Tory elements in the former British Colonies.

     After the Civil War, Braxton Bragg went to work for the Southern railroads pushing West and died in Texas where Bragg's great grandson would live and attend college, first at College Station and then, Austin, Texas.     It was this great grandson, the Texan turned Columbia University sociology professor, C. Wright Mills, who wrote the penetrating analysis of American history creating the landmark book on the American Military Industrialist Complex titled The Power Elite.  As Nathan Bedford Forest had distanced himself from Bragg and then the KKK which he had initially championed, so C. Wright Mills had opened the book on American misadventure and in so doing distanced himself from his mis-adventurous ancestor.  Others would point out the connections between the KKK and Scottish Rite Free Masonry as a commandeering of the entire American Free Masonry movement that had provided such power and purpose to the American Revolution.  The Scottish Rite element of Free Masonry rose from the Tory element of America's colonists supplanting their original vision. If there was any doubt about the dark alliance and opium enticed coalition between Cushing's North and Davis' South in the push for the China Trade one need only note that with Caleb Cushing on his 1843 visit to China was William Tecumseh Walthall the future aide de camp to Confederate President Jefferson Davis helped Davis with his memoires.    Jefferson Davis' great great grandson would marry the granddaughter of New Orleans crime family figure, Carlos Marcello.  Beyond this there was the centrality of Northern artillery expert, Eli Lilly, and his concentration on the symbiotic relationship between opiates and heavy artillery in American commerce and battlefield medicine.  As natural opiates from the historic opium producing regions of Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and eventually Indo-China's Golden Triangle  were used to make morphine, heroin and other derivatives, the U.S. pushed through Eli Lilly Co. the replacement of these drugs with one synthesized by Hitler's chemists at I.G. Farben, Methadone, thus keeping money out of the hands of potential terrorist groups.
     By 1849, thirty years before Howard Cushing's death as he chased Apaches' under Cochise's leadership in Arizona, William Walker, supported as he was by Franklin Pierce, was leading an attempt to annex Baja making it and not San Diego the port of choice for the growing China Trade.   Walker hoped to connect the Baja port to the East Coast making his backers there and himself rich in the process.  Future Confederate President Jefferson Davis was personally laying out the Southern Transcontinental rail route across Dixie and Arizona Territory to San Diego in the years before the Civil War.  Davis' ambitions were sidelined not by Cochise or Geronimo, but by the Civil War triggered by abolitionist John Brown, whose connections to Baltimore's railroad magnate, Alexander Brown, the father of the "National City Bank Boys", Brown and Root, and Brown Brothers Harriman are meticulously avoided by America's leading historians. John Brown's backers included Bostonian, George Luther Stearns, who was trying to corner the lead (as in bullets) market.  As guns were forged in places like the Springfield Armory near Boston, musket balls had come from shot towers where molten lead was dropped into water far below. From Brown's North-South border and port city of Baltimore came lead musket balls and the runaway slave, James Hamlet.  Hamlet triggered the test case in the Fugitive Slave Laws. Hamlet had been working at the Brown's Merchant Shot Tower where he was making musket balls for his owners.  Hamlet serendipitously, or more probably by design, in becoming the focus of the Fugitive Slave Laws pushed the nation ever closer to Civil War.  Hamlet's case prompted memories of William Shakespeare's popular play, Hamlet, which at the time was a favorite of actors like John Wilks Boothe and his family who performed it.  "To be or not to be"....to take up arms or to peacefully co-exist.  A PR and war profiteer's dream case!  John Brown and George Luther Stearns were betting on war and the booty was more than the liberation of slaves.  It was the overland rail route from Savannah or Charleston to California, the Pacific and the opium crops beyond.
     Bourke writes:  “During the war the Southern leaders thought they would establish a chain of posts across the continent from Texas to California, and to occupy Tucson.  The commanding general—Turner by name…….”.   Like the New England China Traders the Southerners, too,  knew so well what lay beyond the Pacific.  Jefferson Davis surely knew that more was at stake than the freedom of slaves and Caleb Cushing had always been a Boston Brahman who sided with the Southern slavers.
      The Brahmin's, not trusting that the pesky Southerners would not derail or commandeer their railroad ambitions during Reconstruction which they did, looked further North to San Francisco to become the bigger port with the arrival of the Transcontinental Railroad through a Northern Rocky Mountain route connected as it was in 1868, but begun years earlier, with the Boston Irish pushing West and meet with the imported Chinese coolies from the developing China Trade pushing East.   Some of those Coolies dangled from ropes over mountain cliffs with dynamite in hand where they were used as human blasting caps and detonators.  Ten years after the Civil War the Southern route with its more desirable, flatter terrain stretching to San Diego and its connection to the U.S. military base already established there, was finally completed.  Southern and Northern "Brahmin's" reunited and the North jettisoned the righteous indignation against slavery, replacing it with apartheid in both regions, one openly declared and the other more subtle, and rebuilt their new "high road" of moral and spiritual superiority upon that "lower road" across the bodies of 600,000 dead....a small price to pay for their present and future fortunes.
     Just as the China Traders had made fortunes in munition sales during the Civil War, with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 they had already learned of other treasures to be found along the China Trade route.  No one dug up these treasures....copper, lead, silver, gold and such better than the standout geologist of the 1833 class of Yale, James Dana.  This Yale class was the progenitor of Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity started by Alfonso Taft whose body, buried in Cincinnati, Ohio, is surrounded by no less than 40 Union Army Generals....protect
     The true motive of all that activity had been making the China Trade more accessible.  That lucrative trade was of necessity being protected by the U.S. Navy which not only secured the Pacific trade routes, but the Indian Ocean routes from the Turkish, Pakistani, Indian and Afghanistani poppy fields to their market in China and other locales including the U.S. and Europe.  They used every tool at their disposal to project power including a fuller understanding of culture, myth and superstition employed to their advantage.   As Constantine had used Christianity to lubricate the rolling wheels of his expansion, so the Brahman China Traders used the church, too, with Protestant and Catholic missionaries, where they could.   The Protestant, Unitarian and Episcopal Brahmans may have gathered on Sunday in Boston's Copley Square, but soon there would come a Roman Catholic Cardinal Cushing.  Some, like daughter of Protestant Christian Missionaries to China, Pearl S. Buck, caught on to the scam early and rebelled not unlike William Ayers and Jim Morrison, but not toward bombings, boozing and drugs, but toward Buck's writing the truth of it.
     The Brahman families controlled the import-export business in the U.S. from early on through the Colonies, politically centered at Philadelphia and then Washington with legal and illegal goods passing through and around government ports….controlled as they were by the Brahmans, themselves.
     As the power elites lost control of U.S. non-militarized ports to groups like the Italian Mob in New York or New Orleans or the Irish Mob in Boston, they sought to outsource some of those ports to regain control with help from companies from Dubai.   When public sentiments in post-911 America went against an Arab nation controlling American ports, the nod went to AIG Insurance, an unlikely port administrator, except that AIG was created from opium profits gained in Shanghai, China, by its founder, Cornelius Vander Starr who insured the Brahmin's shipments across the Pacific with U.S. government contracts....an early example of the betrayal of true laisse-faire capitalism. While the bailout money given to AIG in 2008 was arguably for a good American company, documentary film maker Michael Moore believed otherwise, but never lays out AIG's real history which had clearly repeated itself.
     Meanwhile, the newspaper in San Diego that was owned by an American Nazi sympathizer in the 1940's was bought by the Boston based Bain Capital which employs former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, laying off upwards of 150 of its employees many of whom surely new of these connections.  The connections included ties to the German American Bund of the 1930's that had revealed the "Business Plot" of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, Charles Lindberg and Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler.  As America burned Bain fiddled...or, more accurately, strummed.  Flooding through California ports were cheap knock offs of classic American guitars....Martins, Gibsons, Fenders....made in China like Nike shoes or Apple and other  computers by totalitarian governments.  Bain's Guitar Centers, were headed by men like Greg Trojan, CEO, who also sits on the board of Dominoes Pizza Co......a fitting name for the Trojan Horse and a house of cards.....ah, dominoes?
    If the Brahmans couldn't mine treasure from the ground, they mined it from the culture from low-brow blues, jazz and rock music to high-brow ballets.  As Joy Williams Brown danced with prima ballerina, Margot Fontyne, in New York, her husband, who wrote musical plays called "industrial musicals"....for the chemical and mineral companies that Dana's work had created... mined the evolving literature of Southern writers like Truman Capote and Harper Lee.  Lee, a gifted Pulitzer Prize winning writer of To Kill A Mockingbird, like Van Doren's father and uncle, would shine a bright light on the South's hypocrisy after being exported to Manhattan and then Fire Island never to be heard from again like a rich gold vein having quickly played out.  To Kill A Sea Eagle was not within her range of vision and she may not have fully understood the really dark sentiments of the Southerners who tried to fire bomb New York after the Civil War decades before bombing black churches in the South and too myopic to understand the deeper issues.  Lee's swan song could have been an imaginary tale of how one brilliant group of pithy Southern women, white and black together, Diane Keatons and Meryl Streeps locked arm in arm with Oprah Winfreys and a sober Whitney Houston, had tried to  preempt the North in 1859 by liberating slaves and building a new model army that marches to Baltimore, New York and Boston to free the unwashed Irish and Italian Catholic women...before turning West and South along the Jefferson Davis Highway and future Southern railroad to San Diego to import Chinese goods for Walmart.....and, ah, opium, but cultivated freely by well-balanced, and free-thinking individuals and not by violent cartels or lying governments.
     Historically, laws were enacted to prohibit some goods to pass through our ports while allowing others, but over time the lucrative and addictive drugs and the maze of laws surrounding them, provided the back-drop to the violent world we now inhabit.

    It would be fitting, then, that families involved in this often brutal and unseemly world would want to dust off their image, particularly when they realize that the world is increasingly aware of the scam, but also look to them for the best hope of promoting the democratic principles that can elevate the world out of its habitual darkness kind of like Florentine de Medicci's during the Age of Enlightment.  Alas, the great contradiction.  The government's War On Drugs has always been a fraud.  If anyone knows this it is Mrs. Barack Obama who worked for the Springfield, Illinois law firm (Republican) that handled Mary Todd Lincoln's affairs. Lincoln had been a lawyer for the railroads. And don't forget Barack's friend, William Ayers of the Weather Underground, whose father was on the board of many of the major Military Industrial-Complex's key companies, was generously put in charge of William's rehabilitation.  There is also the guru to the American hippie movement and son of San Diego, California's leading Navy Admiral at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin crisis that kick-started the Vietnam War, Jim 'Break on Through to the Other Side' Morrison of The Doors. 
     "Blah, blah, blah...." Ayers, Morrison and countless other insiders would say to the nation's ongoing attempts to dust off its image having been close enough to have an Oedipal reaction to their father's hidden personae. People are strange riders on the storm.  Well, maybe not Barack.  Anyone elected to lead in this blender of deadly realities may exist from day to day on nothing more than naivety, forced gumption and image in search of some illusive substance, unless they are groomed, as many believe Barack is, for the role.
     On the cover of Van Doren's and Roske’s book, Lincoln’s Commando, is a crouching William B. Cushing holding an extended pole with an Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, attached to it.  His small boat is approaching the Confederate gun ship the Albemarle which his actions sank. The back cover of the 1958 book describes the Albemarle as “the most dangerous ship in the rebel navy,” making Cushing “the most daring man in the Federal forces,” and bringing Cushing from “obscurity to national fame.”

William B. Cushing, AKA
"Sea Eagle" and after 1953,
"Lincoln's Commando"

     Dr. George Peabody Calhoun Forbes of the American Society For Romance and Mythology has noted that “what really lifted Cushing from obscurity was Roske and Van Doren’s book.”  Forbes notes that the cover has the young officer dressed in full formal uniform with four stripes on the sleeves…. “not a possibility for him among 1864 uniforms.  Only three stripes as in his portrait.”  Forbes believes that the release of the book was coordinated to ride the popularity of Mr. Van Doren’s appearance on the game show.  “Of course everything changed when Mr. Van Doren was outed as a fraud.  The New England Brahmans could not possibly have been elevated by this attack on their literary and cultural identity.  Van Doren's problem destabilized their prominence and might lead their enemies to believe that Van Doren’s fraud would have a similar effect not only on their literary and cultural integrity, but also on the drug trade in the U.S. similar to what ripping out the pipeline through the price-setting crossroads of Cushing, Oklahoma, might have on the control and flow of oil.  Hello Keystone!”

    Speculation as to who would have put Charles Van Doren up to writing the book with Roske and then outing him runs the gamut.  The Cushing-connected? Not likely. Navy-lovers? Maybe.  If Charles' father, Mark Van Doren's sympathies leaned left, as his marriage and connections seem to suggest, as evidenced by his friendships including Thomas Merton who died like C. Wright Mills under equally mysterious circumstances, did the outing come from those wanting to embarrass a wing of the Brahman leadership?  Was it a hard right element wanting the young Charles to go their way, just as Ayers had gone left and Morrison had gone ....who knows where....to the other side?  Jewish bankers who some say are behind every plot and if not, still make wonderful scapegoats?  Maybe it was the Irish and Italian Mobs who were sick and tired of seeing their family's faces on flow charts in FBI hearings and who after the election of JFK were hopeful not of correcting these evils, but of inheriting them.  If that were the case, was Bobby Kennedy's attack on organized crime a fraud, as well, given his family's history in bootlegging?

William B. Cushing's demeanor subtly indicates that even in the presence of an Admiral there was
a sense of privilege and place among the elite New England China Traders that
was not shared by other USN officers of the USS Malvern.  Cushing would replace
Porter as captain of the Malvern shortly after this photo was taken.

 

    When asked "who might have an interest in seeing the myth derailed by Van Doren's credibility problems?" Forbes said only, "The usual suspects."  And when asked to spell it out he said simply, "Infighting?  Outfighting?  During the Cold War?  The Communists.  During Iran-Contra?  The land reformers or Reagan, North, Weinberger and Poindexter?  In a drug war with the historically Puritan Protestants of New England?  Irish Catholics drug pushers, maybe?  Italian Catholic drug pushers? Pure pagans? Crypto-Nazi drug pushers?  Dixie Mafiosos angry over the fall of slavery who are also drug pushing as means of re-enslaving?  Black drug pushers who don't give a damn about their own like some of their white counterparts?  Mexican and South American cartels?  The British Royals? The Bilderbergers?  Bilderbergers warring with themselves? Cain and Abel?  Hatfields or McCoys? Arab terrorists providing a big enough umbrella of hate and fear to cast a shadow under which these lesser wars can go on undetected? It's business as usual and sad when you think about it.  Any person with a heart and soul would like to see the world become a better place, but sadly for all our efforts to improve it?  This is what we get. So I guess the question is do you want a world led by one warring faction or another like prison gangs fighting over a piece of the playground on a prison planet?  The world is what we make of it," said Forbes.