Ivy League Woes In Depth

Yale, Yale The Gangs All Here!

William Gardner “Ted” White ,  Reinhold Niebuhr, Louis Nizer,  T.V. Soong, W.L. Borden

and the Yale Political Union Debate of 1941

By Bard Willett Williamson for CPW News Service

      In 1940, the question of whether or not the United States would enter World War II was up in the air.  As the winds of war blew across Europe and the Orient, a leading American-Jewish lawyer, Louis Nizer, spoke openly about Nazi atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped and confessing Christians.  His warnings fell on many deaf ears.
      That same year he published Thinking On Your Feet, (Liveright Publishers, NY).  This book became not only a textbook for aspiring campus debaters wishing to get pointers from some of history’s top orators, but it was also a repository of searing arguments as to why America should get involved in the war quickly.  Nizer believed that it was no time to sleep.  The real awakening would not come until December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

In 1944 as Allied victory seemed imminent Louis Nizer would go on to write What To Do With Germany (Ziff-Davis Publishing, NY, 1944), a book so powerful in its arguments that it was given by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to all of his top military brass working in post-war Germany.  An analyst of the inner workings of the Nuremberg Trials, Nizer would go on to become chief counsel to the Motion Picture Industry of America where he would eventually work alongside Jack J. Valenti to develop the motion picture rating system used today.  Nizer would also be a leading defender of the Warren Commission Report on the murder of John F. Kennedy, leading some to speculate that his distrust of U.S. Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK's father whose support of Germany led to his recall by FDR, was flavored by the Holocaust.

A possessor of Louis Nizer’s just published book, Thinking on Your Feet, was a prominent Yale student, William Gardner “Ted” White (Yale Skull and Bones, ’42, b. 2/25/1918).  White, also on the staff of the Yale News, the campus newspaper, was doing extra-circular work with Yale’s Navy ROTC and its torpedo bomber squadron.  In the coming months many of Yale’s ROTC cadets would be appointed to the aircraft carrier, USS San Jacinto, in the South Pacific.  Before Yale, White had attended Hotchkiss School where Henry Ford, Jr and his brothers, Henry Luce and future CIA director, Porter Goss spent their pre-collegiate years.

 

The eighteen highlighted marginal notations in White’s copy of Nizer’s book, may serve as a map of White’s youthful thought processes.  Purchased from Minneapolis bookseller, Robert W. Reiner, and believed to have been originally in the possession of the estate of White’s sister, Barbara White Bemis, wife of Minnesota packaging magnate, Judson Bemis, the book shines a light on young White’s preparation for the Yale Political Union debate on November 11, 1941.

While it would take a spectroscopic analysis of the pencil carbon to compare the eighteen markings with White’s verified signature to be absolutely sure, the marginal notations are not unlike a time capsule.   “Japan may be indulging in her old hobby of collecting China; Italy may be scrambling Spanish omelets, Germany is becoming the mistress of the seize---but even the dictators realize that neither their own countries nor the world can be indefinitely suppressed.” (p. 254). 

In the chapter titled “A Wedding Toast” there is marked the words... “Someone has described marriage as a pair of shears, united, inseparable, sometimes moving in opposite directions, but always destroying anything that comes between them.” (Nizer, p. 262).   Did White have a girl in mind?  America’s commitment to Winston Churchill’s Britain and America’s dowry-like Lend-Lease program supporting them?  Perhaps the marriage of Yale’s right and left political wings...the intermarriage of America’s old money elites and their desire to have no one coming between them to threaten their position of prominence...especially not an untimely foreign war?

 

White was also the Vice-President of the Yale Political Union and presiding officer at the November 11, 1941 word-battle over the war (for a fuller expose of this debate see Navy, Blue by Meghan L. Clyne, a National Review Magazine writer, editor of Light and Truth).



William Gardner "Ted"
White's copy of
Nizer's
Thinking On Your Feet

The Yale Political Union was a debate group formed in the 1930’s to help enlighten the student body about the burning issues of the day. 

In 1941 the Yale Political Union had already debated the subject of banning union workers from campus employment.  Since Hitler was going after trade unionists, communists, Jews, Gypsies, outspoken Christians, the mentally challenged and others, it was a heated debate.

Yale students were by in large the sons of America’s wealthiest industrialists and it took great courage to take a stand for common laborers in such a high-profile pocket of America’s classic robber-baron families.   When it was learned in the 1980’s that one of Yale’s leading professors, Hendrik de Man, had ties to Nazi Germany, some wondered if the proclivity to overlook international tyranny was entrenched at Yale.  Connections between Yale family dynasties to Nazi connected companies like IG Farben and Hitler’s Thyssen Bank were gradually coming to light in the post-war period. These connections were generally suppressed after the war by Cold War concerns about the rising threat of communism and by revisionist historians working to erase the memory of pre-war economic ties to Germany and Japan.

Supporting the call to arms in 1941, along with William Gardner White was Yale professor, Samuel Flagg Bemis, AKA “U.S. Flagg” Bemis, who arrived on the Yale campus from George Washington University in 1935 to become the Sterling Professor of Diplomatic History and Inter-American Relations.  In 1947 he would argue that the political baggage of the historical revisionists acquired through their connections with isolationism in the inter-war period fueled the flames of war in Europe and the Pacific.  Bemis wrote: “It is difficult to see how there can be any doubt but that the United State and the whole Western Hemisphere would have been in great peril, whether immediate or proximate, had President Roosevelt stood by with arms folded around the new neutrality laws and permitted Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan to have overturned the balance of power by a defeat of Great Britain and the Commonwealth whether in the Atlantic or the Pacific, Southeast Asia, India , or Australia.”  (American Foreign Policy and the Blessings of  Liberty, presidential address delivered on December 29, 1961 at the American Historical Association and printed in American Historical Review 67:2, January,  1961, pp. 291-305.)

     By October 20, 1942 the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazi Germany’s banking operations in New York.  FDR’s Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, enforced Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush, father of George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of George Walker Bush, under the Trading with the Enemy Act  (recorded in Federal Register, November 7, 1942). The order was kept out of the news and published only in obscure government record books, but it cited the Union Banking Corporation’s (UBC) fiduciary relationship to Hitler’s money-man Fritz Von Thyssen through Berlin’s Thyssen-Bank.

None would have been closer to the convoluted connections of America’s wayward industrialists than the sons of Yale’s privileged families.  These students, still young and relatively innocent were not yet fully indoctrinated in the concept of... “it’s JUST business!”.   America’s military industrialist complex showed a rising proclivity to make money from both sides of every world conflict.  None knew this better than the Bemis-White-Gardner clan, tied as they were to the heartland, packaging of farm products and a deep sense of Jeffersonian values.  With their abiding interest in history, they weren’t likely to forget the past.  Remembering was no problem, but going against the unwritten directives of the established order was a significant one.

When discussions at Yale shifted in 1941 from labor issues to whether the US should be isolationist or interventionist with respect to the war, the labor debate was still ringing in young William Gardner White’s ears.  The two issues were indissoluble and White’s interventionist leanings found significant support from Yale’s President Charles Seymour as well as other faculty members including Lt. Commander. W. H. Gardner (Yale ,1916), perhaps a relative of William Gardner White.  Lt. Commander W.H. Gardner had created the Yale heritage of an organic union with the ROTC torpedo bomber squadron.   At the same time, Yale’s William Allen White, perhaps another relative, had organized the Committee to Defend America which vehemently argued for rapid deployment of American troops to help quell the rising treat.

Opposite William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America was General Robert Elkington Wood. Wood’s America First Committee was the leading proponent of American isolationism.  Wood, a top executive with Sears and Montgomery Ward, his son, Robert Whitney Wood, was also a politically active Republican who agitated openly against U.S. involvement in war.  Wood was America First Committee’s first chairman and a strong supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950’s investigation of suspected communists.  Wood later served on the board of United Fruit, a company with large land holdings in Nicaragua and purchased in 1969 by George Herbert Walker Bush’s Zapata Petroleum. These Nicaraguan assets and the need to protect them were clearly linked to Bush’s well-documented covert support of the Iran-Contra cause in the 1980’s, a program that brought indictments of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger...all of whom received Presidential pardons.

            Wood’s closest associates at American First were Henry Ford, the car manufacturer, and Charles Lindbergh, the great American pilot and holder of the record for the first transatlantic flight.  Lindbergh had been adamant in his assertion that the American and European Jews were forcing America into the conflict along with the British and the Roosevelt administration...a view flatly denied by most Americans according to some historians.

            Western Judaism has always been anti-primogeniture and distrusting of monarchical models of leadership.  They are rightfully nervous about climbing anyone’s pyramid.  King David, leader of Israel’s Golden Age, was the last born son of Jesse of Bethlehem and the least likely to have been leadership material.  Within a hundred and fifty years of its independence from Britain, America was forgetting this liberating fact and none more than the families of America’s industrialists who had rediscovered that keeping “Junior” as chairman of the board of limited liability companies would insure that the family dynasties would remain intact from generation to generation.  In the years since the American Revolution with leadership coming from anti-monarchical Free Masons like Washington and Franklin, a new monarchical model of Free Masonry had evolved through Albert Pike, the father of Scottish Rite Masonry.  Pike, a Roman Catholic, unified Tory elements in the American Colonies beginning with Savannah, Georgia while gathering within their ranks uninformed non-Scottish Rite Masons who knew little about Pikes background, nor of his position as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas where he was writing for a Jacobite Scottish magazine published in Edinburgh. On the surface the inclusion of "Scottish" in their secret rites engendered feelings of freedom and liberty, but Pike's sympathies were far removed from the political and religious sympathies of men like Scottish anti-monarchical reformer John Knox.
     Albert Pike had succeeded in aligning the Scottish Rite in the U.S. with its Italian counterpart in the Southern port city of New Orleans, Louisiana.  This alliance informs the misinformation shared by most Americans including leading Hollywood movie director, Francis Ford Coppola, whose God Father trilogy shows the Italian organized crime invasion coming through New York. The Italian wing of the Pike's group is directly linked with the beginnings of the Italian Mafia while Pike's influence on the KKK was so brutal that its founder, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, left the group in 1869 according to historians Shelby Foote and Ken Burns.  Foote and Burns' views on Forrest were challenged by the University of Arkansas' leading historian, Walter Lee Brown, himself a member of Pike SR group.
     Remaining within Pike's sphere of influence was the state of Arkansas where future underworld cabals would include the  creation of the international renegade banking concern known as BCCI and implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal that led to indictments of some of America's leading political figures.  The Bank of Commerce and Credit International was called by reporters "The Bank of Crooks and Criminals" with its close connection to Little Rock, Arkansas' leading bankers including Jackson T. Stephens.


      The Yale Political Union's leadership would have been aware that following the English Civil War in the 17^th Century, Oliver Cromwell repatriated the Jews of Europe who had been exiled by Edward I, Longshanks, centuries earlier.   Cromwell did so for two apparent reasons.  As some of Europe’s best artisans the Jews could help rebuild Britain and as a people with a long history of distrust of kings, the Jews were excellent allies for Cromwell’s parliamentary government.

Wisdom dictated that William Gardner “Ted” White be well-prepared for the upcoming Yale Political Union’s war debate.   Sometime after its 1940 publication date and subsequent release, White acquired his copy of the first edition, first printing of Nizer’s book.  He signed it in pencil with “W. Gardner White.”   Then there’s the marginal notations highlighted with eighteen pencil marks (pp. 107, 110, 111, 119, 120, 136, 147, 236, 237, 242, 252, 253, 254, 255, 262, 263, 279, 287). 

Among the passages highlighted are Nizer’s words...“Justice Stone once gave me this advice for a lawyer:  “If you are strong on the facts but weak on the law, discuss the facts.  If you are strong on the law and weak on the facts, discuss the law.  If you are weak on the law and the facts, bang the table!” (Nizer, p. 107). 

Then there’s the highlighted story in the chapter on Robert F. Wagner, champion of the “Magna Carta of US Labor” the Wagner Act, of how Michael Angelo painted convincing stress cracks on his frescoes when the Pope refused to help shore up the frail building that contained his artwork.   Michael Angelo’s request for reinforcement to protect his cultural icons had been refused by the Pope until the artist helped the Pontiff to envision the future without the added bracing (Nizer, p. 138).  Was young White wondering how to help his fellow Yale students envision the crumbling world stability and the danger of America's lethargy?  

William Gardner White’s contemporary opponent at Yale was William Liscum Borden, an active voice in campus politics in 1941 and business manager of the Yale News.  One can only imagine the heated discussions that transpired between Borden and White, both Yale News staff members.  Borden had been preceded at Yale by William Whiting Borden (Yale 1905), son of wealthy U.S. industrialist Gail Borden whose initial fortunes were gained in creating his canned "meat cake" for the U.S. Army and then pasteurized milk.  William L. Borden was a leading missionary to Northern China's Inland China Mission.

Following the war, William Liscum Borden would become, with Dr. Kenneth Pitzer a leader in the attack on scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.    President of Houston’s Rice University, future home of the James A Baker Center for Public Policy,   Pitzer, along with Borden, were the key witnesses against the Manhattan Project’s "father of the atom bomb".  Rice University was heavily underwritten by Houston's oil empire and James A. Baker's family had long been leading lawyers for the E.H. Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad.

William G. "Ted" White
(2nd row 3rd from left).
William Liscum Borden (2nd row
4th from left).

(L to R) John Coffee "Jack" Hays, Texas Ranger and Sheriff
of San Francisco 1850 during the gold rush.
 John Hays Hammond, John Coffee Hay's cousin and Cecil Rhodes
of DeBeers (2nd from l), founder of Rhodesia's right hand man.
Samuel F.B. Morse (3rd from l),
 inventor of the Morse Code and cousin of James Walker
Fannin (4th from l) who was killed during the Texas Revolution.
San Francisco's Pacific Union Club (r) where Morse, William
Randolf Hearst and two U.S. Secretaries of Defense,
Robert McNamara and Caspar Weinberger,  were members.

Scottish Rite Temple Savannah,
Georgia. Home of first
Scottish Rite Free Masons in the
U.S. founded by Albert Pike.  Pike's
Scottish Rite Masonry unlike the branch
of Masonry of the Founding Fathers was
instituted in Prussia by the Prussian Royal Family. Pike
would triangulate with Caleb Cushing and Jefferson
Davis to provide the land rush across the Great Southwest along which
E.H. Harrimans Union Pacific and Morse's telegraph lines
were intended to reach from Georgia to San Diego, California.

Grumman Avenger like that flown by
George H.W. Bush with
William G. "Ted" White as
tail gunner.

Alfred Whitney Griswold,
founder of the
Yale Political Union.

     The Yale Political Union had been created by Alfred Whitney Griswold, a history professor at Yale and like William Gardner White, a former student at the prestigious Hotchkiss School during his college preparatory years.  Mr. Griswold was a descendant of Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin which figured prominently into the changing economy of the South as well as the changing fabric styles made possible by new blends of cotton and silk from China.

     Texas remained deeply tied to the Northeastern establishment even across the nation’s bloody Civil War and the radical views of Albert Pike would be complimented by the eugenics program of the Harriman backed Cold Spring Harbor genetics experiments.  Author Edwin Black has meticulously documented the Cold Spring Harbor connections to Nazi eugenics and racial purity programs in his landmark book, War Against The Weak...a book that like Christian T. Miller's Blood Money, Col. Daniel Martin's The Expendable Elite or General Smedley Butler's War Is A Racket... shines a piercing light into America's dark alliances.  

     Samuel Hamilton Walker’s engraved invitation to New York’s Tammany Hall Ball is archived at the University of Texas in Austin.  Today, families bicker over the removal of Sam Walker’s body from its San Antonio resting place to the Texas Ranger Museum in McClennan County, home county of George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch.

     Averill Harriman of Brown Brother's Harriman.... E. H. Harriman being founder of the Union Pacific Railroad... was one of the last New York politicians connected to the remnants of the Tammany Hall political machinery.

     Suffice it to say that America’s military has a longstanding connection with the  historic railway “pipeline” stretching from the population and manufacturing centers of the Northeast through Washington to Texas.  Running through that pipeline in the early years was cattle, cotton, copper, silver, gold, sulfur, wood, butter and guns.  By the twentieth century it flowed with oil.  Not surprising, for decades the benchmark price for American oil was set in a town where the pipelines converged in Cushing, Oklahoma.

     When a scratchy copy of a home movie showed a USS San Jacinto pilot being pulled from the Pacific ocean onto a waiting submarine, the USS Finback,  William Gardner White was not aboard the small rubber raft, nor was the plane’s radio operator, John Delaney.   Back on board the USS San Jacinto Chester Mierzejewski, waited patiently to hear details of how his friends had died.  Mierzejewski had the clearest view of the plane as tail gunner of the squadron commander’s plane. 

     Was he satisfied with the explanation?  Apparently not, for during the 1988 political campaign that used the film, Mierzejewski was quoted as saying “I don’t want to get involved politically,” but he admitted that the discrepancies in the accounts of the two deaths troubled him.

     Oddly, on the morning of September 2, 1944, a year in which it has been widely reported that some prominent American companies were still violating restrictions against trading with the enemy, Lieut. J.G., U.S.N.R. Aviation officer, William Gardner “Ted” White, uncharacteristically replaced the regular tail gunner aboard the Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber, Barbara II. 

     As White and Delaney’s plane made its run on the radar installation at Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands, it was piloted by a man who on November 11, 1941, the occasion of the Yale Political Union debate on war over which William Gardner White presided, had been a seventeen year old Phillips Exeter Academy student in New Hampshire... George Herbert Walker Bush.  William Gardner “Ted” White’s father had been a Yale classmate of Prescott Bush  a couple of decades earlier.

     Stanford professor, Anthony C. Sutton, in America’s Secret Establishment (Trine Day Press, 1983) claims that Yale has held a unique place in the pantheon of America’s political powerhouses.  In 2006, actor, director and producer, Robert DeNiro, directed a film titled The Good Shepherd, an expose’ of Yale’s Skull & Bones secret society.  An Italian mobster, after mentioning the unique contributions of the Irish, Italians and African Americans and asking “What do you have?” is told  “We have the United States.  The rest of you are visitors.”  That was after an initiation rite that included disgusting forms of humiliation by the “good shepherd’s” elders in the Skull & Bones brotherhood. (former presidential strategist and author, Kevin Phillips, has validated Sutton’s work in American Dynasty:  Aristocracy, Fortune and Deceit in the House of Bush, Viking Press, NY, 2004)

     Within this secret establishment, a senior society that, like typical college campus clubs is based on class privilege, there is a purposeful dialectic that controls both the right and left wings of political thinking.   According to Sutton, liberal and conservative, free-market and socialistic ideologies are bracketed together within the society’s purview in order to keep the elites in power regardless of the pendulum’s swing.  If this is true, as Sutton has claimed, William Gardner “Ted” White may well have found himself in the pit of the pendulum with more enemies around him than simply puppets of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, but not because of choosing one ideology over the other.  According to Sutton, the order allows for that!  What it does not allow for is sincerity.  If White’s notations in Nizer’s book are any clue at all, then they suggest that White’s sin was believing that there was goodness, virtue, selfless empathy and a moral compass in the human heart...deep down...even in the darkest of human hearts.

     White’s “sin” was in not understanding fully the price of admission into the established “order”.   For the single-minded citizen, molded as they often are by deep religious sentiment, there is no guarantee of a danger-free ride.  The only synthesis for any dialectic that sees power as its ultimate goal...is inevitably war, death, skulls and bones. William Gardner “Ted” White ,  Louis Nizer  and others were pursuing something else...the simple belief that when a nation finds itself deep in the heart of darkness, good people must seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with each other....which come to think of it would be a simple fulfillment of that Golden Rule celebrated in some form or fashion by all of the world's major religions and conveniently glossed over by its non-practicing practitioners.