Prouty at 100 and The Secret Team

http://progressivepilgrim.review/steal-this-book/

I enjoyed reading this and I had to chuckle about his comment regarding Prouty's 'The Secret Team'. It is almost unbearable in its detail. Tedious only begins to describe what it's like to wade through it as I did many years ago. It still sits on my shelf and I will upon occasion get it out while searching for something.

Prouty's own legacy remains a little mixed. He tainted his credibility here and there and yet I don't think he can be dismissed as so many seem eager and ready to do. His name became more popular due to Oliver Stone and his creation of the 'X' character in the 1991 film JFK. It's a frustrating movie as there is so much that is accurate and presented in a compelling way and yet mixed with Stone's speculations, Hollywood cinematic antics and in some cases omissions and conflations. The overall picture is on the right track but ultimately deceptive and misses the mark, maybe doing more harm than good. The story just can't be told in three hours. The movie whets the appetite and yet it's easily critiqued which then in the minds of many, discredits the whole notion of a conspiracy (or more properly conspiracies) surrounding that November day in Dallas.

Upon closer examination many of the critiques are cases of paltry nit-picking. That said, I was once something of a Stone fan and yet I find myself increasingly put off by his work. His recent documentary series on American history had the potential to be of considerable value but he always has to slip in a bunch of filth and other shock tactics, and eventually I just turned it off. I wanted to watch it with a couple of my kids, but I gave up. I'm pretty much done with Oliver Stone.

The X character in JFK was so compelling that many (like me) began to investigate its origin and the trail leads to Fletcher Prouty. There was no Garrison-Prouty meeting on the Washington Mall in the wake of David Ferrie's death as the movie depicts. That said, the meeting which is something of a composite and conflation of actual discussions nevertheless reveals information and reflection that came to Garrison some time after the events of the movie. It is not inaccurate in what is said... it's just the setting and way it's presented that is problematic. Obviously Stone is trying to make a rather dramatic point (and its effective) by setting this utterly fascinating and compelling philosophical rumination on the grounds of the Washington Mall, the sacred grove and symbolic holy ground of the American Empire. Its filth and corruption is uncovered in whispers amidst the monuments and the myths.

Donald Sutherland's X/Prouty character provides several minutes of some of the most forceful and gripping footage of the film. It provides the big picture and back-story which is just as stirring as the investigations into the particulars of Oswald, Ferrie, Ruby, Shaw and the other assorted characters who make up the rather bizarre story that Garrison stumbled upon. Sutherland/X says as much.

Prouty's story is still interesting and though some elements are outdated the basic outlines and mechanics of how the system works... something he grasped, still holds true. If anything the way in which this power functions is even more complicated in our own day. Society itself has grown more complex in the computer age.

All that said, these paths frustrate because one encounters some rather outlandish folks and their ideas and in some blatant cases, erroneous thinking and presumption. These circles are populated by many that don't think in Christian terms and there are many false roads, dead ends and of course there are the liars and deceivers motivated by a host of different concerns.

Kennedy's plans for Vietnam still remain a disputed point. His critics and enemies insist he had no intention of ending the war and in fact planned to expand it. In fact the debacle that the war became is largely hung around his neck. And they can easily point to his 1960 campaign against Nixon in which Kennedy ran to the Right of the Eisenhower administration's policies and exploited the fiction of the missile gap. Camelot is certainly something of a myth and yet it's also a story of transformation. Kennedy came into office on a militarist platform... something he partly abandoned fairly early in 1961 and would seriously abandon in late 1962. Whether he did intend to 'pull out of Vietnam' or not, it's clear his policies underwent a significant change throughout the course of 1963, reaching their climax in his often overlooked American University speech that June. Many believe his attempt to bring about a modus vivendi, an attempt to effectively end the Cold War is what got him killed.

His enemies viewed him as reckless, immoral, unstable and even treasonous. He was unworthy of the office and was unfit to lead the nation through such a volatile period. Others of course view him as flawed but noble in intention, principled but practical and courageous in resisting the overwhelming power that sought to take the United States into open conflict with the Soviet Union, a war in which there could be no victors.

While leaning slightly toward the latter, I essentially reject both of these views but I will admit the period and the characters who haunt it are utterly fascinating. In some respects I wish I could have lived through it all as an adult with an adult's reflection and discernment but in other ways it would have all been something of a blur. So much that is known today would not have been possible to know at the time.

US society was on the cusp of great change and upheaval. Men like J Edgar Hoover believed the United States was engaged in a low-grade Civil War. When cast into such categories they viewed themselves as following in the footsteps of Lincoln as saviours of the nation. In the face of existential crisis, the Constitution and all moral questions were effectively moot. The end justifies the means, the end was (to them) the preservation of the American Establishment.

Often the story is confused by focusing too exclusively on the 1960's and identity politics. This will certainly shed some light and can be stirring in itself but one cannot hope to apprehend let alone comprehend the larger picture unless one wrestles with a greater historical sweep... the world post-1945. It was truly (in one sense) a new world and America was transformed not only geopolitically but even domestically. It was something Eisenhower hinted at in his famous farewell address in which he referenced the now famous Military-Industrial Complex.

Only when the larger story is told, a story which necessarily must include a wider scope of history and ideology, the roles of banking and finance, the criminal world and the power and threat of technology can one hope to find some kind of coherence. And yet coherence is always elusive, always shaped by the perspective of the perceiver and how they relate everything from causality to the nature of evidence, theories of truth and whether or not ideas have any role in interpreting phenomena or shaping their interpretation. Historiography a seemingly mundane and even straightforward subject to some certainly comes into play here and it is laden with not only epistemological concerns but necessarily touches on complex and ponderous philosophical questions.

The 1960's did represent serious change, not just in terms of society but in the functionality of the Deep State that Prouty knew so well. The tactics utilised by the United States abroad... came home or rather began to be implemented domestically. Again if you understand that to many in power the 1960's represented a threat of Civil War and that the enemy was operating through the underground, and through subversion then you can understand that by their reckoning a paramilitary/guerilla paradigm was necessary to combat it. It was a dirty war and in wars people die. COINTELPRO was but a facet of an ever-changing aggressive action and paramilitary arm of what Prouty called The Secret Team and Wright Mills called The Power Elite.

Given that I write this on 4 April 2018, the 50^th anniversary of King's assassination, it's worth reflecting on. King's own family didn't believe the official story and one cannot help but be moved and reflect on King's demeanour during the 'Mountaintop' speech on 3 April. Many think he knew the end was nigh and indeed King died one year to the day of his denunciation of the Vietnam War. Was that a coincidence? Maybe.

King was a hated figure by many in the Establishment, many who today praise him, but his non-violent message was not as problematic or urgent as found in figures like Malcolm X or in the rising influence and immediate danger of the Black Panther Party. But when King turned against Vietnam and began to wed anti-militarism, poverty and labour to his larger struggle, the nature of his movement changed and he became a serious threat. J Edgar Hoover clearly thought so and viewed himself as the guardian of Fortress America, a guardian out to slay a dragon.

Now that doesn't mean that James Earl Ray was necessarily part of a larger Deep State conspiracy but when it comes to the big assassinations of the 1960's there's so much smoke that one has to be comatose or lost in reverie to miss the fire. There are a greater number of 'doubters' when it comes to JFK but I think most people have failed to really look into the King assassination let alone take in the larger context. Others are blinded by the potential identity crisis in questioning such foundational beliefs in what America is and represents. Others are caught up in the sentimentality expressed in songs like 'Abraham, Martin and John' choosing to focus on the emotion and tragedy and yet refuse to wrestle with the questions that must be asked by any thinking honest person.

Stone's depiction of Garrison is flawed and misleading though the former District Attorney or Orleans Parish remains an interesting figure. I've read his 'On the Trail of the Assassins' more than once and I would believe Garrison any day over pedestrian blowhards like Vincent Bugliosi or Establishment-safe artists of the false expose like Gerald Posner. These men function as agents of the Praetorium.

Prouty's name is better known today than it was thirty years ago or when he published The Secret Team in 1973. That in itself is interesting and maybe a source of some hope. His commentary on 9/11 would have been insightful but he died in June of 2001 at the age of 84.