Re: America's Dreyfus Affair, by David Martin
Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 6:26 am
Money, of course, is not just a force for bad. It is as necessary for those who would do good as for those who would do evil. In fact, the evidence is very strong that the German foreign minister was wrong about the importance of Captain Dreyfus’ Jewishness in effecting his return from Devil’s Island. Publicity usually takes money, and Dreyfus’ case emerged from its initial first couple of years of obscurity not because of any organized Jewish effort, but because the Dreyfus family had money, and the dedicated older brother, Mathieu, was determined to spend as much as it took to get justice for Alfred. To be sure, the first Dreyfusard, the young firebrand journalist, Bernard Lazare, was one of the first aggressive Jewish activists, having written a major work on the history and causes of anti-Semitism, and to him, both in his heart and in the case he made publicly, “Dreyfus was the symbol of the persecuted Jew.”8 But contrary to the claims of the anti- Dreyfusards, he apparently got very little, if any, organized Jewish assistance for the cause of the convicted Captain.
Jews are like any other people in choosing to believe that which it is most comfortable to believe. Even the man who later founded Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who covered the first Dreyfus trial as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of Austria, wrote in his dispatch upon the conclusion of the trial that Dreyfus was probably guilty, though he would later claim that it was the Dreyfus ordeal that “made me a Zionist.”10
There was more than enough reason for Jews, like everyone else, not to want to believe Lazare. Certainly very few would want to admit to themselves that “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could only make everyone feel less secure. The state had put its full authority behind the conviction. The Dreyfus family was from Alsace, and though they were culturally French right to the bone, their textile factory still operated there even though the region had become a part of Germany as a result of the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And what sort of man would want to defy convention and assault that bastion of privilege that was the French military officer caste in the first place? Dreyfus’ strong French patriotism, which was a major motivation for his choosing the military career, was for others, not the least of whom were fellow Jews, just another good reason to suspect him.
In addition to Lazare, perhaps the most politically prominent Jew in the country, Chamber of Deputies member Joseph Reinach, was eventually won over to the Dreyfusard cause and he did yeoman’s work for it, but he had to struggle against his co-religionists. By late 1897, three years into the Affair, organized Jewish opinion was gravitating much more toward the new idea of a restored homeland in Israel, a development that to Reinach could only undercut the cause of justice for Alfred Dreyfus. Reinach was so disturbed that he wrote an article in Le Figaro denouncing it:
Profiteers?
So the eventual exoneration of Dreyfus was a triumph not of Jews as a group, but a triumph of truth and justice. It was also a triumph of a group of individuals dedicated to truth and justice, some of whom were Jewish and some of whom were not. But it was not all just a case of high ideals winning out. It was no doubt, to a degree, a triumph of money as well. Here is Bernard Lazare’s initial reaction when asked by his publisher to take a position on the Dreyfus case:
But after examining the evidence he was won over and did prodigious work for the cause. Though the author David Levering Lewis says Lazare “volunteered” his services to the Dreyfus family, anti-Dreyfusards have consistently claimed that he was “bought” by the Dreyfus family. The debate, I believe, is a pointless one. The family had lawyers who could hardly have been expected to work for free. Lazare was a journalist who had to earn a living, and he did put in a great deal of time for the Dreyfus family. The family no doubt bore much of the logistical expense of his work such as printing up and distributing the initial 3,000 copies of Lazare’s pamphlet laying out the case for Dreyfus’ innocence. But Lazare was extraordinarily idealistic, and if he contended that he was not actually paid for his services to the Dreyfus family he more than earned the right to be taken at his word. The relevant point, for our purposes, is that the “bought” charge was so persistently made by his opponents. The implication behind it is that the truth of the matter is not the important thing. Confident that the disparity of resources is massively on their side, the authorities and their apologists are quick to attack anyone who would dispute them as a “profiteer.”
When it comes to the Foster case the disparity of resources on the two sides is even greater than in the Dreyfus Affair. We have noted the large and fluctuating number of daily newspapers there were in Paris at the time, which is an indicator of the ease with which one could get into the newspaper business and reach a significant audience. Newspapers were how the residents of Paris got their news. We have a number of media, and with the exception of the Internet, all are prodigiously expensive to get into. The greater their scope and reach, the more expensive it is to enter the business. Most people now get their news from television, the most expensive business, and the major television networks have been a monolith on the Foster case, actively preventing news from reaching the public that dispute the official government line, and, in some instances, actively and very dishonestly promoting the government line. Newspapers are next in the hierarchy, both in expense to operate and in influence, and they have been almost as monolithic, with only a few little chinks in the armor creeping in at The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Investor’s Business Daily. Magazines come next, and, surprisingly, across the political spectrum from The Nation on the left to the American Spectator on the right, no information has been allowed out through their pages that breaks ranks in the slightest with the massive cover-up effort13. At the bottom of the news hierarchy are the local radio stations with their call-in talk shows. Even the radio stations are mainly owned by large, rich conglomerates, but some have permitted guests like the journalists Christopher Ruddy and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, citizen researcher Hugh Sprunt, and the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer, John Clarke.
As great as the disparity of power has been, it has not been great enough for the people in the White House. The White House Counsel’s Office has actually produced a 331-page report entitled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” which it supplied secretly to media people until the Wall Street Journal made the existence of the report public. The principal thesis of the report is that all the information about the Clinton scandals that gets out, which is, of course, characterized as nothing more than mere conspiracy theorizing, can be traced ultimately to the banking fortune of Pittsburgh conservative, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife employs Ruddy at his small newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and does provide financial backing to such entities as Accuracy in Media, Strategic Investment Newsletter, the Western Journalism Center, and the American Spectator (this last having been terminated after the magazine attacked Ruddy on his Foster reporting).
There is no doubt that without Scaife’s considerable commitment of money the news on the Foster death would have been even more effectively suppressed, but all that Scaife has spent has really done very little to penetrate the public consciousness. Only the American Spectator has anything like a mass audience, and, as we have noted, it has gone along with the government on Foster14. The relative meagerness of the opposition did not prevent the government and its apologists from raising the “bought” or “profiteer” charge, though. What they apparently fear above all else is that the free enterprise ideal in journalism might actually work and that someone might spread the truth in a self-sustaining manner by selling it. Thus, on its scurrilous Sixty Minutes piece on Ruddy, CBS had a lawyer for one of the Park Policemen say, outrageously falsely, that Strategic Investment had made a half-million dollars on its Foster video (Bear in mind that there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of this entire Scaife operation. Christopher Ruddy is certainly “bought” by Scaife--in the sense that he openly employs him-- to a greater degree than Lazare was ever bought by the Dreyfus family so Ruddy’s work can be interpreted as probably the best reflection of the Scaife intentions.. The reader is referred, in turn, to Part 2 of my “Dreyfus” for a detailed examination of Ruddy’s bona fides. It was on this video where the bald and unsupported statement was made---a statement that Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes jumped all over-- that Foster was left-handed.).
My own experience perhaps offers better parallels with the charges leveled against Lazare than does the experience of the Scaife team. The family of the young Fairfax County, Virginia, college student, Tommy Burkett, whose violent death on December 1, 1991, was ruled a suicide, certainly has behaved more like the dedicated Dreyfus family than have Vincent Foster’s survivors. His connection to the Foster death is, among others, that he had the same autopsy doctor, James Beyer, who performed the same sort of job as he did on Foster; he had the same medical examiner, Donald Haut; and the current second ranking man in the FBI, Robert Bryant, involved himself in his case before he had any apparent jurisdiction, as he did in the Foster case. At least as significant is the fact that Tommy, his parents learned after his death, had been induced into doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, in his powerful new book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as one of two cases illustrating, at the very least, Dr. Beyer’s lack of competence refers to the “highly sensitive death of Tommy Burkett,” and proceeds to prove how sensitive it is by not bothering to tell us why.15
The parents found Tommy seated dead in his upstairs room with his legs crossed at the feet, his hands folded on his lap, and the family revolver lying on top of his hands with its cylinder slightly ajar. A single bullet was in the wall above his head but not where it should have been if he had shot himself through the mouth as the police concluded. The family also noticed blood spatter as though from gunshots on downstairs walls. The emergency workers who first arrived told the parents that from the condition of the body it was apparent that Tommy had been dead for several hours. The first arriving policeman, on the other hand, said that he had died just minutes before the parents arrived home, and before that, even before he viewed the body he told the mother, “I’ve seen lots of these suicides. Don’t blame yourself.” Even though the bullet was not taken from the wall and the curious blood spatter was not analyzed by the police, with the help of Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, they ruled suicide.16 Later, the parents paid for the body to be exhumed and another autopsy to be performed. That autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous contusions that had not been noted by Dr. Beyer. Young Burkett had clearly been beaten to death.
This is only a small sample of the numerous anomalies in the Burkett death. After it appeared on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries the FBI was moved to conduct a civil rights investigation of the case. Predictably, in December of 1995, they came to the same conclusion as the police, but they held back what they said was a 1,800-page report backing up their conclusions. Only recently, with the help of the Virginia congressional delegation, has the FBI begun to release piecemeal to the parents a heavily redacted, unnumbered hodgepodge of documents which they say constitute part of the report. As of this writing the parents have just begun to analyze and respond to it through the same congressional channels by which they received the report. Their next immediate goal is to obtain congressional hearings on the case.17
Another similarity to the Foster case, and perhaps the most telling one, has been the role of the media. For 18 months no newspaper would even mention Tommy’s death even though reporters would sound very interested when the parents first talked to them. Only when the parents got the idea of making the original overture by pay phone instead of their home phone did they get results, Later they had a professional sweep done of their phone system and found that the phone was being tapped. A reporter for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine later interviewed the parents at length, but, to this day, the only thing that has appeared about Tommy Burkett in The Washington Post has been an “in memoriam” on the obituary page paid for by the parents.
I have written for the newsletter that the family puts out periodically, and I included song lyrics about the story and an essay about the connections and similarities of the case to Foster’s in my privately-published book, The New Moral Order. Internet correspondents professing to care greatly about government corruption and the scandals of the Clinton, and, tellingly, only the Clinton administration have labored mightily to hang the “profiteer” label on me for offering the book for sale on the Net and one of them went so far as to ask me, as one of many prying questions he put to me by private E-mail, if I was being paid by the Burkett family.
The Burkett parents are both English teachers, the father in public high school and the mother in college. They don’t have the money that the Dreyfus family had, but they do have the same dedication and determination. If they did have that much money there is a very good chance that they would be a good deal farther down the road toward justice than they are now. And if they could so easily afford to pay people to publicize their quest for justice, I don’t know that I would refuse any offer they might make to pay me, but the usual route these days is to hire a public relations firm for such things. From the experience I can certainly say that I know how Bernard Lazare must have felt when he was publicly dismissed as someone who had been “bought” by the Dreyfus family.
Stacked Deck Against Freedom
It is now time to reflect upon the lessons of the of the highest ranking government official to die violently under mysterious circumstances since President Kennedy. The cost, in a purely monetary sense, of the apparent murder would have been nominal, but the expense of the continuing cover-up is enormous. What are the meager resources of a few independent truth seekers selling a few books, tapes, and videos compared to the federal government, with its tentacles into academia and its joint operation with the corporate media establishment? As we look upon the pyramids of Egypt or some magnificent Gothic cathedral in Europe, we can’t help thinking about the sheer manpower that had to be mobilized to create such structures. Similarly, we cannot help but be impressed with the expensive manpower holding together the edifice of lies in the Foster case. The millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went to the Fiske and Starr cover-ups may be the most obvious monetary hemorrhage, but think for a minute of what the simple act of attempting to intimidate the witness Patrick Knowlton must have cost. He has counted at least 25 different men putting the evil eye on him in the streets of Washington, and behind them there had to be a support structure that could mobilize so many people on short notice. More than that, the perpetrators had to be sure in advance that the vast resources controlled by those who run the media empires would not, in turn, mobilize any part of those resources to inform the public of the brazen act.
Recall now the words of the first Republican Party president with which we began the first part of the larger “Dreyfus” essay:
Those words were spoken in a period of great crisis for our country. Abraham Lincoln, in the first of their series of debates, was faulting Judge Stephen Douglas for his influential public pronouncements on the slavery issue, which Lincoln deemed to be excessively legalistic and lacking in morality. Consider further the words of Thomas Jefferson, a man who we might say was our first Democratic Party president:
Jefferson wrote this in a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington shortly before the formulation of our Constitution, whose writers took the sentiments to heart with their powerful protection for freedom of expression in the very First Amendment.
America’s Dreyfus Affair has made plain, with the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson sharing power and responsibility, and with a man at the top who took his middle name from the latter, that what that great founding father most dreaded is now a reality. For all the protection that he had hoped they would provide us against that government, and don’t, we now have a government without newspapers.
David Martin
December 30, 1997
_______________
Notes:
1. David Martin, from “Of Swords and Pens,” in The New Moral Order, the Poems and Essays of David Martin (Chantilly, VA: DCD Publishers, 1995) p. 46. The entire poem is as follows:
2. David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973) p. 301.
3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: The New American Library, 1951) p. 89.
4. “The Cult of Hope,” in Prejudices (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 89.
5. Op. cit., p. 325.
6. ABC-TV reporter and commentator Cokie Roberts demonstrated another tack that is commonly taken when responding to a question about the Foster case at a panel discussion at American University in Washington. “There are hundreds of first rate reporters in the country,” she said, “and you can be sure you would have read about it if there had been anything to it.”
7. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987) p. 35.
8. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986) p. 138.
9. Ibid. p. 139.
10. Lewis, op. cit., p. 60.
11. Ibid., p. 260.
12. Bredin, op. cit., p. 135.
13. Perhaps in 1998 the cover-up house will crumble. The January 1998 issue of The American Spectator has a very favorable review by quintessential Washington insider, Robert D. Novak, of the best and most powerful book that the American Press has ever largely ignored, Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories. Novak repeats uncritically the following charge from the Evans-Pritchard book:
Novak goes on to say that “...Evans-Pritchard holds out hope for the ‘the ordinary citizens’ who will ‘cleanse the institutions of this country before they become irretrievably corrupt.’ Patrick Knowlton, a harassed witness in the Vince Foster case, last year filed a federal tort claim naming FBI agents as defendants.”
14. But see the late breaking development detailed in the previous note.
15. The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.) p. 148.
16. The parents themselves later had the bullet removed and analyzed. The examiners found no trace of human tissue on the bullet, indicating that it had not passed through any part of a human body, but it had apparently passed through something. About half of the bullet was missing and could not be accounted for.
17. For more information contact Tom Burkett and Beth George, 13456 Muirkirk Lane, Herndon, VA 20171, Tel. (703) 435-3112. E-mail tburkett@clark.net. Especially recommended is the web site of the national organization the Burketts have founded, Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up: http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. For all four parts of “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” go to http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
For most French Jews, this intransigent, overly vehement, revolutionary writer lent support to the legend of the Jewish syndicate of cosmopolites and compromised the Jews dangerously by supporting, because he was Jewish, the cause of a traitor.9
Jews are like any other people in choosing to believe that which it is most comfortable to believe. Even the man who later founded Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who covered the first Dreyfus trial as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of Austria, wrote in his dispatch upon the conclusion of the trial that Dreyfus was probably guilty, though he would later claim that it was the Dreyfus ordeal that “made me a Zionist.”10
There was more than enough reason for Jews, like everyone else, not to want to believe Lazare. Certainly very few would want to admit to themselves that “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could only make everyone feel less secure. The state had put its full authority behind the conviction. The Dreyfus family was from Alsace, and though they were culturally French right to the bone, their textile factory still operated there even though the region had become a part of Germany as a result of the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And what sort of man would want to defy convention and assault that bastion of privilege that was the French military officer caste in the first place? Dreyfus’ strong French patriotism, which was a major motivation for his choosing the military career, was for others, not the least of whom were fellow Jews, just another good reason to suspect him.
In addition to Lazare, perhaps the most politically prominent Jew in the country, Chamber of Deputies member Joseph Reinach, was eventually won over to the Dreyfusard cause and he did yeoman’s work for it, but he had to struggle against his co-religionists. By late 1897, three years into the Affair, organized Jewish opinion was gravitating much more toward the new idea of a restored homeland in Israel, a development that to Reinach could only undercut the cause of justice for Alfred Dreyfus. Reinach was so disturbed that he wrote an article in Le Figaro denouncing it:
The sole result of this campaign, which in any case is destined for a pitiful failure, would be to give the impression...that those Frenchmen who belong to the Jewish faith are subordinating the idea of the fatherland to I cannot imagine what sort of solidarity which existed in a vague way during barbarous times, which was prevalent no doubt at the origin of civilized societies, but which in modern societies is an anachronism.11
Profiteers?
So the eventual exoneration of Dreyfus was a triumph not of Jews as a group, but a triumph of truth and justice. It was also a triumph of a group of individuals dedicated to truth and justice, some of whom were Jewish and some of whom were not. But it was not all just a case of high ideals winning out. It was no doubt, to a degree, a triumph of money as well. Here is Bernard Lazare’s initial reaction when asked by his publisher to take a position on the Dreyfus case:
Why? I know neither him nor his people. If he were some poor devil, I would have worried for him. But Dreyfus and his family are very rich, they say; they’ll be able to take care of themselves very well without me, especially if he is innocent..12.
But after examining the evidence he was won over and did prodigious work for the cause. Though the author David Levering Lewis says Lazare “volunteered” his services to the Dreyfus family, anti-Dreyfusards have consistently claimed that he was “bought” by the Dreyfus family. The debate, I believe, is a pointless one. The family had lawyers who could hardly have been expected to work for free. Lazare was a journalist who had to earn a living, and he did put in a great deal of time for the Dreyfus family. The family no doubt bore much of the logistical expense of his work such as printing up and distributing the initial 3,000 copies of Lazare’s pamphlet laying out the case for Dreyfus’ innocence. But Lazare was extraordinarily idealistic, and if he contended that he was not actually paid for his services to the Dreyfus family he more than earned the right to be taken at his word. The relevant point, for our purposes, is that the “bought” charge was so persistently made by his opponents. The implication behind it is that the truth of the matter is not the important thing. Confident that the disparity of resources is massively on their side, the authorities and their apologists are quick to attack anyone who would dispute them as a “profiteer.”
When it comes to the Foster case the disparity of resources on the two sides is even greater than in the Dreyfus Affair. We have noted the large and fluctuating number of daily newspapers there were in Paris at the time, which is an indicator of the ease with which one could get into the newspaper business and reach a significant audience. Newspapers were how the residents of Paris got their news. We have a number of media, and with the exception of the Internet, all are prodigiously expensive to get into. The greater their scope and reach, the more expensive it is to enter the business. Most people now get their news from television, the most expensive business, and the major television networks have been a monolith on the Foster case, actively preventing news from reaching the public that dispute the official government line, and, in some instances, actively and very dishonestly promoting the government line. Newspapers are next in the hierarchy, both in expense to operate and in influence, and they have been almost as monolithic, with only a few little chinks in the armor creeping in at The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Investor’s Business Daily. Magazines come next, and, surprisingly, across the political spectrum from The Nation on the left to the American Spectator on the right, no information has been allowed out through their pages that breaks ranks in the slightest with the massive cover-up effort13. At the bottom of the news hierarchy are the local radio stations with their call-in talk shows. Even the radio stations are mainly owned by large, rich conglomerates, but some have permitted guests like the journalists Christopher Ruddy and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, citizen researcher Hugh Sprunt, and the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer, John Clarke.
As great as the disparity of power has been, it has not been great enough for the people in the White House. The White House Counsel’s Office has actually produced a 331-page report entitled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” which it supplied secretly to media people until the Wall Street Journal made the existence of the report public. The principal thesis of the report is that all the information about the Clinton scandals that gets out, which is, of course, characterized as nothing more than mere conspiracy theorizing, can be traced ultimately to the banking fortune of Pittsburgh conservative, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife employs Ruddy at his small newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and does provide financial backing to such entities as Accuracy in Media, Strategic Investment Newsletter, the Western Journalism Center, and the American Spectator (this last having been terminated after the magazine attacked Ruddy on his Foster reporting).
There is no doubt that without Scaife’s considerable commitment of money the news on the Foster death would have been even more effectively suppressed, but all that Scaife has spent has really done very little to penetrate the public consciousness. Only the American Spectator has anything like a mass audience, and, as we have noted, it has gone along with the government on Foster14. The relative meagerness of the opposition did not prevent the government and its apologists from raising the “bought” or “profiteer” charge, though. What they apparently fear above all else is that the free enterprise ideal in journalism might actually work and that someone might spread the truth in a self-sustaining manner by selling it. Thus, on its scurrilous Sixty Minutes piece on Ruddy, CBS had a lawyer for one of the Park Policemen say, outrageously falsely, that Strategic Investment had made a half-million dollars on its Foster video (Bear in mind that there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of this entire Scaife operation. Christopher Ruddy is certainly “bought” by Scaife--in the sense that he openly employs him-- to a greater degree than Lazare was ever bought by the Dreyfus family so Ruddy’s work can be interpreted as probably the best reflection of the Scaife intentions.. The reader is referred, in turn, to Part 2 of my “Dreyfus” for a detailed examination of Ruddy’s bona fides. It was on this video where the bald and unsupported statement was made---a statement that Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes jumped all over-- that Foster was left-handed.).
My own experience perhaps offers better parallels with the charges leveled against Lazare than does the experience of the Scaife team. The family of the young Fairfax County, Virginia, college student, Tommy Burkett, whose violent death on December 1, 1991, was ruled a suicide, certainly has behaved more like the dedicated Dreyfus family than have Vincent Foster’s survivors. His connection to the Foster death is, among others, that he had the same autopsy doctor, James Beyer, who performed the same sort of job as he did on Foster; he had the same medical examiner, Donald Haut; and the current second ranking man in the FBI, Robert Bryant, involved himself in his case before he had any apparent jurisdiction, as he did in the Foster case. At least as significant is the fact that Tommy, his parents learned after his death, had been induced into doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, in his powerful new book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as one of two cases illustrating, at the very least, Dr. Beyer’s lack of competence refers to the “highly sensitive death of Tommy Burkett,” and proceeds to prove how sensitive it is by not bothering to tell us why.15
The parents found Tommy seated dead in his upstairs room with his legs crossed at the feet, his hands folded on his lap, and the family revolver lying on top of his hands with its cylinder slightly ajar. A single bullet was in the wall above his head but not where it should have been if he had shot himself through the mouth as the police concluded. The family also noticed blood spatter as though from gunshots on downstairs walls. The emergency workers who first arrived told the parents that from the condition of the body it was apparent that Tommy had been dead for several hours. The first arriving policeman, on the other hand, said that he had died just minutes before the parents arrived home, and before that, even before he viewed the body he told the mother, “I’ve seen lots of these suicides. Don’t blame yourself.” Even though the bullet was not taken from the wall and the curious blood spatter was not analyzed by the police, with the help of Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, they ruled suicide.16 Later, the parents paid for the body to be exhumed and another autopsy to be performed. That autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous contusions that had not been noted by Dr. Beyer. Young Burkett had clearly been beaten to death.
This is only a small sample of the numerous anomalies in the Burkett death. After it appeared on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries the FBI was moved to conduct a civil rights investigation of the case. Predictably, in December of 1995, they came to the same conclusion as the police, but they held back what they said was a 1,800-page report backing up their conclusions. Only recently, with the help of the Virginia congressional delegation, has the FBI begun to release piecemeal to the parents a heavily redacted, unnumbered hodgepodge of documents which they say constitute part of the report. As of this writing the parents have just begun to analyze and respond to it through the same congressional channels by which they received the report. Their next immediate goal is to obtain congressional hearings on the case.17
Another similarity to the Foster case, and perhaps the most telling one, has been the role of the media. For 18 months no newspaper would even mention Tommy’s death even though reporters would sound very interested when the parents first talked to them. Only when the parents got the idea of making the original overture by pay phone instead of their home phone did they get results, Later they had a professional sweep done of their phone system and found that the phone was being tapped. A reporter for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine later interviewed the parents at length, but, to this day, the only thing that has appeared about Tommy Burkett in The Washington Post has been an “in memoriam” on the obituary page paid for by the parents.
I have written for the newsletter that the family puts out periodically, and I included song lyrics about the story and an essay about the connections and similarities of the case to Foster’s in my privately-published book, The New Moral Order. Internet correspondents professing to care greatly about government corruption and the scandals of the Clinton, and, tellingly, only the Clinton administration have labored mightily to hang the “profiteer” label on me for offering the book for sale on the Net and one of them went so far as to ask me, as one of many prying questions he put to me by private E-mail, if I was being paid by the Burkett family.
The Burkett parents are both English teachers, the father in public high school and the mother in college. They don’t have the money that the Dreyfus family had, but they do have the same dedication and determination. If they did have that much money there is a very good chance that they would be a good deal farther down the road toward justice than they are now. And if they could so easily afford to pay people to publicize their quest for justice, I don’t know that I would refuse any offer they might make to pay me, but the usual route these days is to hire a public relations firm for such things. From the experience I can certainly say that I know how Bernard Lazare must have felt when he was publicly dismissed as someone who had been “bought” by the Dreyfus family.
Stacked Deck Against Freedom
It is now time to reflect upon the lessons of the of the highest ranking government official to die violently under mysterious circumstances since President Kennedy. The cost, in a purely monetary sense, of the apparent murder would have been nominal, but the expense of the continuing cover-up is enormous. What are the meager resources of a few independent truth seekers selling a few books, tapes, and videos compared to the federal government, with its tentacles into academia and its joint operation with the corporate media establishment? As we look upon the pyramids of Egypt or some magnificent Gothic cathedral in Europe, we can’t help thinking about the sheer manpower that had to be mobilized to create such structures. Similarly, we cannot help but be impressed with the expensive manpower holding together the edifice of lies in the Foster case. The millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went to the Fiske and Starr cover-ups may be the most obvious monetary hemorrhage, but think for a minute of what the simple act of attempting to intimidate the witness Patrick Knowlton must have cost. He has counted at least 25 different men putting the evil eye on him in the streets of Washington, and behind them there had to be a support structure that could mobilize so many people on short notice. More than that, the perpetrators had to be sure in advance that the vast resources controlled by those who run the media empires would not, in turn, mobilize any part of those resources to inform the public of the brazen act.
Recall now the words of the first Republican Party president with which we began the first part of the larger “Dreyfus” essay:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
Those words were spoken in a period of great crisis for our country. Abraham Lincoln, in the first of their series of debates, was faulting Judge Stephen Douglas for his influential public pronouncements on the slavery issue, which Lincoln deemed to be excessively legalistic and lacking in morality. Consider further the words of Thomas Jefferson, a man who we might say was our first Democratic Party president:
The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.
Jefferson wrote this in a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington shortly before the formulation of our Constitution, whose writers took the sentiments to heart with their powerful protection for freedom of expression in the very First Amendment.
America’s Dreyfus Affair has made plain, with the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson sharing power and responsibility, and with a man at the top who took his middle name from the latter, that what that great founding father most dreaded is now a reality. For all the protection that he had hoped they would provide us against that government, and don’t, we now have a government without newspapers.
David Martin
December 30, 1997
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Notes:
1. David Martin, from “Of Swords and Pens,” in The New Moral Order, the Poems and Essays of David Martin (Chantilly, VA: DCD Publishers, 1995) p. 46. The entire poem is as follows:
Of Swords and Pens
The pen may be stronger than the sword
But pens, like guns, can be bought,
And battles of words, like battles with guns,
Can be unfairly fought.
Those who rule know all too well
The power of the word,
And so they ration carefully
The ones that can be heard.
In our land there’s little chance
That virtue will prevail
When “truth” is a consumer good
And words are all for sale.
2. David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973) p. 301.
3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: The New American Library, 1951) p. 89.
4. “The Cult of Hope,” in Prejudices (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 89.
5. Op. cit., p. 325.
6. ABC-TV reporter and commentator Cokie Roberts demonstrated another tack that is commonly taken when responding to a question about the Foster case at a panel discussion at American University in Washington. “There are hundreds of first rate reporters in the country,” she said, “and you can be sure you would have read about it if there had been anything to it.”
7. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987) p. 35.
8. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986) p. 138.
9. Ibid. p. 139.
10. Lewis, op. cit., p. 60.
11. Ibid., p. 260.
12. Bredin, op. cit., p. 135.
13. Perhaps in 1998 the cover-up house will crumble. The January 1998 issue of The American Spectator has a very favorable review by quintessential Washington insider, Robert D. Novak, of the best and most powerful book that the American Press has ever largely ignored, Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories. Novak repeats uncritically the following charge from the Evans-Pritchard book:
Authorities rearranged the “crime scene” at Fort Marcy Park to move White House aide Vincent Foster’s body and place a gun in his hand. Evidence was hidden and destroyed, and testimony by witnesses altered by the FBI to fit the suicide theory. Witnesses, in fact, were harassed. Foster’s “suicide” note appears to be a planted forgery. The career Justice Department prosecutor assigned by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr found himself blocked as he probed for the truth, and he returned to his former duties with his mouth shut tight.
Novak goes on to say that “...Evans-Pritchard holds out hope for the ‘the ordinary citizens’ who will ‘cleanse the institutions of this country before they become irretrievably corrupt.’ Patrick Knowlton, a harassed witness in the Vince Foster case, last year filed a federal tort claim naming FBI agents as defendants.”
14. But see the late breaking development detailed in the previous note.
15. The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.) p. 148.
16. The parents themselves later had the bullet removed and analyzed. The examiners found no trace of human tissue on the bullet, indicating that it had not passed through any part of a human body, but it had apparently passed through something. About half of the bullet was missing and could not be accounted for.
17. For more information contact Tom Burkett and Beth George, 13456 Muirkirk Lane, Herndon, VA 20171, Tel. (703) 435-3112. E-mail tburkett@clark.net. Especially recommended is the web site of the national organization the Burketts have founded, Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up: http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. For all four parts of “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” go to http://www.aci.net/kalliste/