True Anon Truth Feed - UNLOCKED: Episode 484: Ford's Foundation
Aired: 2025-10-16
Duration: 02:01:23


=== Welcome to Forth Reich Archaeology (14:56) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, so we take the allegations against Liz pretty seriously.
[00:00:04]  We take the allegations against Liz pretty seriously, and we heard you and heard your guys' pain.
[00:00:11]  She's getting the voice surgery.
[00:00:14]  We're putting her under the knife.
[00:00:15]  She's in Thailand right now.
[00:00:17]  She's going to Dubai.
[00:00:18]  She'll be there on Tuesday.
[00:00:20]  Hopefully Thursday she ends up in Johannesburg.
[00:00:24]  And then Friday to finishing touches, of course, in Tucson, Arizona.
[00:00:30]  You know, Liz has gone through a lot of changes over the years.
[00:00:34]  Obviously, we've debuted, I think this is two versions of her so far.
[00:00:38]  At least.
[00:00:39]  At least.
[00:00:40]  And we understand that a lot of you aren't happy with the new model.
[00:00:43]  And we're bringing back, I think, like a new take on like a vintage one that you liked.
[00:00:50]  So it's going to be some of the old Liz and then some of the new Liz and then some of a Liz that you guys have never even seen before.
[00:00:58]  Liz 3 for Web3.
[00:01:01]  And so while that's happening, of course, the cat's away, the boy shall play.
[00:01:06]  And we hope you'll forgive us for an all-male episode.
[00:01:34]  Welcome to TrueAnon.
[00:01:36]  I'm Liz Franczak.
[00:01:37]  And I'm Brace.
[00:01:39]  And I'm Young Chomsky producing the show.
[00:01:43]  I'm a mess without her.
[00:01:44]  Yeah, that's okay.
[00:01:46]  Sometimes, you know, absence makes the Brace grow fonder, as they say.
[00:01:49]  That's true.
[00:01:51]  Liz, I feel like this has happened the last time that Liz was missing from episode two, where she was audibly sick on an episode before, and then just didn't show up the next time.
[00:02:03]  But it has nothing to do with that.
[00:02:05]  You know, she's just taking, she's in the Bahamas right now.
[00:02:09]  She's getting some sun.
[00:02:10]  We could make the audience miss her by just like leaving silence where she would chime in.
[00:02:15]  So I'll try to not say anything.
[00:02:17]  Liz, what did you mean by that?
[00:02:21]  Interesting.
[00:02:22]  You know what we should have done?
[00:02:24]  It's too late now.
[00:02:25]  What we should have done is just recorded like the cold open and then this part as if Liz was here just leaving the silences and be like, sorry, the audio got fucked up.
[00:02:35]  She's cut from this episode.
[00:02:36]  Yeah.
[00:02:36]  I could dub into like peanuts like teacher sound.
[00:02:42]  Again, oh yeah, it's like there's like a buzzing in her mic.
[00:02:46]  We had to just cut it.
[00:02:46]  Yeah, don't complain about it.
[00:02:48]  Don't go fuck it.
[00:02:48]  It's done.
[00:02:49]  Well, it's done.
[00:02:49]  It's done.
[00:02:50]  We upgraded the systems.
[00:02:51]  We're now using the kind of microphones you've never actually were using the exact same microphones, but we're now using kind of cables that they gave to us special.
[00:03:01]  We have an all-male episode of True Anon.
[00:03:04]  We are talking about Gerald Ford.
[00:03:06]  Now, before every woman listening to this turn, nope, that's too sexist of me.
[00:03:10]  But you know what?
[00:03:11]  There's no one to give me a disapproving look.
[00:03:13]  But we talk about women, Betty.
[00:03:16]  Yeah, Betty Ford?
[00:03:19]  I'm like, she was kind of the king crackhead of the White House until Hunter came in there.
[00:03:24]  That's true.
[00:03:24]  Right?
[00:03:25]  He should do the Hunter Biden clinic.
[00:03:27]  Like, you should go to a Hunter Biden center if, like, you're like too tweaked out.
[00:03:31]  It's for like only the worst crackheads out there.
[00:03:35]  I will.
[00:03:36]  You will?
[00:03:37]  I'll go.
[00:03:38]  The crazy thing about that, this has nothing to do with the episode we're talking about there.
[00:03:41]  The crazy thing about the Hunter Biden stuff is like, if you, again, like, I, I've done a lot of math.
[00:03:49]  I've smoked, I'm not going to say I've done a lot of crack, but I like crack.
[00:03:52]  But the filming of it, of yourself doing drugs, is something I've just never encountered.
[00:03:57]  Didn't Rob Ford do it?
[00:03:59]  Rob Ford was filmed surreptitiously by a hater.
[00:04:02]  Okay.
[00:04:02]  And he was clearly, that is the kind of shit you'd want video of you.
[00:04:06]  Yeah.
[00:04:07]  Well, that's, that's very contemporary.
[00:04:08]  You know, that's the self, the drug use selfie.
[00:04:11]  Yeah.
[00:04:12]  You know, as documentation.
[00:04:14]  But Rob Ford, like hanging out and fucking, what was he, like, speaking to patois and shit?
[00:04:19]  Like, that's like the video you'd be proud of.
[00:04:21]  Be like, look, yeah, that was me at my worst, but I'm doing my best.
[00:04:24]  And I'm looking cool and I'm jiving with the brothers.
[00:04:27]  It's like, he's doing, I don't know.
[00:04:29]  I mean, he perished.
[00:04:30]  No, he died.
[00:04:32]  I don't keep tabs on that.
[00:04:33]  He died.
[00:04:33]  His dog is in charge now.
[00:04:36]  But that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
[00:04:38]  We're talking about Gerald Ford today.
[00:04:40]  Well, there's a relation there.
[00:04:42]  I know.
[00:04:42]  I wish there was a relation.
[00:04:44]  God, I wish there was just three families in the entire world.
[00:04:47]  There's so many people named Ford, I guess.
[00:04:49]  I know.
[00:04:49]  Well, and of course, Michigan, too, which is something that I didn't even talk.
[00:04:53]  We didn't talk about, but no relation to Henry.
[00:04:56]  Anyways, we have Don from Fourth Reich Archaeology here to talk to us about Gerald Ford, the Fourth Reich, and a lot of other shit.
[00:05:04]  We're talking a lot about the Church Committee.
[00:05:05]  We're talking about the Warren Commission, that kind of classic stuff.
[00:05:10]  And here we go.
[00:05:13]  I feel so naked without Liz here.
[00:05:26]  There's nobody to shake their head in shame as I do another pathetic, insulting introduction for a guest.
[00:05:34]  She might not even know it ever happens.
[00:05:36]  She may not even know I exist.
[00:05:39]  She might not even exist.
[00:05:41]  But nevertheless, I shall persevere.
[00:05:43]  I wasn't even meaning to record this, but now I've started speaking into the mic.
[00:05:48]  Boys, I need your power.
[00:05:49]  I need to point both of you.
[00:05:51]  Put your hands in the center here.
[00:05:53]  We are no more women on podcasts.
[00:05:58]  Welcome to the boys cave.
[00:06:00]  Welcome to Boys Town, Boys Zone.
[00:06:02]  Welcome to Sniffies.
[00:06:04]  We are talking, ladies and gentlemen, today about another little group of men that had very few women presence in the room at many times.
[00:06:16]  That sentence.
[00:06:18]  Certain words in there may have made it not make sense, and that's because there is no female presence in the room, just like oftentimes, check out how tortured this is in the Ford White House.
[00:06:29]  But that is getting ahead of ourselves.
[00:06:32]  Don, welcome to the show.
[00:06:33]  We have with us today in the Naval Observatory, soon to be the White House, Don from Fourth Reich Archaeology, here to talk to us about Fourth Reich Archaeology, but also about Gerald Ford.
[00:06:48]  Before you stop listening, that was a real guy.
[00:06:52]  I know that many of our listeners are 12 plus to 16 minus, between the 12 and 16 age range, and live in various countries in the mysterious East, such as China, both Koreas, and Thailand.
[00:07:07]  But that was a real American president.
[00:07:09]  We have a real American podcaster.
[00:07:11]  Please, you have to start talking because I'm going to fucking embarrass myself.
[00:07:15]  Hello, welcome to the show.
[00:07:16]  Thank you for having me.
[00:07:18]  It is great to be here with you.
[00:07:20]  And I might even venture to say, not only was Gerald R. Ford born Leslie Lynch King Jr., a real American president, but perhaps the realest American president.
[00:07:37]  Interesting.
[00:07:39]  It is, I got to tell you, I actually did not know about the Lynch King thing until I listened to your show.
[00:07:44]  I feel like I don't know about presidents enough.
[00:07:48]  That one's pretty buried.
[00:07:50]  That's like, there's a lot of detritus to get through before you get there.
[00:07:54]  In fairness to Jerry, if I may call him that, even if he didn't fall out with Lynch King Sr., or Lynch King Sr. sort of fell out with a child Jerry, I would have changed that.
[00:08:08]  I would have changed that.
[00:08:09]  And he was a northern, he was a northern Republican.
[00:08:12]  He wasn't a Southern Democrat.
[00:08:13]  Right.
[00:08:14]  Right.
[00:08:16]  Your show is called Forth Reich Archaeology.
[00:08:18]  God, I feel like Mark Maron right now.
[00:08:24]  You both are forbidden from talking for the rest of the show.
[00:08:28]  I don't look like Mark Maron.
[00:08:29]  And now I feel like a jerk for senior forbidden from talking.
[00:08:31]  Forthright archaeology, what is it?
[00:08:35]  Well, it is taking this concept of the fourth Reich that probably many true non-listeners will be familiar with.
[00:08:43]  If not foot soldiers of.
[00:08:44]  Indeed.
[00:08:46]  That basically the idea is that, you know, I don't think it's so much a passing the torch from the Nazis to the Americans after World War II as more of a continuity from before, during, and after the Third Reich between the owners of capital, this network of capital that was largely built in the British Empire, the European colonial empires,
[00:09:15]  gets its money into Wall Street banks and finances the rise of the Third Reich in the wake of the Versailles Conference, which of course was attended by some of our favorite horsemen of the Fourth Reich, both Dulles Brothers in attendance in the house.
[00:09:34]  And Ho Chi Minh.
[00:09:35]  Ho Chi Minh up in there.
[00:09:38]  Edward Bernays had a seat at the table.
[00:09:42]  This is one of the things about the Versailles Conference I've never understood.
[00:09:46]  Did they just let you go?
[00:09:48]  Because Ho Chi Minh was pretty young back then.
[00:09:51]  Like, I mean, he was like, I mean, I think it was in his 20s or 30s, but like he wasn't, I believe, a famous figure yet.
[00:09:57]  Like, he'd been living in fucking, he'd been working in the hotel in Boston that we stayed at that had a crazy fire alarm.
[00:10:03]  And our producer was the only person who went downstairs.
[00:10:05]  He followed the damn instructions, but nobody else did.
[00:10:08]  Everybody waiting for the elevator.
[00:10:10]  The pipes froze.
[00:10:11]  And that was, and I knew there was a problem with that twice.
[00:10:13]  In the middle of the night.
[00:10:15]  But I'm like the Versailles Conference.
[00:10:16]  I'm like, did you, could you just go?
[00:10:18]  Like, what was Edward Bernays doing there?
[00:10:21]  Yeah, Bernays is a tricky case.
[00:10:22]  I'm not sure if he got the invite through Uncle Freud.
[00:10:26]  Yeah.
[00:10:27]  What the fuck would he have an invite for?
[00:10:29]  We're doing this conference.
[00:10:30]  There's going to be a lot of psychology.
[00:10:32]  I'll send my nephew.
[00:10:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:35]  I don't fucking know.
[00:10:36]  But the uncle of the Dulles brothers, I mean, they had a real ticket because their uncle Robert Lansing was Secretary of State for Wilson and was a big white supremacist right there with his racist boss Woodrow and invited the boys to come get a seat.
[00:10:56]  But they were pretty active participants in, you know, the debt arrangements and how rearmament, you know, building a loophole for German rearmament, essentially, so that their clients, when they would eventually get back into law practice, could take advantage and finance Hitler.
[00:11:16]  It's interesting.
[00:11:17]  There's this sort of like, there's this, I can't remember the guy's actual name, but like his, his podcast, like his like Nom de podcast is Martyr Maid.
[00:11:27]  But like he went on like the Tucker Carlson show and there was this big sort of, I don't know what, kerfluffle about him like being like Winston Churchill was like the devil of World War II or whatever.
[00:11:38]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:38]  Because, and like the subtext and occasionally the text is because he fought against Hitler.
[00:11:44]  But I think from like a certain perspective that there is a, I mean, certainly Churchill was no small D Democrat.
[00:11:54]  But like from a certain perspective, like Churchill did sort of fuck that up for everybody because the Nazis could have been, if these people were all thinking clearly, the Nazis could have actually been a great bulwark against communism.
[00:12:09]  Oh, yeah.
[00:12:09]  And there's like just a certain, a few certain, I guess, mistakes of history.
[00:12:14]  One of them being actually Hitler's, well, probably the Popular Front government in France, but like also in Hitler's kind of literal personal animosity towards the French and the French high command that like prevented that from happening and just Britain loving to sign treaties.
[00:12:31]  Yeah.
[00:12:31]  I mean, the main, one of the main voices in the ear of Neville Chamberlain at the Munich conference, the famous appeasement, was Montague Norman, who is the head of the Bank of England.
[00:12:47]  And his best friend, like literally named each other's kids after one another and were godfathers to their grandkids was Jalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the Reichsbank president and eventual Nazi finance minister.
[00:13:08]  I might be misremembering it here, but was it his niece who married Scorzeni?
[00:13:13]  Yeah, I think it was his daughter?
[00:13:16]  It's like his daughter or his niece or someone.
[00:13:18]  Maybe it's just, yeah, maybe it's straight up his daughter who married one of our, I got to be honest, Fourth Reich goat, Third Reich goats, actually, but also Fourth Reich goats.
[00:13:29]  A real bridge figure.
[00:13:30]  Real, real bridge figure, Otto Scorzeni.
[00:13:33]  And you know what?
[00:13:34]  Not only was he one of the scariest woeers of the Third Reich, but he was also one of the greatest businessmen in Spain.
[00:13:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:13:43]  Probably not too difficult.
[00:13:45]  Yep.
[00:13:46]  Yeah, I mean, it's funny because with the Fourth Reich stuff, it's like, I think there was a bit of a like a fuck moment with many in the American establishment after the end of World War II, where it seemed that maybe FDR had maybe over-promised a little bit to our friend Stalin in the East.
[00:14:12]  And one of the sort of Europe's heart, Germany, had been cleaved in two and was also like, was just unable to serve as this bulwark against communism, which had now spread up until Central Europe and was threatening to spread in many other, also Western Europe as well, France and Italy and Greece, I guess at that time too, although that's just Southern Europe.
[00:14:36]  But it's not important.
[00:14:39]  Not important.
[00:14:39]  And to me, I'm always like, well, It's a little Johnny come lately, but they did their best in the aftermath of World War II to blend American ingenuity and German, but also Belarusian, Belarusian, however the fuck you say it.

=== Iron Curtain Spread (16:24) ===

[00:14:56]  But, you know, I'm talking about people from Belarus, Ukrainian, Baltic, Balkan.
[00:15:01]  Oh, yeah.
[00:15:03]  You know, blood and sweat and honor, such as it was, but I'm obviously making a reference to the youth, it's the slogan there, together to fight against communism.
[00:15:16]  And integrated some of the ideas too, but integrated some of the Nazi ideal, Nazi ideas, but also the money and the manpower that was left over.
[00:15:26]  Yes.
[00:15:27]  And I think the ideas and the manpower go hand in hand because in order to plug that gap, right, the biggest gap was the U.S. had no knowledge of the USSR because they weren't really looking, peeking at their notes during the war.
[00:15:51]  And so once the Nazis surrender, then you have this contingent of planners, you know, and there's a lot of debate still about how big it was, but definitely a big group from Reinhardt Galen's organization, the Eastern Front Intelligence Organization, were hiding in the mountains, waiting for the Americans to come.
[00:16:17]  And when they did, they presented them with all these files on the Soviets that they'd obtained during the war and offered their services to the U.S. military intelligence.
[00:16:30]  And then eventually, with the help of Dulles, with the help of Frank Wisner, and even Angleton on the periphery there are just wholesale incorporated right into the CIA payroll from basically the beginning of the CIA after the National Security Act of 47.
[00:16:52]  Yeah, it's, I mean, thank God that Engleton was right and that America was so thoroughly penetrated because they really did waste a lot of these guys, the lower level guys, parachuting them into, you know, behind the iron curtain post like 40, I mean, I guess really post-45, but like post-46, 47, and they were immediately killed.
[00:17:13]  Like we, America sent, and it's funny because this is reframed as such a tragedy.
[00:17:18]  And it is in like a very abstract sense, like in that a human life is a tragedy or a human death rather is a tragedy wasted so needlessly.
[00:17:27]  But America parachuted like a ton of people or tried to infiltrate a ton of people, former collaborators or just straight up Nazi soldiers behind Soviet or Eastern bloc lines at the beginning of the Cold War.
[00:17:40]  They did this all throughout the Cold War, but at the beginning they were really trying to like both sort of foment insurgency and then like shore up insurgency, like in the case of like Poland or in Latvia and stuff.
[00:17:53]  It was a Bay of Pigs mentality for a country that's like, I don't know, a thousand times bigger than the island of Cuba.
[00:18:01]  Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:18:04]  If it was ridiculous in Cuba, imagine how much more ridiculous it was in Poland.
[00:18:09]  Yeah, and I feel like they kind of caught on from that, from those early attempts.
[00:18:13]  And then, I mean, speaking of Bay of Pigs, not to get too ahead of ourselves, but like later, because I sort of view a lot of those like Cuban terrorist organizations in the same way, they were actually more effectively able to use these sort of dissident exile groups for their proper purposes, which is like terror groups opposed to like guerrilla insurgencies.
[00:18:38]  I mean, some of them did do the guerrilla insurgencies too, and integrate them with American special forces and sort of use them as like death squad handlers for places in South America, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:18:49]  But back to, I think, like the 40s, 50s, I think we quickly realized that like, okay, well, we're not going to be able to send in like legions of shock troops of like Nazi Hungarians back in.
[00:19:04]  And so we should integrate kind of maybe the upper echelon types that we have.
[00:19:09]  Not the people who are necessarily at the top of the Nazi party, but certainly the Wehrmacht, the German army, men who served with honor and distinction, we can integrate into the NATO apparatus pretty easily.
[00:19:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:19:22]  Yeah.
[00:19:23]  And the other aspect of kind of the failure of the parachute drop approach is I think we'll get into this a lot when we start to talk about the eternal present and the integrated spectacle, but is integration of these Nazis into propaganda as well, like voice of Radio Free Europe, that, you know, later Voice of America, U.S. Information Agency,
[00:19:51]  the old Tucker Carlson's dad's old outfit.
[00:19:55]  But that was a big jobs program for ex-Nazis and ex-members of these local like Iron Guard in Romania or whatever.
[00:20:06]  I mean, we've talked about this on the show before.
[00:20:09]  I think in our last all boys episode with Matt Farwell, but like, actually, no, I think we talked about this with Mas Robeson.
[00:20:16]  But there was all these, I mean, for listeners who don't, aren't familiar, like we called the nations behind the Iron Curtain the captive nations, right?
[00:20:25]  And this was sort of the American like approach to, although Ford, ironically enough, got in trouble for kind of making a gaffe related to this, but or for doing a gaffe.
[00:20:36]  I'm not sure what the verb for gaffing is, but we referred to like all the countries behind the Iron Curtain as like captive nations.
[00:20:42]  Basically, half of Europe, half of the world really is imprisoned by communism.
[00:20:47]  And so we had all these sort of representatives of these captive nations, oftentimes people who fled from those countries because they had, for instance, been in the Iron Guard in Romania and maybe hung Jews from meat hooks or had been in the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary who really just tried to do like all the Holocaust in like two months in Hungary.
[00:21:08]  But all these like the really bad guys who like, first of all, had the means and wherewithal to flee, but came to America, they became sort of the representatives for all the people under communism in all of Eastern Europe.
[00:21:22]  Right.
[00:21:23]  And as a result, you know, you don't even need to get conspiratorial about it.
[00:21:28]  It's totally self-preservation from their point of view.
[00:21:31]  What's conspiratorial is the fact that they were secretly given all this power inside the U.S. government.
[00:21:39]  But it's not conspiratorial to say that they exaggerated the threats emanating from the so-called Soviet empire and the will to global expansion from Moscow, which was never really a threat at all.
[00:22:00]  No.
[00:22:00]  I mean, that's the funny thing about it.
[00:22:02]  It's like even in sort of critical stuff about the Soviet Union sort of post-World War II, like they didn't actually successfully spread the revolution pretty much anywhere.
[00:22:15]  Like they did assist some people in Africa, but they didn't really assist them like doing it.
[00:22:20]  Like after they took power, like they would send technical advisors and like, you know, sometimes they would send like, I think they gave NASA some like pilots or whatever, but like they really, they weren't like sending like legions of guys anywhere or like rolling the tanks in.
[00:22:34]  I mean, Afghanistan was their like one big version of that.
[00:22:38]  I mean, way to pick them.
[00:22:39]  I know.
[00:22:40]  And they blew that one.
[00:22:42]  I know, but that's look who it was, you know.
[00:22:45]  But yeah, I mean, there was this sort of fear of global communism and fomented by a lot of these guys.
[00:22:54]  And in turn, you know, I don't like to sort of exceptionalize democracy as being like non-authoritarian, you know, because like, for instance, there was concentration camps in democratic France in the 1930s.
[00:23:06]  You know what I mean?
[00:23:06]  Like it's not, there weren't death camps, but like these things are not like exceptional to Nazi Germany.
[00:23:12]  In California.
[00:23:13]  Exactly.
[00:23:14]  Precisely.
[00:23:15]  You're right.
[00:23:15]  Yeah.
[00:23:16]  There was racially based concentration camps in California.
[00:23:19]  And I think all throughout the West.
[00:23:21]  I heard they were bringing them back in Florida.
[00:23:23]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:23:24]  Although I think it might have gotten, there's an environmental review that might stymie it I read about today, which is the triumph of liberalism.
[00:23:35]  There are certain like the Nazis became, the Nazis that came over here became more democratic and the democratic people in charge of our government became sort of more Nazi and melded into this kind of like creature that really was able to spread its wings fully in the 1960s,
[00:23:54]  1950s, 1960s, 1970s before being slightly, having its wings slightly clipped in the mid-1970s and then turning into what it turned into today, which it really needed to in the modern national security state.
[00:24:08]  Right.
[00:24:09]  And this is kind of where the fourth Reich archaeology project picks up is we kind of view the moment like you've got the groundwork being laid right after the war.
[00:24:22]  All these guys coming on board.
[00:24:24]  The programs and the bureaucracies are being built.
[00:24:28]  Then along comes a elected president, John Kennedy, and he plays along, gets burned because they're not very smart when they make these predictions all the time.
[00:24:45]  And so they get rid of him.
[00:24:48]  And then the period really from November 63, the coup in Dallas, to you could, there's many places where you could bookend the other end of it, this consolidation period.
[00:25:01]  I kind of like to think of Jonestown as the other bookend.
[00:25:06]  Interesting.
[00:25:06]  Potentially.
[00:25:08]  Or maybe it's the October surprise stolen election of 1980 is the other bookend.
[00:25:15]  But there's a lot that happens hidden from view, which is then immediately submerged beneath an official narrative that's really crafted in real time.
[00:25:30]  Like when you even say clipped the wings, that is arguable if the wings were clipped or if, you know, as you guys were talking about with Seth Harp, the same sorts of operations just got moved around in the shell game and were distributed on a different model that is no longer so reliant on government bureaucracy,
[00:25:57]  which after the revelations of the 70s is by necessity by, you know, to maintain the illusion of democratic control subject to some additional controls and regulations and accountability.
[00:26:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:14]  No, you're right to say that.
[00:26:15]  I mean, I sort of guess by clip the wings, I mean that like those particular institutions were set back a little bit.
[00:26:22]  I mean, the CIA was damaged reputationally and did have to have a lot of the, especially the more kinetic movements from the CIA transferred over to just the straight-up military, which I'm sure was not pleasant for them.
[00:26:37]  But even if it ended up with the same results for the world.
[00:26:42]  But also the presidency itself got in a little bit of trouble during the Nixon-Ford years and ended up with a lot of things ostensibly transferred to Congress.
[00:26:54]  But kind of to what you're saying, one of the things that Congress did, not to get too ahead of ourselves, during this period where the wings were clipped of the presidency, is they passed the War Powers Act, where they're supposed to be, the Congress is supposed to be the people that declare war.
[00:27:08]  Well, as I was saying, it didn't work out too well for them.
[00:27:12]  But it's so funny because whenever something does happen, like whenever like the U.S. bombs Yemen or like Iran or somewhere, the U.S. starts bombing somebody, there'll always be like some fucking guy or like one or two people that'll be like, we got to pass like a war powers resolution act, either for or against this.
[00:27:28]  And then it just goes nowhere.
[00:27:31]  They need something to keep Bernie busy.
[00:27:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:34]  His retirement program.
[00:27:36]  Bernie and Rand Paul and yeah, a couple of other people.
[00:27:41]  I guess Marjorie Taylor Greene now, too, has become one of these Rand Paulian figures who likes to make a speech after something happens that they fail to do anything about ever.
[00:27:51]  Yeah.
[00:27:52]  So while we've been talking about this, you've made numerous references.
[00:27:55]  In fact, sent me a copy of, I don't know how to pronounce it, it's Guy Deborah.
[00:28:02]  I've read Society of the Spectacle, but this is comments on Society of the Spectacle, which I've now also read since you sent it to me.
[00:28:07]  And it's fucking, it's fairly short, although for our listeners, probably a paragraph is too long, no disrespect.
[00:28:14]  And I think it is a good framework to talk about this kind of stuff.
[00:28:18]  Yeah.
[00:28:19]  I mean, I think the first one, a little bit maybe more inaccessible, a little bit more rambling.
[00:28:28]  When he gets to the comments, it's published in 1988.
[00:28:32]  And maybe you could link the, it's online in the show notes, but it's pretty on point for this, describing this process, you know, the integrated spectacle.
[00:28:46]  Maybe Maybe before we launch in, I'll read this quote that I think tees up nicely the discussion of Gerald Ford and this consolidation process.
[00:28:57]  So he writes, The precious advantage which the spectacle has acquired through the outlawing of history from having driven the recent past into hiding and from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society is above all the ability to cover its own tracks, to conceal the very progress of its recent world conquest.
[00:29:22]  Its power already seems familiar as if it had always been there.
[00:29:27]  all usurpers have shared this aim, to make us forget that they have only just arrived.
[00:29:44]  So let's talk about Gerald Ford.
[00:29:47]  Why?
[00:29:49]  Because listen, your show, you guys have done several series, Warren Commission.
[00:29:53]  You guys have like a million part one on the Warren Commission, which is also Gerald Ford.
[00:29:57]  I know you guys are doing Jack Ruby one right now.
[00:30:00]  But you started with Gerald Ford.
[00:30:03]  And I got to tell you, I think when most people hear Gerald Ford, they think of parodies of Gerald Ford, which are very difficult sometimes to separate from the real character of Gerald Ford as he is so parodic sometimes in his, let's say, public appearances.
[00:30:23]  I mentioned earlier a gaffe that he made during a debate.
[00:30:26]  I can't remember who the debate.
[00:30:27]  I think the debate was with Carter where he's talking about the Eastern Bloc.
[00:30:35]  And he's like, I don't know what you guys are talking about.
[00:30:38]  Like, it's not under Soviet domination.
[00:30:39]  Poland isn't.
[00:30:40]  Romania isn't.
[00:30:42]  And I understand actually what he's saying there because by the mid-70s, especially in Romania, there were fissures between them and the USSR.
[00:30:50]  But to the average person, or even probably just most people watching that, they were like, does he not know that they're like communist-controlled governments?
[00:31:02]  And it was like a huge sort of blunder on his part.
[00:31:05]  But really, I also mentioned the parodic aspect because literally the Saturday Night Live parody of him comes up so often in Gerald Ford histories because it actually like damaged his credibility because people just saw him as that guy.

=== Gerald Ford's Blunder (04:03) ===

[00:31:21]  Right.
[00:31:22]  Yeah, it was Chevy Chase that did.
[00:31:24]  And he didn't even try to do an impression or anything.
[00:31:28]  It was just the Chevy Chase shtick of clumsiness and falling down and spilling water.
[00:31:35]  And it's pretty funny, actually.
[00:31:37]  There's even, I think it was the first, maybe the first episode ever of Saturday Night Live that they did the check, debuted the Chevy Chase impression.
[00:31:50]  And it would have made sense if it wasn't that like 75.
[00:31:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:55]  So, you know, beneath that, and it's a perfect foil, really.
[00:31:59]  It's a perfect cover for this process whereby the presidency is separated definitively from the person occupying the office.
[00:32:13]  Yeah.
[00:32:14]  Yeah.
[00:32:15]  Because if you see Gerald Ford as just a goof, just a kind of mumbling, stumbling guy who maybe he's not the most competent, maybe he's not the brightest, but he's a decent guy.
[00:32:29]  He's just like somebody you know.
[00:32:31]  You know, he's from Michigan.
[00:32:33]  Yeah.
[00:32:33]  He was a football player.
[00:32:35]  He's not an Ivy Leaguer, although he is actually only the second president in U.S. history to have a graduate degree from an Ivy League university, which like JFK didn't go to law school.
[00:32:50]  The only other one that did before him was Rutherford B. Hayes, another unelected president, incidentally.
[00:32:59]  He didn't go to grad school?
[00:33:01]  Well, not grad school.
[00:33:01]  He didn't go to Ivy League.
[00:33:03]  No, he that did go.
[00:33:04]  But got a graduate degree.
[00:33:07]  Okay, nobody else got a graduate.
[00:33:09]  Like many had gone, you know, to undergrad, Harvard and Yale and Princeton and what have you, but not an actual, you know, he was Yale law.
[00:33:19]  It's funny because, I mean, the obvious comparison for Ford is, of course, LBJ.
[00:33:27]  And because they both are kind of like goofy looking, but like, and Elf Sobeek both became from vice president to president under unusual circumstances.
[00:33:40]  And but LBJ is, I think, seen as so much more of like an actual figure of his time and like, well, I guess more respected.
[00:33:50]  Like there isn't like a like 20 volume Robert Caro set on President Ford.
[00:33:55]  Oh, no.
[00:33:56]  No, LBJ is, I mean, one of the titles of the Caro book, The Master of the Senate.
[00:34:01]  He was like a real chess player and very forceful and strong, you know, will to power, using everybody in his way how he wanted.
[00:34:11]  Whereas Ford is the opposite.
[00:34:13]  Yeah, he's like kind of a loser.
[00:34:15]  And it was his dream.
[00:34:16]  His dream was like not to be president, but his dream was to be like Speaker of the House.
[00:34:21]  Right.
[00:34:21]  Or so he says.
[00:34:22]  And this is the thing, and we play with it a lot throughout our excavations into his life and times, but he puts this image out and allows this image to be out there for him, but is doing a lot more of the calculating than he really gets credit for.
[00:34:44]  And there's this narrative about Ford that, oh, he just got the vice president slot because, you know, and on the sort of left conspiratorial side of things, because he was on the Warren Commission, helped out with the cover-up of JFK, you know, came out of nowhere and was just plopped there to kind of be the caretaker after Nixon.
[00:35:09]  And, you know, if you look at his life, his trajectory goes in that direction towards the real evil heart of American power way before he gets on the Warren Commission.

=== Gerald Ford's Unexpected Path (12:25) ===

[00:35:25]  And I would say his selection to the Warren Commission was already kind of taking into account his safe role as a trustworthy operator on behalf of this Fourth Reich, the horsemen of the Fourth Reich.
[00:35:46]  Who are your horsemen here?
[00:35:48]  So as far as people that are really have a hand in pushing the Gerald Ford piece forward on the board, you know, what's unsung is that both of the Dulles brothers had a role in that.
[00:36:04]  Really?
[00:36:06]  Really?
[00:36:06]  Yeah.
[00:36:07]  Like he gets into Congress.
[00:36:10]  He, in 1948, he's elected for the first time.
[00:36:13]  And, you know, we can talk about kind of how he gets there.
[00:36:17]  Yeah, but go on, finish the Dulles Things first.
[00:36:20]  Yeah, so to jump to that point in time, in, I think it's 1953, he's tapped as a member of the House Appropriations Committee Defense subcommittee, so the military budget people, by the administration, the Eisenhower administration, to accompany John Foster Dulles on a junket to Asia.
[00:36:46]  Okay, yeah.
[00:36:46]  And this is a guy, the only time he'd been in Asia was on board an aircraft carrier during World War II.
[00:36:53]  And so he is not a well-traveled guy, but is there under the wing of this very Nazi-friendly fella, Foster Dulles.
[00:37:06]  And they go to Korea, to the DMZ.
[00:37:12]  They go to Tokyo, where the operations are being run.
[00:37:17]  And they see, you know, the 53 equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation on, yeah, we ran out of targets over Korea because we blew them all up.
[00:37:28]  Destroyed like, what, like, isn't like 80% of the, just everything in North Korea?
[00:37:35]  Yeah.
[00:37:36]  And then they go and chill with the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan.
[00:37:46]  So they're making moves.
[00:37:49]  Jerry clearly ingratiates himself.
[00:37:53]  And by the time they get back, he is on the radar of Allen Dulles.
[00:37:58]  And obviously, having graduated from Yale Law in the early 1940s, he's already got some connections to people that by this time are staffing up the high echelons of the CIA.
[00:38:13]  And by 1956, he gets named to the predecessor of the House Committee on Intelligence.
[00:38:19]  There was none at the time.
[00:38:22]  But they were so secretive that there were no aides allowed in and no notes were allowed to be kept.
[00:38:30]  And so it's kind of a black hole.
[00:38:32]  Yeah.
[00:38:32]  But one must surmise that Ford was getting as good a view of any civilian into all that shit.
[00:38:44]  Yeah.
[00:38:45]  And in the 50s, it was a lot.
[00:38:47]  So let's go back in time a little bit here because Ford, I mean, you mentioned he's represented, he's elected in Michigan here.
[00:38:56]  And we also, you said at the top that he is originally named Lynch King, but he's from Michigan.
[00:39:06]  And from what I understand, because there's a very interesting, while we were sort of planning this episode, I watched a very hagiographic kind of, I think Ford, whatever, like from his presidential library produced video about him.
[00:39:21]  That's like, it sort of is like, it's like one of those Ken Burns documentaries in its, I guess it's in presentation and like there's sort of like, you know, battle marches or whatever in the background.
[00:39:34]  But it's just, it's all these guys kind of being like, he was such a good boy.
[00:39:38]  And that I think is the general view of Ford is like a well-meaning, slightly simple, but not super stupid guy that like just came in here to like heal the nation.
[00:39:52]  And so is that correct?
[00:39:54]  Because I mean, being from Michigan, you know, it's the Midwest.
[00:39:58]  He's from the middle of the country.
[00:40:00]  He's, he's a simple lawyer.
[00:40:03]  And he kind of gets elected as the way this documentary tells it because there is a isolationist wing of the party that he is opposed to.
[00:40:16]  Now, is that true?
[00:40:17]  Is this just like, I fell for the lies of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library?
[00:40:23]  I think you fell for the lies.
[00:40:25]  Damn it.
[00:40:26]  Once again, misled by the Gerald Ford Presidential Library.
[00:40:30]  To kind of start all the way at the beginning of what he carries within him.
[00:40:37]  So he's actually not born in Michigan.
[00:40:39]  He's born in Omaha, Nebraska.
[00:40:42]  Oh, he's a cop at Baga.
[00:40:45]  Well, not exactly because his mom actually flees from Omaha when he's 16 days old.
[00:40:54]  His biological father chased them out of the house with a knife.
[00:40:59]  Yeah, I will say, for all of the sort of rosy-tinted view of Gerald Ford that one gets from, I guess, official publications on him, his dad does seem like a genuine piece of shit.
[00:41:15]  His birth dad.
[00:41:16]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:17]  And that's with good reason because his grandfather was one of these guys.
[00:41:24]  We compare him to the Robert De Niro character in Killers of the Flower Moon, if you've seen that.
[00:41:30]  I have not.
[00:41:31]  Okay.
[00:41:31]  Well, he's like just a settler's settler kind of a guy.
[00:41:36]  One of these Western businessmen, not a covered wagon guy, but a smooth operator and a calculating operator and a ruthless operator named Charles Henry King.
[00:41:50]  He became a millionaire many times over from basically founding a bunch of little towns, setting up the warehouse that they would sell all the shit, the banks, whatever, a little bit of capital.
[00:42:03]  I mean, it is a classic capitalist, right?
[00:42:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:08]  Really just putting the C into the old equation and watching it grow.
[00:42:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:15]  And so that kind of mentality, that ruthlessness, you know, as a kid, Jerry was reportedly a bully and was a real aggressive little kid.
[00:42:28]  He was a big guy.
[00:42:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:42:30]  Yeah, he was a big guy.
[00:42:32]  You know, he joined, he starts playing football, kind of gets a way to channel his anger.
[00:42:39]  But even in high school, he's already ambitious.
[00:42:44]  And he's coming from, he grows up in Grand Rapids, right?
[00:42:49]  He ends up there and never remembers living in Omaha, of course.
[00:42:53]  But his birthplace, his crib, the city that rears him is Grand Rapids, which is a Dutch Calvinist town.
[00:43:04]  And the big thing in Calvinism is predestination.
[00:43:08]  Exactly.
[00:43:09]  The old Max Weber spirit of capitalism.
[00:43:13]  Yeah.
[00:43:14]  And so this, I think, also informs him along with kind of his inner turmoil.
[00:43:21]  And by the time he's in high school, he becomes an anti-communist, kind of a thug on the football team, but a popular thug, right?
[00:43:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:31]  Not an uncommon sort of stereotype.
[00:43:34]  Right, right.
[00:43:34]  Like there's this famous incident where some the young pioneers, that was like the CPUSA.
[00:43:41]  Yeah, with the little red handkerchiefs.
[00:43:43]  Yeah.
[00:43:44]  They were doing some stuff in Grand Rapids and like painting their demands on a wall or something.
[00:43:50]  And he shows up with the whole football team, like hitting the baseball bats.
[00:43:55]  And you better clean that up, commies.
[00:43:58]  And they do.
[00:44:00]  And soon after, he rigs an election for most popular boy in Grand Rapids and gets a ticket to meet Herbert Hoover at the White House.
[00:44:10]  I got to be honest, I'm like, that doesn't seem like a very good prize.
[00:44:15]  The most popular guy gets to go meet Herbert Hoover.
[00:44:18]  I guess Hubert Hoover's like, what's your secret?
[00:44:21]  Because everyone hates me.
[00:44:23]  Yeah, this, I think it was before he had become that unpopular.
[00:44:28]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:29]  He was still just, you know, the investor turned president.
[00:44:34]  Yeah.
[00:44:36]  But to fast forward a little bit to when he gets in, right?
[00:44:40]  By the time he's running for Congress, he had already gone, you know, parlayed his football talents to go to Yale law school.
[00:44:48]  Yeah.
[00:44:49]  And again, he gets in through the back door because he's hired as a coach.
[00:44:54]  He doesn't get into law school.
[00:44:56]  Interesting.
[00:44:58]  You can do that.
[00:44:59]  You could in 37.
[00:45:01]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:02]  Because I'm like, I'm always like, if you go, I genuinely don't know.
[00:45:07]  This is an actual question.
[00:45:08]  Like, if you're really good at football, but you're like, I'm not good enough to turn pro, do you try to go to like get drafted or whatever, like get into like Yale or Harvard?
[00:45:21]  They have football teams.
[00:45:22]  They do.
[00:45:23]  They were the big ones back in the day.
[00:45:25]  I guess that's true.
[00:45:25]  Yeah.
[00:45:26]  And like Notre Dame.
[00:45:26]  Yeah.
[00:45:27]  Newt Rockne or whatever.
[00:45:29]  Or the fuck you say that.
[00:45:31]  But like, but like, like now I'm saying, like, if you're like a guy who's like, I'm not that good at football, but I want to go to a good college.
[00:45:39]  Are you like, do you just try getting the Harvard one?
[00:45:41]  Because like, what if you end up at like ASU or something?
[00:45:44]  You know what I mean?
[00:45:45]  Like you better turn pro because otherwise you just went to the number one party school in the nation, but you had to get up early for practice.
[00:45:54]  I don't know if you can do that these days.
[00:45:56]  I mean, I assume so.
[00:45:57]  Some of these schools, I remember with all the scandals, they were talking about reducing athletic scholarships.
[00:46:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:07]  Where the teams are just for no real reason.
[00:46:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:13]  Because that's what I would try to do.
[00:46:14]  I guess if I go back to school, I'll just spend a couple years getting really good at football, then try to get like an athletic scholarship to like, I don't know, Columbia.
[00:46:26]  Yeah, you could also do, you know, it's very specialized now, so you could become like really good at doing one thing.
[00:46:32]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:33]  On special teams, I know.
[00:46:35]  What's the thing where you kick it?
[00:46:36]  You could hold the football for that.
[00:46:37]  I'd be that guy.
[00:46:38]  Yeah.
[00:46:39]  I'll just start working on my index finger really big.
[00:46:41]  It's probably two fingers they hold it with.
[00:46:43]  That's a scary job, though, because what if they kick your fingers?
[00:46:46]  These aren't good enough.
[00:46:47]  You're looting them fuckers.
[00:46:49]  Anyway, so he goes, he gets a job at Yale, but he gets to go there too.
[00:46:54]  He hangs around for like two years.
[00:46:57]  And he's like, let me into the law school.
[00:46:59]  Like, no.
[00:47:00]  And he's just coaching, coaching football.
[00:47:04]  Starts coaching basketball and boxing.
[00:47:08]  I mean, well, fuck it.
[00:47:09]  You know, just to make a little extra.
[00:47:11]  I feel like they weren't that good at basketball back then, so it probably wasn't that hard.
[00:47:15]  No, no.
[00:47:16]  And he was like.
[00:47:17]  It was white boys only.
[00:47:18]  It was white boys only.
[00:47:19]  And it was white Yale boys only.
[00:47:21]  Yeah, it was not a good team.
[00:47:22]  Yeah.
[00:47:23]  But he eventually convinces them.
[00:47:26]  He's like taking some classes in the summer or whatever.
[00:47:29]  I don't know.
[00:47:29]  He gets in and he becomes classmates with these scions of the blue-blooded Yankee elite.
[00:47:38]  Yeah.
[00:47:39]  And joins with them in the founding chapter of the America First Committee when it starts up at Yale.

=== Convincing Them In Summer (13:51) ===

[00:47:50]  Before it became a nationwide thing.
[00:47:53]  Oh, interesting.
[00:47:54]  It was a Yale law school student group.
[00:47:58]  Interesting.
[00:48:01]  But what's crazy about it is, you know, not only is he alongside people like Robert Stewart, who was the Quaker Oats heir and a strong anti-communist, but also Sergeant Shriver, who would become Kennedy's brother-in-law and the first head of the Peace Corps.
[00:48:23]  And the faculty advisor at Yale was a recent PhD grad, Dickie Bissell.
[00:48:32]  Richard Bissell.
[00:48:33]  The Richard Bissell.
[00:48:35]  Okay.
[00:48:36]  Who, of course, goes On to become head of covert ops for the CIA.
[00:48:41]  That's a good guy to know.
[00:48:43]  It was a good guy to know, but nobody's ever really talked about this connection.
[00:48:50]  And so it was something we got really excited about because it's another one of these legs up that Jerry Ford already has by the time he goes back to Grand Rapids and launches this insurgent campaign against the incumbent, just like most members of Congress then and now, a useless old bag of bones.
[00:49:17]  He does something.
[00:49:17]  He does it.
[00:49:18]  Gerald Ford, would you say he was sort of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Michigan's 5th District?
[00:49:25]  I mean, check the boxes.
[00:49:27]  He had the good looks.
[00:49:29]  He had the Northeastern college education.
[00:49:34]  And he's a Latina.
[00:49:37]  Yeah.
[00:49:38]  Well, that's the only one that he didn't have.
[00:49:41]  In fact, he passed as Dutch in his election.
[00:49:46]  Listen, you guys understand, back then, there was only so many races that were allowed to do stuff.
[00:49:50]  So like there was a distinction between like a Dutchman and like, you know, an Irish guy or whatever.
[00:49:56]  Yeah.
[00:49:56]  Like if you're Welsh, like don't bother.
[00:49:58]  So he's, yeah, I don't know what a Ford is.
[00:50:01]  Well, I guess he was king was his last one.
[00:50:03]  But if he wasn't Dutch, you know.
[00:50:06]  In Grand Rapids, that's.
[00:50:07]  He was Latina.
[00:50:08]  Let's be honest.
[00:50:10]  He was the Latina of the day.
[00:50:12]  The Dutch were to Grand Rapids as Latina was to Queens and the Bronx.
[00:50:18]  So he got in by being like, from what I understand, he got in by not being isolationists.
[00:50:25]  Like he had left this behind.
[00:50:26]  Right.
[00:50:27]  Yeah.
[00:50:27]  He left the America first stuff in the past.
[00:50:31]  He wanted to join in.
[00:50:35]  You know, he was a big enthusiast for the Marshall Plan, a big enthusiast for rebuilding Europe as kind of a means of economic imperialism.
[00:50:45]  You know, again, it's not just Jerry by the sweat of his brow.
[00:50:50]  His mentor and his boss at the law firm he was working at in Grand Rapids during the war was an aide to Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, the same guy that sets up the Black Eagle Trust.
[00:51:03]  Like this guy was another one of Stimson's aides in the same office was John J. McCloy, who would later join Ford on the Warren Commission and freed a bunch of Nazis as high commissioner to Germany.
[00:51:18]  So he's like low-key, super well-connected, even before he takes this leap, which, you know, not that it was a sure thing when he does run in the primary, but that in the spirit of predestination, you know, he had the signs that he was destined for greatness.
[00:51:40]  One quick thing, though, is before becoming a congressman, he tries to join the FBI.
[00:51:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:51:49]  Yep.
[00:51:50]  He, that's his first job application after law school.
[00:51:56]  Although there's a job that he held during law school besides coaching that I forgot to mention, which is Germaine.
[00:52:02]  OnlyFans.
[00:52:04]  Yeah.
[00:52:05]  Kind of.
[00:52:06]  Wait, really?
[00:52:07]  Yeah.
[00:52:07]  What was it?
[00:52:09]  He joins forces.
[00:52:11]  So he's going to New York City for his social life along with many of the Yale boys and gets connected with this woman who's a super model of the time.
[00:52:23]  And Gerald Ford?
[00:52:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:52:27]  He's a looker.
[00:52:28]  I guess he was better looking back then.
[00:52:30]  Because I just, yeah, I've seen pictures of him younger.
[00:52:32]  Yeah, okay, fair enough.
[00:52:34]  Damn.
[00:52:35]  He just meets her?
[00:52:36]  He meets this girl, and then she hooks him up with another buddy of hers who's a model.
[00:52:44]  And that guy is a charismatic Irishman by the name of Harry Conover.
[00:52:50]  That guy?
[00:52:52]  She hooks him up with a guy?
[00:52:54]  With a guy.
[00:52:54]  She's like, meet this dude.
[00:52:56]  Meet this dude.
[00:52:57]  I'm a model.
[00:52:58]  I've got a friend who's a model.
[00:52:59]  We're all models.
[00:53:00]  Yeah.
[00:53:01]  She's looking good for beauty.
[00:53:03]  We will pay you a lot.
[00:53:05]  Jerry becomes a model too.
[00:53:07]  No.
[00:53:08]  Cover of fucking Cosmo.
[00:53:09]  Jerry Ford was in the cover of Cosmo?
[00:53:12]  No shit.
[00:53:14]  This is the greatest revelation I think that's ever been revealed in podcasts.
[00:53:18]  That's crazy.
[00:53:19]  I have to look this up, dude.
[00:53:21]  Is it out there?
[00:53:22]  It's out there.
[00:53:22]  Yeah, I think it was in like 40.
[00:53:24]  This one where he's kissing this lady?
[00:53:26]  Yep.
[00:53:27]  Oh, wow.
[00:53:28]  Damn, he was good looking.
[00:53:29]  And they changed both of their, because it's illustrated Cosmo covers back in the day.
[00:53:34]  Yeah.
[00:53:34]  And so they changed both of their hair colors because they wanted a blonde woman.
[00:53:40]  But that's his girlfriend.
[00:53:42]  I'm looking at the, because, you know, obviously Cosmo is famous for like 10 ways to give an exciting blowjob.
[00:53:48]  But back then it was beginning an emotional novel of married life by Isabel Moore.
[00:53:53]  Damn.
[00:53:54]  That's actually sexier to me.
[00:53:56]  Yeah, that's to me.
[00:53:57]  Yeah, to me too.
[00:54:00]  Wow.
[00:54:00]  Interesting.
[00:54:01]  And so he's in his little naval uniform too here.
[00:54:05]  That blows my mind.
[00:54:07]  So he was doing a little bit of modeling.
[00:54:09]  And he goes into business with the guy, Harry Conover, gives him seed money.
[00:54:15]  Pause.
[00:54:16]  And it becomes like the biggest, most successful modeling agency in New York in the 40s.
[00:54:26]  He invents the term CoverGirl.
[00:54:29]  I wish you were about to tell me that Gerald Ford started Ford Modeling Agency.
[00:54:34]  I know that he didn't, but I was really hoping that that was going to lead there.
[00:54:38]  I wish.
[00:54:39]  Interesting.
[00:54:39]  So they invented CoverGirl.
[00:54:41]  Yeah.
[00:54:41]  And Jerry's kind of a silent partner in the whole thing.
[00:54:44]  Yeah.
[00:54:44]  But there is a pet theory of mine.
[00:54:49]  And what's that, man?
[00:54:50]  That he's got all these models, this stable of models.
[00:54:55]  One of the ways that they were marketing the modeling agency was bring the girls around to parties with rich guys, as you know very well.
[00:55:06]  Sylvia Plath talks about this.
[00:55:08]  Classic.
[00:55:09]  And I mean, it continues to this day with your Casablancases and your Brunels and your Epsteins and everything.
[00:55:19]  But my pet theory is that the Jerry Ford Harry Conover modeling agency was providing some companionship for these blue-blooded Yankees at Yale.
[00:55:35]  Interesting.
[00:55:36]  Further firming up that Jerry Ford spot in the limelight.
[00:55:42]  This is literally what the bell jar is about.
[00:55:45]  Like Sylvia Plath might have hooked up with Gerald Ford, although I don't know about the timelines there, but judging from the thing she talks about, it seems like fairly rather diabetic, although probably 1950s.
[00:55:55]  Anyways, damn.
[00:55:56]  So he goes back and he's like, I'm running for Congress.
[00:55:59]  And he wins.
[00:56:00]  He wins.
[00:56:01]  He gets into Congress.
[00:56:01]  Yeah, he's in.
[00:56:03]  And this is where the FBI thing, I think, because he gets rejected from the FBI.
[00:56:07]  He gets rejected, but they send him this letter that's signed by Hoover, I think.
[00:56:14]  And it says, you know, we'll keep your information.
[00:56:16]  We'll keep you and we'll let you know if we have use for you.
[00:56:20]  And he's so happy about that and stays kind of in the FBI camp, the pro-Hoover camp for his life.
[00:56:32]  Well, speaking of, what is his first bill he sponsors in Congress?
[00:56:37]  Raise the director's salary.
[00:56:41]  Throw some bones at old Edgar to go and bet at the racetrack.
[00:56:47]  I mean, he needs some new agent provocateur or whatever to wear.
[00:56:51]  But I will say, you know, Ford is, I think, oftentimes sort of portrayed as a dumbass.
[00:56:57]  I'm like, if you are trying to like move the pieces around, I get into Congress, my first thing is be like, everybody who's influential, we're raising their salary.
[00:57:06]  That's my bill.
[00:57:07]  Because even if it fails, they know that you still want to bat for them.
[00:57:10]  Right.
[00:57:11]  But is he like, is he, what is his like impact in Congress?
[00:57:15]  Like, is he like a, you know, is he one of these guys who's like, is he an AOC?
[00:57:21]  No, I mean, he's not really high profile for the decade of the 50s.
[00:57:30]  He's more focused on relationship building than on doing spectacular things.
[00:57:37]  So he is office neighbors with JFK in his first term.
[00:57:43]  Two handsome devils.
[00:57:45]  They walk side by side every day to the floor and back and chat and, you know, become pals.
[00:57:55]  He becomes pals with Nixon and even invites Nixon to stay at his parents' place in Grand Rapids.
[00:58:05]  Could you imagine how good it would feel to just fucking wake up in the morning and come downstairs and there's Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford's parents.
[00:58:12]  Oh, Jerry's out maybe cutting some wood in the backyard.
[00:58:15]  Everyone's eating cottage cheese and you're just like, this is home.
[00:58:18]  This is home.
[00:58:20]  Mrs. Ford, this pineapple is fresh.
[00:58:24]  I asked for it canned.
[00:58:25]  It's pretty good, Nixon.
[00:58:28]  It's the, because the jowls, it's, they inflect his, his vocalizations in such a way, but they always seem to have.
[00:58:36]  But he's like close with Nixon.
[00:58:37]  This is from what I always understood, too, because again, I have like a very, some of my view on Ford's like presidency is like, I guess, a little bit of pop history.
[00:58:46]  But my view was that he was like pretty close with Nixon.
[00:58:49]  Obviously, Nixon stayed in his parents' house, but like they were boys.
[00:58:52]  They were tight.
[00:58:54]  Yeah, they were boys.
[00:58:55]  I mean, they are very opposites in personality and upbringing, but they, I think Jerry must have recognized like, this guy's a fucking psycho.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:08]  He's going places.
[00:59:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:11]  And Jerry, so Jerry is, I mean, this is also during a period where like the Democrats like rule Congress.
[00:59:18]  Not quite.
[00:59:19]  Really?
[00:59:19]  Okay.
[00:59:20]  In the 50s, it's still pretty Republican, kind of switching back and forth.
[00:59:27]  It's not until like late when once he's established himself and he's got his solid footing in the House and he's like, how am I going to move on up here?
[00:59:41]  Then his path to the speakership is like impossible.
[00:59:45]  Narrows and narrows and narrows.
[00:59:46]  Because then it's like becoming more and more and more Democrat majorities to the point where it's like two to one.
[00:59:52]  And it's like insane margins.
[00:59:55]  That was what I was thinking, but I guess it didn't.
[00:59:57]  Yeah, it didn't start all the way back then.
[00:59:58]  So his like, his whole thing, because he gets elected to minority speaker.
[01:00:02]  Mm-hmm.
[01:00:04]  Yeah.
[01:00:04]  The minority speaker.
[01:00:05]  Right.
[01:00:06]  That's what they call me.
[01:00:07]  And yeah, it's minority leader.
[01:00:10]  Minority leader.
[01:00:10]  Yeah.
[01:00:11]  He doesn't get to speak that way.
[01:00:12]  Yeah.
[01:00:13]  Yeah.
[01:00:14]  Before that, speaking of the Nixon thing, one more thing, you know, contrary to his unambitious, unassuming Jerry myth, he was persistently dogging Nixon to name him VP candidate in 1960.
[01:00:32]  So I did know that because he thought he was going to get it at some point, right?
[01:00:36]  Like he was really gunning for it.
[01:00:38]  And from what I understand, Nixon's whole camp was like, fuck no, dude.
[01:00:42]  He's dumb.
[01:00:43]  Yeah.
[01:00:44]  Like he's not a shark.
[01:00:45]  He's not a player.
[01:00:46]  He's like, he's too, like, this guy will not hack it in the Nixon world.
[01:00:51]  Right, right.
[01:00:52]  And he doesn't have the connections.
[01:00:54]  They were, they just didn't know all this stuff that we do.
[01:00:57]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:00:58]  I know that they would have gone, bro.
[01:00:59]  But eventually they came to their sense.
[01:01:01]  Maybe.
[01:01:01]  But it's like, I mean, that was the whole thing.
[01:01:02]  And it was like, it was sort of, I guess it's been portrayed in some plays I've read it that it was like a little bit of, it was like a minor betrayal, right?
[01:01:10]  Like he really thought that he kind of had it locked in because he and Nixon were good friends and it just did not go down.
[01:01:18]  It didn't go down, but, you know, it ultimately worked for his favor because it's like I told you, both an I Told You So and you owe me one for 73.
[01:01:32]  So it's a double whammy there.
[01:01:35]  All things coming up, Jerry.
[01:01:38]  You mentioned his ascent to the minority leadership position.

=== Rumsfeld's Rise: Telling the FBI (03:01) ===

[01:01:42]  And this is where our other Reichsman of the new generation enters the scene, which is, of course, Donny Rumsfeld.
[01:01:54]  We love him.
[01:01:55]  So Rumsfeld is, I mean, that's the beauty of Ford is that Rumsfeld is like kind of his guy.
[01:02:03]  Like they're friends.
[01:02:05]  Oh, yeah.
[01:02:06]  And it's weird.
[01:02:07]  Like Rumsfeld is like 19 years younger than Ford or something, or like 20 years younger.
[01:02:13]  He's got to be pretty young then.
[01:02:15]  Yeah.
[01:02:15]  Definitely not a veteran of the World War II.
[01:02:20]  No.
[01:02:21]  You know, and he gets elected for the first time in, I think, 62.
[01:02:28]  And right after his first term, he's like, got the lay of the land, Rumsfeld, you know, wrestling guy and really hands-on trying to start a revolution in the Republican Party.
[01:02:44]  And he sees Jerry Ford as his ticket to doing that.
[01:02:48]  And this is important because in 65, Rumsfeld leads the charge in this group that call themselves the Young Turks.
[01:02:58]  I believe there's a media company that's named after Rumsfeld's congressional.
[01:03:04]  Yes, yes.
[01:03:05]  And of course, you know, Kamal Ataturk, the famous time traveler, Saw how goaded Rumsfeld was, goes back and is like, we got to get these, we got to get the viziers out of here, and names his group the Young Turks as well.
[01:03:19]  Right.
[01:03:19]  But it was all, it was all Rumsfeld original.
[01:03:23]  I mean, it is really funny.
[01:03:25]  I feel like now the world's too woke for shit to be named the Young Turks anymore.
[01:03:28]  Like the Young Turks Media Organization was like the last thing that can be named that without people being like, didn't they do the Armenian Genocide?
[01:03:36]  When it's starting.
[01:03:38]  And yeah, because it's usually just like it's a group of sort of young guns who are like revolutionizing an existing order.
[01:03:47]  Yeah.
[01:03:47]  Yeah.
[01:03:48]  And it's, you know, kind of finalizing this shift to internationalism over the isolationism of the past.
[01:03:59]  And, you know, to be clear, like isolationism, it meant like, let's not do the Marshall Plan.
[01:04:04]  That was the big divisive issue about isolationism in the late 40s.
[01:04:09]  Yeah.
[01:04:09]  But by the 60s, you know, it's let's do aid, foreign aid.
[01:04:15]  Let's not be so racist and maybe we can win or let's be more racist and try to break off some of the Dixiecrats in the South and stuff like that.
[01:04:31]  But Rumsfeld, even in that campaign, you see how he is acting like the pushman behind Ford.

=== Rumsfeld's Flight Plan (02:50) ===

[01:04:44]  Like he's telling him, like, Jerry, you got to fly over to this place.
[01:04:47]  You got to fly back to Washington.
[01:04:49]  You got to do this and this other thing.
[01:04:51]  Like really orchestrating and stage managing the rise.
[01:04:56]  And, you know, that is, of course, by that time, Jerry was fresh off the Warren Commission.
[01:05:02]  So he had really made a name for himself at the national stage and was ready to go.
[01:05:10]  What was Jerry's tenure on the Warren Commission like?
[01:05:13]  Because I know that he was a, let's say, a conduit for the FBI during that.
[01:05:20]  That's something that sort of sort of later revealed is that he was meeting with the FBI and basically telling them what went down during the meetings.
[01:05:27]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:05:29]  And he essentially was Hoover's mole and passing information.
[01:05:36]  And he was also a real go-along with Dulles and McCloy.
[01:05:43]  The three of them kind of became a pod.
[01:05:47]  Dulles obviously was exercising the most influence over the direction of things.
[01:05:55]  And Jerry was just going along with it.
[01:05:58]  I mean, it's almost comical Jerry's intervention.
[01:06:02]  Like when they all go to Dallas, he was doing the Lee Oswald like run up the stairs with a stopwatch, like doing the walk across town and shit.
[01:06:11]  Like this athletic guy in his suit and tie.
[01:06:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:15]  Like, well, if I can do it, I'm sure that he, a man 20 years my junior, could do it.
[01:06:21]  Yeah.
[01:06:22]  And then when it gets time to file the report, he's like looking over it and he makes one of the last edits to actually move the description of the entrance wound in the back, to move it like a little bit higher on Kennedy's back so that the trajectory of the single bullet would look cleaner.
[01:06:48]  Because you know, the entry is like four or five inches below the collarbone or something like that and it comes out the necktie and so it's like how did it go from down to up if it's coming from six floors and in the air?
[01:07:03]  I mean, I'm sure you've seen the internal diagrams.
[01:07:05]  You know it bounced off the ribs, went back in.
[01:07:08]  You know it sort of just it did like a loop Looney Tune style.
[01:07:11]  That was in Connolly, but in JFK it was supposedly clean in, clean out and it didn't like map out at all the way that it should have.
[01:07:22]  Yeah, so he's like, you know what?
[01:07:25]  Let's just, let's just move it a little bit up, and that way, you know, we won't get this so many questions interesting.

=== Pills and Political Maneuvering (03:16) ===

[01:07:34]  So Rumsfeld and Ford are kind of like inseparable after this, and Rumsfeld also.
[01:07:42]  I think this is notable because of some of the stuff that happens a little later in this story.
[01:07:46]  Rumsfeld is famously like an acolyte of Milton Friedman oh yeah, which is a bit of a Young Turks thing going on with him too there and he's, he's helping Ford along.
[01:07:59]  Nixon obviously did not become president, JFK did and then stopped being president, LBJ president.
[01:08:07]  And what is Ford doing during this time?
[01:08:11]  He's biding his time.
[01:08:13]  He's trying to pool together a Republican majority in the Congress and thinking strategically about which districts can we break off, and he's traveling around a lot.
[01:08:26]  This is another thing about Jerry Ford and kind of the myth versus the reality.
[01:08:32]  He has this image as the great family man, but during this time, he's really leaving his wife Betty Ford alone with their three kids all the time.
[01:08:45]  And this is when she develops an addiction to pills and to alcohol.
[01:08:52]  And so Jerry is doing everything but, you know, keeping an eye on his family.
[01:08:57]  Yeah, I actually was wondering, it's so funny because Betty Ford is like more famous than Gerald Ford just because of the Betty Ford centers, which like, do people go to the, are those still around?
[01:09:06]  I think so.
[01:09:07]  I feel like when I was in rehab, I was in there with somebody who had been to a Betty Ford.
[01:09:11]  Is that Hazelden?
[01:09:12]  No, I think Hazelden's different.
[01:09:16]  But the Betty Ford centers are like, like, it's, it's, God, man, he and Carter are so alike in certain ways, but like Betty Ford was a crack hit.
[01:09:27]  I mean, she wasn't, the crack hadn't been invented yet, to be clear.
[01:09:30]  She was like, but she was addicted to like barbituates, I think, and opiates.
[01:09:34]  And she was a drunk.
[01:09:35]  Yeah.
[01:09:36]  Yeah.
[01:09:36]  It was it.
[01:09:37]  The pills, I think, were a big piece of it.
[01:09:40]  She had some surgeries and then later she has cancer.
[01:09:44]  And so she's, you know, the classic like prescription to abuse pipeline.
[01:09:53]  And, you know, she's also much better person than he was in a lot of ways.
[01:10:00]  Like she pushed his policies in a lot of areas that cost him politically.
[01:10:08]  Rumsfeld fucking hated her.
[01:10:11]  I bet.
[01:10:12]  And Cheney, like, would scream at her and stuff.
[01:10:16]  So she's not, I would want to get fucked up if I had to deal with those two assholes.
[01:10:22]  She was, she was famously pro-abortion too.
[01:10:24]  Yep.
[01:10:25]  Which, I mean, you know, Republican Party election, fucking difficult.
[01:10:30]  Pro-abortion, talked about, you know, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if my daughter had premarital sex.
[01:10:37]  Yeah.
[01:10:37]  Like just kind of your standard positions of the modern woman, which had no place in the Republican Party at that time.
[01:10:47]  Yeah, certainly not for the first lady.
[01:10:50]  Yeah.

=== Lot of Questions Left Unanswered (10:31) ===

[01:10:51]  So he's, he's kind of biding his time, running around countries.
[01:10:55]  You know, it's like, Betty, go, you know, drink two quarts of rum and, you know, hang out with the kids.
[01:11:01]  Is he like, what is he plotting at this point?
[01:11:04]  Just to be, just to try to get a Republican majority in the House.
[01:11:07]  Yeah, it's unclear exactly when he realizes that that's not going to happen anytime soon, but it's not going to happen.
[01:11:16]  Yeah.
[01:11:17]  And so.
[01:11:18]  You still got to try, I feel like.
[01:11:19]  You know what I mean?
[01:11:20]  It's like, you can't just be like, there's no road to victory.
[01:11:23]  If you're like, they always do this, right?
[01:11:25]  Like once I'm once one side gets schlonged, it's like you kind of got to send your guy out on like a listening tour.
[01:11:30]  Like, I mean, they've been getting schlong for a little while, but you know, he had to do something.
[01:11:36]  Yeah.
[01:11:36]  Yeah.
[01:11:36]  So, you know, he's keeping his relationships.
[01:11:39]  He's keeping his contact with Nixon.
[01:11:42]  At this time, also in mid-60s, he gets a phone call from then Senator Prescott Bush, who says to him, Hey, my boy, George, just got elected to Congress.
[01:11:58]  How about giving him some plum spots?
[01:12:01]  So he's using his position as minority leader, and he uses it for one to plug George H.W. Bush onto the Ways and Means Committee and get him a leg up in the Congress.
[01:12:14]  And you got to imagine that there's other types of favor trading going on as well.
[01:12:19]  He does not get himself onto the Nixon-Agnew ticket where Nixon famously called Agnew his assassination insurance.
[01:12:32]  Yes.
[01:12:32]  And it is like smart because nobody wanted Spiro Agno to be president.
[01:12:38]  No.
[01:12:39]  You know, and so it was like that.
[01:12:41]  And I think there is like, there's some, there's a quote I actually just read about Nixon talking about it.
[01:12:45]  But it is like kind of, I think that saved Trump in 2016 as well.
[01:12:52]  It's like we can't, Hence can't be running the show here.
[01:12:55]  Yeah.
[01:12:56]  No.
[01:12:58]  But yeah, Nixon wins in 68.
[01:13:01]  Spiro is VP and then wins in 72 against George McGovern, fucking landslide.
[01:13:08]  And then, but, of course, famously hit with two big scandals.
[01:13:15]  One involving Spiro Agnew, which is the bribery scandal, and then, of course, Watergate.
[01:13:21]  Yeah.
[01:13:22]  And the Agnew thing, it's funny because it's another one of these myths that just covers up what really happened.
[01:13:32]  You know, Jerry Ford, old innocent Jerry, in the background, and he's picked because of his clean hands, goes the story.
[01:13:41]  In fact, Jerry became aware really early on, like before it had hit the headlines, from one of the bribers of Agnew at the Christmas party that was thrown by Hale Boggs' son.
[01:14:00]  So Hale Boggs, you know, had been on the Warren Commission with Ford, was a good friend of his, just died in 72 in a suspicious plane crash after basically calling for the prosecution of J. Edgar Hoover.
[01:14:15]  Coincidence, I'm sure.
[01:14:18]  And his son, nevertheless, carries the family tradition of a Christmas party.
[01:14:23]  And there, Jerry gloms on to this fact that Agnew is about to get schlonged, to borrow your expression.
[01:14:32]  Oh, to borrow from Donald J. Trump.
[01:14:33]  It's a very common expression in politics.
[01:14:36]  They say schlanged all the time.
[01:14:38]  And he starts positioning himself.
[01:14:41]  Oh, yeah.
[01:14:43]  Now, he's not aware, it seems, of the impending Watergate doom.
[01:14:49]  Maybe not that early, but Watergate stuff is coming out not that late in 73.
[01:14:58]  Yeah.
[01:14:59]  It starts to kind of trickle out little by little first before it's a huge thing.
[01:15:07]  But by the time Jerry gets the vice presidency in, I think it's October of 73, by that time, apparently Al Haig, that was Nixon's chief of staff, another very interesting figure for another day.
[01:15:27]  But he tells Jerry, like, you know, don't get too used to the vice presidency, essentially.
[01:15:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:35]  Well, you could interpret that as like, hey, Nixon's going to lose his next election.
[01:15:39]  I guess he'd already been elected twice.
[01:15:40]  He was termed out.
[01:15:41]  Yeah, he was termed out.
[01:15:42]  You're right.
[01:15:43]  Okay, so there's only one way to interpret that.
[01:15:45]  I mean, he doesn't even make it a year.
[01:15:47]  I mean, Nixon resigns in August of 74.
[01:15:51]  And it's like there's Gerald Ford, having been not elected to the vice presidency, becomes vice president, and then unelected to the presidency, becomes the president.
[01:16:02]  And this is when he says, I mean, this is, I think, his most famous quote, our long national nightmare is over.
[01:16:09]  Yep.
[01:16:10]  Which is funny because I feel like it hadn't been that long of a nightmare.
[01:16:13]  But there was like real, like this, there's many unprecedented parts of the Watergate scandal that happened.
[01:16:22]  And like, namely, one of these things is like Nixon's resigning, but is he going to be prosecuted?
[01:16:30]  And that's sort of one of the other things that Gerald Ford is known for, is the non-prosecution of Richard Nixon.
[01:16:37]  And, you know, I want to get your, to question you about that, because there's obviously, at the time, a lot of contemporary questions about was there a deal made?
[01:16:51]  Yeah, I mean, I think there probably was an understanding, you know, and probably it was done implicitly enough to have plausible deniability.
[01:17:04]  Hopefully Nixon at this point after the Nixon tapes kerfluffle had realized that maybe you should put less stuff on paper or in voice recordings.
[01:17:16]  Yeah, yeah, that was a big backfire.
[01:17:19]  And of course, you know, the deeper history side of Watergate that we'll be getting into in a future series within a series, I'm sure.
[01:17:29]  But Alexander Butterfield, the guy who set up the tape system, is alleged to have been a CIA agent.
[01:17:38]  Yeah, I mean, there's that we've never done, I don't think we've, we've talked about Watergate in some episodes.
[01:17:44]  We've never done like a straight Watergate episode, but like there is this sort of narrative of Watergate that it's very much like basically a CIA operation to take out Nixon.
[01:17:53]  Yeah, I think there's something to it.
[01:17:55]  I think there's something to it.
[01:17:56]  But it's not clean.
[01:17:57]  Like none of this stuff is clean.
[01:18:00]  And the whole reduction of everything, and we can, this kind of gets into the bigger picture, but the pinning the blame on the CIA alone stuff is also shifting the focus away from, say, the Office of Naval Intelligence that might have had their own shit going on or the FBI or any of the other litany of intelligence agencies that are active at a given time.
[01:18:29]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:30]  Which, by the way, like tripled now.
[01:18:32]  Oh, yeah.
[01:18:33]  But nevertheless, Nixon is taken out.
[01:18:36]  He flies off in the helicopter.
[01:18:39]  And where did he fucking go?
[01:18:40]  I always wondered that.
[01:18:41]  I'm sure I could easily find that out.
[01:18:43]  But like Nixon just takes off in a cop chopper.
[01:18:46]  Where the fuck did the chopper land?
[01:18:47]  Just at the airport and he got on a plane?
[01:18:49]  I mean, I don't think it could have gone all the way back to California.
[01:18:53]  Exactly.
[01:18:54]  Like, he just took a chopper to the, well, what are you going to do?
[01:18:57]  Drive?
[01:18:58]  You know, yeah, it's the president.
[01:19:00]  But, well, not anymore.
[01:19:01]  And I was just a private citizen.
[01:19:03]  Ford becomes a president.
[01:19:05]  And this is really where the narrative of Ford that we all know and love comes out, which is that he's the healing president.
[01:19:11]  He's there.
[01:19:11]  He's not very smart.
[01:19:12]  He's not very good at being president.
[01:19:15]  But gosh darn it, like he healed the nation.
[01:19:17]  And the number of one thing that people point out as to his healing abilities is the fact that he just didn't prosecute the president who was just caught doing a bunch of crime.
[01:19:26]  And I never understood that.
[01:19:28]  And it's funny because every time I was reading a bunch about it over the past few days too, you always see people being like, you know what, Maya Culpa, like I was against, I was for prosecution in the 70s, but now I realize that it was the right thing to do to not prosecute Nixon.
[01:19:42]  I'm pretty sure the right thing to do would probably be to hold the president of the United States to some semblance of the law.
[01:19:49]  Right.
[01:19:50]  That's the thing.
[01:19:51]  I mean, his official excuse is just, oh, it's grabbing all the headlines.
[01:19:56]  It's distracting and it's not enabling me to govern the country because all anybody cares about is Watergate.
[01:20:05]  But it's like he's presenting it as a false choice between spinning your wheels about it and like trying to stage manage it, like to sweep it under the rug versus just a clean pardon.
[01:20:20]  When the third option that you mentioned, like, sorry, dick, like your head's going to roll right now.
[01:20:27]  Yeah.
[01:20:27]  Yeah.
[01:20:29]  That was just off the table, not even considered.
[01:20:31]  And it's just interesting.
[01:20:32]  I mean, and I could be just completely wrong here, but I'm like, was there a massive like constituency for like free Nixon?
[01:20:39]  Like, you know, I mean, it's, it's, that's the thing.
[01:20:41]  It's like, it seems like he'd been pretty cleanly caught in many, in some ways.
[01:20:47]  And at least there was room for prosecution.
[01:20:49]  I mean, certainly he thought there was.
[01:20:53]  And just nothing happened.
[01:20:54]  It was just, there was a total pardon.
[01:20:56]  Yeah.
[01:20:57]  I mean, I think the pro-Nixon constituency consists of the big money guys that had always backed him and the intelligence community in as much as part of what the Watergate scandal kind of covered up was Nixon's own battle with the CIA.

=== Nixon's Pragmatic Gambles (03:22) ===

[01:21:23]  And that revolved in turn around a lot of questions about the Kennedy assassination.
[01:21:29]  Which Nixon himself had a lot of questions about.
[01:21:32]  I mean, there's also, I mean, one can't like separate this from some of the foreign policy that was going on during Nixon and then also continued into Ford's, right?
[01:21:39]  Like Nixon saw eventually the winding down of the Vietnam War and then a certain level of detente with the Eastern Bloc.
[01:21:48]  And then, of course, very famously, the opening, not opening up of China's later, but like the meetings with China in the 1970s and diplomatic relationships established under the aegis of the very Chinese Henry Kissinger, who stayed on during Ford, as did like a lot of Nixon people.
[01:22:13]  And, you know, there was a lot of criticism of that, of both detente and of the relationship with China coming from all parts of the political spectrum in the U.S.
[01:22:26]  Yeah, I mean, to the extent that the old heads at the CIA were still around in the 70s, like especially the circle around Jim Angleton, they were absolutely convinced that the Russia-China split was fake.
[01:22:46]  Yeah, I know.
[01:22:46]  That's the funny thing.
[01:22:47]  Like they all thought it was like this insane, like huge ruse that like, and like, listen, not to discount, like, there was a lot of pretty spectacular sort of Soviet disinformation campaigns and I guess like coups, not literal coups, but like spy coups.
[01:23:09]  Like they, they pulled off some pretty spectacular operations.
[01:23:12]  That literally faking a diplomatic and political rift between two, the two largest countries on earth, I don't think that's within anybody's capabilities to pull off.
[01:23:24]  Like that would have been like, that's like storybook shit.
[01:23:28]  They really did have a major falling out.
[01:23:31]  Oh, yeah.
[01:23:31]  Famously, the Sino-Soviet split, which doomed us to our present state of affairs.
[01:23:36]  But regardless.
[01:23:39]  That's in the backdrop of all of this stuff that like they really hated Nixon for trying to and kind of successfully in some, you know, I guess depending on what yardstick you use to measure success, but joint, you know, playing both sides against each other.
[01:23:58]  Yeah, I mean, listen, we saw China become like within China and the American sphere of influence kind of become one, especially in places like Africa, like with Ford, Angola, you know, but also a lot of all over the world.
[01:24:13]  I mean, we saw this happen with Cambodia and Vietnam as well, where the Chinese and the Americans would end up, and fucking Afghanistan would end up supporting the same side and the Soviets would be sort of on the opposite, usually more, I guess, left-wing side of things.
[01:24:34]  And Nixon, I mean, for all that the CIA might have disliked him, that was a smart move if you're thinking about American hegemony.
[01:24:43]  Yeah.
[01:24:44]  Yeah.

=== CIA Chastened, Rockefeller Commission (08:31) ===

[01:24:45]  It was the pragmatic thing to do.
[01:24:49]  And he really wanted, you know, he was obsessed with his legacy and wanted to have this memory of Nixon as the great president of the 20th century.
[01:25:03]  And nobody wanted to give him those flowers.
[01:25:06]  And Jerry, you know, at least on the surface, does not Go after that glory.
[01:25:13]  And that's also part of why he gets such a pass on everything because it's pretty unassuming.
[01:25:19]  But it's what happens kind of behind the scenes and as this outrage over Watergate.
[01:25:28]  And that spins out into the outrage over first the family jewels document leaking and then the church committee and the pike committee.
[01:25:39]  And Ford launches his own bullshit presidential, the Rockefeller Commission.
[01:25:47]  So yeah, let's talk about that real quick because we've talked about the church committee in the show before, but there were several committees.
[01:25:55]  And the church committee was sort of, this comes from a Seymour Hirsch article.
[01:25:59]  He wrote about, what was it?
[01:26:01]  I guess it was Operation Chaos, but he wrote like about one aspect of it.
[01:26:05]  And then in the New York Times in like 74, that gets picked up and it sort of spins out into, I think, was it about this spine on ramparts?
[01:26:13]  I don't remember.
[01:26:14]  But then it becomes the church committee, which is a congressional committee, is formed.
[01:26:20]  But in order to sort of preempt that, Ford, whose vice president is Nelson Rockefeller.
[01:26:28]  Right.
[01:26:28]  Which we didn't mention, but that's another Rockefeller.
[01:26:31]  Another big one.
[01:26:33]  But he launches the Rockefeller Commission or Committee.
[01:26:38]  I think it's Commission.
[01:26:39]  If the Church Committee has ever been accused of being a whitewash, the Rockefeller Committee, or Commission, rather, I don't think pretended to be anything but.
[01:26:47]  It was like literally explicitly said, like, do not, like, it was a staged managed commission about the abuses of intelligence agencies.
[01:26:56]  Yes.
[01:26:57]  You even have anecdotes about Dick Cheney with the quote-unquote final report just ripping pages out.
[01:27:06]  So I want to get back to Cheney in a second, but yeah, so basically Ford tries to preempt the church committee by doing the Rockefeller Commission.
[01:27:15]  It doesn't work.
[01:27:15]  The church committee still happens.
[01:27:17]  And that's where we learn of like basically all the shit that we know.
[01:27:23]  Not everything, but like a ton of like the CIA's misadventures, as they might put it, during the 1960s, 1970s, 1950s comes out then.
[01:27:33]  All the assassination programs, a bunch of MKUltra stuff, like it comes out, Operation Chaos comes out during that.
[01:27:40]  And remember, like, this is so, I think, quaint and stupid even, maybe not stupid, but it seems maybe funny to mention now.
[01:27:48]  But like, the CIA in its remit is not allowed to operate in the U.S.
[01:27:53]  And then it turns out the CIA in its, you know, barely 20 years, less than 20 years of existence up to that point, had been operating a lot in the U.S.
[01:28:03]  A lot.
[01:28:05]  And this was like, There was this interesting sort of, there's this narrative of like the CIA got tamed during that point.
[01:28:14]  So sort of what we were talking about earlier.
[01:28:16]  Yeah.
[01:28:16]  Because like, you know, you had William Colby basically having to resign.
[01:28:21]  You know, Engleton's out a little before then.
[01:28:25]  And the CIA is sort of like chastened.
[01:28:29]  Now, obviously, with hindsight, we know that a lot of that stuff was just dispersed or dispersed, but also dispersed to other agencies within the government.
[01:28:43]  Like a lot of the espionage stuff, a lot of the domestic spying stuff.
[01:28:46]  I mean, a lot of that was the FBI, anyways.
[01:28:50]  And it was sort of a, it ended up being, it wasn't like a whitewash, but in some ways it was.
[01:28:57]  A limited hangout.
[01:28:58]  A limited hangout, you might say.
[01:28:59]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:29:00]  An actual correct usage of the term limited hangout.
[01:29:03]  Yeah, the OG limited hangout, perhaps.
[01:29:07]  And this is coming at the same time as the executive was also under fire.
[01:29:15]  And a big proponent of a really strong executive was somebody who was working in Ford's office at the time, which was Dick Cheney.
[01:29:23]  Now, Dick Cheney famously was a very powerful vice president.
[01:29:29]  And we were talking, I can't remember if it was during this show or before the show, but we were talking about how it seems like Cheney and Rumsfeld, for that matter, learned a lot about what they wanted to do when they were maybe going to be in power later during their tenure in Ford's office.
[01:29:44]  Because again, Ford becomes president after the resignation of Richard Nixon, and of course, the resignation of Spiro Agnew.
[01:29:52]  And so the executive branch is pretty fucking tarnished at this point.
[01:29:56]  Oh, yeah.
[01:29:57]  More than it had been since Teapot Dome.
[01:30:00]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:30:01]  Like the century before.
[01:30:02]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:03]  And so what, like, what is what is Cheney learning during this time?
[01:30:09]  So much.
[01:30:10]  Yeah, he is learning a lot.
[01:30:12]  I mean, it really is like these guys, and you mentioned like Rumsfeld, an acolyte of Milton Freeman, of Leo Strauss, the whole Chicago School of Economics.
[01:30:24]  That's his district.
[01:30:26]  I mean, he's on the north side, but even while he's in Congress, he was going to their seminars and was sidling up and really studying the ropes for what would be the neoliberal economic model.
[01:30:40]  And that requires, as it did in the case of Chile, where it was first implemented on a massive scale, a dictatorship, essentially.
[01:30:53]  So the diffuse executive power and the weakening of the executive, which is not only a consequence of Watergate and Nixon, but also, and this goes back to what you're saying, like, was the nightmare that long?
[01:31:09]  I think the nightmare encapsulates all the way back to the Vietnam stuff, the civil rights movement.
[01:31:16]  Like all of that stuff is part of this nightmare that disturbed the mythological equilibrium of the 1950s picket fence Americana of like David Lynch.
[01:31:32]  Yeah.
[01:31:34]  I mean, that's that's sort of he it's it's forward by like accident, sort of, I don't know, accident is the right way to put it, but like he kind of midwifes this new order.
[01:31:44]  Like 75, things really change.
[01:31:46]  Yeah.
[01:31:47]  And so the dynamic with Cheney coming in, so Rumsfeld, the first day that Ford finds out for sure that he's going to be president, calls Rumsfeld back.
[01:32:01]  Rumsfeld had been kind of exiled by Nixon to NATO in Brussels.
[01:32:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:32:09]  Go hang out with those Nazis.
[01:32:11]  Yeah.
[01:32:12]  And so he comes back, and then the first call that Rumsfeld makes is to Cheney.
[01:32:17]  He's like, meet me in D.C. We're going to the White House, baby.
[01:32:21]  So Rumsfeld is chief of staff, and Cheney is deputy chief of staff at Rumsfeld's right hand.
[01:32:30]  And the two of them are putting their heads together with this mission to make the most of what they see as a lame duck, you know, access to a lame duck presidency where you can kind of do whatever you want.
[01:32:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:32:50]  And what do they do?
[01:32:52]  Well, fast forwarding to, I mean, obviously foreign policy is a big Kissinger area, and they are not on good paper with Henry.
[01:33:04]  Yeah, and he's like, and listen, I mean, this is the interesting thing about Henry Kissinger.
[01:33:10]  Like, he is not, he's not like a, he's different than a lot of these guys.

=== Kissinger's Independent Stance (02:14) ===

[01:33:17]  I mean, for all of his faults, and there are many, Kissinger did have his own fucking thing going on.
[01:33:23]  He was not like a neocon.
[01:33:25]  Right.
[01:33:26]  Right.
[01:33:27]  Very much not a neocon.
[01:33:29]  Certain of his ideas and strategies are picked up by the neocons later, but he is, I mean, he's a target for ousting.
[01:33:40]  Yeah.
[01:33:40]  Like Rumsfeld and Cheney, they want to get rid of Kissinger because he is too, in their view, too focused on détente, too weak on great power confrontations, not willing to use the Russian menace and too focused on kind of what they would have seen as like pussyfooting around in the third world kind of a thing.
[01:34:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:34:13]  I mean, then you have Ford running against Carter.
[01:34:19]  Oh, but we got to talk about September 75.
[01:34:23]  Oh, okay.
[01:34:23]  The double lady assassins.
[01:34:25]  Of course.
[01:34:26]  Yes.
[01:34:28]  This is the other thing.
[01:34:29]  Ford, you know, I don't know how I didn't put this together earlier.
[01:34:32]  Of course, Ford's a model.
[01:34:34]  right?
[01:34:35]  And so it's only fitting that the only lady presidential assassins in this nation's history both target him.
[01:34:42]  We have squeaky fromm, and then as covered, as we covered in the tribal theme episodes, Sarah Jane Moore.
[01:34:48]  Right.
[01:34:49]  So these both happen in September of 75.
[01:34:53]  What a month.
[01:34:55]  Crazy month.
[01:34:56]  I mean, and both in California, both in Northern California, too.
[01:35:01]  So it's a very like concentrated, and you got to think for the guy, traumatic period of time.
[01:35:09]  You know, we were talking before we started recording.
[01:35:12]  I don't really think that the squeaky attempt, so to speak, was a real assassination attempt.
[01:35:21]  Yeah.
[01:35:22]  You think she was just like there?
[01:35:24]  I think, I mean, she had a gun.
[01:35:27]  There was the bullets.
[01:35:29]  I think she left them at her house.

=== Memo to the Secretary Defense (12:12) ===

[01:35:31]  There was maybe like Fromm of being a great planner.
[01:35:35]  Yes.
[01:35:36]  So in any event, I mean, she was kind of insistent that she wasn't trying to kill anybody.
[01:35:41]  She just wanted to raise awareness for the Redwoods.
[01:35:44]  Raise awareness for the Rwandwoods.
[01:35:45]  They're huge trees.
[01:35:46]  People are aware of them.
[01:35:47]  They're like the biggest trees.
[01:35:50]  Well, not big enough.
[01:35:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:35:53]  But the more one is, and this is an area that, I mean, could go on for literally hours, and we're about to do a whole series on focused on her.
[01:36:05]  But a very, well, it's going to be called she Harvey Oswald.
[01:36:10]  Okay.
[01:36:11]  Because she's kind of died in the wool from early on.
[01:36:16]  Very, very bizarre and interesting operator.
[01:36:21]  And perhaps there was some deeper involvement in either one or both of these attempts.
[01:36:31]  Suffice it to say, a month later, Cheney and Rumsfeld give Jerry Ford the ultimatum of his life.
[01:36:40]  On October 24th, 1975, they send him a memo that is basically 28 pages of, you're a fucking piece of shit.
[01:36:51]  Yeah, you said, so I read that memo.
[01:36:54]  It is a fucking insane thing to say, to write out to the president.
[01:36:59]  Right, right.
[01:37:00]  And especially it's interesting because it goes to show you that this whole unitary executive theory, it's not actually about the president.
[01:37:08]  It's about the office of the president, which is available to them and their likes.
[01:37:14]  Yeah.
[01:37:15]  So I actually, just to read from part of it right here, I mean, this is their, Cheney and Rumsfeld are writing this to the president, President Ford.
[01:37:23]  Perception of the president.
[01:37:24]  They're like sort of writing him like these, these, I guess, I don't know, these strategy ideas are like couched as strategy, but a lot of it is just like, really, that's a lot.
[01:37:34]  Among the public at large, the president is perceived as decent and honest.
[01:37:37]  They like you.
[01:37:38]  However, there are growing questions about your leadership capabilities and competence.
[01:37:42]  Your approval ratings on radio average is lower than that of previous presidents.
[01:37:47]  And you get very low marks when questions are asked about your handling of specific problems, such as the economy and foreign policy.
[01:37:53]  It should be noted, too, that the economy is not doing well.
[01:37:57]  In general, they like you as an individual, but have doubts about your performance as president.
[01:38:02]  I mean, you could couch that as, you know, these guys are just talking tough to him and talking straight to him ahead of an election.
[01:38:07]  Yeah.
[01:38:08]  And eventually they get to a point where they're like, in 76, there's like four ways that this could play out.
[01:38:14]  And three of them end with, you lose.
[01:38:16]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:38:18]  Because again, that's the other thing.
[01:38:20]  This young upstart named Ronald Reagan.
[01:38:26]  Oh, yeah.
[01:38:27]  Was was threatening to run against in a primary against the sitting Republican president, which wouldn't be that crazy because, again, like no one elected Ford.
[01:38:38]  And so it wouldn't be insane.
[01:38:40]  I mean, nowadays I wouldn't have to do it, but it wouldn't be insane to have a primary then.
[01:38:43]  But Reagan was sort of viewed by many people as like, if he runs against him, he's going to win.
[01:38:48]  And Ford squeaked it out.
[01:38:50]  Right.
[01:38:51]  Yeah.
[01:38:51]  He did launch the primary challenge.
[01:38:54]  And this is also where, like, so you have the double assassination attempt September 75.
[01:39:01]  October 75, there's this memo from Cheney and Rumsfeld.
[01:39:07]  One of their recommendations, like, if you want to have any chance in hell to potentially eke out an unlikely victory in 76, you got to change house.
[01:39:21]  And so he then, like, within a week, does what's called the Halloween massacre, fires a bunch of people, including the Secretary of Defense, and replaces him with Rumsfeld.
[01:39:36]  So he promotes Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense at the age of like 43 or something.
[01:39:43]  And then Promotes Cheney to chief of staff, taking Rumsfeld's job, gets Brent Scowcroft on the National Security Advisor role and takes Kissinger off of that role,
[01:39:58]  but leaves Kissinger in as Secretary of State, and maybe most importantly, brings in George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA to oversee the transition that we've been talking about that happens, you know, of all of these functions out of the CIA and into whether it's different DOD agencies or just private sector.
[01:40:26]  Like the Safari Club pops up at this time famously, and they're relying on these real informal networks.
[01:40:35]  Yeah, of Middle Eastern arms dealers and sort of mercenaries from England.
[01:40:41]  And yeah, it becomes like widely distributed, a lot of the power.
[01:40:47]  Yeah.
[01:40:47]  Yeah, I think that's sort of the crazy thing about the end of Ford's presidency is all these guys, I mean, granted, it's Bush's son, but a lot of these guys are heavily involved in the both pre- and post-9-11 events.
[01:41:04]  Right.
[01:41:05]  To get back to Reagan quickly, so he's like posing this threat of attack from the far right, but it works so hand in hand with the Cheney-Rumsfeld ambit.
[01:41:16]  Like they're pushing forward to move his policies to the right.
[01:41:21]  Yeah.
[01:41:22]  And they're fluffing up the Reagan threat.
[01:41:27]  And at the same time, like there's some good reasons to believe that Rumsfeld in particular was back channeling to the Reagan people as well.
[01:41:38]  Well, the Reagan's campaign was definitely good at back channeling.
[01:41:42]  Yeah.
[01:41:42]  Oh, yeah.
[01:41:44]  And, you know, the money in the party kind of saw the same forces that pushed out Nixon kind of saw the future as being much more aggressive, much more mythological in its rhetoric and framing of the Cold War against, you know, we need to bring back the evil empire.
[01:42:06]  The first thing George Bush does when he gets into CIA is set up Team B to give the exaggerated reports on Soviet strength, rhyming again with what the Nazis did after World War II.
[01:42:21]  So we see the pattern repeating itself.
[01:42:24]  And yeah, you're totally right that Cheney and Rumsfeld, not only in the W admin, but in the Reagan-Bush era, like Cheney was Secretary of Defense for H.W. Bush in the Gulf War.
[01:42:40]  So he got in the first Gulf War, got his little hands dirty, and Rumsfeld was sent as a private envoy to go and meet with Saddam, of course.
[01:42:52]  Famously.
[01:42:53]  And so they're in the mix.
[01:42:56]  They are much more at home in the post, you know, the post-Reagan world where I think this experimentation that they were doing in the Ford White House bears its fruit and sets them up with all the tools that they need to carry out their agenda.
[01:43:25]  So, of course, Ford famously loses to a peanut farmer from Georgia who doesn't have a drunk wife, but he's got a drunk brother.
[01:43:35]  And of course, the peanut farmer from Georgia famously loses to the handsome actor, although actually not really that handsome.
[01:43:43]  It was different in those days.
[01:43:44]  It was different in those days, but to Ronald Reagan and then sort of exiled to go do Habitat for Humanity and then eventually be wheeled out for increasingly distressing looking pictures, whether it be with his family, of course, the famous horrible, scary one with the Bidens, which to me is the defining photograph of the Biden presidency is him in jail with the Carter sort of kneeling down with these hobbits.
[01:44:11]  You know, they were all talking backwards and there was like sex of human beings.
[01:44:15]  It is like the most lynchian moment of, I would say, and I don't, and listeners will know, I don't use this descriptor ever, but I would, I would describe many moments of the Biden presidency as very lynchian.
[01:44:27]  I think in the past decade, there's that and then Trump being informed of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death with Tiny Dancer in the background.
[01:44:33]  Yes, those are episodes.
[01:44:35]  I mean, I kind of want to actually like talk about a little bit modern day stuff because one of the big things that Cheney was all about was this like really strong executive.
[01:44:45]  And we see that really being trod out again with the second Trump administration and this like view of the executive as having been sort of robbed of this power that it should have and an attempt to reassert that power.
[01:45:07]  I think one of the things that stands out to me, especially from like 75, is just the lack of anybody getting in trouble.
[01:45:16]  And I think, obviously, listen, I'm not, I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
[01:45:20]  I know no one ever gets in trouble for anything.
[01:45:22]  But like with the church committee, with Nixon, with all this stuff happening sort of like back to back to back to back, like what do we actually see come out of the church committee, right?
[01:45:32]  Like you have all this stuff get moved to other agencies, but then you also have like the FISA Act.
[01:45:38]  I mean, that's in 78, but like that leads, of course, to like, you know, a lot of the stuff that we learned about from the Snowden leaks and like the fights at courts and stuff, which ironically, Trump is like one of the only, one of the only things he's given a shit about is sort of tamping down on those.
[01:45:57]  But like it gives rise to this even more secret, even more backdoor stuff that becomes this like ever increasingly complex network of like legal maneuvers and intelligence agency like guidelines and stuff that we are just like never allowed to see or even if we can see it is just really hard to understand in its like vastness and complexity that is the modern day.
[01:46:24]  And so it's it's so much of this stuff is like has its echoes.
[01:46:28]  I mean, obviously history works like that, right?
[01:46:30]  Like it's, it's, it's literally linear.
[01:46:32]  It's time.
[01:46:34]  But I think there are just so many echoes from 75 to 2025.
[01:46:39]  Yeah.
[01:46:40]  It's spooky, right?
[01:46:41]  It's it's indicative of not only like a pattern, but of a trap that we, you know, whatever, the democratic public have absolutely no say whatsoever in designing.
[01:47:02]  And I mean, from definitely no ability to get out of it using the old institutional means that are available to us through the electoral system or whatever.
[01:47:16]  And you repeats kind of once and then again and then again and then again, like the lack of accountability.
[01:47:26]  You know, the last one was Nixon, really.
[01:47:29]  Like the last time anybody paid a price for anything was Dick Nixon.
[01:47:33]  And that was a political price.
[01:47:34]  And that's the other thing.
[01:47:35]  Like it was literally like, I mean, Spiro Agnew technically paid more of a price because he actually had to pay fines.
[01:47:41]  But not that much.
[01:47:42]  Not that much.

=== Lack of Accountability (07:17) ===

[01:47:44]  But Nixon, I mean, Nixon, like, he just resigned.
[01:47:48]  Like, he wasn't prosecuted.
[01:47:49]  And like that, that there's so, I mean, there was obviously that like Supreme Court decision that was heralded by many about how like, you know, Trump could kind of get away with a lot or the presidency had a lot of power to get away with a lot of stuff.
[01:48:04]  But like, even with this shit that like, I guarantee Trump's going to pardon himself at the end of his term, you know, Biden partying all these like, I mean, which I guess makes sense because now there's just a ton of political prosecutions, but like Biden partying a bunch of people at the end of his term.
[01:48:22]  You know, there's just like this, this culture of impunity in Washington that is like, it's so, it makes me sound like a Mother Jones op-ed writer to talk about or whatever, but it is a fucking real thing.
[01:48:33]  And like so much of it, like one can't help but wonder like what would have happened, what would be different if Nixon had been prosecuted.
[01:48:40]  Like if there was precedent for actually prosecuting somebody who had committed legal offenses while in the highest office.
[01:48:49]  And you could look at what happened to Iran-Contra that there were some convictions, not the president, which Reagan should have been prosecuted, even if he did have dementia.
[01:49:01]  I was going to say he could have gotten out of that by being like, where am I?
[01:49:05]  But I mean, he basically confessed to a crime on national TV.
[01:49:08]  He did.
[01:49:09]  Yes.
[01:49:10]  My heart and my best intentions tell me that what I said was the truth.
[01:49:16]  But now I know that it wasn't.
[01:49:18]  It's just amazing.
[01:49:19]  My heart tells me what I said was the truth.
[01:49:22]  I'm always saying that to women.
[01:49:25]  The footage is crazy as I'm saying that.
[01:49:29]  But all those other guys, they bring in Barr.
[01:49:31]  Yeah.
[01:49:32]  Again, it's the same cast of characters even.
[01:49:36]  I know.
[01:49:37]  And he just cleans it.
[01:49:38]  I mean, that was Barr's thing.
[01:49:39]  He cleaned it up for them.
[01:49:40]  He cleaned it up.
[01:49:41]  And now, you know, it won't be Barr next time, but it'll be, you know, some guy that's even dumber because you don't even have to be good at it anymore.
[01:49:48]  I know.
[01:49:48]  And that's the thing is like there's, and maybe it's like, I don't know.
[01:49:53]  Maybe it's, it's like, I'm trying to think of like, what was there?
[01:49:56]  The fucking Mueller report?
[01:49:59]  You know what I mean?
[01:49:59]  It's like, I'm trying to think, it's like all these things are such like, they're done in some way now.
[01:50:06]  Like we'll have some variation of like, we're looking into this kind of thing.
[01:50:10]  But like nobody, I think the big thing that's different is like there is zero expectation that anything actually happens ever.
[01:50:17]  Right.
[01:50:18]  Like there is just like no expectation from the from the general public in America that like anybody in power is like going to be held accountable for anything.
[01:50:26]  Right.
[01:50:27]  I mean, all of the pigs are slopping at the same trough.
[01:50:32]  Exactly.
[01:50:32]  Yeah.
[01:50:33]  I mean, even Menendez, right?
[01:50:35]  Like there was like a question of like whether Menendez was actually going to get in trouble for having fucking gold he got from like the Egyptian defense ministry in his house.
[01:50:44]  And everyone's just like, you know what I mean?
[01:50:45]  Like, yeah, he should resign, but he's still going to work, you know?
[01:50:48]  Like nobody, like, it's, it's this, it's, they really are in some ways like untouchable.
[01:50:54]  Because even if somebody nominally gets in trouble, like Nixon did, for instance, like, okay, well, you know, in the interest of healing, like, we don't want to do anything.
[01:51:02]  I mean, that was the same thing with Trump one, right?
[01:51:03]  Like, they didn't really, I mean, they did end up going after him in this like half-assed, weird lawfare way where they just like did a bunch of like really shoddy court cases against him that like all kind of ended up going nowhere so that eventually people could be like, well, he's a felon, but it's like, well, I don't know.
[01:51:20]  I feel like if I got 34 felonies, I would probably go to jail for one day.
[01:51:24]  You know what I mean?
[01:51:25]  Like, he didn't go to jail for any days.
[01:51:28]  It's nuts.
[01:51:29]  I mean, it's not only the executive branch and the legislative branch.
[01:51:34]  You also have the Supreme Court justices taking, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in trips and travel and whatever the fuck else they want to get from these rich guys.
[01:51:47]  And they just say, no, it doesn't affect my decisions.
[01:51:50]  These are just my friends.
[01:51:51]  Yeah.
[01:51:52]  Yeah, I know.
[01:51:53]  And that's the interesting thing.
[01:51:55]  It's like, and it's like, people can like, you know, maybe there'll be an op-ed about it, or there'll be some kind of public outrage about it, but there's no like real vehicle for that outrage to take a form, the form of, you know?
[01:52:06]  I mean, even something like as like, for instance, like the church committee or whatever, we at least learn some like new information.
[01:52:15]  Like people don't even, like, that doesn't even really happen anymore.
[01:52:19]  Right.
[01:52:20]  And the information that you do learn is so selectively filtered out that it's usually serving somebody's agenda.
[01:52:30]  Like who could remember?
[01:52:32]  I mean, I would say who could forget, but who could remember the Trump impeachment with like Lev Parnas and Vindman and shit?
[01:52:40]  Like, what was that even about?
[01:52:41]  No, yeah.
[01:52:42]  And I followed that.
[01:52:43]  I don't know.
[01:52:44]  I go back to thinking about the church committee because that gave rise to, I can't remember what it's called.
[01:52:49]  It's like the Intelligence Officers Protection Act or something like that.
[01:52:52]  But it made it illegal to leak the names of like CIA officers, for instance.
[01:52:59]  Because right after the church committee, or maybe even during the church committee, the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was assassinated.
[01:53:08]  And then that was sort of like sideways blamed on the church committee, even though like it was known that he lived there.
[01:53:15]  It was like, it wasn't like a super, it wasn't a very well-kept secret.
[01:53:19]  But I think it was also his name was published in like Counterspy or something like that.
[01:53:23]  Yeah, maybe Phil AG.
[01:53:24]  That's, yeah, yeah.
[01:53:25]  They like blamed Phil Agy for it.
[01:53:28]  And then that gave rise to this act that made it illegal to say the names of these people.
[01:53:35]  And I think there's been like maybe two prosecutions.
[01:53:38]  John Kirkow was one of them.
[01:53:40]  And then the other was, what's his, I can't remember what the guy's fucking name was, but it was about the Valerie playing Scooter Libby.
[01:53:47]  And there's been two prosecutions under it.
[01:53:49]  One of them was Scooter Libby during the Bush White House.
[01:53:52]  And it's like these things are like, I mean, obviously, I think it's supposed to have like more of a, I think it has had more of a chilling effect than any actual like, you know, prosecution backing it up or whatever.
[01:54:02]  And I don't think, by the way, that it should be a crime.
[01:54:04]  Scooter Libby's innocent.
[01:54:06]  Well, he's, no, he definitely did it, but he got pardoned too, didn't he?
[01:54:09]  He did get pardoned.
[01:54:10]  Yeah, he got pardoned.
[01:54:11]  And weren't they after playing for, and my memory is like completely failing me on this, but like, weren't they, didn't they not like her because she was critical of the Bush administration?
[01:54:20]  It was her husband.
[01:54:21]  Her husband.
[01:54:22]  They made a movie about it with Sean Penn.
[01:54:25]  Really?
[01:54:25]  And a December song.
[01:54:27]  What's the movie?
[01:54:28]  I forget the movie.
[01:54:29]  It's called Fair Game.
[01:54:31]  I've never heard of that.
[01:54:33]  Is it good?
[01:54:34]  No.
[01:54:34]  I mean, it's, you know, it's like the husband character, he was a State Department guy in Niger.
[01:54:46]  Yeah.
[01:54:47]  And so he was kind of counteracting the yellow cake uranium bullshit.
[01:54:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:54:53]  And so that's why they retaliated against him by outing his wife's cover.
[01:54:59]  Gotcha.

=== Erosion Of Checks And Balances (05:00) ===

[01:55:02]  I just think about this, like, man, like, I think it was all, and maybe it was later than 75, but like the Clark Amendment, which cut off U.S. funding to UNITA in Angola.
[01:55:14]  Oh, yeah.
[01:55:14]  Right?
[01:55:15]  The Hughes Ryan Amendment.
[01:55:17]  Which was that one?
[01:55:18]  This was by Leo Ryan.
[01:55:20]  R.I.P. to another check on covert funding, or it was like for any operations, you need congressional approval or something like that.
[01:55:31]  It was another one of these, putting a check on intelligence.
[01:55:34]  And of course, gets gunned down at the Port Kaituma airstrip in Guyana by members of People's Temple.
[01:55:44]  I mean, it's so, I don't know.
[01:55:47]  I mean, I talk about a lot on the show, like how it feels like there's nobody, like it doesn't feel like there's nobody in charge.
[01:55:53]  It does feel sometimes like there's somebody in charge, but it doesn't feel like there's any check on anybody in charge.
[01:55:58]  And it feels like the people in charge, like there's no, and this is a very simplistic framing, but you'll forgive me, like good guys out there.
[01:56:06]  You know, it's all just like scumbags from the top to the bottom.
[01:56:10]  Yeah.
[01:56:11]  And I mean, it's a little, we were talking a little bit about this before recording too.
[01:56:15]  The right wing has kind of taken on the mantle of both revolution in as much as they want to accelerate things down a certain path in a way that's inconsistent with the institutional checks and structures in existence, but they also are in power.
[01:56:36]  So they're kind of now, we're seeing them actually exercise power in a way that's totally unchecked.
[01:56:45]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:56:46]  I mean, it is like not to be whatever about this, but like some of the shit the Trump administration is doing is fucking kind of insane.
[01:56:54]  Oh, it's totally insane.
[01:56:56]  And all the left responds to it is we should just, you know, put the toothpaste back in the tube and try to go back to how things were after the church committee.
[01:57:07]  Yeah.
[01:57:08]  We need another church committee or whatever the fuck.
[01:57:10]  Like it's not really a solution because it doesn't recognize the real problem.
[01:57:17]  Yeah.
[01:57:18]  And it doesn't have any sense of the power dynamics that are at play On purpose, largely, because like I said, I mean, they're just yeah.
[01:57:31]  And it's, it's, to me, it's just like they talk about sort of the erosion of the democratic institutions.
[01:57:36]  I mean, this is a big liberal talking point, but guess what?
[01:57:38]  They've eroded.
[01:57:39]  You know what I mean?
[01:57:40]  They've eroded.
[01:57:41]  They suck now.
[01:57:42]  I mean, they weren't very good to begin with, and now they're really, really, really bad and they don't work anymore.
[01:57:48]  And there is no like solution that you see from anyone besides just like, oh, we'll rebuild them.
[01:57:53]  Well, it's like, I don't think that's going to happen at this point.
[01:57:55]  Because A, there's power there that you could use if you're like a lib who gets into power, which you're certainly did not really happen that much during the Biden.
[01:58:04]  I mean, they tried to, you know, they tried to, they tried to get Trump on like the Stormy Daniel shit in New York Court.
[01:58:11]  It's like, that's your, you're like attempt at this.
[01:58:15]  It's dog shit, you know?
[01:58:17]  Right.
[01:58:18]  And you don't need new laws.
[01:58:20]  Yeah.
[01:58:20]  He's breaking the ones that already exist.
[01:58:23]  I know.
[01:58:23]  It's, I mean, we talked, I know you had Silverman on your show too, but like, man, his shit, like with all the fucking crazy crypto donors that, I mean, this guy makes Spiro Agnew look like a fucking amateur.
[01:58:38]  You know?
[01:58:39]  I mean, Spiro Agnew, he was taking whatever could fit into an envelope.
[01:58:45]  Yeah.
[01:58:47]  Yeah.
[01:58:48]  You can't fit that much cash into an envelope.
[01:58:50]  No.
[01:58:51]  And meanwhile, into like a fake company, you can pump untold sums.
[01:58:59]  Yeah.
[01:58:59]  Literally uncountable, not unaccountable, but you can't count how much bribe money is flowing in to that mafia ass family enterprise.
[01:59:11]  And if I may read another Deboer quote.
[01:59:14]  Absolutely.
[01:59:14]  That he, so, you know, you can think about this process as the corporatization of everything, but then corporations resemble mafia.
[01:59:26]  And so what Debo writes about this phenomenon is it is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing mafia and state.
[01:59:36]  They are never rivals.
[01:59:37]  Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life have all too easily shown.
[01:59:44]  The mafia is not an outsider in this world.
[01:59:46]  It is perfectly at home.
[01:59:48]  Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.
[01:59:57]  And I would add on that, and governmental institutions as well.

=== Mafia As Model Enterprise (01:20) ===

[02:00:02]  Yeah.
[02:00:02]  To the extent that they're effective at all and not just there to take up space and to perform the role of giving ease to the population by fostering the belief that something is being done with all the money that we pay in taxes.
[02:00:21]  It is to commit crimes on a mass scale.
[02:00:27]  Well, Don, I think that's a perfect place to leave it.
[02:00:29]  Where can people find you?
[02:00:31]  The podcast is Forthreich Archaeology, and we are streaming wherever podcasts stream.
[02:00:39]  We have a Patreon and I'm on Twitter at Angleton Orchids.
[02:00:46]  Well, we'll link those in the show notes.
[02:00:48]  Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[02:00:50]  Thank you for having me.
[02:00:52]  I feel like I inhaled, so I should say something else.
[02:00:55]  I'm going to exhale.
[02:00:56]  Jill Ford.
[02:01:12]  All right, it's a nice day.
[02:01:13]  We got to get out of here.
[02:01:14]  Yeah.
[02:01:14]  My name is Bryce.
[02:01:15]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[02:01:17]  The show is chewing on.
[02:01:19]  We'll see you next time.
[02:01:20]  Let's do it together.
[02:01:21]  One, two, three.