THE DREAM OF PASSAMAQUODDY
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THE DREAM OF PASSAMAQUODDY
PART ONE: COINCIDENCE AND A MISSING PIECE OF HISTORY
You may have recognized the picture of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on this web site as part of an advertisement that has run in several publications. The advertisement alternatively chides the New York Times and Time Magazine for not telling us the story of JFK’s Dream of Passamaquoddy. I am the author, Andrea Silverthorne, an average American, who by happenstance of birth and circumstance came upon this story in 1989.
In the winter of 2003, through my professional capacity, I met an editor from the Boston Globe, Jeannette Watson. On my desk, she saw the picture of JFK in Air Force One, flying over the Passamaquoddy Bay with Senators Muskie and Chase, and she asked me about it. After but a cursory explanation, she expressed “great interest” in hearing a story that concerned John Kennedy that she had never heard before.
The editor asked me to record my story and send it to her. I bought audio tapes, but never found the time to start the story. Eight months later, the approach of the fortieth anniversary of the President’s assassination prompted me to begin an e-mail correspondence with the editor, outlining both the “Dream” story and my research. Initially, her comments back to me were encouraging: “Great reading”; “When’s the next installment?”; "Got Prelude to a Movie; anxious to read,” but after I had sent her about half of the story, I received an e-mail from her stating that the story was very interesting to her, and she wanted me to continue telling it; however, she thought no one could publish it because of September 11, and its aftermath.
I accepted her judgment; as it happened, on September 11, 2001, I was in the Boston subway, in transit to the Kennedy Library to conduct research, when I learned about the attack on the World Trade Center. I had made a similar decision. September 11 and its aftermath stopped me from working on the project for a long time. I did not think that it was an appropriate time to be carving American statesmen into the bottom of Mount Rushmore. Neither discouraged nor disappointed, I finished “my story” for the Boston Globe
In 2006, troubled by a plethora of doomsday predictions on global warming, which basically offered no true agenda for tackling the problem, I began placing my ads in publications that I could afford, and tried sending the information to several major media publications. I have received no acknowledgement or reply. Suspecting that these publications, like the Boston Globe editor, have concerns about the politics of the story, I have decided to tell it myself. There will always be an excuse not to tell this story.
A set of personal coincidences led to the discovery of JFK’s efforts to realize the energy potential of our tidal currents. In 1989, I discovered that an island in the Passamaquoddy Bay, off the coast of Maine, belonged to my family. The Canadian government took Marvel Island as abandoned in 1973.
I recognized 1973 as the year my uncle, a former state senator, from Washington County, began a two-year effort to push through an approval to build an oil refinery in Eastport, Maine. The northern reaches of Maine are the only place in the eastern United States capable of accepting oil super tankers in their harbors. I had intimate details of my uncle’s effort because he talked a blue streak about it, especially when he won approval from the Maine legislators, only to have his initiative quashed by the Canadian government, whose leaders denied passage for the tankers through their Head Harbor Passage.
Were the Canadian government taking of Marvel Island and the oil port efforts related? I began research on the oil industry in Maine. In an old book on Maine history, called simply Maine, which included the story of my uncle’s efforts, I found a two-sentence reference to the fact that President John Kennedy had tried to build a tidal dam between Passamaquoddy and Cobscook Bay. The book said the dam was very controversial, had many enemies, was communistic, and did not proceed after his death. I was aghast. The dam was not only to be built in the county my uncle represented; it was to be built in his hometown −at his front doorstep.
We were a close extended family. My uncle had been in Miami during the Kennedy years, attending a Shriners' convention. He visited with my family, and he never mentioned the dam. Growing up, spending summers in Eastport, both my uncle and grandfather had regaled us with stories of President Roosevelt’s short-lived efforts to build the dam. Why did I not know that the one of the most written-about presidents in our history planned to build the Quoddy Dam? I asked my mother and my Aunt if they knew about Kennedy’s efforts. I asked my uncle’s daughter, then living in Seattle. No one had heard about John Kennedy’s Quoddy Dam. Showing my mother the book was required to make her believe it was true. My uncle’s daughter was incredulous; her father had never mentioned it. Surely, her father would have spoken of it to her, at least briefly, in his visits, letters and phone calls, if it were true, she told me. Eastport is a very small town and it would have been a big story there. The dam was always hoped for to save Eastport from economic decline. A model and exhibition of the Roosevelt Dam is a tourist attraction in the town; no mention of the Kennedy effort is in the exhibit.
“Now here is a possible motive for his murder I’ve never heard of, a domestic not a foreign issue,” I mused. The musings went no further. I dismissed the premise from my mind. Where was an average American to take information like this? I continued with my battle for the island. In 1992, we won. The Canadian government released the island to the heirs.
What ultimately led to my exploration of JFK’s efforts at Passamaquoddy is best described as a twist of fate. In the early nineties, I began working with a partner in my real estate endeavors. By the mid nineties, I became dissatisfied with his contributions to the partnership. One day, as he prepared to make his ritualistic five PM sharp departure from the office, I expressed my feelings in no uncertain terms. “Get a life,” he retorted. I decided I needed a hobby, an after five life, propelling me to walk out the door with my partner, thus relieving the inequities that created my resentment. I bought video editing software and a camera, and began to develop a concept for an Internet television show that would enhance my real estate business on South Beach. I went back to school to learn production skills, first to Florida International University for journalism and then to the University of Miami for independent film study.
The winter of 2000, I enrolled in a course at the University of Miami called: History by Hollywood. The professor instructed the class to pick a film to analyze for historical accuracy, Hollywood versus history. I picked Amadeus. A fellow student picked JFK. During class discussion of the movie JFK, our professor began to discuss all the research Oliver Stone had done, and all the money he had spent to leave “no stone unturned.” He had even hired Harvard University he told us. Suddenly, 1989’s dismissed thoughts did a back to the future loop to my frontal cortex. My hand shot up. My professor acknowledged me. “Why didn’t Harvard tell Stone about the Passamaquoddy Dam?” I asked. “The what?” he exclaimed. That was it! Right then and there, more than ten years after I had first discovered it, I decided I would develop a movie script about the Kennedy dam, using “History by Hollywood” leverage ─ and develop a documentary using journalistic standards. I would show them on the local cable show I had created.
After registering for school, in the late summer of 2000, I took a trip to New York to see an ailing friend and my youngest daughter, with the intent of spending research time in the New York Public Library. My friend passed away before I arrived. I devoted my time to research for the movie and documentary.
Tidal power was the foremost reason for visiting the library: how it worked; why it worked financially, and who had attempted it besides the United States. Through Internet research, I had found one quote that said there was enough tidal power distribution throughout the world to replace fossil fuel in power production. I thought the Internet was a weak source. I wanted to learn the where-with–all of the technology. A scary radio program I listened to as a child was also on my mind. I wanted to authenticate it for the moral of the movie and find its name. Finally, researching Masonry and anti Catholicism completed the list. They were not related subjects in my mind when I began research. I remembered the controversy over Kennedy’s religion and the debate over its possible effects on our governance. I am not a Catholic, but had found the issu confounding as a young adult .
Masonry was on the list simply because the movie was to revolve around a Maine family like my own. My grandfather and uncle were Masons. My uncle would always stop to get my grandfather on the way to a Masonic meeting. They were Shriners. I loved to watch their antics in the town’s Fourth of July parade. Anti-Catholicism and Masonry research was only for the purpose of putting authentic flavor of the times in the movie.
Surprisingly, library information on tidal power was minimal and not very useful, and even more surprisingly — there were no references to the Kennedy effort ─ at all. What I did find answered none of my questions. The best possible source of the scary radio show was something called The Inner Sanctum.
Left with nothing to do on the main topic of research − tidal power − I turned to the ancillary subject matter. I found plenty on Masonry, including reams of old journals with the names of members, times of meetings and other monotonous notations. There were many books on Masonry, but there was only so much time. I decide to wait and use the University of Miami library. There was one book worth looking at because you could not remove it from the library. Called Behind the Lodge Door, by Paul Fisher, its title and its library restrictions were interesting. I sent for it from the stacks. Anti-Catholicism was a verdant field, and two other search results were particularly interesting, a small pamphlet entitled Should a Catholic Become President, written in the late fifties, and an archived file, donated to the library in 1902. This file needed special permission for access; it was called the Baldwin McDowell file. I was a student. The status gave me access to this file. I made a beeline to a gated section of the library, showed the pass, and gained entry.
The librarian sent for the file. Soon an archivist delivered old boxes to the table. The Baldwin McDowell file, named after its two contributors, consisted of two parts. Perusing the first box produced stacks of nonsensical, short letters written back and forth between and about Protestant Protectionists. I read quite a few and dismissed them as not relevant. They were chatty, contained nothing on anti- Catholicism, and did not seem to present any historical value other than the fact they were old. I copied none of them; I would soon regret this decision.
The second part of the file consisted of probably every newspaper article written about Catholics during the gathering period, the late 1800’s, and in addition, it contained the writings of one of the Protestant Protectionists. These writings included number manipulations that the author said proved Pope Leo XIII was in deed the devil himself. They also included what appeared to be a letter between the Irish Catholic Archbishop of Chicago and a French Catholic Bishop in Montreal. Written in the Protestant Protectionist handwriting, this scribe had either copied it or — made it up. There was nothing in the file giving a clue to the source or reason for its donation to the library. The letter was a suggestion from the Irish Catholic clergy to the French Catholic clergy that together they could join forces to take over the United States and Canada for the Pope. I left this area of the library with the thought someone was spying on American Catholics.
Returning to the call desk, the two other items I had requested were waiting for pick up. The pamphlet Should a Catholic Become President was incredible. Written by an Evangelical minister, it put forth that electing a Catholic was akin to Armageddon. The author pointed out how dangerous Catholics were becoming. They had just reached governorships in three states. He named them. One was the state of Maine. This was not like the editorial discussions on JFK’s religion presented during the campaign by our professional, decorous press. This was heady stuff − deadly.
A former intelligence officer from the OSS, the organization that gave birth to the CIA, wrote the book Behind the Lodge Door. After a civilian career that included work as a congressional aide, Paul Fisher was now a retired journalist and author. These were certainly not the credentials of a flake, but what I read of his book seemed preposterous. Masonry was a political power, and an onerous one at that, it was saying. The book was written with an obsessive, strident tone; still, Mr. Fisher’s credentials were impressive ─ and he was a Catholic. I decided to try to find a copy of the book when I returned to Miami.
This decision would lead to a correspondence with Mr. Fisher that would last the better part of a year. He, I would learn, spent twenty-two years investigating the assassination of John Kennedy, primarily revolving around the reopening of the inquiry into the President’s death in the late seventies. I credit this correspondence for much of my ability to present to you a never openly looked at motivation for the assassination of the first Catholic President of the United States. Having a motive to commit a crime is not a crime, but in all instances of crime, investigators always look at motivation, “Persons of interest,” is how law authorities phrase it.
For forty-three years, we have been debating how many bullets were fired that fall day in November 1963 and nothing more. There was not one “person of interest” ever named as a possible sponsor of Lee Harvey Oswald and his activities. Do not count Louisiana DA Garrison’s naming of Clay Shaw or David Ferrie. They had no compelling motivation to murder Kennedy.
AFTERWORD: Later, after finding the “William Torbitt Document” on line, I changed my mind; it appears Garrison had the tip of the tiger’s tale, but did not construct enough evidence before trial. Clay Shaw was a Director of Permindex, a Montreal based company, with offices in Italy and Switzerland; according to Torbitt,( Torbitt is a pen name of a Texas Attorney), it was an intelligence front for assassination planning and other off the record activities.
Returning to Miami, the first thing I did was go to both the public and the University of Miami libraries. I found books on Maine history. The old book I had found ten years earlier was not there, but there were other, newer books. Not one mentioned Kennedy’s Quoddy Dam. Only President Roosevelt’s aborted efforts were written about. Here again, a catalog search would find little more than encyclopedia references to tidal power and no mention of Kennedy’s Quoddy Dam, except for one item, A New York Times article that reported on a speech that Kennedy made on October 19, 1963, at the University of Maine, in Orono. Here was a second two-sentence reference to the Quoddy Dam. The reporter, Tom Wicker, mentioned that after the speech, John Kennedy had directed Air Force One to fly over the site of his proposed tidal dam. The Associated Press snapped the picture of JFK, interfacing my site, the afternoon of October 19, 1963. Wicker mentioned that the dam was controversial, but did not explain the controversy.
I had taken course work in journalism, which taught the press loved controversy; it was a driving force. Find the controversy students were taught; get all sides of the story. Here we had a statement from the largest, most famous American newspaper in the world that a controversy existed; a controversy that involved the President of the United States who was the most charismatic, written-about President in our history, and the reporter did not even give a cursory explanation of it. Four sentences, in two publications were all I could find in three superb libraries, which between them cataloged virtually all publications in America.
NOTE: Recently while researching energy on the Time magazine archive site I found a small mention of JFK’s July 16, 1963 Rose Garden announcement for the tidal project.
The scary radio program,which I had listen to with my cousins in Maine, would regularly feature Edgar Allan Poe’s The Telltale Heart. It was our favorite. Instinctively, before I did any research − whatsoever — I decided that the story of the dam had been buried out of fear that anyone who learned of it would hear a “beating heart.” Next to Tom Wickers story, on JFK’s visit to Maine, the New York Times had printed a copy of JFK’s Orono speech. It began “In the year 1717 . . . .”
I must have perused a hundred books on Masonry between the two Miami libraries. I took home about fifteen books, including one on the birth of an African American branch of Masonry, chartered by England’s Grand Lodge, when they could not get American Masonry to charter them. There were many, many books on the subject. I chose the oldest, having learned from other research projects that the older the book, the more accurate and insightful the information. Paul Fisher’s book was for sale on the Amazon.com, and I ordered it, along with another book that sounded interesting called Born in Blood.
I will spare readers a twenty-page report. I can describe what I learned Masons are all about in one word − the occult −and their historical agenda can be defined in two categories — control of the state and anti-Catholicism. If Masons were successful in their political goals, they fell in with the state; they became the state. If they could not establish direct control of the state, they became a revolutionary force, as they did in predominately-Catholic Italy, and in France, where they aligned with the left. In France’s Third Republic, they were the progenitors of Deism and Positivism, the proponents of the secular, and the enemies of traditional religion. In the Germany of World War II, they were against Hitler and Hitler was against them. While Masonry developed with a right leaning posture in some countries and to the left in others, they all had, as one author described it, “unity of purpose,” in their anti- Catholicism and their devotion to secrecy and each other.
Masonry first became openly significant in Italy, thriving in England secretly until the year 1717. The secret society eventually spread throughout the continent and across the ocean to the New World, our world. Their emphasis of societal secrecy and− what religious authors called their “pagan” rituals, are what most authors critical of Masonry credit for “. . . an inevitable moral deterioration.”
Masonic rituals based themselves on signs, symbols and legends expropriated from a myriad of mystical history: Greek; Cretan; Jewish; Roman Mithraism; and the Hermetic. The Shriners, an entertainment and philanthropic offshoot of the Masons, are an example of their Hermetic emphasis.
Their extensive use of Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah, was a bastardized version they called Cabala, which had its roots in the Jews’ migration to Italy, after their expulsion from Spain. The Vatican thought the Jewish document Sepher Yatzira (Book of Creation), demonstrated proof of the Trinity in its first three “Sephrot” that beget the remaining seven. (Madonna’s song “Ray of Light.”) Italian monks picked it up, became fascinated with it, and developed fortune telling Tarot cards, mimicking the ten Sephrot and the twenty-two Jewish letters. An Italian nobleman by the name of Agrippa took it to France, where it emerged as witchcraft. Most of the non-Jewish authors writing on the subject of Jewish Mysticism were Masons. King Henry VIII sent the future first Archbishop of Canterbury to visit real Jewish Kabbalists in Italy to develop biblical justification for his divorce and planned split with the Catholic Church. Lord Agrippa would then use his knowledge of the Jewish science to argue for King Henry’s wife, Catherine of Aragon. It was the divorce of the millennium.
NOTE: please read the documnent “And It Came To Pass,” on this site for more information on the difference between the serious science of Jewish Mysticism and the occult practices of Masonry.
We are a Masonic country. Masons started our revolution. The men that dumped the tea in Boston’s harbor were Masons. The Green Dragon Tavern, from which the revolutionaries launched their insurrection against the British, was the first American Masonic Lodge. The original owner of our country, King George III, was a Mason. All the Kings of England were Masons. Once the secret society controlled a State, they became the protectors of the status quo. Most of our Presidents were Masons. Some did not arrive at the White House as a member, but were inducted in at the highest degree of Masonry, after they reached the top job in our country. Theodore Roosevelt was inducted after the assassination of McKinley, which was about the same time someone deposited the Baldwin McDowell file in the New York Public Library. Ronald Reagan was inducted after the attempt on his life.
There were no connecting dots between my new fascination with anti Catholicism─ or Masonry ─ and JFK’s Quoddy Dam. I had a hunch that they were connected. If a secret society ran America, then America had a secret history.
Masonry reached its highest membership as a percentage of America’s male population in the twenties, right before the depression. The depression saw its influence in the general population wane; it began resurgence in the fifties. At the time of John Kennedy’s death, both Houses of Congress were still controlled by Masons, Republicans and Democrats − a secret majority. A female author noted that while Masonry did begin to approach its pre depression numbers in the fifties, its growth stopped in the sixties. Today its membership is depleted. A Washington Post reporter wrote an interesting article called “Life in the Fez Lane,” about the Shriners’ attempts to hire a Public Relations company to revive them in the twenty-first century.
Perhaps you noticed the fact the year 1717 has appeared twice in this document. It appeared ad-infinitum in the books I was reading on Masonry. It is just as an important date to Masonry as 1776 is to Americans. It is the founding year of the Grand Masonic Lodge in England. If Italy made Masonry fashionable, England made it powerful.
Kennedy used the year 1717 in his speechto draw an analogy from the fact King George I had sent troops to Oxford and books to Cambridge, all in the same year. He likened it to his sending troops to Mississippi and his strides in education. Kennedy gave no explanation as to why the English king sent troops to Oxford. The fact he brought up a painful event was odd, I thought, and without knowing why the King sent troops to Oxford, the analogy was a stretch. The coincidental fact that the event bore the same date as the opening of the Grand Lodge in England intrigued me. Why did the King send troops to Oxford? I had to know.
Turning to the Internet, I went to the JFK Library web site to find information on the speech. It was a significant one, recommending what would become know as Détente, a strategy to deal with the Cold War with Russia. The library had many of JFK’s speeches listed on its site, including his last speech at Amherst College with Robert Frost present, but his next to last − and much more significant speech was not there. Neither a search on the web, in the University of Miami, or Miami’s public library turned up anything in reference to the English troop-sending incident.
Going back to the net, I found the Oxford web site in England, and started e mailing faculty. It took a while to find the right professor, but I finally did find someone that knew of what Kennedy spoke. He was referring to a very famous poem about the King’s successful attempt to quash the Catholic Jacobites. They had been trying to restore the Catholic James II to the English throne. It would be the last hurrah for Catholics in England; however, the professor pointed out, I had the wrong year; the poem began “In the year 1715 . . . .” The Catholic President, who had fought against anti Catholic prejudice in his campaign, had used a reference to the religious war between Protestants and Catholics in his speech. Did the President’s speechwriter make a mistake? Did the President use the wrong year on purpose?
When I did find the speech at the Kennedy Library, by speaking directly with an archivist, it read “In the year 1715 . . . .” Kennedy did not cite the wrong year; the New York Times did. Strange, and it got stranger. I could find no correction in The New York Times. It was an error in a speech by a President of the United States. It was an error on a famous moment in British history, printed in the most well known paper in the world. I knew more research was necessary, but set it aside. Later, I would hire a student in Washington D.C. to search the Congressional Library in Washington D. C., for all the papers that had reprinted the speech. She found four: the New York Times; the Boston Globe; the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. The Boston Globe and the Washington Post reprinted the speech with the right year − 1715. The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor printed the wrong year − 1717.
Large newspapers such as the ones that reprinted JFK’s speech are meticulous about catching errors and typos; they would have been especially careful with a speech by the President of the United States. First, the author of the story rechecks their work. In the case of the JFK speech, it was handed out to the press after he gave it, as was − and still is − the White House custom. It would have been the same for all papers, whether a reporter was there, or if a press wire first prepared it by teletype for distribution. After being readied for the paper or a press wire transmission, the typist would check the document, then the editor, then a proofreader, and finally a second proofreader. In all cases, the checker refers back to the original document. Two papers made the same mistake. All the cross checks at both papers printing the wrong year would have to have failed to catch their mistake. It was only the fourth word in the speech — and it was a number.
At some point after this perplexing discovery, a news story from the sixties came to mind. I remembered that there had been an outcry over the fact our intelligence agencies were found to be inserting made up stories into the papers and using companies and foundations as fronts for intelligence agencies. The stories did not go into detail over how they managed to accomplish this. Finding the original newsprint of the two papers, showing the wrong year −1717 − became an investigative crosscheck to perform. I wanted to see if the actual newsprint version gave the wrong year, but when I would try to find original newsprint, I discovered, in this capitalist, competitive country, there is only one organization in this nation that is responsible for preparing microfiche for all the libraries and newspapers in the United States. There is only one company that is the repository for old newspapers for sale to the public. Neither the October 23, 1963, Christian Science Monitor, nor the October 20, 1963, New York Times were available. During the time I was communicating with the Boston Globe editor about this matter, I did not know that The New York Times owned the Boston Globe.
George Orwell’s 1984 protagonist made his living altering the “State’s” newspapers by both adding and deleting stories. The Ministry of Information, where he worked, was an edifice in the shape of a pyramid, a Masonic symbol. Perhaps, if the newspapers decided to cooperate with the intelligence agencies after the outrage died down, then − when the papers were preserved for history ─ they would not want to preserve false information. It would have to be taken out, and it would have to be done by a company working for or with the government, so they would know which issues contained the false stories. Perhaps then, it could be theorized, something could also be changed and put into a microfiche of a newspaper, to accomplish an after-the-fact documentation of the winning of a religious war.
I would eventually attempt to find the New York Times reporter, Tom Wicker, to see if I could shed further light on this conjecture. He had retired from the paper, but I found him on the web reporting on, of all things, an environmental web site. I sent an email to him asking what he recalled about that day in Orono, Maine. “Not much,” he answered me. E-mailing him back, I told him the paper had made a mistake when reprinting the President Kennedy’s speech; it used a wrong date. “Could you tell me where retractions were printed in the paper during that period?” I asked him. No reply came back from Mr. Wicker.
PART TWO: MR. FISHER, I PRESUME
When the books from Amazon.com arrived, I chose the book, Born in Blood, by John Robinson, to read first. It was a can’t-put-it-down read. Exceptionally well written, logically crafted, it romanticizes Masonry. The author resides in Kentucky, is a member of a non-secret British society, professes not to be a Mason ─ but is enamored of them. Robinson’s main thesis is the discovery of the true ancestry of the Masons, and it has nothing to do with bricklayers.
By this point in time, I had already learned the male youth organization of the Masons was called Demolay, named after the martyred head of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay. Masons were very much into numerology. Masonry’s favorite number was nine; there were originally nine Templar Knights; Masonry had a ground zero, 1717, the year Masons came out of hiding in England, where they had been since the death of Jacques de Molay. The Grand Lodge in England’s founding was two years after the quashing of the Catholic Jacobites in 1715. Robinson’s book did not discover; it disclosed.
According to Robinson, the derivation of Masonry is the Catholic order called the Knights Templar. They sprang out of Crusade activity and were military men of great religious fervor. They guarded Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The order took off in popularity, swelled in number of members, spread out across Europe. They became very, very wealthy, held more land than the Papacy, and became a bank of sorts, lending money to many, including a tremendous amount to Philip the Fair, the King of France. Over the years, the Popes began to fear the order challenged their power and they created a rival order called the Hospitalliters. Then the current Pope, Clemente V, came up with a political ploy to neutralize the power of the Templars; he ordered a merger with the rival group. The ploy did not work. The Templars resisted the hostile take over.
Pope Clemente V then decided to charge them with heresy. He ordered both the King of France, Phillip the Fair, and King Edward of England to arrest all the Templar Knights in their countries. Philip the Fair complied. Edward of England did not. The year was 1307. The King lured Templar Knight’s leader, Jacques de Molay, to Paris on the pretense of talking it over, and he immediately was thrown in jail. The French King tortured all de Molay’s French followers to death. The Pope continued to pressure the English king to arrest his Templars; by the time Edward of England succumbed to the Pope’s wishes, there were no Templars to arrest. They all had gone into hiding.
After a few years in jail, Jacques de Molay, still alive, was given an out: confess his organization’s heresy and he would receive clemency. He agreed. Once they got him in public to denounce his organization, he proclaimed his and his dead followers’ innocence. For his valor, the King punished him with a public roasting, and it was not a verbal bashing. Jacques de Molay was slowly roasted over a fire to his death.
Thus, on that day, a secret war began that would last centuries. In England, the Templars would come out in the year 1717 as the Masons; the Protestant throne assured, they felt safe.
The rest of Robinson’s book deals with the Masons themselves and their rules and rituals. A rule of note learned from other books on the subject is the fact a Mason may never judge or act against another Mason, no matter what the crime, even murder, unless of course he breaks Masonic rules; then he has the choice of losing his head or his entails.
Robinson does reveal in detail Masonic rituals of membership and the hierarchal rites of passage through the many degrees of Masonry, to its top level, the 33rd degree. The rites are high drama and designed to instill obedience and fear of bodily harm — death — should a member divulge Masonic secrets, or break from Masonic tradition and rules. One of the ceremonies involved smashing a symbolic Papal tiara.
Moreover, Robinson divulged, the Masons were in the habit of communicating with one another by writing letters in code. The part of the Baldwin Mc Dowell file containing all those chatty letters might be an example of this activity.
Born in Blood made me view Paul Fisher’s book differently. I now read Behind the Lodge Door. Dispatching an email to its publisher, TAN books, I requested contact information for Mr. Fisher and received his e-mail address. Soon, correspondence began with Paul Fisher about what he called: “The best book never read,”
Paul Fisher’s book is not about the Kennedy assassination; it is about the Supreme Court. An “about the author” blurb on the back of the book is impressive. Paul Fisher graduated from Notre Dame the year I was born, 1943, and attended Georgetown University of Foreign Service, as well as American University. He was an OSS officer in World War II; he was called back to service in military intelligence during the Korean War. His background also included service to Democratic Congressman James Delaney from New York. Before retiring, he rounded out his career as a journalist for Catholic publications. As our e-mail correspondence progressed, I learned he also did service as a civilian in the Army, in both security and intelligence, and he was the inspector general at the Goddard Space Agency, as well as being involved with NASA security. His work in OSS involved the art of code breaking. His work with Congressman Delaney involved developing legislation to implement publicly funded vouchers for private schools. He had investigated the death of John Kennedy for twenty-two years; he began at age fifty-seven, the same age I was, when we began corresponding.
By early October, a month after I had discovered the Fisher book in New York, I was not only in touch with Mr. Fisher; I also had gained his agreement to send me his original notes on the Masonic publication, the New Age, from 1954 to 1965.
Paul Fisher had the uncanny ability to take the gelatin of circumstantial evidence and turn it into the Jell-O of conspiracy. His first chapter documents our country’s “dramatic reversal” on issues pertaining to the place of religion in public life. He blames this change on the success of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “court packing,” during his long tenure as our president. Roosevelt, he tells us, was an ardent Mason of the highest degree − the 33rd. At every opportunity, save one, Roosevelt, during his unprecedented four-term Presidency, chose a fellow Mason to fill vacancies on the bench.
Masons have always had a presence on the highest court of the land, but the year 1941 found them holding a majority, a majority they would continue to hold, Fisher tells us, until 1971. In 1956, the year Kennedy attempted a run for the Vice Presidency, they reached their strongest influence. Seven active members and one past member, Minton —eight out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court — were Masons.
Fisher continues to heat up his gelatin, with a “surprising revelation.” By meticulously documenting evidence of the Justices’ bias toward Catholics, and by equating this bias with both the fast paced US population growth in favor of Catholics − and the decrease in Masonic control of both Houses of Congress, he crafts a case for Protestant fear of possible future dominance by Catholics. Fisher cites this fear for the case law that came out of the highest court in the land from 1941 onward.
In actuality, Catholics became a significant political voting block by 1933. Roosevelt had to hire a prominent Catholic PR man to help him gain the Catholic vote. Catholics doubled in population between the beginning of W.W. II and the year Kennedy won the election, and in the five years between 1955 and 1960, Catholics became the majority of our population growth. More importantly, they were the majority in important electoral states having enough votes to elect a President.
Congressional Masonic Membership of both the Senate and the House of Representatives reached a high of almost seventy% in the 1920’s; it had slipped to around 54% by the time Kennedy was assassinated, still a very strong majority. Fisher’s beef was not against the rank and file membership of Masonry; lower level members received false secrets as a test, he said. It was only the highest levels of Masonry that became operationally covert. Mentioning that Masonry had died out, prompted Fisher to remind me membership was a secret; only the member himself could divulge it to the outside world. He said that there still were about fourteen% known Masons holding congressional membership, during our correspondence, and they were powerful men; Tom Delay and Trent Lott were two that he mentioned
Fisher devotes one short paragraph to the rabid anti- Catholicism that whirled around John Kennedy’s campaign for the Presidency. He devotes many paragraphs to Masonic control of the press, not only through direct ownership of publications and television networks, but also by control of press wire service. Fisher never suggests in Behind the Lodge Door: If you combine the congressional statistics with the Court’s majority, and then add Masonic leadership of the Warren Commission and the press, you certainly have the capacity to control the direction of the assassination investigation.
Among many examples of Masonic concert in the Supreme Court, Fishes discloses correspondence between Justice Burton and the head of the Masonic Lodge in Boston, a man named Lichliter. He is quoted as discussing his visit to the tomb of Jacques de Molay and de Molay’s murder by the Pope and French King. Fisher goes on to affirm Harry Truman’s role in continuing Roosevelt’s work at Masonic “court packing.” (Truman, Fisher said, would become the most powerful Mason in America, reaching the highest Masonic honor ever bestowed on an American President — the actual leadership of Masonry.)
The New Age debuted as the chronicle of Masonic philosophy in 1902. Mr. Fisher sat in the Library of Congress and read every issue of the New Age magazine from 1921 on. Almost every issue, that is. One issue was missing − November 1963. Paul Fisher uses this publication to gel his conspiracy theory, first by proving how important the publication was, the virtual Bible of the organization, and then by demonstrating how every opinion in the publication on the official Masonic policy for Church and State ended up as a Supreme Court case, and finally, by exposing Masonry’s mind boggling opinions on Catholics and their Pope.
Masons, according to authors contributing to the New Age, believed that the most dangerous threat to our democracy was not communists; it was Catholics. The Catholic religion was totally incompatible with the word democracy, they believed. The New Age magazine would change its name in the nineties to the Scottish Rite Journal, Fisher explained. Shortly thereafter, a new public magazine would debut to the public called New Age. It featured the occult and was against traditional religion; it was the work of Masons, Fisher believed.
Paul Fisher quotes a 1930 New Age issue: “In America, public education is the right and duty of the State . . . .” He uses this quote to begin his argument for freedom of choice in grade school education. Sometime later, during a trip to Gainesville, Florida to research Senator George Smather’s Library, I ended up in the University of Florida’s Library, after learning the Smather library was not open. Here, I would get my first look at an actual New Age publication. The library had the issues, but only up until (the year) 1952, the year John Kennedy was elected to the Senate. The New Age featured three mantras that appeared on the inside page of every issue. One of them was the statement that American public schools were the bedrock of American freedom and must be protected. It would be in one of these University of Florida issues that documentation of Fisher’s notes, saying America had far more to fear from Catholics than Communists, appeared
Fisher also sent me a personal autographed copy of a second book he had written, a small pamphlet, about the same size as the Evangelical pamphlet Should a Catholic be President. Entitled And Their God is the Devil, it consisted of sixteen chapters of Papal Encyclicals against the Masonic Order, plus a seventeenth chapter. Chapter 17 of And Their God is the Devil, listed the 15 reasons why Fisher thinks the Masons conspired to kill Kennedy.