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, trouble by a plethora of doomsday predictions on global warming, which basically offer 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 an 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 5 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 the issue was confounding.
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 Torlitt Document” on line, 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 Torlitt, 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 biggest most famous 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.
The scary radio program that 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
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 this 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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 Justice’s 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 70% 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 14% known Masons holding congressional membership, 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 of 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. The Passamaquoddy Dam was not one of them. Fisher prefaced his list with a disclaimer: “I not saying they did it . . . but . . . .” Fisher closed this chapter by pointing out that almost every member of the Warren Commission was also a member of a secret society, either the Masons, or Skull and Bones, a collegiate superlative of secret societies, which was, Fisher explained, like all other university fraternities and secret societies, Masonic in origin and a training ground for the nation’s elite young.
I cannot remember if I learned that Kennedy’s speech really began “In the year 1715 . . .,” before I received Paul Fisher’s second book. I do remember that once I knew and had read Chapter 17’s 15 reasons, I immediately thought I was looking at something that Fisher had manipulated on purpose to equate to Kennedy’s speech that began, “In the year1715 . . . .” It appeared that a man who had investigated Kennedy’s death for twenty-two years, and who was involved in the late seventies reinvestigation, knew something that the rest of America did not know about our President’s death. If Fisher had not explained that the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was also a 33-degree Mason, I would have sent this book to the FBI.
Fisher reinforced conspiracy as the norm for our government repeatedly, both in his book and during our correspondence, except when I finally pointed out to him the mistake in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, which both had printed the wrong year in the President’s speech, coincidently the year of Masonic founding of England’s Grand Lodge. Paul Fisher pooh-poohed this observation and said it was probably just a typo. “Most people would never recognize that,” he said.
It was odd that he did not even consider the possibility, especially in light of the fact that we had previously discussed, in depth, one of his notations from the New Age, concerning the second paper that used the wrong year, The Christian Science Monitor. Fisher had copied verbatim a reprint in the New Age of an article by a Christian Scientist Monitor journalist, written in 1954 during the Joseph McCarthy years of investigations. The journalist said that it had been suddenly observed, as a matter of coincidence, virtually all of the people targeted as communists in the Foreign Service Division of the government, were Protestants, not Catholics, therefore resulting in an increase ratio of Catholic to Protestant members in this important government agency. ‘The Masons and the Christian Scientists were philosophical buddies, and they often quoted one another,’ Fisher had said. Fisher also had stated that McCarthy was right; there were many communists in America at that time. “Read the Verona papers,” he advised.
I went to see the George Clooney film on McCarthy; a picture of McCarthy and his aide Robert Kennedy flashed on the screen. Clooney missed the back-story. The Kennedys were members of the Catholic secret society, the Knights of Columbus. In December of 1952, after his brother John’s successful campaign for the Senate, Robert Kennedy joined McCarthy’s committee; RFK’s father Joe Kennedy, a McCarthy friend and fan, had asked the Senator to give his son a position. Robert Kennedy would leave the committee in July of 1953, but would return as its counsel in 1954. He would leave yet again when public outcry began to build. The Kennedys were virulently anti Communist, as were most Catholics.
Long after I told Fisher about the discovery of the wrong date in Kennedy’s speech, I decided to check when the use of microfiche began; it was not around when I was a college student. It began in full force in 1979, right after the closing of the Kennedy assassination reinvestigation. This oddity of wrong dates, in two newspapers, was probably the only thing I told Paul Fisher that he did not know.
Paul Fisher was brilliant and meticulous. Fisher fully documented his edict that a dramatic and abrupt change in U. S. policy meant conspiracy was present. I came to wonder how the long-lived, Masonic-backed American policy of no aid to private, and especially parochial schools, came to an abrupt halt. After the reinvestigation of Kennedy’s death ended, Fisher would become an aide to a Catholic Congressman, developing legislation for private school vouchers.
According to Fisher, in 1979, there had not been a true Catholic nominated to the Supreme Court since President McKinley nominated Joseph McKenna in 1898, with the exception of the appointment of Justice Pierce Butler by President Harding in 1923. Frank Murphy’s 1940 appointment by Roosevelt, and Justice William Brennan’s appointment by Eisenhower in 1956 were given to men born Catholics, but Paul Fisher accuses them of being Catholics by birth only, men who subscribed to Masonic philosophy. Justice Murphy came from an openly “anti clerical” family and Justice Brennan became known for shaping Roe v Wade.
After the death of Justice Frank Murphy in 1949, no Catholic sat on the Supreme Court until 1956. Minton, appointed by Truman would resign from Masonry in 1946 and become a Catholic, after his resignation from the Court. We now have a Catholic Supreme Court majority − five Justices ─ appointments begun by Ronald Reagan, in 1986 at his first opportunity — after the reinvestigation of the assassination ended.
By Fisher’s own decree, given the occurrence of “dramatic change” in American policy, he was involved in a conspiracy. Is it a credible conjecture that Catholics who participated in the reinvestigation of Kennedy’s death, found substantial circumstantial evidence, enough to name “parties of interest” in the death of the first Catholic President of the United States, and rather than tarnish the American world image, traded justice− for political gain? The “Far Right” moniker was not around before 1980, as a political force. The first year it appeared on the national scene was 1980.
Correspondence with Mr. Fisher was respectful. We both realized we were conversing with an eye to debate rather than argument, and we both knew that we differed politically. In his first response, he would tell me that Catholic rapprochement with Masonry was begun even before JFK’s death, by Father John O’Brien from Notre Dame University. The Priest had been impressed, when after the vitriolic, anti-Catholic remarks made in the New Age during the campaign, a high level Mason published an offering of peace after Kennedy’s election. The Mason advised his fellow Masons to give the first Catholic president a chance. After the death of Kennedy, the overtures from the Catholics continued until the present time. There was, Fisher divulged, a meeting between the two secret societies in 1967, propelled by their mutual distaste of the liberal culture of the sixties.
Paul Fisher made it abundantly clear that he did not agree with the Church’s fraternizing with their former enemy, nor did he believe that they were sincere in giving the Catholic President a chance. He goes into detail in his book as to how the Masons implement the “Cabalist” aspect of allegory, using or saying one thing as a substitute — or meaning — for another, “Aesopian language,” Fisher called it. “The Knights of Columbus have been co-opted,” he lamented.
Behind the Lodge Door, offered first for publishing to the Knights of Columbus, was rejected by the organization. The editor of the Knights’ newsletter said he could never publish it because they were working closely with the Masons. “The Knights and Bishops have been had,” Fisher exclaimed! They had managed to have Canon law with regard to Masonry changed during Vatican II, and he finalized “Today, many, many Catholics are Masons, and our Church is definitely in trouble since that time.”
He ended his e-mail telling me about Harry Truman, who was an ardent Mason and member of the Ku Klux Klan. Fisher had read in a New York Masonic Journal that Truman had made the statement that he was more proud of having been a Masonic Grand Master, than of being President of the United States. “He may have had some influence on the “hit” on Kennedy,” Fisher wrote. He summed up: “President Johnson was a Mason, as were key members of the Commission to investigate . . . .”
By the time I read this e-mail from Paul Fisher, I had learned enough about Masonry to know what Truman’s position within the hierarchical, world Masonic body would mean, if, as Fisher theorized, the Masons where involved in Kennedy’s death and the Warren Commission was investigating itself. Ultimate final decision and permission to assassinate JFK would then have had to come from Harry Truman.
The reference material from the Kennedy Library on the Orono speech had included notes back and forth between Kennedy and his speechwriter. For the Orono speech, Kennedy had asked him to incorporate two analogies. The first had been the poem about the King’s 1715 actions at Cambridge and Oxford, and the other had been an analogy between Harry Truman’s design for a new presidential seal and JFK’s new overtures to Soviet Russia. Truman had asked for a change in the position of the eagle’s eyes on the country’s seal for the initiation of a President of the United States emblem. The eagle looks away from the symbols of war to the symbols of peace. Given Mr. Fisher’s comments on Harry Truman and Masonry, the irony of this did not escape me.
I already knew Lyndon Baines Johnson was a Mason. He had obtained the first degree and stopped. He was a protégé of Truman’s; this outward appearance of not climbing the Masonic ladder was probably attributable to the fact Johnson wanted to enter politics and did not want to alienate Catholic voters. It was certainly not predicated on his inability to gain his superiors permission to elevate himself within the Texas Masonic Lodge.
E-mail correspondence with Paul Fisher was in good part about his notes on the New Age, but we also discussed a lot about anti-Catholicism, and I would also use the author as a sounding board on the other research I was doing. Growing up Irish Catholic, he had seen his fair share of prejudicial behavior, and he knew a good deal of its historical effects on other Catholics. He brought up the long ruling PRI party in Mexico; it was a Masonic party, and it had rigorously suppressed the Catholic Church. American Catholics had appealed to Franklin Roosevelt to stop it ─ to no avail.
After discussing the discovery of the Irish Bishop to French Bishop correspondence in the Baldwin McDowell file, Paul Fisher explained the fear dated back to our inception as a country. At the time of our Declaration of Independence, there was a “Grievance” section put in the document, and one of the grievances was over the fact a French Catholic Bishop from Montreal controlled a diocese that included a good part of America’s northeast colonies.
Here in the United States, I had learned from research, the focus of Protestant prejudice was based not on differences with Catholic dogma as much as on Catholics’ hierarchal leadership, and therefore it was more political than it was theological. It was all about “the foreign Roman Pope.” American Catholics could not be trusted to love their country more they loved the Pope. Protestants feared the Pope would bend them to his will. If only they would get rid of the “foreign” Pope, they could be forgiven and join the American, Christian fold. There is some evidence that thirty years of talks between Protestant and Catholic secret societies have begun to accomplish this. The back-story to the new mega Catholic Church and community Ava Maria, in Naples, Florida, is its elimination of Papal authority; it is not part of an Archdiocese.
Freedom of choice for education with government funding was another debate we had. Paul Fisher was very convincing with his arguments. When he had gotten out of the service, the government gave him money for education and told him to spend it anywhere he wanted, including a Catholic university. Why could parents not have such a gift for public school education? Choice was a constitution right, he claimed.
It was not that I disagreed with his logic; it was just that his logic had consequences. Public schools rely on the number of children enrolled for their funding. It has been almost thirty years, since the time Fisher left the assassination reinvestigation to help develop voucher legislation. Public schools suffer under the No Child Left Behind Act, by losing large amounts of funding, as private charter schools and parochial schools gain strength from public voucher funding. When we have no more children in public schools and the government pays for everyone’s private school, what will be next? Fisher had said that anti-Catholicism had waned during wartime, with Catholic and Protestant boys fighting side by side. The American public school was the melting pot that became America; its demise would surely tend to ferment cultural strife. On this point, I had to agree with the Masonry mantra: The American public schools were the bedrock of our freedom.
I did a lot of research on anti Catholicism in our foreign policy; it was rife. If not the driving force of our foreign policy, it was a constant, covert force. During the time of my communication with Fisher on the subject, I had a Latin American customer who was a diplomat. He made the point in conversation that the U. S had not invested anything of merit in Latin America; all the investment now went to China and India, as before it had gone to Japan and Germany. America only invested enough to benefit from South American resources, he complained. Latin America is overwhelmingly Catholic. A Masonic fear of Catholics greater than any fear of communists is a valid explanation for not elevating our southern hemisphere’s economic power. The fact Latin America is now careening to the left as a result is a predictable outcome.
Suffice it to say, I was very impressed with this Catholic Lone Ranger. I communicated with Paul Fisher for a good deal of time; he was a flawless and reasoned debater, always strong, and never angry. This great respect eventually led to my great disappointment in Paul Fisher.
In our e-mail correspondence, I had asked him if he would consider collaborating on a book about Kennedy’s Quoddy Dam. I expected him to say no, but I did not expect the answer I got. He said that he could not, because he was very busy completing a book he had been working on for twenty years — a book on anti-Semitism. I thought that admirable, until many months later when he e-mailed what the “thrust” of his book was. The “thrust” of his book was an effort to prove that Jews had used anti-Semitism to de-Christianize the West! I could not believe what I was reading! It was truly the most absurd accusation against the Jews I had ever heard, to suggest that a small population of worldwide Jewry could subvert millions of Christians out of their own religious culture.
One of Fisher’s issues in our debates had been that the separation of church and state had gone too far, and he named several organizations’ support of the concept as a very strict definition for the reason this had happened. The groups included the Jewish Anti- Defamation League. The framers of the Constitution’s separation of church and state intent had been transgressed, he had argued; therefore, without asking, I knew his book intended to blame Jews for support of a strict interpretation of the policy as a protection against anti Semitism.
To have this opinion of the evolution of our Constitution’s separation of church and state doctrine was not anti-Semitic; to spend twenty years to write an entire book about only the Jewish role in the church versus state debate was undeniably so. I wrote back he should reconsider the very logic of his premise and instead write a book about the age-old angst between Catholics and Jews. He wrote back that he would consider my thoughts, and our correspondence came to an abrupt end.
I became saddened by the state of the Judeo Christian ethic, during the time I worked on the Quoddy research. It is badly in need of reconciliation with its common denominators. My e-mails to Fisher ended about a month before September 11, 2001. As radical Islam’s fury against the ethic's both Christian and Jewish components smashed into our consciences, I decided if I ever could do a film, I would try and included efforts at rapprochement. We need an attractive team of faith to combat a brutal “faith based” enemy.
PART THREE: WATER
One of the first things I found in the Library of Congress on John Kennedy’s effort to build Quoddy was his Dream of Passamaquoddy speech, given at a 1959 Democratic issues conference in Augusta, Maine. In this visionary speech, he foretold the energy crises we would face, and he prescribed its solution ─ water ─ the rushing water of the Bay of Fundy tides. Kennedy stated in his speech that he had begun working on his dream of building the dam in 1952, when he was elected to the Senate; however, in 1952, there was a legal roadblock in place in Maine that had existed since 1908. There could be no financial feasibility for Kennedy’s Quoddy Dam until it was eliminated.
We do not need fossil fuel for power production; we never did. The battle between the emerging technologies of hydroelectric and fossil fuel for power production began in 1902, in the state of Maine and New York. Fossil fuel won. A group of American and Canadian businessmen formed the Maine New Brunswick Power Company to exploit the vast resources of the area’s tides on both sides of the border, and George Westinghouse began plans to use the rushing waters of Niagara Falls to power New York State.
Westinghouse employed two hydroelectric engineers, Dexter Cooper, who would dedicate his life to trying to tap the energy of Maine tides─ and Nicola Tesla, a man who is as well known for his work in electricity as Einstein is for physics. In addition to his better-known inventions — the radio and alternating current — Nicola Tesla invented the bladeless turbine. He managed to put turbines into use in Niagara’s waters in a three-phase system, and for a time lit up Buffalo and all of Manhattan. Tesla claimed that the waters of Niagara could power all of Northeast America. His turbine, ironically, is now used to pump oil.
In the State of Maine, the fossil fuel industry would be instrumental in winning the support of the Governor of Maine, Bert Fernald, who would pass his namesake Fernald Bill in 1908, prohibiting the sale of hydroelectric beyond the borders of Maine. Electricity produced from fossil fuel was exempt from this law. The law is an indication of the terrible threat hydroelectric posed to the early promulgation of the fossil fuel culture. The company formed to begin tapping the water resources of Maine and New Brunswick disbanded after the bill passed.
Nicola Tesla would continue his propensity to invent technology that was incompatible with the prevailing bias to fossil fuel. In 1933, he converted a Pierce-Arrow’s gas engine to an electric one, which never needed charging and did it very, very inexpensively. How he did this, supposedly, was lost with his death; however, I venture to guess that he powered his car with water, a power source using running water over turbines, a miniature version of his Niagara effort, and I also venture to guess that his engineering for the car still exists. When Tesla died in 1943, Roosevelt had the FBI rush in and confiscate all his papers. A group of engineers has just released a car called “The Tesla Car,” which is electric and runs for a long time without recharging, but still does need recharging, and therefore, is not “The Tesla Car.”
Dexter Copper remained single minded in his life-long push to build the dam in the Passamaquoddy and Cobscook Bays, at the border of Maine and Canada. In 1912, he honeymooned on Campobello Island, the summer home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his parents. He moved to Campobello and became a close friend of the American politician. The Dexter Cooper house still stands, and his grandson is a summer resident.
It took a long time, until the year 1929, for Dexter Cooper to win support of his plan for the dam, and a vote for repeal of the Fernald Bill went on a ballot. The fossil fuel industry bought a newspaper to fight the bill. They invested a good deal of money campaigning against it, with an unsubstantiated argument that hydropower would slow the process of electrification for rural Maine. Of course, it would be the reverse, but the power of the headline worked. The effort to repeal the Fernald Bill was overwhelmingly defeated.
In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced he would build the dam. Unlike the Dexter Cooper two pool plan that would have made the electricity continuous, he choose a one pool plan, which from the onset made it non competitive with fossil fuel. Roosevelt built dormitories for workers and installed cement pilings. He never tried to repeal the Fernald Bill. The effort shut down before it even got off the ground. His engineer for the project states in a historical interview that Roosevelt had used the small effort only to pay back political debts and put people to work, as he had in other WPA programs. Testing a new cement technique was another goal. The pilings installed as the sole construction effort on the dam, still exist, and they are to this day checked every year by the Army Corp of Engineers.
The year 1933 was also the year the frustrated Dexter Cooper suggested to Roosevelt that he place turbines in the Gulf Stream to utilize its constant currents to produce electricity. When Harry Truman campaigned in Maine in 1947, he too made a campaign promise to build the dam, a promise that he did not even try to fulfill. The year 1947 also was the year John Kennedy won a seat in the House of Representatives. One of the few things I was able to find out about the Quoddy Dam and Kennedy’s efforts, prior to his presidency, was that it was during the 1947 campaigns that the dam would be brought to his attention, by a pilot from Maine, named Grey.
In his own words, Senator John Kennedy began working on the dam in 1952. He would work with President Dwight Eisenhower, the President who turned over the White House to Kennedy, and who will be remembered for his dislike of Allen Dulles and his departing words, “Beware the Military Industrial Establishment.”
The “dangerous” Catholic Governor of the State of Maine, referred to in the Evangelical minister’s pamphlet Should a Catholic Become President, was Edmund Muskie, elected in 1954. Muskie would─ one year later, in 1955 ─ preside over the repeal of the Fernald Bill, allowing the sale of hydroelectric outside the borders of Maine, thus clearing the way for JFK’s dream of tapping the tides and providing a clean and free source of energy for his country. In 1956, the dam would clear its first hurdle, when a study recommending it was released to Eisenhower and the Canadian government. And in 1956, John Kennedy demonstrated how far Catholic political power had come by almost winning the Vice Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
PART FOUR: RESEARCH
The National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Kennedy Library were first on the list, when I began to look for the story of the dam. It was not easy to find anything on the dam in government files. I have an article written by a man on Roosevelt’s efforts, who also says everything is very difficult to find. From the Library of Congress, I would find the Dream speech, which said that John Kennedy began working on the dam in 1952. From this same source came a very large study on the dam, released in May of 1961, which gave a broad hint as to the controversy surrounding it. The electricity produced from the dam would be given to local governments and REA cooperatives, not to the private sector. This distribution of power, bypassing private enterprise, was to be duplicated by five. The report located four more spots on the Maine coast where the government could build hydroelectric dams. The report did not make it clear just how many people the dam could serve; I was not yet kilowatt hour savvy.
Online references for the Library of Congress where limited. I did locate a woman at the facility, who found all the bills introduced by Maine Senators and Ted Kennedy to fund the dam, after Kennedy’s death. Senator Ted Kennedy was his brother’s point man for the dam.
Opposition to the dam was found in an entry to the Congressional Record by a Congressman from Illinois by the name of Moseley, who would rail against the dam as being “communistic.” A search for biographical information on the man produced his Masonic affiliation; he was a Royal Arch Mason.
There were a few other entries in the Congressional Record of speeches and comments on the dam. The Kennedy Library had even less information. An initial search of the site in the year 2000, produced only two entries under the dam, then there were three; today there are thirteen. It would take my finding information elsewhere, before I would be able to give archivists enough information to find the Orono speech, the recording of JFK’s July 16, 1963 speech in the Rose Garden, announcing the green light for the dam, and the pictures on my website, including the AP photo that introduces this story. This document is a distillation of research done over the past six years, the bulk of which transpired between the years 2000 and 2003. Since that time, I had mostly only used the Internet to follow the progress of both tidal power and public tidal power awareness, until in attempt to round out this essay, I began research on Lee Harvey Oswald.
The records of the Interior Department were not in the Kennedy Library. Stuart Udall’s repository at the University of Arizona noted that the records were once there and restricted, and then, at some point, removed from the University’s library. I had wanted to see if removal occurred during the reinvestigation period of the late seventies, but I never got around to it. In 2003, I bought out my real estate partner and got very busy building a business. A recent check at the Library found that they were deposited in the library in 1978, and they had a restriction on their access from the start.
I was sure the records of the Department of the Interior (DOI) would give the in-depth story. Troubled by the fact they were not online or in the Kennedy Library, I hired a researcher from the History Museum in Washington D.C., Laura Kreiss, having read a story about her in the Smithsonian Magazine. She curated an exhibition on U.S. Presidents and knew her way around the National Archives. She called not long after I had retained her and left a message to call her. She expressed she was surprised to learn that, inexplicably, despite the fact that it was the law that all records be turned over to the National Archives after the end of each administration, the records of the Department of the Interior from the Kennedy Administration had never been turned over. There were no records available to her for research. She thought it all very “weird.” It was only the Department of the Interior that was missing, she said; all other departments were there. Ihave not rechecked to see if they now have them, but I did call her again recently; she claimed not to remember the incident and said she was to busy to help me.
Getting back to Paul Fisher, I alerted him to the missing DOI records. He advised that there was a government record repository in St Louis, Missouri where one might find them ─ Harry Truman’s Missouri. This was the only glimmer of a hint from Mr. Fisher to suggest, despite his saying he did not know about the dam, until I brought it to his attention, that he did know about it.
It was at this time I realized my status as a non-professional journalist meant I was at a great disadvantage. I would have to get a credible media source to pick up the story, once research, done to the best of my individual ability, was finished.
Maine newspaper archives were next on the list. The Eastport paper was the first source chosen. It would have been a huge story there. The paper shut down in July, the month that Kennedy won the Democratic nomination for President; it would not resume printing until 1968, and then under a new name and ownership.
I hired a researcher, Pat Finn, at the University of Southern Maine’s History Department in Portland to search the archives of big city Maine newspapers; she became as interested as I was in the story. The only true chronicle of the dam she could find was in the Portland Press Herald. The publisher, Gannet, was a big supporter of the dam. The articles she found began right after the assassination. She could find nothing from before the assassination in any newspaper, and the papers that predated the assassination from the Portland Press Herald were missing. A check with the paper’s librarian had found the publisher of this paper did not send papers from the era for microfilming; the librarian first found that the papers were missing, when I asked for them; she was very upset about her missing archives. (NOTE: I sent this story to Marsha Mac Vane at the Portland Press Herald for verification, she has told me that they have since found their original clipping file for the Quoddy Dam; however, they always had the microfilm of full papers from those years; she has suggested that perhaps the University of Southern Maine’s microfiche of those years were missing. Below is my query to Pat Finn and her response.
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Hi Andrea,
I went to the website and what a great story! I did find information
from 1938-1963. I thought I sent it to you. I went to the Maine State
Archives because the Portland Press Herald told me they did not have
those files any longer--that they were sent to Maine Historical. When I
contacted them, they said, “they didn't receive them." That's when I
went up north. I got info from PPH and Bangor Daily and a few other
newspapers. I have the files at home somewhere. I have moved several
times since I last spoke with you. I will find them. In fact I went to
Eastport and to the Orono campus library and found material that I
thought I sent on to you. Anyway let me check when I get home and I
will be back in touch.
I love where you are going with the article.
Pat
>>> <Andthorne@aol.com> 1/14/2007 11:13 PM >>>
Pat. Please visit the web site in the subject line. You did some
research for me sometime back on John Kennedy's efforts to build the Quoddy Dam.
This site is an interim effort, which I just put on the web, because of
global warming. I sent it to Marsha MacVane at the Portland Press Herald for
verification and she told me that while the clipping file for the Dam was missing at
the time, the microfiche for the pre assassination years 1959-1963 were
always there. She has suggested the reason you could not find information from the
years 1959-1963 was because the USC microfiche were missing. Can you clarify
for me that was the reason I only received stories from you that began in
December of 1963? I hope you have been well since we last corresponded, and I hope
you enjoy reading the story.
There were eighty-seven stories published in the Portland Press Herald that told the two-year story of Johnson’s quashing of the dam and the valiant efforts of Secretary Udall, Senators Ted Kennedy, Muskie, Chase, and others to save it. Scattered over a little more than two years, these stories could not have had the effect they did when read collectively─ one after the other. They clearly demonstrate the Johnson administration’s policy and distaste for the dam, giving initial support for Quoddy immediately after the assassination, and then quickly following this support with roadblocks and eventually slamming the door on the dam, after Johnson’s election in 1964.
The enemies of the dam were what I had hoped to find in newspaper stories, but there was not much of a debate after Kennedy’s death. There was one quote from a power official that said he had been against the dam before, but now was for it. Of course, he was safely watching it come to a screeching halt. Revealed during this period was the fact the dam had the capability of producing even more electricity than first presented —and that it could serve more than the New England area.
The then publisher of the Portland Press Herald, Gannet also owned a television station in Portland. He produced a documentary called Quoddy, shown in Canada as well as Maine and Washington. I could never find it.
One of the post assassination stories mentions K. C. Irving, the Canadian oil baron, and his friend, Lord Beaverbrook, a British media owner and close associate of John Paul Getty. Beaverbrook owned pulp and paper companies in the area of the dam. Neither man had made a public comment on the dam, either for or against, the article said.
Another Portland Press Herald story was a reprint from the New York Times by Tom Wicker about the post-assassination dam efforts. Yet another story was about the Johnson administration wanting to do more fishing studies, the same ones that Kennedy had already completed.
After a hiatus in 2001, I returned to the project in 2002, and again contacted the Maine university researcher to ask her to look in small town newspapers. She e-mailed that she had found “deadly stuff” in the Kennebec Journal, and had found relevant material in her Catholic church’s archive; however, she never sent them, and did not answer repeated e-mails inquiring about them. She did send a thesis by a man who managed to trace adequately the “Life Interrupted” of tidal power, but it did not say anything new and did not cover any political issues.
My first class at the University of Miami was a course on researching techniques, including searching the Internet. September 11th interrupted my one trip to the Kennedy Library, and my business was growing. Almost all my research originated on the Internet. Searching the Internet became a nightly routine. The source initially thought to be insufficient, in the end, produced the whole story.
By the time the fall semester and scriptwriting efforts were over, (I will tell you more about the movie later.) I had determined that John Kennedy’s efforts to build the tidal dam at Passamaquoddy ran concurrent with similar efforts by Russia, under Nikita Khrushchev ─ and France, under the administration of Charles De Gaulle. I hired a University of Miami student, who was my tenant, to search under the key words Khrushchev and Udall, and to see if there was anything missed, including a retraction on the 1717-date error. His efforts produced the same October 20 story and speech, and a story about Stewart Udall’s trip to Russia to see hydroelectric facilities, including dams, but nothing in this story said anything about tidal dams.
The University of Miami student also found another very interesting story. Khrushchev was in the process of centralizing the electric distribution grid in Russia; it had just been decentralized prior to his rise to power. This small story would ultimately give rise to what I called my Binga, Banga, Bunga theory: The attempted assassination of De Gaulle, by a member of a secret society called OAS; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and the attempt assassination of Khrushchev ─ and his subsequent overthrow─ were all connected to the three leaders’ oversight of the world’s first tidal dams.
There was a story on the Internet about France’s La Rance Tidal Dam. The French had the honor of completing the first tidal dam in the world in 1967; planning had run simultaneous with Kennedy’s effort. The dam took only four years to complete. Russia’s dam followed on La Rance’s heels and took about the same time to build. The La Rance dam was capable of an output of 240 megawatts, which, the site said, served 90% of Brittany’s three million people. The same site this year says it serves only 600 thousand people; it is not a conspiracy. Both statements are true. The dam has been restrained, and more about that later. The French dam, now forty years old, with minor recent retrofitting, could be expected to run for another forty years or more. It was paid for, required little interim maintenance, and produced electricity from a clean and free source.
France has an overall average kilowatt-hour usage, a little over half the per capita average of the United States, but that was because we have so many tropical and dessert areas. The Northeast has about the same climate as France, with no Riviera. Therefore, a direct apple-to-apple comparison could be conservatively made, except I still did not understand exactly what Quoddy could do based on the May 1961 study, or its increased capacity, revealed after the death of John Kennedy.
I used my student access to Lexus Nexus to research tidal power and found that while it was nowhere on the radar in the three countries that had attempted it, the United States, France and Russia, it had been a debate in other parts of Europe and Asia since1980. There was a particularly lively debate that had gone on in Britain for twenty years, in a stop and go fashion, and many spots in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and China were talked about in news articles.
Britain had quite a good deal of tidal capacity and explored wave power as well. One story was particularly interesting: A scientist’s report on wave power had been sidelined because it was deemed not financial feasible, only to be resurrected by another scientist who reviewed the report years later and found a decimal point error had been made. In actuality, the wave power concept was quite feasible financially. Britain may be the country that has had the most debate, but action has not been forthcoming. Payback for English inaction is now apparent. Lou Dobbs of CNN pointed out that Britain’s reaction to the radiation poisoning of a former Russian spy was tempered by the fact that Britain relied on Russia for fossil fuel energy.
The story about the Philippines on Lexus Nexus mentioned a Canadian company called Blue Energy who had made a proposal to the country for development of its tidal power. The Philippines had so much capacity they could be an exporter of electricity.
My “telltale-beating-heart” theory about the dam was fortified by this discovery of the many, many stories about not only tidal power, but also wave power and the ocean’s thermal resources. Their capacity for power generation was limitless. The American mainstream media, in light of the global warming issue, should have picked up these stories — and the debate — in a big way. They did not and still have not From the time of Johnson’s quashing of the dam, which outside of Maine was mention in only a cursory manner, until the year 2001, I could find no print medium, which had mentioned the technology.
Blue Energy’s site on the web was easy to find. Located in British Columbia, the company bragged about a patent for a new style of turbine. I began a correspondence with one of their executives, Michael Maser, and faxed him John F. Kennedy’s Dream of Passamaquoddy speech and the stories of the quashing of the dam from the Portland Press Herald. He put excerpts of both Kennedy’s 1959 and 1963 speeches on his site, with a link to mine.
I was thrilled, and told Paul Fisher about the company and the link. Fisher replied that all alternative fuel companies and most environmental groups are fronts for fossil fuel companies. I was still thrilled; perhaps Fisher was right, but at least I had found one that was moving in the right direction, albeit slowly, very slowly. If you visit their site, you will see, six years later, they have little more than puffed-upped press releases about studies and trials. I asked Michael Maser to confirm my math: Given a worldwide green light for waterpower, we could dispense with fossil fuel and nuclear power in ten years. His non-answer was “. . . there is not a simple answer to your question, because the political will to expedite . . . and deploy the technology has not been activated.”
An interesting statement; he did not say it (political will), was not there, but rather “not yet activated.” This, of course, had to be the reason that his company was spinning its turbines; it was waiting to be unleashed by a higher power. Maser would later send me an article written by a woman in 2001, who wrote on tidal power, and this time mentioned both the Roosevelt and Kennedy efforts. He also told me that CNN had done a short blurb on the fact Blue Energy was building a trial tidal facility in San Francisco Bay.
Paul Fisher’s comments on fossil fuel fronts diverted my efforts to researching his supposition. The first environmental group looked at was Greenpeace. Its founders included former members of Her Majesty’s Navy, and the first thing that Greenpeace did when it was formed was to harass the French’s efforts to become a nuclear power. This finding was sufficient evidence to become a believer in Fisher’s evaluation of alternative fuel companies and environmental groups.
Now, I had established possible “parties of interest” fossil fuel energy companies; the new energy entry that was competing in Maine directly with the dam, nuclear power; plus all power related investors and ancillary businesses, like transport. However, I had yet to determine the weight of the motive. I had also begun to wonder about Ted Kennedy’s silence on the matter of his brother’s efforts on the dam, especially in light of pressing global warming issues. Why was he not standing up in the Senate and telling everyone about his brother's Dream of Passamaquoddy?
An evaluation of the dam’s delivery format as “communistic” was not the Catholic governance issue needed for the theory I was pursuing. Research revealed Stewart Udall was anti nuclear power, but the missing archives from his department left big holes in my motivation theory.
One evening, web searching brought up a reference to a company called Hydro- Quebec; it mentioned the fact Hydro-Quebec had become government owned about the same time that Kennedy was working on Quoddy. I had lived in Canada for a time as a child and had become opinionated about the French Canadian angst over their culture. I could not see why they had to break away from Canada because they were of a different culture. The very concept of someone putting their culture over their country was something difficult to fathom. When I moved back to the United States, I always followed news stories about Quebec secession. The reference to the French Canadian power company included the fact it was fresh water production of electricity; it had nothing to do with the subject of tidal power, but the timing of its government-owned formation, which ran concurrent with Kennedy’s government controlled effort, along with my long time interest in Quebec, and the Baldwin McDowell file issue of Irish and French Catholic collaboration, made the lead one to follow.
PART FIVE: VOILA!
When I first discovered Hydro-Quebec and learned of the speedy (very speedy) nationalization of the Province’s electric industry by the Quebec government, I was amazed. Growing up in the fifties, I was indoctrinated by the American media on the specter of the dreaded communists’ squashing of free enterprise and the socialistic nationalization of corporate interests. While I left Canada as a teenager the summer of 1960, this should have been a big enough story to be all over the news in America, just like Castro’s simultaneous nationalization of Cuban free enterprise was, and yet I had never heard about it. It was a ‘Paul- Fisher- dramatic- reversal’ of the media’s penchant for headlining “red scares.”
Added to a growing list of existing key words, which already included the keyword Charles De Gaulle, were the two words Hydro-Quebec and secession. A reference to a book called The Gaullist Attack on Canada appeared and I set out to obtain the book. Other links that came up led to a discovery that secessionists were virulently anti-Semitic and virulently anti-“Orange Men.” The term Orange Men was how the Masons were known in Quebec, named after William of Orange, the man who would become King George I and send those troops to Oxford ─ and books to Cambridge.
When I received the book The Gaullist Attack on Canada, written by J.F. Bosher, a French Canadian, who was an anti-secessionist, it was initially disappointing to see that its focus was from 1967 on, and not the period of interest from 1959 to 1963. Nevertheless, I opened the book and saw that there was a short chapter on the pre-1967 efforts of De Gaulle to encourage separatism and destabilize Canada. At the end of this short chapter, Bosher gave a brief mention to Hydro-Quebec. By the time I finished the short section, I had the Catholic governance issue I was looking for.
Hydro-Quebec, Bosher explained, originated in 1944. Maurice Duplessis was a conservative, pro business French Canadian who ruled Quebec as its Premier from 1936 to 1939, and again from 1945 to his death in 1959. A liberal defeated him in 1940. This liberal would take government control of a small power company in 1944 called Hydro-Quebec. There was a noisy outcry and the liberal Premier was defeat by Maurice Duplessis in 1945. Duplessis would refuse to continue the plan of the defeated Premier to nationalize the other eleven private power companies in Quebec. During his long tenure as Quebec’s Premier, this policy remained unchanged.
The liberal, Jean Lesage, won the Quebec Premiership on June 22, 1960 and chose Rene Lévesque, a former journalist, as his Resource Minister. , supported by what Bosher called “neo-nationalists” at the newspaper Le Devoir, moved immediately to try to nationalize the power industry. Bosher say that this push to nationalize power was helped by the encyclical Mater et Magistra (Mother and Country), issued by Pope John XXIII in 1961. The paper used its appeal for social justice as a rallying cry. The Pope managed, in his short reign of five years, 1958-1963, to write this document, recommending state intervention for the common good. By 1962 the small company created in 1944, Hydro-Quebec, would take control of all the Province’s remaining eleven power companies.
The Catholic governance issue addressed in the Evangelical Should a Catholic Become President was now an issue Calling John Kennedy's Quoddy Dam “communistic," must be an example of Paul Fisher’s “Aesopian language,” saying one thing and meaning another, and I immediately reported this find to Paul Fisher. He again pooh-poohed my find. “Oh, I am sure John Kennedy . . . was not paying any attention to Papal encyclicals.” he said. Fisher would eventually relent on his analysis. I will tell you more about this later.
Communication with the author of The Gaullist Attack on Canada, Mr. Bosher, was established, and he recommended reading another book written by the pro succession, French Canadian journalist, Jean-Francois Lisee, called In the Eye of the Eagle.
Sensing that this part of the story was going to be very complex and convoluted, I diverted my attention during this period to include researching English Canada’s position on these issues, and to try to find out about Canada’s involvement in the dam. I had learned from J. F. Bosher’s book that Canada did not have a law like America’s Freedom of Information Act. They had restricted access to archival information, and they were suspicious of all researchers, Bosher said. After 1989, you had the right to ask for information; the Canadian government had the right to deny it to you based on very liberal criteria. The Canadian National Archive site was online, and I contacted them to find a researcher. The procedure was to pick an “authorized, outside” researcher from a list that the archivist provided. The archivists were not allowed to search their own files.
I picked a man named Douglas Campbell, the most English sounding name found on the list. Understanding the rules made me certain that I would probably only get a smattering of information. I contacted Mr. Campbell in February of 2001. I told him what I was looking for, and exactly why I was looking for it. I knew that if I were on track, I would never fool anyone that had access to the information I sought. Mr. Campbell agreed to do his best and get back to me. I turned my attention back to the books of the French Canadians.
J. F. Bosher is a scholar and professor; his book is about the efforts of Charles de Gaulle to splinter Canada in two with the recreation of “New France” in Quebec. Jean François Lisee, the journalist, focused his book, In the Eye of the Eagle, on the views of American Presidents and their administrations on the possible creation of a new North American country. Both men feature the French Canadian public figure, Rene ; he is the Lévesque star of the Lisee book.
Rene , viewed Lévesque as “the heart” of the secessionist movement, came to fame in Canada as a broadcast journalist and charismatic talk show host. He had strong ties to the American military, having joined and served as an Army intelligence officer in World War II. came to Lévesque power in public life as the Resource Minister of the Lesage administration, elected in Quebec in June of 1960, just before the election of John Kennedy to the United States presidency. Ultimately, Rene Lévesque would reach Quebec’s Premiership in 1976.
Quebec, in 1960, was a ram's horn of intricate and convoluted alliances that had evolved, according to Bosher, from the domination of the province’s politics by English-speaking businessmen, who ruled the economic life of the Province of Quebec, and by the dominance of Catholic clergy, who presided over every other side of provincial life. Quebec’s governance would become even more convoluted under the Lesage administration.
Bosher’s book goes into exhausting detail to set the scene for what would become know as the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec. About the same time John F. Kennedy gave his Dream of Passamaquoddy speech in Augusta, Maine, Charles De Gaulle cemented his economic plan for his Fifth Republic, and Rene Lévesque shaped Jean Lesage’s platform to promise a more France-like interventionist government. As soon as Lesage was elected, his administration moved to secularize provincial society with the creation of a new Education Department that would wrest control of the Province’s educators from the Catholic clergy ─ and he moved to nationalize the Province’s power companies, molding them after France’s EDF (Electricité de France).
The Lesage government came up with a name to justify their attack on the Catholic Church’s influence in Quebec. They called themselves the “New Catholics.” Bosher said that up until this time in its history Quebecers did not have a strong affinity for France. They had escaped the Masonic influenced Deist period that France went through, with all of its emphasis on the secularization of society. The French in Canada were staunchly Roman Catholic and thought as little of the “Godless French,” as the French thought of the Québécois accent, which was another source of contention between the two cultures. All this would change in 1960. Immediately after the Lesage government came to power, Bosher explained, legal and illegal French intervention began aiding and abetting a Quebec government bent on secession from Canada, and the former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Rene Lévesque, began the process of secularization of Quebec society.
The theme behind Bosher’s book is that the English-speaking power structures in business and government did nothing to stop the meddling of De Gaulle. Nor did they criticize Rene Lévesque’s interventions of the 1960 Lesage government, or his actions when he became Premier in 1976. Bosher could not understand why they did not. No where in Bosher’s well informed book, giving exception detail of the times, does he mention what was on the drawing board as Hydro-Quebec’s competitor ─ the Passamaquoddy Dam. Bosher’s revelation of the close association Lévesque had with American’s military intelligence puts consideration on the table for the possible presence of a higher purpose, some trade-off, for the American and Canadian media and government silence on what was truly an aberration of North American, free enterprise business and government policies.
Jean Lisee begins his book In the Eye of the Eagle with an introduction to Rene , Lévesque explaining Lévesque’s “pitch” to America on the case for secession. Lévesque thought the Americans should liken his cause to the Boston Tea Party. American administrations likened his cause to the South’s secession, except for one, he said. “And he was of gargantuan proportions,” Lisee dramatized.
Lisee’s chapter on John Kennedy begins with his run for the U.S. Senate, and it documents Kennedy’s efforts to woo away the predominately Republican, French Catholic vote from Henry Cabot Lodge. The Kennedy tactic was to win over a popular French Catholic American priest, Armand Morissette. I would initially only read three chapters of Lisee’s book because, while I first thought substantiation for Masonic fear of French and Irish Catholic collaboration for the Pope was present, I found the chapter fell straight down the credibility hill after the “gargantuan proportions” quote. Lisee never comes close to proving Kennedy supported secession. He cites Kennedy’s support of independence for Northern Ireland and his general opinions on colonialism, and not much more but gossip.
In other research, I had found that the Irish Catholics and the French Catholics did not even like each other. They spoke different languages, had different cultures and competed for standing with the Pope, and in America, especially New England, they competed with each other for economic benefit. When I had read the letter in the Baldwin McDowell File about the collaboration of the Irish and French bishops, one possibility was that it was an early example of a disinformation campaign. Now I thought Lisee had written an updated version of the same tactic; therefore, the task was to find what this possible disinformation was masking. Lisee’s first chapter mentions the nationalization of Quebec’s power, but does not even mention Hydro-Quebec by name. Nor does he mention the Quoddy Dam. I found that books on politics provide clues to follow based on what theyleave out of the book equally as much as they produce clues by what they put in.
Despite the fact J.F. Bosher’s book The Gaullist Attack on Canada predominantly addresses the year 1967 on, reading the entire book to find out more about De Gaulle, who had presided over the building of the La Rance tidal dam, was a necessity. The book has strong credibility, and it has the remains of many Starbucks’ drippings throughout its pages. Bosher and Lisee both discuss the FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front), a violent element in Quebec’s deck of secessionist cards, with communist leanings.
Bosher speculates the FLQ was a Gaullist based front, for after all, he pointed out, there was communist infiltration of France; France had a strong leftist element, and France was viciously aggressive. Bosher cited France’s terrorist actions against Greenpeace to substantiate this last observation.
Lisee, on the other hand thinks the FLQ was a CIA front, American intervention to make the secessionists look unstable and bad for everybody. To back up his claim, he cites the fact the FLQ actions looked a lot like our intervention tactics in Chile, and he points out the sporadic and benign nature of the FLQ actions, such as blowing up the statue of General Wolf, which sat on Quebec’s Plains of Abraham as a testament to the French loss of Quebec and English domination. Both conjectures sounded plausible, and given the convoluted ways of every country’s intelligence services, it just could have been that everyone was infiltrating everyone to make the FLQ into a smorgasbord organization.
There was a clue of omission in both books. There was one accidental maiming and one accidental death attributable to early FLQ members. Both authors left out any mention of the FLQ operative arrested for the accidental maiming, a young man, who with his death in 1971, would become the most famous and mysterious FLQ terrorist of them all, Francois Mario Bachand, and more about this terrorist later.
PART SIX: BLAME CANADA
On June 11, 2001, my last day of a visit to New York to see my daughter, I was packing to leave for the airport and listening to news of the American terrorist, Timothy McVeigh’s, execution, when I decided to check my voice mail and found a message from my chosen Canadian researcher, Douglas Campbell. I returned the call from Miami. Mr. Campbell began by apologizing for taking so long to do the research; he had had an accident and broken his hand. Expressing concern, I asked when it had happened. “Last week,” he replied. I skipped the obvious retort.
It has been a very, very long time since we spoke on two or three occasions, but I learned a good deal from Mr. Campbell about the history of the times being researched, and about Mr. Campbell himself. He was a talking fact book on Canadian history and its foreign relations with other countries. He had majored in computer science and then returned to school to get a degree in history. Irrespective of his computer literacy, Mr. Campbell claimed to be unable to communicate by e-mail because he had no computer. He said he was mailing the material he had found, but sometime later, when it had not arrived, I called him to check on its whereabouts; he apologized, saying he was off on a trip with some Air Force pals. I did finally receive the materials. The documents that arrived, though not large in number, advanced my knowledge and premise significantly.
Campbell sent photocopies of newspaper articles on the dam. The Canadian Foreign Service office collected them in American cities. They were copies of originals pasted on a memo format of the office sending them. It was clear they had been checking all American papers for articles on Canada and the dam. I was ecstatic to see some of them were the missing stories of May Craig, a famous female reporter. Her paper, the Portland Press Herald, stationed her in Washington. One of them was a report on the dam, which did discuss the enemies of the project and actually showed a picture of the Edison Electric anti dam leaflets that the company distributed to their customers.
What was important about this group of his materials was what was missing from the package, specifically the October 23, 1963 Christian Science Monitor and the October 20, 1963 New York Times stories and reprints of the President’s Orono speech, which in microfiche cited the wrong year, 1717. There were other stories from both these papers in the group of gathered newspaper articles sent by Campbell. I called Mr. Campbell back about the missing stories. I told him that as it seemed it was his Foreign Service office’s procedure to monitor, clip and send articles on the dam from these specific papers, the stories must also be in the archives. I asked him to look again, and asked for other research. He did send more information, but not the missing stories.
The possibility that the stories were never clipped is below nil; either they were clipped and lost, or eliminated, or they still exist in the Foreign Service archives and were not sent. Paul Fisher had said there were thousands of records missing from the archives of law enforcement from the Kennedy era. The Canadians do not have to destroy material to keep researchers from getting to it; therefore, my bet was that they have them still. In e-mail to the Boston Globe editor on this segment of "my story," I ended with the exclamation: “Oh Canada, please confess!” Given a desire of competing energy technologies to stop the dam, it could not be limited to the United States. Given a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy to stop the dam’s precedent, it had to be a conspiracy that was international in both scope and design.
The articles from the Canadian papers were useful also. One of them drew the analogy between Quoddy and La Rance output capabilities. I could then take the original La Rance output information and combined it with the Canadian news story to put the Passamaquoddy Dam's capacity in perspective. None of the American information succinctly disclosed the implications of Quoddy. Neither side of the battle seemed inclined to make the case for or against Quoddy, based on how much it would hurt private power companies. The Quoddy Dam, four times the size of La Rance in its installed capacity, was capable of serving twelve million people, which was all of 1963’s New England population, and it was the first of five possible dams on the U.S. side. Canadian waters had much more to offer. It was an alarming turn of events for private power, for fossil fuel, and for all the investors of competing energy companies and the people that worked for them.
A news story about a speech by Kenneth Holum, an Under Secretary of the Interior, was also there. Made to labor groups, it featured remarks on the soon to be dam. Campbell's copying of the document skewed the first paragraphs of the story, resulting in their magnification. Mr. Holum’s words “. . . we don’t say if Quoddy is built; we say when Quoddy is built,” made it clear ─ the Quoddy dam was a done deal, just before JFK’s death.
Much of the Canadian material consisted of internal memos between and for members of the Canadian committee overseeing the dam’s progress, plus members’ communications back and forth between Ottawa’s Foreign Service Office and other Canadian government bodies charged with overseeing studies and policies concerning the dam. One was an additional photographed copy of the above-mentioned Holum “when-not-if” speech, which the Canadian Embassy in Boston had sent to Ottawa, on October 22, 1963. The Ottawa Foreign Service Office notation on the side of the document showed that they had redistributed the memo to the dam’s Canadian committee, on November 26, 1963, four days after the death of our President.
Many of the memos disclose the Canadian viewpoint of America’s political issues with the dam as well as Canadian political issues. Some explained the history of efforts to build a tidal dam in the area, going back to the lobbying efforts of Roosevelt’s friend, Dexter Cooper.
Tidal dam engineering is “Rocket Science”; it has extremely complex engineering and construction. The best explanation of the dam came from Campbell’s Canadian compilation of material; it was a joint Canadian and U.S. study, originated during the Eisenhower administration, and should have been in our country’s archive. The 1956 study, presented to the joint U.S. and Canadian committee cited a 3 billion Kilowatt hour capacity, but in 1959, a report on the same dam took it down to 1.8 billion Kilowatt hours. The Kennedy Quoddy Dam, in its final configuration, was to have produced 1000 Megawatt hours, or over four times France’s La Rance Dam, but still 50% less than the 1959 study and 300% less than the 1956 study.
One theory I posed to myself, in order to solve the perplexing question of why the dam had a ever decreasing proposed installed capacity, was the possibility hydro proponents were scaling back their initial efforts to make it more palatable and less threatening to existing power sources, basically to trick them; however, I later learned that Armand Hammer, of Occidental Petroleum was a close friend of Roosevelt and knew Dexter Cooper; therefore, he had to know what the total capacity of the area was, and how it might effect his and other fossil fuel producers’ interests. The proponents of the dam could not have slid the potential of tidal power under the fossil fuel rug. Armand Hammer bought the Roosevelt summer home from the Roosevelt family in 1952, the year that Kennedy started to push for the dam; he would buy Occidental Petroleum in 1956.
The 1959 report was the best layman description of the construction and engineering of the dam. Kennedy was racing to be the first in space, and he was racing to make America first in tidal dam construction. The press followed the first with great ardor and, outside of New England, gave the dam less than a thousand words.
Conversations with Douglas Campbell were long, hours not minutes. I took no notes, as it was quite a chore to keep him talking. I tried to pull hen’s teeth, asking him repeatedly why it had been so easy for the Lesage government to nationalize the province’s free enterprise electric industry. He finally mumbled something like: “They (the power
companies), were not making any money anyway; Quebec was mostly a rural province; it was not an issue.”
According to Campbell, the Canadians were blasé about the dam. Their official position during Kennedy’s administration was that as long as it did not cost them anything, and as long as there were no outcries from the fishing industry, they would cooperate. They thought they would even get some free electricity from it. How much power the central government in Ottawa had to influence policies as compared to the autonomous power of the Province to push it through on its own is a question I did not ask of Campbell. I did learn from him that New Brunswick had just elected their first French Arcadian Premiere, Louis Robichaud — French and Catholic. There was a Catholic troika propelling the Quoddy Dam — Kennedy, Muskie and Robichaud — a troika that I would later document was implementing the social justice philosophy of a foreign, Roman Catholic Pope.
Campbell discussed Premier Robichaud’s role in New Brunswick’s history and suggested I read a book called Louie Robichaud and The Big K.C., referring to K.C. Irving, the Canadian oil baron, who made his home in New Brunswick. Apparently, they did frequent battle. I asked Douglas Campbell if Robichaud was still alive. In 2001 he was. While e-mailing the Globe editor, I tried to impress upon her the need to get men like Robichaud and Udall, and for that matter, Ted Kennedy, on the record before they died.
The Canadian memos after the assassination read like the script to the feature length South Park cartoon Blame Canada. The Johnson administration, the Canadians felt, was trying to place the blame on Canada for the quashing of the dam.
PART SEVEN: MR. SPEAKER
Concurrent with the Canadian research, during a nightly search on the Internet, the Carl Albert Library came up. Searching his file and the file of Cornelius Gallagher, whose archive was in the same repository, brought up quite a few references to Quoddy and with it an issue ─ the nationalization of power. Ten months of manipulating key words finally produced material that was an indication the Quoddy Dam was not just an isolated policy of Kennedy and his administration. Apparently, there was a true debate going on over the attributes, advantages, and disadvantages of private and public power. I sent for the complete file. It never arrived. The library claimed they mailed it. It still did not come. Calling yet again and paying for a second copy, produced a package about the size of two legal reams of paper. The materials arrived just before I left for Boston on September 10, 2001.
Returning from Boston after America's trauma, I cast the material aside and later moved it to a glass storage box by my desk. About three months later, a second package arrived from the Carl Albert Library, postmarked July of 2001. Obviously, it was the first package the library had claimed they had mailed; it contained the same material. Puzzled by its long delay, I still did not read the material and put it in the glass storage box, with the first set of materials. One night, months later, sitting at my desk writing checks, the red border that surrounded the material caught my eye. Finishing my sundry check writing chores, I removed the material and sat down to read it. When I had finished the material, my long pause from research on the Quoddy Dam was at an end.
The first item to catch my eye in the Albert material was a February 1963 copy of a Fortune magazine article. Perhaps I was wrong and there was a publication that mentioned the Quoddy Dam, a major one, belonging to Skull and Bones member and Time magazine owner Henry Luce. Titled There’s No Stopping REA ─ or Is There?, the article traced the history of the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Electrification Administration and its leaders.
The author explained the “new reality” of REA. It was “. . . troubling the agency’s congressional friends and alarming the U. S. electric-utility industry.” As America grew, REA became no longer rural and its Co-ops were becoming very large and “increasingly engaged in aggressive, government-subsidized competition, with the investor-owned electric-utility industry.” They were exempt from federal taxation and financed below cost, the article’s author explained. They got first call on cheap hydropower.
Please note the author admitted hydropower was cheap. Oil has always been a bad choice for energy conversion. If you put a barrel of oil into a refinery, run around the other side of the refinery, and put your barrel in front of the output spigot, your barrel will only be one third full, when the conversion completes. If you then take your barrel of gas and dump it in your car, two thirds of that gas goes up in the air in the combustion required to power your car; therefore, today, when you say sixty-three dollars a barrel, you really need to say one hundred and eighty-nine dollars a barrel, to effect the Colbert Report’s 'truthiness' about the real cost of oil. Coal is a much better use for energy conversion, but coal is the biggest offender when considered as a Global Warming contributor.
Getting back to our anti-REA author, Hubert Kay, he sums up the introduction to a very long, well-written article defining the issues with this statement: “Having clearly outrun the intentions of REA’scongressional founders, they constitute a growing threat both to American principles of private enterprise and to the gigantic private investment in the U.S. electric industry.” Please take note of his use of the word “gigantic.” Finally, here was the motivation theory’s weight, clearly defined. (At the time I read the article, the worldwide power industry was an 800 billion dollar a year industry and that dollar figure did not count the money made by their raw fuel providers. It grows exponentially every year.)
The author next turned his attention to the new Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s REA administrator was Norman Clapp, the brother of Gordon Clapp a former TVA administrator. Clapp, when answering his critics at a national rural electric cooperative association meeting said: "It is perfectly plain that this opposition springs from big business and its political allies. These are the culprits who are trying to hang the socialist smear on you.” Hubert Kay, the journalist telling this amazing story, then quoted Clyde Ellis, described as a former Congressman from Arkansas, turned lobbyist, and sometimes called, “the man who runs REA from the outside.” Ellis had made a statement at a conference of western states about private power companies, declaring: “Their objective is to take over the government. They are public enemy No 1─ more dangerous than communists, because communists are not a threat, but dictatorship is a threat.” The world’s much more dangerous Catholics and power company executives had now both diminished communists.
Hubert Kay was sounding a lot like the author of Behind the Lodge Door, Paul Fisher. He was crafting a conspiracy with his typewriter and, like Fisher, was doing a very good job of it. Kay then brings Kenneth Holum, President Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of the Interior for water and power, front and center in the argument as “the man in charge of the power produce by the gigantic public dams.” At this point, I thought surely the Passamaquoddy Dam would be coming up in the story shortly, but it did not. Not one word —repeat —there was not one word mentioned about the Quoddy Dam in this entire well-written, comprehensive word battle on private versus public power.
Passamaquoddy was to be the biggest source of power for the REA; Holum was running around saying; “We don’t say if Quoddy is built. We say when . . .” Therefore, as a journalist, he was clearly derelict in his duty by not mentioning it, or left it out on purpose. This Fortune journalist, Hubert Kay is not one that could be excused as not knowing about it. He even mentioned Washington-based Edison Electric