THE DREAM OF PASSAMAQUODDY
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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 year 1715 . . . .” 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 had more pride in 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. The 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 he 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 an 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. I have 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.