STELLA!

Title: A Streetcar Named Desire

Rating: 5 Stars

As I continue to work through the AFI list of best films, last week I watched A Streetcar Named Desire. I’d previously watched the film and seen the play performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (and yes, I know it was written by Tennessee Williams and not Shakespeare, but they do branch out). It’d been many years since I’d done either so it was interesting to revisit.

Most people, if they know anything at all about the play or the film, primarily remember Brando screaming Stella.

Well, it certainly is more than that. Considering that the play opened in Broadway in 1947, the subject matter is actually quite shocking. Having lost her estate and resigned from her teaching position, Blanche DuBois, a now faded Southern Belle, shows up on her sister Stella’s doorstep in New Orleans. Stella’s husband, the uncouth Stanley, sees right through Blanche’s weak facade and begins to torment her for the purpose of exposing her.

By the time that the play is done, we understand that Blanche is an alcoholic. When she was much younger, she found her husband in bed with another man. She shamed him so much that he ended up killing himself. She didn’t resign from her teaching position but was fired for an affair with an underage student. Before she came to New Orleans, she was living in a cheap hotel frequented by prostitutes.

All of this has left Blanche mentally frayed. Stanley bears down upon her to break her even more. She has a full mental collapse after Stanley violently rapes her. She is carted off to a mental institution.

The play ends with Stella willfully choosing not to believe Blanche’s story and staying with Stanley.

If all of that is not enough, there are additional scenes of drunkenness and domestic abuse.

This is a lot to take in for a play written in 1947. The play was turned into a film in 1951. In that year, the film industry was still operating under the Hays Code, which set very strict moral guidelines.

Considering that it was made under the Hays Code, the film is actually quite astounding. You need to look at it through the lens of that time to really understand how groundbreaking it was.

You have to start with Brando. If your only image of Brando is The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, you’ll need to sit down for this film.

He radiates ferocious sexual energy. He looks beautiful. Whenever he’s on the screen, your eyes are drawn to him. Considering all of the baggage that Brando’s acting later carries, when you watch this film, you need to understand that nearly no one knew who he was. This was his first broad exposure. Watching this film in 1951 must have been like watching a supernova explode.

Nearly all of the actors in the film were from the original Broadway play. They all were adherents of the newly christened school of method acting. Instead of stylized performances, the actors all embodied their characters and acted naturally.

All except for Blanche, played by Vivien Leigh. She was a classically trained actor that gave very stylized performance.

Considering the larger theme of Blanche’s alienation from the New Orleans denizens through her artificial high class airs, Leigh’s formally stilted performance actually served quite well as a foil to the method actors. The fact that Leigh was also bipolar adds a tragic dimension to her performance.

Having to abide by the Hays code did have a weird impact upon the film. First of all, Blanche’s first husband couldn’t be gay. Although there’s a really discrete reference to it, the film made it appear that he killed himself just because she scorned him for being weak. Stanley’s rape of Blanche could not be shown. The film cut that scene down to a mirror being broken as Blanche fights Stanley. The Hays Code also forced the director Elia Kazan to change the ending. In the play, Stella stays with Stanley. Since the Hays Code dictated that no one can profit from immoral behavior, in the film Stella leaves Stanley. Yes, according to the Hays Code, Stella could not stay with Stanley because of a rape that it would not allow to be shown.

I’ve now seen over 85 films on the AFI 100. This film, above all others that I can think of, truly seems groundbreaking. Even though filmed in black and white, due to its naturalistic acting and themes, it’s a film that seems to be decades ahead of its time.

Happy Days Are (Never) Here Again

Title: The Rise And Fall Of American Growth

Rating: 4 Stars

When I think of progress, I think usually in linear terms. I think that over time, our condition has generally improved. Given the long line of improvement that we’ve enjoyed this far, it’s kind of hard to imagine that we’re at the end of the line. Especially when I think of changes potentially coming down the pike like autonomous cars, gene therapy, and ever better artificial intelligence, I like to think that we’re on the cusp of ever greater advances.

Thinking otherwise is kind of like the Christians that are convinced that Jesus is coming back any day. Well, he hasn’t come back in two thousand years, what makes you think he’s coming back now in your lifetime? Such thinking is egocentric. Me thinking that the end of progress will come (or has come) during my lifetime seems arrogant.

However, what if my premise is wrong? What if progress isn’t linear? What if our lives were fundamentally unchanged for centuries? What if there was a burst of innovation that materially changed our lives during the century between 1870 to 1970? What if those innovations have been played out and now there’s nothing like them even close on our horizon? What then?

That’s the central argument of this work. It makes that argument over 650 pages and many dozens of charts and tables. It is not reading for the lighthearted.

Even so, the argument is not all that complicated. The second industrial revolution, which at its most basic, was the harnessing of electricity and the internal combustion engine, had significantly more impact improving people’s lives than our current third industrial revolution that is based upon information and communications technology.

We speak now of the power of networks. However, the second industrial revolution was truly networked. Instead of just data, the entire house was networked for the first time.

Previously, homes were isolated. Lights were powered by kerosene. Water was carted in by women. Bathroom was an outside privy. All travel was powered by walking or by horse.

All of this changed. By 1940, most homes (except for parts of the South) had electricity, water, sewer, gas, and telephones. Nearly everyone had cars.

Simply having access to clean water and disposal of human waste had dramatic impacts on reducing infant mortality and reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Lights powered by electricity lengthened the day, increased productivity, and greatly reduced the probability of fire. Having a telephone, and later a radio and a television, vastly reduced the cultural isolation of a household.

All of these, especially the reduction of infant mortality, greatly increased American productivity.

An interesting idea that he submits is that the Great Depression and World War II were key contributors to the growth of American productivity. During the Great Depression, American companies that survived figured out how to ruthlessly cut  costs. During World War II, under intense pressure, American companies raised their productivity to seemingly impossible levels (eg Ford was able to pump out an airplane every hour). Also during the war, with so much of American output being devoted to the war, consumption dropped and the workers’ savings rate dramatically increased. Therefore, at the end of the war when you’d expect the economy to crater due to lack of demand, there was a pool of money that was available that Americans could spend on consumer goods. All of this set the stage for the very productive decade of the 1950s.

Since 1940, it is not as if progress stopped. The improvements before 1940 were simply fundamental. A person from the present day traveling to a typical 1940 home would see it as primitive but recognizable (that person would see refrigerators, stoves, and running water) while a person from 1940 traveling to a typical 1870 home would be shocked at the difference.

Improvements since 1940 have, to a large part, been incremental. The biggest changes have been in information and communication. You no longer need an army of secretaries to type redundant forms. It no longer costs twenty dollars to call London. You can order nearly anything you like without leaving your house.

Those are not small gains, but compared to an elemental change like electricity, they simply don’t measure up. Also, to a great extent, Gordon now believes that we’ve already incorporated the fruits of the third industrial revolution into our lives. There are limited additional productivity gains to be had.

The relative short period of growth from the third industrial revolution is one of the reasons why Gordon thinks that we’ve reached the end of our great productivity gains. Other headwinds that he sees are the aging of Americans, the ever increasing economic inequality, shortcomings in our education system, and the massive amount of debt that our government is accumulating.

He does have prescriptions to partially offset these headwinds. They’re pretty standard fare that has virtually no chance of passing in our current poisoned, divided government. Even if all of his ideas were to come to pass, he freely admits that it would have at best marginal effects on future growth.

So, is he right? After a brilliant century, are we now back to the status quo of virtually no growth?

If so, what does that mean to us?

This Is How You Build A Bridge!

Title: Bridge On The River Kwai

Rating: 4 Stars

This was one of the films on the AFI list that I was least looking forward to watching. It was on commercial television pretty regularly as I was growing up. I was remembering a somewhat ponderous epic (it’s over two and a half hours long) that was going to tell a pretty simple story. There was an oppressive Japanese prison camp commander that would violently force British POWs into slave labor to construct a bridge. Concurrent with that would be an Allied commando operation to detonate the bridge after it was completed. The highlight of the film would be the commandos successfully blowing up the bridge.

Well, it turns out that none of that is true. Shockingly enough, it turns out to be a significantly more nuanced film than the ten year old me remembers.

Colonel Saito, the camp prison camp commander, is brutal. When he’s first introduced, he seems pitiless. Colonel Nicholson, the British POW leading officer, tries to discuss Geneva Convention violations with him and Saito promptly throws him into the hot box as punishment.

After this battle of wills, Saito is discovered not to be pitilessly evil. He makes accommodations with Nicholson. They have 1:1 discussions where Saito reminisces about his time in England. Saito explains the pressure that he’s under. He must finish the bridge by a certain date or the disgrace of his failure will require him to commit ritualistic seppuku. He is behind schedule on its construction and is determined to finish it. All of this does not make Saito a nice guy, but it does help to explain his motivations. He is not a one dimensional evil character.

Similarly, Nicholson could easily have been another, albeit completely different, one dimensional character. As the leader of the POWs, he could easily have been painted as the selfless, sacrificing hero determined to do his best by his country.

In fact, Nicholson is significantly more complex. When debating the Geneva Convention law with Saito, the rule that he fixates on is whether or not officers can be forced to work. That is (apparently) outlawed by the Geneva Convention, but in a camp where disease and death is running rampant and workers are essentially worked to death, is that really the hill that you want to die on? Keeping the officers’ hands clean? Apparently, Nicholson does. He nearly dies during his time in the hot box. Even then, on the point of death, he refuses to concede.

Saito and Nicholson come to a rapprochement. Saito, now desperate to get the bridge  built, agrees to yield day to day direction of the bridge’s construction to Nicholson and his officers.

Now this is where the film takes a turn that I completely missed / don’t remember. Nicholson, remember is a British POW fighting a desperate war against the Japanese in the Pacific theater, really gets into building the bridge. Despite the fact that it will be part of a main transportation effort to feed the Japanese war effort, he takes it as somehow a badge of British honor that he must build the best possible bridge possible.

Instead of just going through the motions of creating a middling bridge, Nicholson drives his men hard. During the later stages, he cajoled POWs from the sick bay, many of whom barely able to walk, to help out. To make it even more ironic, there are scenes of British officers actually get down and dirty and doing real work. Nicholson ends up forcing his men to do the very things for which he condemned Saito. In his narcissistic zeal, Nicholson does in fact create a superior bridge.

As the bridge is being built, a commando team is sent to blow up the bridge upon its completion. This part of the story is much more traditional. Shears, an American officer, has previously escaped from the POW camp and so is the perfect choice to lead the team to the camp. Shears is a layabout only interested in his own survival. Forced to lead the team to the camp, the question that inevitably arises is, will Shears rise above his cynical self interest to make the ultimate sacrifice when the time for action comes? Unless you’ve never seen a war movie, you’ll probably already know the answer.

The final interesting point comes after the commandos have laid the charges on the bridge. Nicholson, doing a final inspection, notices the charges. Now completely wrapped up in the successful construction of his bridge, he becomes determined to save the bridge from destruction. Only after the commandos have died and Nicholson looks down on the face of a young dead British commando does the the veil of his obsession drop. Now dying himself, he redeems himself with one last act by falling onto the explosive plunger, destroying the bridge that he worked so hard to build.

I still kind of think that this story could have been told in something less than two hours and forty minutes, but all in all, this was one of those films on the AFI list that exceeded my expectations of it.

The Incompetence Of Spies

Title: Operation Mincemeat

Rating: 4 Stars

Most casual readers of WWII history know the basic facts about Operation Mincemeat, even if they don’t know the actual details or even the name of the operation.

The problem was that the Allied forces needed to somehow crack open Hitler’s Fortress Europe. USSR and Germany were in a titanic struggle in the East. To relieve Stalin, another front needed to be opened in Western Europe to divert German resources from the East.

Since the Allied forces had recently taken possession of North Africa, the most obvious point of entry was Italy. To successfully invade the Italian mainland, Sicily must first be invaded and conquered.

The problem was that this was also obvious to the Nazis. The Nazis had shored up Sicily’s defenses. Invading Sicily could easily end up being a disaster.

It became strategically important to the Allied forces that the Nazis be tricked into believing that the invasion was actually going to happen elsewhere. The decision was made to make it appear that the Allied forces were going to invade the Balkans through Greece with a second path going through Sardinia. Since you can scarcely hide the fact that a huge army was actually going to invade Sicily, that invasion was disguised as a feint to distract the Germans from the two other invasion points.

There was a massive disinformation effort to sell this to the Nazis. The subject of this book was a small part of that effort called Operation Mincemeat. It involved finding a recently deceased man, fitting him in a military uniform, forging some top secret documents that indicated the false invasion plans, and then throwing the body and documents off of the coast of Spain. The Spanish, theoretically neutral but with a definite fascist tilt (thanks, Franco!), would retrieve the body and let the Nazis get a look at these ‘lost’ top secret documents. This information, in conjunction with other disinformation efforts (eg hiring Greek translators and simulating a fake army), would convince the Nazis to shift their focus away from Sicily and to spread their forces thinly throughout the Mediterranean area.

Amazingly enough, it worked. The body was found by the Spanish. They did pass the documents onto the Nazis. The Nazis did add forces to defend the Balkans. They pulled troops away from the Eastern front at a crucial time that enabled the Soviets to gain a critical victory. The forces on Sicily consisted of a couple of tough Nazi regiments and a whole bunch of demoralized, unenthusiastic Italian soldiers that did not put up a lot of resistance. The invasion of Sicily was successful. That in turn led to a successful invasion of the Italian mainland.

The story behind Operation Mincemeat is quite interesting and as usual, Ben Macintyre does an excellent job telling it.

However, as I was reading it, I was struck, as usually happens when I read spy histories, by the thought, are spies really good or bad for a country? Would a country actually be better off if it didn’t actually engage in spying (other then counter spy activities to try to ferret out those trying to steal your secrets)?

If you need further proof of what I’m talking about, read a history of the CIA like Legacy of Ashes. Even though it’s not a polemic, every time I read it, I see a harsh condemnation of the art of spying.

For instance, even though the USSR was the biggest threat to the US for nearly a fifty year period and the huge bulk of the CIA was focused on it, pretty much no one at the CIA knew that the USSR had actually collapsed until they saw it on CNN. Even though they had no clear evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the CIA knew that Bush / Cheney wanted / needed / demanded proof that they existed, so the CIA did all that they could to bias their analysis to provide ‘proof’ that was used to justify the second Gulf War.

Let’s not even talk about the failures of 9/11. If the CIA has any job at all, it’s to identify external threats to the domestic front.

The essential challenge to spying is that even the honest spies are lying to someone. If you know for a fact that someone is lying, how do you know that they’re not also lying to you? For instance, there was a high level Soviet defector to the US. The US authorities could not figure out whether or not he was a double agent.  He was placed under house arrest and interrogated for eighteen months. He turned out to be a legitimate defector. Whatever value he might have had was long lost.

Then of course there are spies like Aldrich Ames. He was a CIA agent that sold secrets, including the names of double agents in the USSR, to the Soviets for many years. Despite having all of the red flags that are supposed to identify possible espionage targets (eg flashy cars, money troubles, alcoholism, inappropriate system access), he secretly spied for the USSR for many years.

Reading Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre wants you to admire the ingenious British spies, and yes, they were very clever. However, the Nazis should have been able to see through the plan. There were a couple of reasons why they weren’t.

First of all, they were more interested in telling Hitler what he wanted to here instead of actual analysis. The fact that Hitler was obsessed with the fear of an Allied invasion through the Balkans made the Nazi spies bias their work towards that position. Since the dead soldier’s papers pointed towards an invasion of this type, that automatically gave it more weight than it should have had and they were more likely to discard evidence that would lead them to believe that it was a plant.

Secondly, they had great confidence in their most critical spy ring that they had embedded into the UK. Amusingly enough, this vaunted spy ring was nothing more than a set of fictional characters created by the British intelligence service. Unsurprisingly, this spy ring validated the dead man’s papers. The Nazis were fooled into thinking that this was an independent confirmation.

Finally there was Alexis von Roenne. He was the intelligence analyst most trusted by Hitler. He was widely respected for his intelligence and analytical acumen. He analyzed all of the Operation Mincemeat papers and pronounced them genuine. That was all of the confirmation that Hitler needed.

That wasn’t all von Roenne did. He also bought into the false story that the invasion of France was going to take place at Calais instead of the actual target Normandy. He also consistently overestimated Allied military strength by a factor of two, putting the Nazi military seemingly always at a disadvantage.

If he was such a smart analyst, then why did he make such crucial blunders? Well, although he was a patriotic German, he was also intensely religious. Those beliefs led him to despise what the Nazis were doing. It was believed that he consistently gave Hitler bad information so that he would lose the war and that Germany could somehow right itself from that defeat.

Although he wasn’t actually part of the 1944 assassination attempt of Hitler, he did get caught up in it because he knew the plotters. Ultimately, he was arrested and confessed to hating the Nazi principles. He was executed by being hung on a meat hook until death.

So, the Nazi intelligence service was completely bamboozled by a fake network of spies, analysis biased towards a predetermined decision, and betrayal in its top ranks.

All along the German military knew that the target of the invasion was going to be Sicily.  They allowed themselves to be distracted by the actions of their intelligence service.

This brings me back to my original question, might the Nazis have been better off without all of the over analysis, distrust, and confusion that an intelligence service by its very nature brings?

Are spies really worth it?

Clock And Dagger Forrest Gump

A while ago I wrote about Sidney Gottlieb. He was the head of the MK-ULTRA program and was the CIA’s poisoner. Reading about MK-ULTRA was fascinating, but what I found even more fascinating was all of the cultural touch points that he had to major historical figures from the twentieth century. He was kind of like a top secret Forrest Gump. I thought that I’d write a bit about some of the people that he came into contact with, either directly or indirectly.

First of all, let’s talk about the three figures that first brought Gottlieb into the CIA to work his mind control magic. The three were James Jesus Angleton, Frank Wismer, and Richard Helms.

James Jesus Angleton is a person that I’ve written about before. Universally considered to be a genius level, grand chess master spy, he was completely taken in by Kim Philby. Kim Philby was, at one time, a successor to the British MI6 that turned out to be a decades long double spy for the USSR. Ruined / humiliated by the experience, Angleton turned the CIA upside down, ruining an entire generation of spies, trying to find a mole in the CIA. He was pretty much fired in disgrace and drank himself to death.

Frank Wismer was an old school spy from the OSS. He was an important leader of the CIA until, well, his nervous breakdown and subsequent suicide. Richard Helms was another old school spy who ended up running the CIA for a while. Among other things, the notorious Vietnam War era Project Phoenix, where over twenty thousand Vietnamese were tortured and murdered, was conducted during his time as leader. One of his last actions as director was to order the destruction of all MK-ULTRA files.

In my review, I discussed the fact that some prisoners volunteered to take LSD for a small reduction of time served. Some were dosed with LSD every day for eighteen months. One of those prisoners was a very young Whitey Bulger. Whitey Bulger was the notorious, murderous Boston organized crime leader that evaded capture for over fifteen years. Bulger claimed that participating in the program traumatized him. At one point, he even swore to find the head of the program and have him murdered.

I also mentioned in the review that someone had been dosed with LSD without his consent. His name was Frank Olson. He had such an adverse reaction to it that, shortly after the experience, he ended up falling / jumping / being pushed from a ten story hotel window. The fact that it’s not conclusively known exactly what happened to him is a good clue that there was a cover up. One of the CIA operatives involved in the cover up was none other then James McCord. If that name sounds familiar, it probably should. He was one of the Watergate burglars.

In his role as poisoner and gadget man for the CIA, Gottlieb was involved with the cartoonish attempts to assassinate Castro. Such things as exploding seashells, exploding cigars, and powder that would make Castro’s beard fall out to his everlasting disgrace were some of the operations contemplated. None of them worked, obviously. One of the key middlemen involved between the CIA and possible assassins was Handsome Johnny Roselli. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he was a high profile Chicago organized crime figure.

With his avid interest in LSD, Gottlieb authorized many projects to understand the effects of LSD. Unfortunately, the Swiss manufacturer of it could produce only very limited quantities. Gottlieb leaned on the Eli Lilly drug company to reproduce it in bulk. Essentially, the CIA became Eli Lilly’s sole customer for mass quantities of LSD.

Once properly supplied, many of the MK-ULTRA sub projects started up. LSD was flowing out to universities and research facilities in large quantities for a wide variety of purposes.

Do any of you see where this is going?

One of the projects was in California. One of the subjects of the experiment was Ken Kesey. After trying it once, he became convinced that it opened a portal to a new world. He not only began to take it more regularly (it was very loosely managed so it was easily available) but started to proselytize its benefits to an ever growing audience. Similarly the poet Allen Ginsberg had his first experiences of LSD as part of a government experiment. Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, was also a subject of CIA sponsored LSD experiments.

It can reasonably be said that the 1960s counterculture movement, which did so much to shake the foundation of the traditional post WWII American culture (which Gottlieb was so intent on protecting from those evil communists), might never have happened without Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA program.

So, there you have it. Sidney Gottlieb, who I’d never heard of, had an almost unimaginably huge impact upon mid century America, albeit nearly completely unintentionally.

 

The Myriad Pod People Are Here!

Title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Rating: 4 Stars

This is a great example of 1950s era sci-fi pulp fiction. A doctor in a small town in California gets worried as a number of his patients begin claiming that their loved ones are not quite right. In fact, they are convinced that their loved ones are no longer their loved ones at all. Later they come back to him all embarassed and tell him to never mind, everything is all right.

One of his friends calls him late at night and shows him a discovery. In his friend’s basement is a shapeless mass that appears to be slowly changing into the shape of his friend.

The doctor connects the dots and begins to think that these forms are slowly but surely taking over everyone in the town. The doctor and his girlfriend are captured by the pod people and, in true 1950s pulp exposition form, explain in detail that these pods are actually alien life forces millions of years more advanced than us that, after their planet died, have been aimlessly drifting through space looking for more worlds to inhabit.

They’re told that the transition to pod form will be painless and will inevitably happen once they fall asleep. Determined not to go out quietly, the doctor and his girlfriend decide to put up a fight.

I won’t ruin the ending (even though it’s many decades old) because the many remakes of it choose to end differently. I don’t want to ruin the original source if you haven’t read it yet.

It is a fun read. To me, the fact that it has had so many remakes is the most interesting aspect of the novel. Surely better sci-fi pulp novels have been written, but it’s this one that has been stayed in the zeitgeist.

This (originally called Body Snatchers) was written in 1955. Although Jack Finney claimed no political motives to his novel, it hardly seems accidental that it was written in the age of McCarthyism. During this time of extreme paranoia, there was wide spread belief that there were communists embedded at all levels of our society. This included everyone from state department diplomats to politicians to artists to even school teachers. There was a belief that these everyday normal Americans were all part of some deep secret cabal of communists trying to convert other Americans to communism and to overthrow our democratic system.

Although McCarthyism is the most obvious example of this, it is by no means an isolated example of American paranoia. You can visualize any number of trends and they nicely translate into the theme of this novel.  The mindless pursuit of consumerism and the banality of suburban conformism are both obvious applications.

Therefore, over the years, this material has been refashioned many times. In more optimistic times, the pod people are defeated through individual actions. In other versions, the pod people are defeated through social collective actions. In the more pessimistic remakes, the pod people emerge victorious.

Even today at more minor levels, you can see people thinking along this vein. Think of how frustrated the Bernie supporters are as the pod people of the Democratic party mindlessly coalesced around the Biden nomination.

And don’t even get me started about the Republican party. The party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt that freed the slaves, was, even into the 1960s, key to the Civil Rights movement and, in 1940, was the first main stream party to support the Equal Rights Amendment, somehow has become a party closely identified with racist and sexist policies. Its leader, with some ninety percent support from the party followers, is a neurologically impaired serial grifter.

Sometimes I think that pod people are the only reasonable explanation.

You Don’t Want The Truth!

Title: Poisoner In Chief

Rating: 4 Stars

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom…my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

That, of course, is an excerpt from Col Jessup’s speech from A Few Good Men. As I read the biography of Sidney Gottlieb, Nicholson’s famous speech continued to run through my mind.

Sidney Gottlieb was a trained chemist. He was recruited by the CIA. At the CIA he led the MK-ULTRA program and later took a larger role in the Technical Services Staff where he presided over the development of poisons and trick weapons used by spies in the field.

That very cursory description of his biography hides a nightmare of dark acts. Personally, Gottlieb seemed to be a decent person. He lived simply with his wife and children on a remote farm, growing his own food. In retirement, he went on a multi-year journey where, among other things, he volunteered at a hospital for lepers in India. A lifelong stutterer, he received a masters in speech therapy and helped others overcome their speech difficulties. He worked at a hospice to tend to the dying.

While at the CIA, he committed or commissioned unspeakable acts. These acts were all done in the fight against communism. As a Jewish person in the aftermath of WWII, he probably felt a powerful need to fight evil wherever it exists. In the 1950s, communism seemed to be an existential threat to the West. It seemed to be an implacable force of evil single-mindedly focused on world domination.

Having just fought and won a war against a similar determined foe, the forces of democracy felt that the only way to combat such a foe was to meet evil with evil. The rumors that the North Koreans were attempting mind control over US prisoners of war was enough for Americans to stand up their own mind control experiments. If a relatively few innocent victims had to be sacrificed to prevent communists from taking over our country, then that’s a small price to pay.

To save democracy from this scourge of communism, virtually any action was justified. From the book, there’s a great line about the type of personality attributes that the CIA recruited: “compulsive activism and ethical elasticity”. This led the US to try to bring in Nazi concentration camp doctors under Operation Paperclip to learn about their human experiments. When this failed, Americans went to Germany to learn directly from them. Similarly, instead of being executed for war crimes, the head of Japan’s infamous Unit 731 was recruited by the American to learn about its torturous experiments.

Gottlieb was a perfect example of this implacable drive and flexibility. He became convinced that whichever nation mastered mind control would reign supreme. Manchurian candidates assassins would be unstoppable. Spies would heedlessly spill their secrets. Entire armies of blank slate soldiers with no fear of death would sweep their opponents off the battlefield.

Gottlieb was convinced that the communists were well ahead in this race, so he would stop at nothing to catch up. This fear sparked the rise of the MK-ULTRA program. Under its auspices there were many sub projects trying to find the mind control elixir. Its many projects included the following.

In Europe, people suspected of being spies or communists were imprisoned. They were then endlessly interrogated using drugs. Once the interrogation was completed, the victim would be murdered and the body disposed. Gottlieb witnessed many of these interrogations.

Students at Harvard were dosed with LSD at Harvard. At least one student committed suicide as a result.

At a conference that Gottlieb led, LSD was introduced into the punch without anyone’s consent. One attendee never recovered. A short time later, after telling a CIA officer that he was going to go public, he fell / jumped / was pushed out of a window to his death.

Prisoners in Atlanta were dosed with LSD in exchange for slight sentence reductions. They were given daily doses of LSD for months at a time.

Without anyone’s consent, schizophrenic children were dosed with LSD to determine how they would react.

Mentally handicapped children were fed breakfast cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium.

Black patients at an addiction treatment center in Kentucky were basically treated as prisoners. There, instead of treating their addiction issues, they were treated with psychedelic drugs for experimental purposes.

The CIA ran houses of prostitution. The prostitutes would perform the agreed upon sex act, slip the john a drug, and then try to get them to confess their secrets to them.

The common theme to these operations was the powerlessness of the victims. Children, minorities, prisoners, and addicts were all considered the detritus of society. Horrible things could be done to them with no repercussions.

All of this is horrific. Two more facts make it all the worse. The first fact is that all of the experiments failed. There is no way to wipe a person’s mind and then overlay it with a new set of thoughts. They never even came close to success.

The second fact is that the communists nations were not engaged in mind control. They had no interest in drugs like LSD.

Gottlieb’s acts of evil were attempts to protect America from a nonexistent threat and were, not only futile, but ultimately served to, along with Watergate and the Vietnam War,  dramatically increase distrust of American government in the 1970s.

Are there lessons that we can learn here and apply to the abuses that arose out of 9/11?