Is Obama Behind the Hit on Trump? How the Deep State Game is Played

It's now publicly accepted that the CIA, factions in the CIA, whatever, object to Trump and are making life difficult for him.

The interesting question is, is President Obama just a passenger on the runaway Deep State train, thoughtlessly rattling through his hollow valedictories, or is he the conductor?  or the engineer?

I was struck by this possibility while reflecting on David Ignatius' revelation on Thursday that intercepts showed that Trump's security adviser, Michael Flynn, had been on the phone with the Russian ambassador several times on the day President Obama announced the expulsion of the Russian diplos.

Hmmm.  I thought.  With all due respect, David Ignatius doesn't do reporting.  He does top-drawer steno.  He didn't dig this factoid out.  It was fed to him.  Specifically, the fact that Flynn's communications were being intercepted--normally, one would expect, the kind of tittle-tattle kept from the public eye under the rubric of "protecting sources and methods"--was being made part of the public discourse.

The next day, there was follow-up.  Not just followup pundit regurgitation on the leak to Ignatius: followup confirmation by the Obama administration:

The Obama administration is aware of frequent contacts between President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the United States, including on the day President Barack Obama hit Moscow with sanctions in retaliation for election-related hacking, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

...
Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador were first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. The official who spoke to The Associated Press was not authorized to confirm the contacts publicly and insisted on anonymity.

So, the story, relying on covert surveillance, that Flynn is canoodling with the Russian ambo is being determinedly and repeatedly fed to the press.

Consider: for eight years the Obama administration has been resolute/overbearing/fanatical, choose your adjective, in plugging leaks.  But now we get this concerted blabberai.

Is Obama just phoning it in while his aides run riot at the end of his administration.

Or...

Is Obama condoning and perhaps even directing the hit on Trump--Obama in the library with a candlestick--while making sure his fingerprints aren't on the weapon?

Time to re-up one of my favorite pieces, on the 1954 campaign against Joe McCarthy.  It's a useful corrective for young journos craving their "Murrow moment"--when the press seemingly rises up in spontaneous democratic revulsion to mete justice out on a demagogue.

But it also provides an instructive primer on how the executive branch can use the deep state, dossiers, allies in Congress and--of course!--a cooperative press to do its dirty work.

Spoiler: taking down McCarthy was the result of a carefully planned campaign executed by bureaucrats, spooks, and pols at the order of President Eisenhower and bringing in the press at the last stage to administer the coup de grace.

I wrote this piece a year ago.  But as you can see, it stands up pretty well today, in the last days of the Obama administration and, possibly, the last days of Donald Trump.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Yes, the Press Might Do a Joe McCarthy on Trump; Just Not the Way You Think

I am not particularly impressed with protestations that the Fourth Estate is going to solve our Donald Trump problem by speaking truth to power, exposing his low, dishonest, and inflammatory rhetoric, and the filthy bigotry in which he traffics.

There’s a lot of people—a lot of voters—down in the sewer with Donald Trump.  Apparently the smell doesn’t bother them.

Nor do I hold out hope that elite opinion-makers like Thomas Friedman will lead the stampede of asses that will trample Trump into well-deserved oblivion.

And I do not have much patience with the trope that all the media needs to do is put on its big-boy pants and stick it to Donald Trump in the name of decency just like the press did to Joe McCarthy in the glorious days of Ed Murrow in 1954.

This hagiography is enshrined in George Clooney’s biopic of Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck (excellent film, by the way), which characterizes Murrow as having the courage to step forth and confront McCarthy with a scathing series of televised exposes in March 1954 when nobody else would.

Indeed, Murrow took up the cudgels in 1953 when few others were willing.  Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly openly characterized the famous See It Now reports as pre-planned advocacy, not reporting.  As quoted in Ralph Engelman’s biography, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism, Friendly declared:

I think we were balancing how what we knew how to do well against what he did superbly well, which is to be a demagogue.  And I’m sorry we had to do it that way. But it was the challenge of a lifetime, a desperate moment for the country, and not to have used it because of a series of rules that we would apply to ourselves and that Senator McCarthy would abuse to the ultimate would have made history judge us very harshly. [Engelman, pg. 125]

McCarthy was a world-class creep and demagogue.  He was also an eager bottom-feeder in the murky waters of the American security state, which were lavishly chummed by J. Edgar Hoover with real and faux evidence to ensnare real, faux, potential, and imagined Communists.  Eventually McCarthy got big and intimidating enough to upset a lot of people.  Declaring the Democratic Party the “party of treason” and questioning the patriotism of two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was a start.  But I think just the start.

We can take it as a given that certain media outlets were determined to stick it to McCarthy.  But in deciding whether the media today has the mission and chops to properly identify an existential demagogic threat to the nation and righteously sh*tcan it, it would help to explore the assertion that CBS and prestige media were able to reach beyond its core audience of disgruntled Democrats and liberals to bring down Tailgunner Joe. 

For a more plausible alternative, try President Eisenhower and his anger at McCarthy’s attack on the Army, which started with a gaudy search for Communists in the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

Ike apparently no like.

President Eisenhower initiated a secret campaign to nail McCarthy in the beginning of 1954.  The story was first told in the 1980s by Eisenhower staffer William Bragg Ewald in his book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?  It will be told in greater detail in 2016 by David Nichols of Southwestern College, Kansas, in an as yet untitled book based on the Eisenhower archives and other declassified sources.

Here’s what Nichols had to say in an excerpt posted by the National Archives:

Eisenhower carried off his anti-McCarthy operation by means of rigorous delegation to a handful of trusted subordinates; these included Chief of Staff Sherman Adams; Vice President Richard Nixon; Press Secretary James Hagerty; Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and his deputy, William Rogers; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the administration’s representative to the United Nations; and Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred A. Seaton, who collaborated with H. Struve Hensel, the Pentagon’s general counsel. While less intimate with the President, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Army counsel John G. Adams played critical roles. These men were expected, like foot soldiers in war, to put their lives and reputations on the line to protect the President and extinguish the political influence of Joe McCarthy.

Yup, even that devoted anti-Communist Richard Nixon saw which way the wind was blowing and signed on to ratf*ck McCarthy.  And it looks like J. Edgar Hoover helped cut off McCarthy at the knees by repudiating a document McCarthy brandished during the Army hearings.

In January 1954 Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams instructed the Army’s Chief Counsel to write up a report describing the harassment of the Army instigated by McCarthy’s pit bull, Roy Cohn, in the matter of fellow staffer David Schine, with whom Cohn appears to have been infatuated.  By February, the job of preparing the report is in the hands of the Assistant Secretary of Defense and the General Counsel of the Army.

And then in early March, per Nichols…

Sherman Adams’s good friend, Vermont’s Republican Senator Ralph W. Flanders, ridiculed McCarthy in a speech on the Senate floor. Flanders words dripped with sarcasm: “He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops…”

Murrow quoted Flanders’ speech in his famous See It Now broadcast the same night . 

Murrow’s legendary program makes for interesting viewing.  

It was immediately recognized as a high-minded hit piece designed to show McCarthy at his least attractive.  One of the more ham-fisted segments shows an apparently juiced Tailgunner Joe, his comb-over sagging into a bedraggled spitcurl on his forehead, engaged in some dinner-speech blather.  As McCarthy struggles to keep his wits about him and finish his speech, the camera portentously pans to a rather naff mural behind him depicting George Washington in a heroic pose.  Compare and contrast, the message here.

I was struck by a clip he showed of Eisenhower energetically asserting his prerogative to handle executive branch loyalty issues without congressional committees (i.e. McCarthy) butting in.  Incongruously, the famously placid Eisenhower in his physical appearance and temperament strikingly resembled that famous shoe-banger Nikita Khrushchev. 

The worst thing Murrow comes up with is catching McCarthy lying (or as we’d say today, “perhaps intentionally misrepresenting”) the ACLU as a proscribed Communist organization while he bullyrags a State Department boffin for a book he wrote in the 1930s.

The program concludes with Murrow’s justly famous peroration. 

Then, per Nichols:

Those events set the stage for March 11, 1954. That day, on Eisenhower’s secret orders,Seaton released a 34-page, carefully edited account of the privileges sought for David Schine to key senators, representatives, and the press. The document ignited such a fire-storm of negative publicity that, on March 16, the McCarthy subcommittee agreed to hold televised hearings. McCarthy would temporarily step down as chair…

The hearings were broadcast by the fledgling ABC and DuMont networks with gavel-to-gavel coverage for 36 eye-glazing days.  It will be very interesting if Nichols’ book addresses the hows and whys of the collapse of McCarthy’s poll standing (from the 50s to the 30s) during the hearings for the understanding of modern onlookers.    

Here is a clip of the apparently cathartic “have you no decency?” slam from Judge Welch to the applause of the gallery.  The indecency in question was McCarthy hounding Welch over the issue of a member of his team that Welch had to send packing back to Boston because he had belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization HUAC deemed a Communist front.  After the decency jab, Welch still had to deploy a hissy fit and end his examination in order to deflect McCarthy’s determined efforts to make hay out of the embarrassing incident, so it’s difficult for me to grasp how this was a decisive high-five moment for the anti-McCarthy team.  But apparently so.

Much more effective in my opinion are the cutaways to the mesmerizingly sinister apparition of Roy Cohn, who looks and writhes like a hagfish impatient to swim off and burrow into a welcoming corpse. 

On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was condemned by the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22.  This is usually reported as “censure” but it wasn’t, as the contemporary account in the New York Times made clear.  Richard Nixon presided over the session and finessed the adoption of the resolution.  It took a lot of finessing and some low comedy to deliver a satisfactory outcome in the evenly-split (44 Rs, 44 Ds, 1 Independent) Senate.

The only transgression cited in the resolution was McCarthy acting like an insulting, high-handed jerk toward a number of senators who were investigating him.  Apparently the investigation itself hadn’t produced anything deemed suitably awesome—or maybe it was always intended as just a waystation in the road to Senate condemnation.  In any case, the anti-McCarthy forces simply nailed him for his demeanor.

People who remember Clarence Thomas’ “high tech lynching” stunt before the Senate Judiciary Committee will be amused to learn that one of McCarthy’s main transgressions was characterizing the proceeding against him as “a lynch-party” or “lynch bee.”

All 44 Democrats voted for the resolution.  Twenty-two Republicans also voted in favor and twenty-two against, leading one to believe that Eisenhower-inflected party politics rather than good old small d/Large D/Murrow-fueled democratic indignation was in play.  Senator Flanders, the good buddy of Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, introduced the resolution. 

Afterwards, McCarthy faded away and died from hepatitis.  Again, it will be interesting to see what Nichols has to say about any Eisenhower-related maneuverings that may have prevented McCarthy from bouncing back.

Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, became very close to Eisenhower, describing Ike after he left office as “a part-time correspondent for CBS News” because of all the TV specials the ex-President did with CBS Reports.  I leave it to the inquisitive to explore when those close relations began, and whether the well-connected Murrow et. al. had any inkling that Eisenhower and his team were maneuvering to drop the hammer on McCarthy as the famous See It Now broadcast was assembled.

One of my favorite journo stories concerns the carefully choreographed leaking of the vital Army report to the press on March 11, two days after Murrow’s famous broadcast.  Press coverage of the allegations created the outrage boomlet that midwived the fatal Army hearings.  The anecdote comes courtesy of Art Spivak, then working for International News Service:

... the Army’s counsel, John G. Adams slipped to some senators and to the Baltimore Sun’s reporter Phil Potter a 34-page single-spaced “chronology” of efforts by Cohn, with McCarthy’s backing, to force the Army to give Roy’s recently-drafted buddy G. David Schine a direct promotion to lieutenant, assign him to serve his military term on the staff of the subcommittee, and enjoy sundry other favors. The bottom line was a charge that Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” if his wishes were rejected.

Adams, a fellow South Dakotan and long-time friend of Potter’s, knew Potter would make use of the anti-Cohn, anti-McCarthy chronology, Potter, in turn, knew that the chronology was potential dynamite and his unsyndicated story would get nowhere unless other news outlets had it too.

The way Potter told it to me later, he therefore offered a copy of the Adams chronology to Arkansas Democratic Sen. John L. McClellan, ranking minority member of McCarthy’s subcommittee. McClellan was an arch-conservative and at first didn’t oppose McCarthy, but he grew to despise the Wisconsin Republican’s tactics. And so, with Potter’s guidance, McClellan invited a small group of reporters to his Fairfax Hotel apartment in Washington and leaked the chronology to them. I was one of those invited. Others included reporters for AP, UP, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
...

There was only one copy of the chronology available at McClellan’s suite, so the four other reporters and I laboriously hand-copied each of the 34 single-spaced pages of the document, passing each page to the other reporter until all were finished copying. We didn’t finish until close to midnight. From the hotel, I phoned a “bulletin” and brief story to the INS news desk in Washington, to catch the wire at the end of what we called the “A.M. cycle” for morning papers.


...

At the time, and for years afterward, I thought Adams had prepared and leaked his chronology on his own, in retribution for his and his Army colleagues’ treatment by McCarthy and Cohn.

Thirty years later, the full story came out in Ewald’s deceptively titled “Who Killed Joe McCarthy” book. Ewald provided chapter and verse on how Adams was only one player in a broadly mounted but confidential assault on McCarthy and Cohn by the Eisenhower White House, Department of Defense, and Department of the Army. The President himself was described as publicly silent but vitally active in orchestrating the developments that spawned the Army- McCarthy hearings.

Yes.  Faithful steno work and an inability to see the big picture and the guy behind the curtain—Eisenhower.  That’s how the press helped bring down Tailgunner Joe.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Donald Trump meets his political end, perhaps for some legal or tax entanglement.  That is, if there’s anybody in the political establishment adept as Eisenhower who wants to remove a disruptive, independent-minded demagogue.  If there is, I don’t doubt that the journalists will be ready to hold up their end.

Great Game on the North Korea Chessboard

I have a piece up at Asia Times on Donald Trump’s North Korea options: waste it, sanction it (and China), or have a burger with Kim Jong Un: Trump, North Korea, bombs, and burgers.

“Kinda crippling sanctions” got another workout at the UN on November 30, highlighting a point I made in the piece that the US and PRC are interested, for differing reasons, in 1) maintaining North Korea’s status as an international pariah but 2) keeping it on life support.  

The PRC’s motives are pretty simple: North Korea isolated and hopelessly reliant on the PRC is infinitely preferable to a North Korea pivoting away from the PRC to engage with the US, Japan, and/or South Korea.  

US motives, I think, are somewhat more complicated: There’s loyalty to a lazily-executed denuclearization strategy that has so far failed miserably; there’s also the fact that the “North Korea threat” allows the United States to maintain and upgrade its military posture not just in South Korea but also in North Asia to provide heft and credibility to the China-containment regime.

Bottom line is North Korea is highly unlikely to surrender its nukes for reasons Muammar Qaddafi, if he were alive, would find compelling; the PRC still has insufficient incentive to take the highly risky step of cratering the regime through a genuine economic blockade; and the US was, at least until the North Korean ICBM program began to develop some homeland-threatening credibility, quite happy to let the situation drag on a.k.a. strategic patience.

US bestie Japan, I imagine, is also not too interested in North Korea regime collapse and the emergence of a competing Korean powerhouse spanning the whole peninsula either.

So you get incremental stuff like this:

The new sanctions target North Korea’s hard currency revenues by placing a cap on coal exports, cutting them by at least 62%.

Diplomats said the new sanctions further clarify that the “livelihood” exemption, which allowed the Chinese imports, is meant only to protect the livelihoods of those currently living inside North Korea, not Chinese people or companies doing business with the country.
…
North Korea’s main ally and largest trade partner, China, hailed the sanctions as striking a balance between punishing the rogue nation and protecting its people.

“The resolution adopted by the council today demonstrates the uniform stand of the international community against the development by DPRK of its nuclear missile programs and forward the maintenance of the international non-proliferation regime,” China’s ambassador, Liu Jieyi, said, adding that the measures “are not intended to produce negative consequences on DPRK’s humanitarian situation”.

You may notice that, thanks to the UN sanctions resolution, as long as the DPRK keeps its nukes the PRC has a license to ratchet up the economic pressure on North Korea for whatever reason, whether it's endangering the world through WMD or just inching too close to the US.  That's pretty sweet.

I should add that one motive for the US pushing the UN sanctions strategy is it sets the table for US national “secondary” sanctions targeting countries and enterprises that continue to do business with North Korea.  That strategy was used by the Obama administration with reasonably good effect in the case of Iran, especially against highly vulnerable European institutions that were canoodling on Tehran trade; the PRC was also targeted though Chinese “backfilling” via barter & RMB-denominated transactions was a continual headache for the US.

There is every indication that Hillary Clinton intended to clone the Iran strategy on North Korea when she became President, not necessarily in hopes of denuclearizing North Korea as much as having a perpetual US sanctions club ready to beat the Chinese.

Believe it or not, the US had already road-tested the strategy of threatening PRC international financial institutions over North Korea back in the Bush administration. It is apparently remembered only by me that the money-laundering designation of Banco Delta Asia in Macau was intended to impress and cow the PRC with a demonstration of the power of the US Treasury Department financial sanctions death star.

One reason the PRC is deeply engaged in the North Korean UN sanctions effort (other than its utility in keeping North Korea isolated, flat on its behind, and reliant on China) is to sustain and channel the UN track and avoid giving the US a legal basis and political justification to impose national sanctions.

The energetic PRC efforts to internationalize the RMB should not be understood primarily as an attempt to replace the Almighty Dollar as the international reserve currency.  They are meant to ensure that, if the US deploys the secondary sanctions weapon again, the PRC has the international financial infrastructure in place to conduct its business without the need to clear transactions through the US Fed, as is the case with all dollar transactions conducted through the international clearing networks such as SWIFT.  

The concept that all significant dollar transactions touch base in America is why the US government can drop the hammer on those European banks that paid gigantic fines for business they did out of Europe with Iran, Cuba, Sudan, etc.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Back to North Korea, which can be regarded a) as the last great treasurehouse in Asia unexploited by Western capitalism and b) the chessboard upon which the US, China, and Japan play the North Asian Great Game.

The Chinese play wei-qi, the strategy game; Shinzo Abe plays multi-dimensional chess as he juggles the needs of the US alliance with the reality that Japan must have the capability to act independently; Donald Trump apparently just wants to play checkers.

I previously wrote about Trump’s disinterest in complex multilateral Asian initiatives like TPP and the pivot and his preference for simple bilateral deals with immediately realizable benefits.

You know, like normalizing relations with North Korea, sticking a finger in the PRC’s eye, and jumping the line ahead of South Korea and Japan in pursuing economic advantages in the North.

In other words: Eat the burger, Donald.

I expect the foreign policy/military/security quadrant is laboring mightily to convince him otherwise, since it is totally committed to the pivot architecture.  I see the pivot as a futile, expensive, dangerous, and ultimately doomed gambit to sustain American pre-eminence in Asia past its sell-buy date but that’s just me, and maybe devotees of offshore balancing like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump knuckle under to the blandishments of what is, frankly, the main business unit of the US government and a trillion-dollar presence in America’s economy and politics. 

Trump’s initial stimulus/pork barrel/institutional bribery plans centered on a supersized 350 ship navy, so I expect he will find it equally expedient to give it some ego-enhancing missions in the South China Sea.  CSIS is already agitating for its precious FONOPs (“Mischief Reef! Gotta do Mischief Reef!”) even though the underlying strategy of isolating the PRC as an UNCLOS renegade is pretty much an omnishambles with Duterte’s tilt toward China.

In any case, “Presided over U.S. retreat from Asia” is a resumé bullet point that any president would happily defer to his successor.

So I’m leaning toward big ticket muddling instead of opportunistic burger munching. 

The Ghost at the Abe-Trump Banquet: Nobusuke Kishi

Understandably, a lot of the coverage analyzing the impact of Trump on Japan has emphasized the negative: Trump is a trade-war guy, he wants Japan to pay more for bases, he’d be happy to stand aside as Japan slugged it out in some military encounter with North Korea, he’s pulled the plug on TPP…

Quite a long list.  And Prime Minister Abe hurried to New York to reaffirm the relationship and hopefully mitigate some of the awful things Donald Trump has promised to do to Japan.

Abe's takeaway from the November 17 meeting with Trump was "as an outcome of today’s discussion I am convinced Mr. Trump is a leader with whom I can have great confidence in."

 

Ooh baby.

In my most recent piece for Asia Times, And the Winner of the US Election is…Shinzo Abe? I take a contrarian view: that Trumpismo--and the virtual demise of the TPP (in its present form, maybe! but never say never! Read the piece!) is a long-expected and, in some fundamental way, welcome development for Japan when it comes to Japan edging aside the United States as the indispensable nation in Asian trade diplomacy.

Here I'll focus on the military dimension of the U.S.-Japan relationship, illustrated by the parallel experiences of Prime Minister Abe and his grandfather, Prime Minister Nobosuke Kishi.

Japan—and Abe—have been preparing for the moment that the United States would kick Japan to the curb since at least 1971-72, when Nixon screwed Japan royally with the Plaza Accord and PRC recognition.

And Abe’s been anticipating that moment, since his stated ambition is to re-establish Japan as a “normal” nation, freed from the shackles of the peace constitution imposed by the United States and one that completely controls its national and global destiny.

Trump's stated disdain for the structures of the post-war US-Japanese alliance gives Abe the space, indeed the imperative to pursue that dream.

Japan isn’t quite “normal” yet, but via the Cabinet’s reinterpretation of the Peace Constitution and the passage of legislation redefining and enabling collective self defense in 2015, the road to Japanese power projection outside its borders and territorial waters, though winding and narrow, has been blazed.

Well, maybe not too winding and narrow.  The very fact that the legislation was a hopeless farrago of amendments (heroic attempt to explain the law here, thanks to the US Naval War College) to existing policies probably created holes big enough for a Komatsu bulldozer to drive through, if the political will exists.

Most of the debate related to “collective self defense” i.e. incrementally enhancing Japan’s ability to join U.S. military operations not directly involved in defense of the Japanese homeland.  Though much lusted for by US pivoteers, this revision carefully avoided permitting Japan’s front line military participation in whatever mischief the US cooked up.  

However, the “Peace and Security Preservation Legislation” also redefined unilateral Japanese use of force through military action outside its borders “when an armed attack against a foreign country that is in a close relationship with Japan occurs and as a result threatens Japan’s survival and poses a clear danger to fundamentally overturn people’s right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” according to a ‘splainer provided by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Enabling unilateral Japanese overseas military operations is the permanent takeaway from constitutional re-interpretation, no matter what the US does or doesn’t do in Asia.

For Abe, there’s a personal element in his struggle to redefine Japan’s military role, thanks to his bloodlines in the right wing Japanese elite, specifically his grandfather, Nobosuke Kishi, illustrated by the striking parallels between Abe's quest to push through the security legislation in 2015 and his grandfather's epic struggle to renew the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960.

There’s even some pop-psych mumbo-jumbo involved, as this fascinating piece on the timing of the votes on the security legislation from Nikkei indicates:

     July 15 [2015; the date the Diet House of Representatives approved Abe’s security bills] was an important date for Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's grandfather and a former Japanese prime minister. Fifty-five years ago to the day, Kishi's cabinet was forced to resign amid mounting public opposition over the renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.

There's more than LDP astrology at work.  Kishi's experiences are cited by Abe himself as a shaping influence.  Here's a family snap of the two:

In his autobiography, Abe claims that, despite being only six years old, he remembered the traumatic days of 1960:

Abe, in his book, "Utsukushii Kuni-e" ("Toward a Beautiful Country"), recounts his childhood memory of June 18, 1960, the day before the new security pact was passed. Protesters surrounded the parliament building, and Kishi was trapped inside the prime minister's official residence. According to Abe's recollection, Kishi was drinking wine with Eisaku Sato, Kishi's younger brother who later became a prime minister himself, when he said, "I know I am not wrong. If I am going to be killed over this, so be it."

Renewing the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty over massive popular opposition was a transformative moment in Japanese history and for Kishi himself.  It represented a major step in the restoration of the prestige and power of the pre-war conservative elite after it had been broken and discredited by the war and the occupation.

Similar, in fact, that the breakthrough Abe achieved in 2015.

 Abe now finds himself in the same circumstances as his grandfather did 55 years ago: pushing his vision of Japanese transformation within the context of an overbearing U.S. presence that is at the same time welcomed and resented.


Fortunately for Abe, though beset with demonstrators inside and outside the Diet, he was not driven to the extremity of calling in the police to literally carry incensed opposition lawmakers out of the chamber, four cops per legislator, as his grandfather did to force through the vote, thereby earning Kishi the profound hatred and contempt of a generation of Japanese leftists as a Showa militarist retread.

Indeed in 1960 the outrage in Japan at the treaty was so great and the demonstrations so massive that Eisenhower’s envoy trying to make it into town from Haneda was trapped in his limo and had to be rescued by a Marine helicopter.

Understandably, Ike’s visit to Japan to celebrate ratification of the treaty was canceled.

Also fortunately for Abe, he also did not have to endure a subsequent assassination attempt by a disgruntled right-winger, as Kishi did.  For historical/morbid interest, here is the archival raw Pathe footage of Kishi being rushed to the hospital as his assailant is detained.  Also bloodsplatter.  Pathe camerapeople were really on the ball:



The parallels between Abe and Kishi--their circumstances, their outlooks, and their challenges--are striking and significant and go beyond their shared experiences in enacting unpopular security legislation.  Kishi’s special relationship with the United States—and his pivotal role in shaping the Japan-US military partnership—offer other interesting perspectives on the actions of his grandson.

Kishi was more than the postwar shepherd of the LDP’s alliance with the United States.  He had been a key cog in the Imperial war machine and became a vital pillar of American policy in Japan after the war.

Kishi averted prosecution as a war criminal because…well, I will outsource this part of the discussion to a lengthy quote from Sterling and Peggy Seagraves’ Gold Warriors.

In 1956…the Eisenhower administration labored long and hard to install Kishi as head of the…Liberal-Democratic Party and as Japan’s new prime minister.  This was the same Kishi who had been a member of the hard core ruling clique in Manchuria with General Tojo Hideki…Kishi had also signed Japan’s Declaration of War against America in December 1941…During World War II he was vice minister of munitions and minister of commerce and industry, actively involved in slave labor…Following Japan’s surrender, he was one of the most prominent indicted war criminals…[pg. 122.  Seagraves wrong on a point here: Kishi was accused and detained as a Class A war criminal for “crimes against peace” i.e. plotting war, but never formally indicted]

The Seagraves stipulate that Kishi was sprung from prison thanks to a deal brokered by the Japanese underworld to hand over looted war gold to the U.S. as a massive off-the-books slush fund in return for gentle treatment of Japan’s elite by the occupation.  I’m not going to dismiss that allegation.  Dig up a copy of Gold Warriors and judge for yourself.

Anyway, Kishi somehow did avoid prosecution and became the core of America’s preferred ruling party in Japan, the LDP.  Continuing with the Seagraves’ account (which draws heavily on the writings of Michael Schaller):

For ten years, Kishi was groomed as America’s boy…[The American Council for Japan] worked tirelessly to improve Kishi’s mousy image, tutored him in English, and taught him to love Scotch.  To them, Kishi was America’s ‘only bet left in Japan’ [Schaller attributes this quote to John Foster Dulles].

Kishi’s key attraction to the U.S. was, of course, his pro-U.S. tilt.  In a piece posted on Chalmers Johnson's JPRI website, Schaller writes:

Kishi reasserted his loyalty to America's Cold War strategy, pledging to limit contact with China and, instead, to focus Japanese economic attention on exports to the United States and mutual development of Southeast Asia.

Hmm.  Sounds rather...Abe-esque, doesn't it?  Pivoty, perhaps?

Finally, after much struggle and expense, Kishi became Prime Minister in 1957.  According to the Seagraves, during his term the CIA paid the LDP $10 million a year from the slush fund, known as the M-Fund, to help it secure its political fortunes.

Then, in order to gain Kishi’s support for the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty—the one referred to above, the one that was so unpopular Kishi was eventually forced to resign—the Seagraves allege that the U.S. government transferred control of the M-Fund to Kishi—personally. 

The Seagraves, apparently working off an investigative memorandum by Norbert Schlei (long story) allege Richard Nixon, charged with the task of negotiating the new treaty, gave up the fund in return for unspecified assistance in his unsuccessful presidential run in 1960.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around that, but in any case, for whatever reason, it appears that the M-Fund a) did exist and b) control over it did pass from the CIA and into the hands of Kishi and the LDP, kicking off a spectacular and perhaps ongoing carnival of corruption at the highest level of Japanese politics.

The Seagraves allege that Kishi helped himself to 10% of the fund, a not inconsiderable $3 billion in 1960s dollars, and established himself as the LDP’s kingmaker for the rest of his life. 

Writing in 1991, Schlei further alleged that, thanks primarily to the energetic activities of bag man & subsequent Prime Minister and trafficker in Lockheed peanuts Kakuei Tanaka (who helped himself to $10 billion dollars from the fund, according to Schlei), the M-Fund had grown to $500 billion.

The links between the United States and the LDP--which Abe now, of course, heads--are long, deep, and dark, and designed to survive the vagaries of national elections. Abe is a key custodian of that relationship.

Again, Kishi was rather Abe-esque in ramming through an unpopular security bill that above all else pleased the United States enormously.

As to the geopolitical implications of the 1960 security treaty, it permitted the US a massive and permanent military presence in a state that, along other political axes, was increasingly a “normal” sovereign state i.e. a state that was in danger of wandering off in pursuit of an independent or non-aligned foreign policy.  This was not a trivial concern in the 1950s, when Japanese public opinion was largely pacifist, leaning toward a non-aligned foreign policy, and not particularly interested in signing on as America's Cold War partner in Asia.

Per Schaller, Uncle Sam was pretty pleased with Kishi's work, and his determination to push the massively unpopular treaty through the Diet:

During the next 18 months Kishi collaborated closely with Ambassador MacArthur in revising the security treat. The U.S. agreed to scrap many of the most unpopular elements of the 1951 pact in return for the right to retain air, naval, repair, and logistic facilities in Japan--along with a secret protocol preserving the right to move nuclear weapons "through" Japan.  The importance of these bases, and those in Okinawa, became abundantly clear during the Vietnam war.

Given the current rumpus over media "normalization" of Donald Trump, it is interesting to consider how the U.S. press treated a guy who had literally signed a declaration of war against the United States:

In January 1960, Prime Minister Kishi flew to Washington to sign a revised mutual security treaty.  President Eisenhower welcomed him warmly and the America press lavished effusive praise on the visitor, barely mentioning the demonstrations against him and the treaty when he left Tokyo.  Time magazine graced its January 25, 1960 cover with a portrait of a smiling Kishi against a background of humming industry.  The prime minister's "134 pound body,", Time noted, "packed pride, power and passion--a perfect embodiment of his country's amazing resurgence."  Newsweek trumpeted the arrival of a "Friendly, Savy [sic], Salemsan from Japan."  The revised treaty, along with the ubiquitous Sony transistor radios shipped to America, Newsweek explained, symbolized the U.S. alliance with the "economic powerhouse of Asia." 

Here's that Time cover:

 

America was on hand to encourage Japanese re-militarization even to levels that were then, and have remained for half a century, politically unattainable.  A fascinating webpage at MIT commemorating Hamaya Hiroshi's photojournalism of the “Anpo” opposition movement to the Treaty tells us:

[T]he preamble to the treaty voiced the “expectation” that Japan would assume more responsibility for its own defense, meaning in effect that article nine of the constitution would have to be amended or worked around. At the time of the signing, American officials foresaw Japan creating an army of 325,000 to 350,000 within three years. [emphasis added]

For perspective, 50 years later, the JSF still has not gotten there.  As of 2015, JSF claimed 247,000 active and 56,000 reserve personnel.

Here's another family portrait that's too good to pass up: Kishi in 1957 with his two grandchildren in American rootin' tootin' Injun garb he brought back from his trip to Washington.  Shinzo Abe's on the right.

Abe recapitulated his grandfather's close ties to the United States, specifically to the yippy-ki-yay neo-con anti-China wing of the Republican Party.  It is little remembered except, I suppose, by me, Dick Cheney, and the Hudson Institute (where Cheney major-domo Scooter Libby still holds a sinecure and Abe speaks on occasion) that Abe, in his first, doomed prime ministership,  endorsed Cheney's strategy of  a "Asia Democratic Security Diamond" (Japan, India, Australia, and the United States) a.k.a. China containment structure at the time it (and Vice President Cheney) were very unpopular inside the Bush White House.

Now, of course, Abe's Japan is a mainstay of the U.S. pivot to Asia and, as I discuss in my Asia Times article, the keeper of the TPP flame even though it's been doused for now in the United States and many of the other signatory countries.

It is, however, simplistic to characterize Kishi (or Abe) simply as a collaborator doing America’s bidding in Japan. Understanding, appreciating, and exploiting the undeniable reality of American power after it has crushed his nation doesn’t necessarily imply a repudiation of national dreams, nationalism, or for that matter even anti-American national ideology.

Kishi was a defiant scion of a samurai family and Japanese imperialist who rejected the idea of Japan as a pacifist ward of the United States.  In Kishi’s eyes, the 1960 treaty was a blow against American occupation.  In his own words:  

Under the old security treaty, America was the overwhelmingly dominant party. Since Japan did nothing for its own defense, the US military was essentially occupying the whole of Japan, even though the Allied occupation was officially over. As long as that situation persisted, Japan-US relations could not be said to rest on a rational foundation. That’s why a change was absolutely necessary. 

With this perspective, Kishi's success in winning control over the M-Fund looks like another step in his quest for Japanese national and military self-determination.

Presumably President Eisenhower needed to be told something to explain the alienation of the M-Fund billions and the official reason, interestingly enough, according to Schlei was the need for Japan to have direct and expeditious access to black funding to evade constitutional restrictions “in case of war”:

[T]he ostensible reason for ceding control of the Fund to Japan was Japan's need for an emergency source of funds in the event that war should break out.  In such an eventuality, Japan would be especially vulnerable because its constitutional prohibition on military force would severely hamper financial preparation for defense.  In order to make the Fund and even better source of defense funds in time of need, the Japanese negotiatiors agreed that after the Fund was released to Japanese control, they would add substantially to the amount of the Fund.

In other words, it seems that with Japan not ready to revise the constitution as a reciprocal treaty and become a formal full-fledged security partner, Kishi sold the United States on the idea of obtaining control over a huge pile of black money (which he may have regarded as rightfully Japan's in the first place) so he would be able to develop Japan’s military capabilities “off the books”.

By his lights, then, Kishi was fighting a two-front war against domestic pacifism and American hegemony, and restoring Japanese independence as a nation and, potentially, as a security power in the process.

Abe sees himself as heir to that struggle, according to an article in Japan Times:

Amending the Constitution was Kishi’s long-standing political aim. His grandson, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, now views it as his to complete...Kishi believed that early Allied Occupation policy was aimed at snuffing out the patriotism of the Japanese people...Abe appears to bear similar resentment toward the Constitution, although as prime minister he is unlikely to express this publicly.

In this context, it’s good to understand Abe's core political and personal identity as a historical revisionist, i.e. a member of the robust right-wing contingent in Japanese politics that believes the key precipitating factor in the Pacific War was a US act of aggression, the economic blockade, and that Japan subsequently was unfairly subjected to “victor’s justice” and imposition of the onerous pacifist constitution…and unjust persecution of patriots like his grandfather.

I wrote at length about Japanese historical revisionism concerning World War II over at Japan Focus, particularly in the context of revisionists’ love for Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, who wrote a massive dissent to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal decision—the Tribunal that would have tried and sentenced Kishi if he had not been somehow plucked from Sugamo Prison.

The Pal dissent is a cornerstone of the Abe’s narrative of the injustice meted out to Japan’s leaders, as can be seen from this Telegraph report of the aftermath of the LDP’s victory at the polls in 2012:

"The view of that great war was not formed by the Japanese themselves, but rather by the victorious Allies, and it is by their judgment only that [Japanese] were condemned," Mr Abe told a meeting of the House of Representatives Budget Committee on Tuesday. 

In his previous short-lived spell as prime minister, for 12 months from September 2006, Mr Abe said that the 28 Japanese military and political leaders charged with Class-A war crimes are "not war criminals under the laws of Japan." 

Prime Minister Abe made a pilgrimage to Kolkata in 2007 to meet with Pal’s son and receive two pictures of Pal with Kishi.  The photos were taken in 1966, when Pal journeyed to Tokyo to receive Japan’s highest civilian order, ‘The First Order of Sacred Treasure’.

Here’s a picture of Abe’s meeting in Kolkata. 

According to The Hindu:

“The people of Japan love Radhabinod Pal [1886-1967] and still hold him in the highest esteem,” Mr. Abe reportedly told the son of the lone member of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to have found not guilty all those accused in the famous Tokyo War Crimes Trial (1946-48).

In an interesting sidebar concerning the theme of Abe’s apparent fetish with anniversaries that kicked off this piece, there’s this:

“The Prime Minister told me that the new generation in Japan knew little about my father but they might have got to learn of him after a documentary on him shot by a government agency was telecast in that country on August 14,” Mr. Pal said.

“The day of the telecast marked the 62nd anniversary of the Japanese Army deciding that far too many innocent lives had been lost on the two occasions atom bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 [in 1945] to fight on in the Second World War. A day later the Japanese surrendered,” Mr. Pal recalled.

Finally, to understand Abe’s relationship with his American patron, consider this concluding remark by Schaller:

In 1960, as soon as the new treaty became effective, the United States withdrew its support from Kishi--who now seemed like damaged goods.

I would think that Abe has internalized the lessons of how to please the United States through an anti-China tilt and cooperation with the US military.

But he probably also remembers that the United States, though it protected, promoted, and enriched his grandfather, ultimately abandoned him.

When America turns away, Japan has to be ready to stand up.


With the election of Donald Trump, that day has approached with alarming speed.  But Abe has devoted his political life to preparing for it.