COUNTERPUNCH's FERI/Roosevelt Dynasty Connection? — part 1

COUNTERPUNCH's FERI/Roosevelt Dynasty Connection? — part 1 by bob feldman "Worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979...Both Kathy [Christison] and her husband Bill, also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the COUNTERPUNCH website."--COUNTERPUNCH web site on 10/22/02 "I would be ever so grateful if you would be good enough to set aside some time when you are next in Washington in order that my people in the CIA may have the benefit of your observations on your recent trip through Southeast Asia. We are particularly interested in the thoughts and reactions of the people themselves, and I think you can help us understand them better."--CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, in a May 9, 1952 letter to Eleanor Roosevelt "Operation Brotherhood was conceived, controlled, and funded by Colonel Lansdale and the CIA, and yet, as a covert operation, it needed plausible cover to legitimize its credibility as a private, independent project providing humanitarian aid to the unfortunate. The International Rescue Committee [IRC] proved extremely useful in this regard. In February 1955, the IRC joined with the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as the chief sponsor of a major fund-raising campaign. The prominent progressives, Reinhold Niebuhr and Eleanor Roosevelt, accepted the positions of honorary chairs of the drive, with former OSS director William Donovan and Joseph Buttinger named as two of the vice-chairs... "Raising funds for Operation Brotherhood in Vietnam served as a secondary goal of the drive...The campaign also provided an excellent opportunity to persuade the American people of the urgent necessity of aiding the Diem regime."--COVERT NETWORK: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA by Eric Thomas Chester in 1995 "I would like to see all progressive groups work together. But since some of us prefer to have our staffs and policy-making groups completely free of any American Communist infiltration if we can possibly prevent it, while others have not quite as strong a feeling on this subject, it is natural that there should be two set-ups...The American Communists seem to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential..."--Americans for Democratic Action[ADA] Founding Meeting Keynote Speaker Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947 The COUNTERPUNCH newsletter is published by the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity [IAJC]. A senior advisor of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute [FERI] in recent years, Ford Roosevelt, has also been the vice-president of the IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH. FERI Senior Advisor Ford Roosevelt is one of the grandsons of former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR] and Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1947,Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the anti-communist Cold War liberals who set up the Americans for Democratic Action [ADS] "parallel left" political group. One of the editors of COUNTERPUNCH, former WALL STREET JOURNAL columnist Alexander Cockburn, has also been a columnist for THE NATION magazine for many years. Coincidentally, both NATION editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and NATION editor vanden Heuvel's father, International Rescue Committee [IRC} board member William vanden Heuvel, sit on the board of directors of the FERI organization to which the IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH vice-president is linked as a senior advisor. According to its Form 990 for 1999, IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH takes in around $178,000 each year from its alternative journalism activity. It then spends around $46,000 to print up its newsletter, around $35,000 to advertise its newsletter and around $15,000 on administrative costs. Unlike most of the other anti-conspiracist alternative media gatekeepers, IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH doesn't appear to have received any big Establishment Foundation grants in recent years. But its vice-president, Ford Roosevelt, is a member of a Roosevelt Dynasty that possessed upper-class wealth and much political power during the 20th-century. The inherited wealth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's family came from both the Delano family and the Roosevelt family. In his 1975 book, A RENDEVOUS WITH DESTINY: THE ROOSEVELTS OF THE WHITE HOUSE, the now-deceased apparent stepfather of IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH Vice-President Roosevelt--Elliott Roosevelt--recalled how FDR's mother obtained her inherited wealth: "Delano ships sailing out of New Bedford made the family rich...The China trade accelerated the piling up of money, some of it undoubtedly earned from the sale of opium in an era when opium and its derivatives could be bought openly in virtually any city in the world... "...One of Granny's uncles, Franklin Hughes Delano...augmented the fortune by marrying Laura Astor and promptly retired from commercial business...The Franklin Delanos had no children, so a share of their wealth fell into Granny's hands; she shared her gratitude by naming Father for her beneficent uncle... "When her father, Warren Delano II, died, he left her $1,338,000 of the funds he had accumulated in China..." A RENDEVOUS WITH DESTINY also describes how the Roosevelt side of FDR's family obtained its inherited wealth: "By the end of the American Revolution the New World Roosevelts had enjoyed well over one hundred years of steadily expanding prosperity...None of them made anything approaching Delano money, but they bought land, thousands of acres of it, along the Hudson to qualify as landed gentry...Not until the railroad boom came along in the nineteenth century did any of our Roosevelt ancestorrs amass a few million dollars." According to FDR's son, before FDR moved into the White House in 1933, he sold all his shares of mining company stock and instructed his mother to sell hers. As U.S. President between 1933 and 1945, IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH Vice President Roosevelt's grandfather not only received a salary of $75,000 and an expense allowance of $25,000. FDR also was given a subsidy of $100,000 a year by his mother while he was in the White House--until FDR's mother died in 1941. IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH Vice President Roosevelt's grandmother also brought in money for FDR's family during the Great Depression of the 1930s. From "the few hundred thousand dollars of inherited capital which she brought into her marriage," Eleanor Roosevelt received an income of $5,000 a year in 1936, according to RENDEVOUS WITH DESTINY. In addition, in 1936, FDR's wife also "earned twenty times as much from her rounds on the lecture circuit and from her...columns, MY DAY, which appeared in some sixty newspapers..." According to the 1987 book ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND THE MEDIA by Maurine Beasley: "For a woman of her day, Eleanor Roosevelt earned an astonishing amount of money while she was first lady; $75,000 as an advance on her autobiography, for an example, and an estimated $156,000 from her radio broadcasts in 1940 alone." Following his mother's death in 1941, FDR inherited "virtually everything she had, including the sum of $920,715," according to Elliott Roosevelt's book. The RENDEVOUS WITH DESTINY book also noted that when IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH Vice President Roosevelt's grandfather suddenly died in 1945, "he left a net estate of $1,974,316 and $562,142 worth of life insurance which went to the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia. (The Warm Springs Foundation is presently called the Roosevelt Warm Springs Rehabilitation Development Fund). Among the stocks and bonds contained in FDR's portfolio when he died were 800 shares of General Electric stock. Of the $1,439,171 worth of assets that were left for the trust fund (following the payment of funeral and administrative expenses by FDR's family), the bulk was left to Eleanor Roosevelt. What remained in the trust fund after Eleanor Roosevelt's death in 1962 was then passed onto FDR's five children--Jimmy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt and Elliott Roosevelt--and FDR's grandchildren. The book ELEANOR: THE YEARS ALONE by Joseph Lasch noted that, according to FDR's will, following Eleanor Roosevelt's death: "The estate was to be divided into five equal parts. Each of his children was to get half of his or her one-fifth share as well as the income from the other half of the one-fifth share, which was to be held in trust during their lives and to go...to the children of each of the five." The same book also revealed that in 1946--the year before she gave the keynote address at the anti-communist "parallel left" ADA's founding convention--Eleanor Roosevelt's "total income, including $30,000 from her husband's estate, would come to $80,000 annually." According to the book MOTHER R: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT'S UNTOLD STORY by Elliott Roosevelt, FDR left the bulk of his estate to Eleanor Roosevelt "so that she would enjoy the income from it to the end of her life, when the principal was to be shared equally among us children." In addition to what she inherited from FDR in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt still also "had an inherited income of $8,000 a year," plus "the proceeds from Father's life insurance to tide her over until she was allowed to begin drawing the interest on his estate," according to the MOTHER R: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT's UNTOLD STORY book. As a Presidential widow after 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was also able to "take advantage of the franking privilege which enabled her to answer her mail without the expense of buying stamps," according to Elliott Roosevelt's MOTHER R. book. After helping to found the anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action [ADA], the grandmother of IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH Vice President Roosevelt continued to make a lot of money from the marketing of her mainstream media celebrity status. As the ELEANOR: THE YEARS ALONE book recalled: "The range of her interests was reflected in her taxable income from professional activities which, in 1954, was almost $90,000: $36,000 from MC CALL's, $20,000 from her column, and $25,000 from Colston Leigh for lectures." Even just a year before her death in 1962 at the age of 78, Eleanor Roosevelt was still able to earn a lot of money. According to ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND THE MEDIA, "In 1961...Mrs. Roosevelt's professional income came to more than $100,000, of which lectures accounted for $33,500 and payments for her writing close to $60,000..." Much of the money that Eleanor Roosevelt earned between 1945 and 1962 was donated to tax-deductible charity organizations. But, after her death, what was left of both FDR's estate and her own wealth apparently was destined for inheritance by her children and her grandchildren. So if a grandchild of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt ever decided to help subsidize a publication like COUNTERPUNCH with inherited money, it's possible that the origin of much of that money would be what was left by FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. An alternative media group which was relying on Roosevelt Dynasty money to subsidize its work might possibly tend to avoid scrutinizing the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute [FERI} from an anti-corporate/anti-war radical left perspective--especially if the alternative media group's vice-president was a senior advisor to FERI. Such an alternative media group might also tend to avoid examining the anti-communist role that the ADA played during the Cold War era, since the ADA's classist politics reflected Eleanor Roosevelt's politics during the Cold War era. A quick glance at a book written by COUNTERPUNCH's co-editors in the late 1990s--WHITE OUT--does indicate, for instance, that there is no reference to either ADA's Cold War era role or to Eleanor Roosevelt-- although the COUNTERPUNCH co-editors do note that "Dulles's brother, Allen, head of the CIA, dispatched Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup against "the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. end of part 1