Chapter Five - High up in the balcony, London, 1973

“Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.”

--Margaret Mead

High up in the balcony, London, 1973

Sometimes life provides insights when least expected. Sometimes those unexpected insights prove to be worth their weight in diamonds no matter how long we have to wait for the clear, clean edges of thought to crystallize.

The performance that evening at the opera house in London included singing by Ramona Dewitt, but although a polite hoard of attendees from all over the world were in attendance and the performers were excellent, no one had come just to hear the singing. Tonight marked the pomp filled opening of the first Environmental Conference for the United Nations, held here in England and attended by everyone who was anyone. Her Majesty, the Queen of England, was also in attendance.

Gladys Elliot Ramsey had been looking forward to this event for a good long time; the environment had become her issue in the years following her divorce while still struggling to raise her children alone and without the support of her wealthy ex-husband, Lionel Ramsey. Ex-husbands who are attorneys rarely pay very much in support, Gladys had discovered. The law includes the means to avoid accountability for those who wield it.

Gladys had become expert in bartering for lessons in tennis and tutoring in literature in exchange for any and everything her two girls needed. She tried not to complain. Her girls starting working when they were fifteen; there would be no long, slow summers visiting with friends and vacationing for them. The terms of the divorce, however, did mandate that their father pay for the college of their choice. He complained bitterly that this forced him to cut back on the two-month vacation his second family spent in Europe every summer. How, he would complain to all in range of his voice, could that bitch do this to him and his innocent children?

Gladys tried not to make money an issue. That would not have been acceptable.

Tonight was a non-monetary compensation for her many years of efforts. So it had been a shock when Gladys and Valerie realized that no ticket had been provided for Gladys. Valerie, sensing the disappointment of her long term and unpaid assistant, insisted Gladys use the one ticket provided to her. The world famous psychiatrist was used to galas; she would stay at the hotel, comfortably ensconced with dinner served up in her room, a good book and bed her earnestly sought companions. Dr. Newcomb really preferred it that way, she said with a twinkle in her eye. She had discovered an Agatha Christie she had never read in the bookshop around the corner from the Savoy, where they were staying. That would keep her well entertained.

It had been Gladys, a volunteering divorced mother, who first introduced and familiarized Valerie with the workings of the UN from her previous work at the University of Chicago. It was right that Gladys should go.

Gladys had loved the pomp and spectacle of galas since she was an undergraduate at Windhammer College. Chatting and seeing and being seen had always been a part of her life. Dressing for the event, she checked her gold silk gown. It had been designed by de Moi for her cousin Felicia, who had passed it on her. Felicia did not wear her gowns twice, and this one had been purchased for her daughter’s début in Philadelphia last year. The cousins were nearly identical is size and had been born only thirteen months apart.

Gladys did not envy Felicia her life of ease. Her life, Gladys thought, had been more interesting, if rocky in spots.

Gladys had picked Windhammer for college for herself because it was close to her home as well as for its academic excellencies. College was an expense that did not trouble her parents; it would be paid for by the family trust.

From Windhammer, Gladys could go home to spend time with friends and her parents. Some girls her age avoided their families but Gladys had been an only child who had learned to read and think on the gentle laps of Rector Elliot and his loving wife, Eleanor. The couple had waited nearly twelve years before their one daughter entered their lives and became the focus of their home. Rector Elliot was the last son of a large family of wealthy entrepreneurs. His interests had diverged from his family’s into arenas of the personal and spiritual. The husband and wife started each morning with a reading from the Bible; Gladys heard the Bible at least as often as she heard the classic fairy tales.

In Philip Elliot’s wife he had found a soul mate; both of them were uninformed on the fine points of mergers, stock, and management that filled the time of their closest relatives; both were sensitive and nurturing to their small daughter and to the flock they served.

That community centered on Eastchester County, New York, and included some of the wealthiest families in the world. This was home to them. They had met at a debut for the daughters of members of the Yacht Club. Eleanor had been visiting Pooch (Sylvia) Smith, a friend from school. Eleanor was the youngest daughter of a Main Line Philadelphia family; her husband’s family had fought the Revolution from New York. Then they had lived near the Murray estate now a part of New York City. Their families were long accustomed to wealth.

Gladys had gone on to Windhammer from the very good and up scale prep school paid for by her grandparents. She had taken with her a cheerful ignorance of the world beyond the rarified circles in which she had been raised. College at Windhammer had opened up many avenues, but others had remained closed. If you don’t know the door is there you never think to look for the key that will open it.

Gladys’ years at school had been exciting and rewarding. She had entered school during the third year of the Second World War, 1943, and had accepted as natural the many changes that war brought. She knitted for the troops, carrying her yarn and needles into class with her. She was careful about what she ate; the family maid had been instructed to cut back on their consumption of meat and eggs. The whole family carefully saved tin foil for the war effort. Gladys read the papers every day, discussing events with her parents over the dining table. She admired the courage and perseverance of Eleanor Roosevelt. The First Lady was her Godmother and just what a woman should be. Unconsciously, she took her as a model.

Gladys‘s boy friend, Jason Mitford, was a student at Yale. The two had met at the Yacht Club in West Harbor. Gladys was spending the summer crewing for Emily Randolph, a friend from Thatcher School. It was just the two of them at first. They shared a love of the sea, horses and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Gladys would slip Kipling’s collected works into her pocket and read aloud when they were out past the shoals onto the open water, mixing the excitement of India and war with the currents of the sea and air. Sometimes they would read Emily Dickenson. Emily had been named for the Massachusetts poet and thrived on the intensely anguished cadences of her verse.

Gladys also brought Whinny, her chestnut riding horse, to stay in the vastly cool stables with Chester, Emily’s jumper, and the small legion of other horses that resided there. Days with Emily were spent in motion, either on horseback or on the water. After riding they would walk the horses cool and then slip off in the dark interior of the stables, rubbing the horses dry and clean with towels and curry combs. They always smelled like horse, even when they were on the water; Nanny lectured with little effect in the long free space of summer. So it had been just the two of them until they turned 14.

Then Jason had joined them.

Jason was a friend of Emily’s brother Jonathan; he was fifteen but instead of ignoring them, he agreed to come along when they went out early one morning on the Gaucho, Emily’s little sailing dingy.

He went once and then somehow it became a routine.

That one day had turned into many days when Jason appeared for an early breakfast on the long wraparound veranda, served by Nanny on the teak dining set that comprised part of the furnishings that extended the possibilities for conversation and contemplation into the outdoors. The table was always set with a linen tablecloth and perfectly folded napkins, although outside the stainless steel tableware was used. It was at the opposite end of the three-story mansion so as not to disturb Emily’s parents. They ate eggs and buttermilk pancakes still crisp from sizzling in butter and coated with fresh, hot maple syrup that stuck to the tongue it was so thick. They drank orange juice squeezed by Cook just for them that morning. If they had any in the kitchen, cream-dipped berries would accompany their meal.

Then they sailed. The long days and the cadence of Kipling’s poetry had forged a bond. Jason was fascinated by the war stories of the Englishman and had memorized the Last of the Light Brigade. Reciting it to the backdrop of waves crashing on rocks had moved all three to tears. The three talked, dreamed, and laughed; they had experienced shell pink mornings and the glossing and dimming of summer.

They inhaled the class-conscious heroism of Kipling, adding his characters to their growing understanding of honor and courage. Their world was a simple place. Right and wrong remained firmly engraved, defined by ideals forged from the lives of those they admired.

Summer with Emily and Jason threaded through Gladys’ life becoming a part of her forever.

After her quiet wartime debut, held in New York although her mother would have preferred Philadelphia, summers with Emily ended. Emily spent her next summer in California with her married sister who lived in San Francisco. They wrote, talked on the phone, and saw each other briefly from time to time. To Gladys, it was a long winter away.

Jason went on to Yale, another in a long line of Mitfords to study there. But Jason left before finishing. He refused to say why at the time. That had been shock enough. Then he joined the Army instead of waiting for a slot that would have guaranteed his safety in the OSS or one of the politically oriented corps that worked in and around Washington D.C. These units were populated with a cross section of everyone they knew. Most had finished college and gone to officer candidate school or directly into the OSS. That was how it was. The Regular Army was not for their kind.

He wrote back, sometimes.

Back at school at Windhammer, Gladys wrote to Jason every day while he went through basic training and was shipped out to the European Theatre. That year she had studied the War in class with her favorite professor, Dr. Sybil Gwynn. Dr. Gwynn had insights into the political events that astonished Gladys. Flipping through a list of OSS agents years later, Gladys discovered the name of her favorite professor, Dr. Gwynn, listed as a covert operative. As she slowly ran her finger over the list of OSS her shock grew.

She had not realized back in the 1940s that Yale was ground zero for the OSS. She had not known that the College Librarian at Yale had been in charge of information transfer from the OSS to the newly organized Central Intelligence Agency.

Windhammer was not the closest women’s college to Yale. But Gladys’ family, at least the men, had been going there for generations. Gladys met Yale men at nearly every party she attended; a good portion of the families who attended the church her father had had in his charge for so many years were Yale men. Over her years in college there she had dated at least ten young men who had gone on to the OSS or the CIA.

Evidently there was a lot she had not known. No one had told her.

For Jason, joining up was a decision that also changed his life. He found himself fighting his way up the Italian Peninsula in 1943 in a war that never seemed to end. The letters from Gladys had been the bright spots of sanity that sustained him, but when he came home he was a very different man. His body and soul had been wounded and in the wake of World War II only visible scars were real.

Her work with the American Field Service had been fun and involving. She had met interesting people, traveled, and done her best to help accomplish the inspiring goals of their charter. She had served for a time as their Treasurer. Those goals were to connect people through service throughout the world, helping to create a new world order. That had sounded necessary and good. Why, she had wondered occasionally, was there all of this emphasis on politics?

Gladys had attended a conference of the American Field Service as the representative from Windhammer. It had been something of a fluke. The appointed representative had eloped with a fiancé who would prove to be a very temporary husband. Careful of her obligations, however, the young heiress had sent on to Gladys the agenda, tickets, and paperwork. Gladys had gotten on the train and gone with only two days notice.

The Conference took place in Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1947. It had been an inspiring occasion, filled with new friendships and some astonished looks from people with whom she was acquainted. Later, this too would return to call into question the world she thought she knew.

Gladys had just finished college and was working as a volunteer for the American Field Service when Jason returned. He demanded the letters he had written her and tore them up while she stood watching in shock. He left her standing there, alone. Emily had gone on to Mt. Holyoak and marriage to a stockbroker whose family had owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange since it began. The company, Randolph, Bates, Farnum and Fineman, had offices in New York on Canal Street. They also had offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and London. Emily would be traveling extensively in the years to come. Her first child, a son, was born in London less than a year after her spectacular wedding.

Eighteen months later, Gladys married an up and coming attorney who had made partner in an old and established law firm in the City. The marriage would last long enough for her to give birth to two daughters.

After the break up of Gladys’ marriage brought on by a series of affaires on the part of her husband, Gladys found surcease in what was really a continuation of the work she had begun even before her graduation from Windhammer. That work and raising Emily and Lilith kept her too busy for needless introspection.

Gladys tucked the ticket neatly into her evening bag along with her compact. She glanced in the mirror, tossing back her head just a little and smiling. The event included a lavish buffet during the intermission, so she would not need more than a few dollars for incidentals.

Walking into the main room, Gladys could see the VIP section reserved for the people she and Valerie had worked with right up front in the first balcony and so was astonished when the usher, glancing at the ticket she presented, escorted her upstairs to the nether regions of the highest balcony. There, glaring at her, twisting his wrist and jerking his head in the odd manner that had become so familiar to Gladys, was Paul Roofer, obviously surprised and annoyed to see her. He asked abruptly where Dr. Newcomb was sitting.

Looking at his sunken eyes blazing with anger, Gladys felt a stab of insight into this man who had worked so hard to make himself an integral part of the world of the United Nations. It was an ugly view into his soul. She had a lot to think about.

Dr. Newcomb had made her mark in the world and on the world in so many ways. Her foundational work on the neurobiology of the human mind, its functions, and the connective threads that created cooperation between people were now studied nearly everywhere on Earth. Where most psychiatrists were uninvolved with the larger world, however, Dr. Newcomb was a passionate advocate for the personal integrity of people everywhere. Her gold eyes flashed at reports of injustice and the heat of anger easily ignited her voice in protest.

Gladys loved her clear vision.

Breakfast the next morning was taken in Dr. Newcomb’s suite. Dr. Newcomb was up when Gladys knocked and already having her one soft boiled egg – two and a half minutes – and her slice of unbuttered toast, washed down with tomato juice and coffee. For Gladys she had ordered a croissant and delicately sliced fruit. Dr. Newcomb’s unceasing energy kept her as thin as a rail, although she was a dedicated trencher woman.

“How did the opening ceremony go?” Valerie looked up at her, her old eyes twinkling slightly.

“The ceremony was just what you would expect but…” Gladys paused, considering carefully what to say. “the ticket was for a seat up in the rafters.” She looked at Valerie. Valerie’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“Interesting. Now I wonder what…any ideas?” Valerie looked at her, head cocked slightly to one side, her expression all attention and inquiry.

“I, or you, were expected. The seat was right next to Paul Roofer.” Gladys smiled impishly. Valerie laughed. “He did not look very happy when I arrived.”

“If Paul Roofer is unhappy, then we must have done something right.” Valerie said, smiling at Gladys just before spooning up the last golden remnants of egg.

Both Valerie and Gladys had long since learned to be wary of Roofer.

Paul Roofer was a fixture at the United Nations. Roofer had been a classmate of Randolph S. Branch at Yale. Randolph S. Branch, who was himself the son of former Senator and oilman Bristol Branch, went on to become vice president and then president years later.

Roofer was forever around to be tripped over. Appointed through his connections, his presence had also over time correlated strongly with odd happenings that Valerie and Gladys could not fail to notice. For instance, previously unannounced changes in meetings, times, places and the wording of text that had been unanimously agreed on by committees operating out of the United Nations suddenly changed. The typists who prepared documents were sometimes seen chatting with Roofer. It had taken several years for them to notice this pattern. During those years, Gladys and Valerie had also become aware of the activities of Roofer’s more extended connections.

All of Roofer’s associates shared some common interests. Senator Branch, Roofer’s roommate at Yale in Fulbright College, was an oilman. He thought, breathed, and it was rumored, imbibed, oil. Certainly the family business consumed crude oil from all over the world. It was rumored that he had favored space flight until his staff of petroleum engineers had persuaded him that there could be no oil on the Moon.

Two of Senator Branch’s closest associates and business partners were Ralph ‘Musk’ McCallum, an oilman from Canada who ran a huge conglomerate of interests all over the world, and B.A. Shreveport, another individual whose massive oil empire included refineries and pipelines all over the world.

Oil, Gladys learned, was something that needed to be fed unceasingly into refineries for money to continue to flow.

Valerie had once said that all human action took place through human cooperation between individuals who shared common ideas. Sometimes cooperation was a good thing. Cooperation allied with innovation had created the cure for polio. Valerie had postulated some of the first theories on the neurobiology of cooperation, linking this field to economics, her second life interest.

But cooperation also founded the Nazi Party, she often reminded her students while lecturing at her classes at NYU. Motives and goals provide the direction for human action, but that direction could take you anyplace. In the case of Roofer, it seemed that his intentions were his own self-aggrandizement. Being seen with Valerie, sitting next to one of the most respected figures associated with the founding of the United Nations at this first meeting, must have been very important to him.

Neither Gladys of Valerie could see any other motivation for his odd behavior.

The United Nations had been founded in the wake of World War II to promote cooperation between nations and individuals. The focus of their activities was on governmental institutions. This was very much an artifact of the attitudes and preconceptions of their generation.

The world in the aftermath of the Second World War saw all human action as appropriately controlled through government. This had been the view of Marx, a reflection of the trend towards a larger and more centralized government that had become dominant in America with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. The succeeding decades of collusion with the Robber Barons of trade had brought its eventual reaction but little move towards reversing the trend.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Business was seen as a necessary evil, an adjunct to human action to be tolerated but distrusted. Business viewed government as both enemy and potential ally. If influence was for sale, the grandsons of the Robber Barons knew where to buy.

A small cadre of the best and brightest, many of them from Yale, had experienced the Second World War through their activities in the OSS, drawing their life lessons and truths from the delicious games of convert action necessitated by wartime intelligence. R & A, Research and Analysis, had become the province of those who could hone their academic abilities to produce rapid response assessments of probabilities based on reams of material sent to them from OSS officers operating in remote locations.

Some in R & A and throughout the two theatres, as well as at home, had met first in the darkened crypt of the Skull and d’Bones, the secret society that had selected and funded the elect of Yale for generations. The war years had broadened their acquaintanceships into every conceivable part of the world.

Secrecy was a way of life for them. For members of the Skull and d’Bones, that was natural enough. Those who were not even supposed to acknowledge that they had been ‘tapped’ could withstand the temptation to discuss their secrets because secrecy brought with it many rewards. Members of the Society gained, along with cash grants, connections that guaranteed their financial and social futures. This was an enticing reality for those initiated into the mysteries of the OSS and later the CIA. Money and the privileges of power were a part of their rebirth rights as Members of the Skull.

The OSS and later the CIA breathed in the culture of secrecy from the esoteric traditions brought back to America from the Illuminati of Germany, assuming for themselves the patina of righteousness that the Knights Templar had worn as a badge of honor. Some of them referred to themselves as the Knights of Darkness.

For these, the anointed, the heady heights of power and respect had come early. Many were still undergraduates or had received their degrees through the accelerated program at Yale when their careers began. Many of them had inherited wealth and knew that their choices in life would never be dictated by monetary need.

When the games had threatened to end along with the hostilities of World War II, these soldiers of fortune still wanted to play. The Cold War provided the reason for the games to continue. Communism had replaced the Socialist Nazi regimes of Germany, Italy and the Imperialist monarchy of Japan as the focus of evil rampant in the world. How or why anyone in the CIA thought that a collectivist system could compete in the arts, literature, or consumer production was a question that went unanswered. But those books, artists and suspect writers on their list suddenly found their careers frozen, their books removed from the shelves of every book store in the nation, and their friends cooling.

The logic of secrecy had been mainstreamed from the windowless block of stone and gothic presence on campus and injected into policy at the highest levels of American government. It had happened as a natural transition, transfusing the power of old money and privilege into the innermost workings of intelligence within government, putting the covert tools of diplomacy and the crypt into the hands of men with very different rules for living.

The games of the Cold War would be played out using the rules practiced by the boys of Skull and d’Bones. They would be brought to maturity by men hungry for power.

News in Brief

Americans, rattled by continued threats of war, today heard the President of the United States urge them to pay close attention to directives from Nuclear Preparedness Authorities, keeping a sufficiency of supplies and water to tide them over in case of war. The Mayor of New York, moved to action by the ensuing crisis, announced at a press conference today that in the case of Nuclear War, the City will not ticket cars illegally parked on the left side of each street.

March 20 – 22 1970

The National Organization of Women meets in Chicago to organize. Among other motions, the delegates vote on a proposal to adopt the use of Ms. instead of the traditional Miss and Mrs. or simply dropping the use of an honorific altogether. The motion passed by one vote. The woman who cast the deciding vote, Ellen Selfridge, the founding president of the organization at Princeton where she taught, immediately began using the honorific herself. She had wanted to for a good long time.

It meant a lot to the slender young mother of two. Seated in the far back corner she had watched as the standing count worked its way through the rows of women, nearly 300 in number, representing a national membership that had just topped 2,000. It had been a close vote, a ballot decided by a majority of one. Without an honorific before her name, no woman could be published in a paper or seated in the faculty dining room at Princeton. But choosing between Mrs. And Miss defined every woman within the context of her relationship with a man. The women here were building the tools to make equality more than a dream, and it was a dream that had been Ellen’s own since her childhood in the nearly Victorian world of England of the 30’s.

Ellen did not notice that afterwards she sat just a little straighter. But she did.

December - 1971

This month a group in Denver Colorado founded a new political party. The Libertarian Party founded on the ideas of Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand, elected officers and moved to adopt a platform. The newly elected National Chairman of the group, Dennis Neilson, a former member of the Republican Party and Young Americans for Freedom said their action came about because of Wage and Price Controls, a policy mandated by President Ricardo Dixon earlier this year.

December – 1972

When the Electoral College polled today making, official the election of the President of the United States, one Elector from Vermont, a Roy MacBrain, cast his vote for the Libertarian candidates for President and Vice-President. Those were Dr. Jonas Hopsmeyer, a professor of philosophy at USC and Teri North, a talk-show host from Oregon. This marks the first time a woman has gotten a vote from the Electoral College for either office.

October 1973 - Blandinger Tape: Dixon Too Drunk to Meet

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AB) -- Five days into the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, with the superpowers on the brink of confrontation, President Dixon was too drunk to discuss the crisis with the British prime minister, according to newly released transcripts of tape recordings.

Horace Blandinger’s assessment of the president's condition on the night of Oct. 11, 1973, is contained in more than 20,000 pages of transcripts of Blandinger’s phone calls as the president's national security adviser and secretary of state -- records whose privacy he had guarded for three decades. The National Archives released them Wednesday.

GUARDIAN by Decon Gray - The USA breathed a huge collective sigh of relief when, in early 1973, the wretched Vietnam War came to an end - for the Americans, at any rate. Then the glow faded as a vast domestic scandal unfolded. Even before the dramatic events called Rivergate were played out, Vice-president Ricke Blintz was forced to resign after the revelation of his systematic income tax evasion, and grim allegations of other even more criminal frauds.

1975 - New Recruit to the Republican Party

The Republican Party has gained a surprising new, perhaps we should say neo recruit, in the person of Hyman Opal, a former neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, is now calling himself a neo-conservative.

1978 – The North Atlantic

Built in Aberdeen, the vessel that became the Rainbow Marine served the British Ministry for research before becoming a North Sea fishing vessel. It was bought by Green4Peace for around $70,000 in 1978. Used in campaigns against Icelandic, Spanish and Russian whaling activity, the harvesting of seal pups in Canada, and the dumping of nuclear waste by France and Britain, it was refitted for work in a new campaign in 1985.

Loyal Barrington, the President of Green4Peace, followed his conscience and authorized the use of the Rainbow Marine to patrol the oceans in defense of the whales. His action was a response to the death of thousands of whales killed in recent years and a rapidly dropping population of whales’ world wide.