A Bent for "Scholarly Propaganda"
Soon, however, the fledgling organization was turning out a lengthening list of publications: Early NACLA Newsletters included analyses of the penetration of Latin America by U.S....
...the movement needed information...
...it was a culture...
...There was a pervasive sense that we were on the verge of a huge political upheaval," she remembers...
...In particular, he worked on a politically explosive pamphlet that documented Columbia University's links to the corporate and defense establishments of the Vietnam era...
...Data, he remembers, came from obscure library sources: military research journals, histories from the "Columbiana" section of the Columbia library, New York City records and deeds...
...People who were "out there" yesterday were in the movement today...
...Preserving interests and preserving environments friendly to those interests was essential, and the U.S...
...The early Newsletter was directed both inward and outward, to the movement and to a larger public...
...military policy, was a graduate student in art history at Columbia University, an antiwar activist and a member of SDS...
...Harriman," "The Rockefeller Empire...
...So one of the discussions we had about trying to combat this was that we needed to show in some systematic way that this was how the U.S...
...This early work was self-consciously in the spirit of the great radical journalist I.F...
...The idea gradually evolved into a critical magazine with a left perspective...
...So I started doing some research on who influenced sugar policy in the United States...
...Jon Frappier, now a private investigator near San Francisco, recalls how the files were obtained: In May, 1968, several thousand Columbia students, on strike to protest the university administration's plan to build a new gym in Harlem's Morningside Park, and opposed as well to the university's research complicity with the war in Vietnam, seized several campus buildings, including the administration offices...
...In 1969, of course, the movement was alive...
...government was obviously making itself available in that capacity...
...He had every newspaper you can imagine, and clippings...
...He said if you're not really committed to doing this on a long-term basis, don't do it...
...policy...
...Stone's credo: Everything is there to be revealed...
...the composition of that complex, a complicated network of military and business interests and institutions...
...It was the kind of newsletter that circulates among organizers, gets handed out at demonstrations and that also begins to be picked up by libraries...
...He went to New York in the fall of 1967 after Goff and Lippincott had set up shop...
...I was drawn to that and started hanging out with the NACLA folks and found the atmosphere congenial, especially compared with the more revolutionary and violent modes of activity that were proliferating at the time...
...So here was a power structure that I felt was largely influencing what U.S...
...not prettying it up, not packaging it to make it more readable or attractive...
...The idea, he remembers, was to create "an activist organization whose role was never totally clear, but it would focus on trying to change U.S...
...It gave rise not only to political conflicts but to conflicts over NACLA's role...
...that Perspective on the Peruvian Mikary-Part I this level of commitment, some of the compafieros at NACLA really wanted to be engaged in 'active' activism, not sitting at a typewriter turning out the newsletter...
...Throughout the 1970s, the group debatedfiercely-whether NACLA should become part of a leftist or working class party, what NACLA's relation to the working class should be, whether NACLA should be an organization with no discipline in the political sense but a group of critical thinkers with a Marxist background...
...Bunker was Lyndon Johnson's Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) and special envoy to the Dominican Republic...
...We tried to deepen that orientation," says Goff, "by focusing on the economic interests behind U.S...
...He got a job with Ramparts magazine which had a contract to write a book on secret funding of domestic and foreign organizations by the CIA...
...The lack of clarity was both a strength and a constant source of tension...
...policy, trying to create a 'foreign policy public' that could create change...
...I think that's always been one of the strengths of NACLA, to be able to speak to a very wide group, to bring people together not necessarlU UU LU Wi...
...In 1969 NACLA published its manual on empirical corporate research, the Research MAPthodolonv Guid_ "This was one of the key origins of what became known as 'the corporate campaign,"' says Goff...
...The truth is in front of you...
...After a trip to Guatemala in early 1966, Frappier had returned to Ann Arbor and learned of the tentative plans to start something that would eventually become NACLA...
...In 1969, NACLA told everyone else how to probe power in a pamphlet that became-in movement terms-something of a best-seller, the Research Methodology Guide...
...We drew material from mainstream sources and footnoted everything...
...Was it a conspiracy...
...Then there was Abe Fortas, Special Counsel to the President: board member of the Sucrest Corporation, very big in Puerto Rico, a large molasses importer...
...There was a group of us doing that research and working at NACLA...
...This was after Ramparts had broken the story of the National Student Association getting [CIA] funds...
...campuses...
...And since the movement was dynamic and growing, there was a thin line between "talking among ourselves" and outreach...
...I became a kind of research activist, and that activity became a key factor in the Columbia student strike of 1968...
...In This Issue: "Suddenly," he remembers, "the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in a massive, overwhelming way, under the pretext of defeating a Communist insurgency...
...corporate interests: "Kaiser's Global Empire," "The Hanna Industrial Complex," "Brown Bros...
...But it was fundamentally seen as a part of the movement's own self-education...
...He had heard through friends that a radical organization called NACLA was making "research and exposure" a central part of its mission...
...The pamphlet was called Who Rules Columbia...
...It was not always, as Goff comments, "a compatible group of people, but NACLA managed to hold it together...
...His house was filled with newspapers...
...The early focus led to a combination of political theory and intensive empirical research...
...y to agreed UtL tO WVI in concert...
...He was the former president and a large shareholder of National Sugar Refining Corporation, the second largest sugar company in the United States...
...The "liberated documents" gave great impetus to "Who Rules Columbia...
...We all thought that...
...But when you look at the Dominican Republic and you look at the Caribbean-more so in that period than now-you see that sugar was the dominant force...
...Then there was Averell Harriman, on the Board of Directors and with strong financial ties to the National Sugar Refining Corporation...
...There's a detective i work aspect to research that has always appealed to me...
...imperialistic operation was, and that Vietnam was no aberration at all, and that there were so many things happening in Latin America and the history of Latin America that provided what we needed to show people in this country that this was endemic to the system...
...We were talking to one another, putting out ideas, communicating, doing research, organizing conferences, getting people together...
...Klare did much of the research that went into the early NACLA power structure studies and the documentation of the military industrial complex on U.S...
...The tension between "politics" and "information," however, has never disappeared...
...Frappier had been Mike Locker's housemate in Ann Arbor, and an activist with SDS and with an SDS offshoot called the Radical Education Project...
...We were all clipping fanatics...
...In 1968 NACLA published a carefully documented study of one university's ties to corporate and military power called Who Rules Columbia...
...On the basis of this kind of work, NACLA was able to bring together a fairly broad spectrum of people unhappy with U.S...
...People were copying and distributing documents found in Kirk's office and it was all right there, the complicity with the military and the CIA...
...We were able to get it off the presses by graduation day...
...He suggested that sometimes it was the small, seemingly unimportant news items obscurely situated in the paper that were, in fact, the mega stories, and that typically you had to hunt through a number of papers to find them...
...Right off the bat, this was interesting...
...NACLA was just getting it out...
...Nor has the tension among a broad variety of left political positions...
...Judy Hellman remembers the ambivalence felt by some Naclistas at being "comfortable" researchers when others were taking great personal and physical risks and making great sacrifices...
...I think we sold a thousand copies that day...
...policy and direction was all about...
...We had all been active in the antiwar movement, working on Ann Arbor's first teach-in in 1965, for example, and I remember not really buying some of the arguments that the liberals were putting out that the Vietnam war was just an aberration...
...Lippincott remembers a NACLA meeting with Stone...
...We were sitting around the office at 106th and Amsterdam and another staff member came running in and said 'they've just taken over President [Grayson] Kirk's office at Columbia and what are we going to do?' And as I remember, we didn't discuss it very long...
...These tensions were to rise throughout the 1970s...
...For some reason, maybe my scholarly bent, I got attracted to the research part of the movement, in particular, seeking out the ties between academic institutions-particularly Columbia-and what we called the military industri- R al complex...
...It was quite obvious to me that the pretext was 99% baloney...
...And who pops up but Ellsworth Bunker...
...But my sense was that the people in NACLA were people who had made a different choice...
...It was a justification for U.S...
...In the late 1960s, Michael Klare, now a prominent analyst of the arms industry and U.S...
...That's how I started...
...Not only were we able to document the charges against the university, but we were part of the efforts to change its policies...
...The idea behind all these works ISmaml bls bm was to understand the system in order to change it...
...Most notably, the pamphlet also drew from documents from the university president's own files...
...we all just packed up and went down there for the duration of the strike...
...foreign policy and then how the military and police forces were brought to bear" to implement that policy...
...We didn't contract out for articles," remembers Goff...
...Interests were clearly articulated...
...What was the 'sugar power elite...
...Back in the mid NACLA N 1960s, in the spirit of Dwight D. ' Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell THE ROCKEF warning to beware of the "military LATIN industrial complex," NACLA founder Mike Locker, then a radical ., sociology student at the University of Michigan, had been researching...
...Later on, there would be a concerted focus on studying political economy and thinking about how an intellectual group could play a role in radical politics...
...domination and it deserved some research and analysis...
...No, it wasn't a conspiracy...
...NACLA was not uncovering arcane information, but revealing the forces at play which, once they were understood, could be dealt with more effectively...
...The early meetings and discussions were attended by people from Christian, Marxist, civil rights and antiwar groups, as well as by professional journalists and academics...
...So I started looking into it and I discovered the sugar industry which I then knew nothing about...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
