Quote:Files of Chester V. Clifton, November 22, 1963–January 20, 1969

This Series contains records, none of which have been digitized.

This series consists of the working files of C. V. Clifton during his time as Military Aide to the President under President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson. The files reflect the subject matters for which Clifton was responsible.

Access: Partially Restricted
Access to some of these archival materials is restricted for the following reason:

    Donated - Security Classified
    Top Secret

Quote:

HIROSHIMA
WHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?

From what we read in the general media, it seems like almost everyone felt the atomic bombings of Japan were necessary. Aren't the people who disagree with those actions just trying to find fault with America?

DWIGHT EISENHOWER

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.

More notable quotes on the atomic bombing.

Quote:Col. J. Leo Bourassa. He headed up the "Special Facilities Division" within the Office of Emergency Planning. He is the person mentioned in the Blue Book file dealing with the Kecksburg crash.

Aerial photographs of Mount Weather show the presidential heliport where the president is dropped off. The tower that directs in the president’s flight is known as "bluegrass tower." In the Kecksburg Blue Book file right after J. Leo Bourassa’s name you will find (Code blue grass). Another connection to the code "bluegrass" is a paranormal CIA project started in 1955, which I haven’t confirmed yet.

While at the Johnson library I was looking for files on Bourassa and on the "Special facilities Division" to see how it fit into the Kecksburg crash. What I learned about Bourassa while at the library is that he had also been heavily involved in the 1965 blackout of New York City. In fact, he wrote a report to Ellington detailing his findings. Bourassa’s findings hinted at the possible role of UFOs in the blackout.

The White House Role in Crashed UFO Retrievals by Grant Cameron.

Quote:The Military: Downgrading a Whistle Blower

Monday, Aug. 27, 1984

The Pentagon has long been tough on employees who publicly challenge its way of doing business. While working in the Penta gon's Program Analysis and Evaluation (P A & E) office, Franklin ("Chuck") Spinney (TIME, March 7, 1983) earned the ire of his superiors with reports on how the military routinely underestimates the costs and overrates the effectiveness of high-technology weaponry.

Spinney has been given a mediocre rating ("fully successful," Pentagonese for soso) on his civil service evaluation, which could sink his chances for a promotion or a pay raise. His supporters charge that David Chu, a Reagan appointee and head of P A & E, pressured Spinney's immediate superiors into underrating the dogged whistle blower. When Republican Congressman Jack Edwards of Alabama called Deputy Secretary of Defense William Taft IV to complain, Taft denied that Chu or any other political appointee had tried to influence the evaluation. Such action would have violated civil service rules. Spinney maintains that he will go to court, if necessary, to fight the evaluation. At week's end there were signs that the Pentagon might review its finding.

Quote:In an age when we ought to know better, the public perception of the evolution of science and technology retains the flavor of old just-so stories. In these tales, great discoveries or inventions are typically made by a single person.

...

Recently, attempts to address historical slights have lapsed instead into another kind of just-so story. Over the past two decades it has become standard, even fashionable, to credit the invention of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even cell phones to 1940s movie star Hedy Lamarr. The story is appealing and exotic: Lamarr, an intelligent woman and amateur inventor, was shoehorned into a Hollywood culture that valued her as a screen siren and nothing more. Since a Google doodle was devoted to the actress in 2015 and Bombshell, a documentary about her, was released in 2017, the popular history has become chiseled in marble—well, let us say, arrayed in bits.

It is true that Lamarr and her unlikely partner, the radical modernist composer George Antheil, hold a patent for an important radio-transmission method that finds its way into several modern communications technologies, including Bluetooth. But it is equally true that their patent was hardly the first in this area. It is further true that the earliest operational systems employing this technique were created after World War II independently of their patent, and the essential idea can be traced back nearly to the birth of radio itself. If Lamarr and Antheil’s attorneys had performed a more diligent patent search, different doodles might well have graced Google.

The Actress and the Composer

The tale of Hedy and George might have been written by Arthur Conan Doyle, or even Graham Greene. Briefly: At an early age Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler in Austria, married Fritz Mandl, a Nazi sympathizer and Austria’s leading munitions manufacturer on the eve of World War II. Lamarr escaped this unhappy union (as she tells it, disguised as a maid whom she had drugged) and soon after ended up in Hollywood. Through a mutual interest in the obscure field of applied endocrinology, she met George Antheil. Revealing that she possessed a flair for inventing weapons, Hedy shared with him an idea for a secure torpedo guidance system that employed a novel technique known as frequency hopping.

[frequency hopping explained]
...

An invention notebook in George’s handwriting reveals that he was influenced by Philco’s 1939 Mystery Control, the first commercially available radio remote controller. With the help of Samuel Mackeown, a California Institute of Technology engineer, George ironed out the bugs in their invention, and he and Hedy applied for a patent in June 1941. Considering the familiarity with patent conventions and technical radio concepts on display, it seems likely that Mackeown wrote the patent itself. On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 (issued to Lamarr under her married name, Hedy Markey) for a “secret communication system.”

Despite the novelty of their approach, the pneumatic player-piano mechanism made their system unwieldy—and certainly unworkable in battle. Antheil made strenuous lobbying efforts to get the invention adopted by the Navy, but it was shelved. According to George, the Navy brass thought he wanted to put a player piano in a torpedo. Nevertheless, one frequently encounters claims (for instance, in Richard Rhodes’s 2011 book Hedy’s Folly) that because of its military potential, the Lamarr-Antheil patent was classified by the Navy. Although it adds to the story’s drama, that detail does not appear to be true.

The authors of the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook state that the patent was processed routinely with no imposition of secrecy. A tiny New York Times notice dated October 1, 1941, did report that the National Inventors Council “classed Miss Lamarr’s invention in the ‘red-hot’ category,” but two days later Lamarr and Antheil’s patent attorneys, Lyon and Lyon, wrote a letter (provided to me by Antheil scholar Mauro Piccinini) to their clients making a contrary claim:

Quote:We noticed considerable publicity to the papers recently resulting from statements of Col. Lent of the National Inventors Council. This publicity is rather puzzling in view of the fact that the Patent Office has not issued a Secrecy Order. It is also difficult to understand why the Secrecy Order has not been issued in view of the fact that the Examiner has found nothing antedating the invention.

George himself apparently didn’t believe the invention was classified: He gives the patent number in his 1945 autobiography Bad Boy of Music and is under the impression that anybody can get a copy of the thing by mailing 10 cents to the Patent Office. In addition, in their letter Lyon and Lyon also expressed surprise that “the Patent Office did not discover more pertinent patents than those cited.” That surprise turned out to be well-founded.

Claims and counterclaims have been made as to whether Lamarr originated the frequency-hopping scheme or learned of it in meetings at Fritz Mandl’s firm, the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik. In Bad Boy, George affirms that she got her education at those meetings, and although he is not exactly the world’s most reliable memoirist, he could hardly have received the information from anyone but Hedy. Robert Price, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory and a pioneer of spread-spectrum technology, interviewed Lamarr. He told me that he came away convinced that she had heard the idea in her husband’s boardroom, and with tongue somewhat planted in cheek, Price called her “the Mata Hari of World War II.” Still, one must be mindful of historical gender roles—of how Lamarr might have presented herself as well as how her statements might have been received.

The notion that Lamarr’s patent might have begun with an idea she heard from her former husband’s colleagues is dismissed in the documentary Bombshell, where the filmmakers claim that German engineers at the time were unaware of the technology. However, Hans-Joachim Braun, whose 1997 article in American Heritage of Invention and Technology spurred the current interest in Lamarr’s role as an inventor, informed me that documentary evidence in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg shows that German engineers before World War II were aware of frequency hopping, although they lacked the means to put it into practice.

...

If ideas are born of necessity, then the mother of secret communications has been war. Most of the research into spread-spectrum transmission took place in anticipation of war, or during war itself. By some estimates, during World War II as many as 90 percent of German electronics engineers were involved in the country’s (ultimately unsuccessful) anti-jamming campaign. Under such circumstances, the invention of frequency hopping was not just probable, it was inevitable.

...

As a rule, scientists engaged in fundamental research would rather do something novel themselves than try to duplicate someone else’s results, which only adds to the noise. In that regard, the overwhelming concentration of talent at the old Bell Labs had its advantages. It may be too much to hope that a new system can be devised to streamline the chaos. Failing that, one can at least take solace from knowing that recognition for one’s accomplishments depends largely on the diligence of the patent search, and that the march of ideas will continue regardless of who gets the credit.

Quote:Vladimir Putin's character was cut from the film before an actor was cast for the role. Putin, who was just three months into the job as Russian president when the tragedy occurred in 2000, was slated to appear as a supporting character in at least five scenes in the film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, EuropaCorp's president, Luc Besson, wanted to shift the story's focus to the rescue mission rather than the politics behind the disaster. One theory is that nobody at EuropaCorp wanted to be hacked. "Remember The Interview (2014)?" a source said, referring to the Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen-directed comedy that angered Kim Jong-un and is believed to have sparked the infamous Sony hack in 2014. Ironically, the Russian leader is sympathetically portrayed in the original Kursk script, which highlighted why he took the tragedy personally (Putin's father was a submariner).

Quote:In the early 1960's, the American golf cart company Chadwick began buying Isetta 300 chassis and drive trains to be used as the foundation for fiberglass bodied golf carts. My understanding is that not many of these were produced and that they are pretty rare. Isettas may not have been very fast compared to other cars on the road, but I bet Chadwick 300 golf carts were some of the fastest carts on the course.
BZ's BMW Isetta 300 restoration and microcarblog

Quote:The story of the Manhattan Project began in 1938, when German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann inadvertently discovered nuclear fission. A few months later, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard sent a letter to President Roosevelt warning him that Germany might try to build an atomic bomb. In response, FDR formed the Uranium Committee, a group of top military and scientific experts to determine the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction.

Nevertheless, initial research moved slowly until the spring of 1941, when the MAUD Committee (essentially the British equivalent to the Uranium Committee) issued a report affirming that an atomic bomb was possible and urging cooperation with the United States. The U.S. government responded by reorganizing its atomic research under the S-1 Committee, which was in turn under the jurisdiction of the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development, led by Vannevar Bush. As the project progressed from research to development, however, Bush realized that the S-1 Committee did not have the resources for full-scale construction, eventually opting to turn to the Army for support.

The name itself, “Manhattan Project,” is commonly thought to be a misnomer, but its first offices were actually in Manhattan, at 270 Broadway. The atomic bomb project thus became known as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), or Manhattan Project for short.
The Manhattan Project

Quote:Around 2.7 million people left the GDR and East Berlin between 1949 and 1961, causing increasing difficulties for the leadership of the East German communist party, the SED.

In the early morning hours of 13 August 1961 [Film 5.80 MB], temporary barriers were put up at the border separating the Soviet sector from West Berlin, and the asphalt and cobblestones on the connecting roads were ripped up. Police and transport police units, along with members of “workers’ militias,” stood guard and turned away all traffic at the sector boundaries. The SED leadership’s choice of a Sunday during the summer holiday season for its operation was probably no coincidence.

Over the next few days and weeks, the coils of barbed wire strung along the border to West Berlin were replaced by a wall of concrete slabs and hollow blocks. This was built by East Berlin construction workers under the close scrutiny of GDR border guards.

The construction of the Berlin Wall

[attachment=1171 Wrote:EndtheMadnessNow pid='9652' dateline='1691982968']When the most basic of common sense is a breaking news story, you know we are in trouble.

(08-14-2023, 07:26 AM)Snarl Wrote:

(08-14-2023, 03:16 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: When the most basic of common sense is a breaking news story, you know we are in trouble.

Been going on for so long now I can't even remember when it became a thing. Pretty sure CNN started it though.

(08-14-2023, 08:10 AM)BIAD Wrote:

(08-14-2023, 07:26 AM)Snarl Wrote:

(08-14-2023, 03:16 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: When the most basic of common sense is a breaking news story, you know we are in trouble.

Been going on for so long now I can't even remember when it became a thing. Pretty sure CNN started it though.

Surely fake... isn't it?!!

Quote:Video: VCNO Lisa Franchetti Takes Command of Navy

It is now the first time in the Department of Defense’s history that three of the military’s top officers are in acting positions, Austin said during his remarks at the ceremony.

In his remarks, Austin called on the Senate to confirm the now more than 300 military nominations, including Franchetti, as well as Gen. Eric Smith, who is currently in the position of acting commandant of the Marine Corps.

“This is unprecedented. It is unnecessary. And it is unsafe,” Austin said.
“Our troops deserve better.”

Quote:Under the Radar & Strange bedfellows

East Side player Gary Fears and his diverse business associates are betting that his military aviation business finally takes off. Whether it will fly is still up in the air.

Asked whether his activities are somehow involved with covert CIA operations, Fears laughs. “Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “I wish there was something that exciting to all this stuff that I was a CIA guy, but that’s not the case.”

Quote:As the renovation came to a close, rumors spread across Washington that the commander-in-chief had new protections in place. The front page of The Washington Post on April 18, 1951, blared:

“Truman Digs into Special Fund for $881,000 A-Bomb Shelter.” Congressmen who had approved and overseen the project fund expressed displeasure that they hadn’t been told of the shelter construction—nor about the extra monies spent. But Truman and his advisors saw it as a necessary step—and not the last one that would be taken. That $881,000 was just a tiny down payment on the billions to come.

Quote:"SCIENTISTS blame an intense burst of solar activity for events which halted all trading on Toronto’s stock market last month. Officials watched in disbelief as three disc drives failed in succession on what is supposed to be a ‘fault-tolerant’ computer system. The crash stopped trading for three hours. ‘I don’t know what the gods were doing to us,’ said John Kane, the vice president of the exchange.

Quote:The fleet's welcome began before daylight on the morning of Thursday, August 20th with site-seers coming out on steamers as far as 30 miles to meet the fleet in the dark. By the time they reached the headlands of Botany Bay, they had an escort of many excursion vessels.  Off Coogee Bay they Could see thousands upon thousands of people on the bluffs.  From there to the harbor, on the high cliffs, rocks and headlands, it was simply a mass of humans.
The Great White Fleet Visits Sydney, Australia | Initiating a novice into the mysteries of father Neptune

Quote:1890s in America. In the Southwest, the Frontier closes. On the other side of the country, John Ford is born.

1950s in America. Las Vegas rises. Del Webb plans Sun City. Goggle-wearing onlookers. Nuclear tests in the desert. Boom or bust has become BOOM & DUST.

In that same desert, John Ford makes his science fiction movies. John Wayne and Henry Fonda risk radiation poisoning. The cowboys – astronauts. The desert – Mars. Both the natives and the settlers are Martians to each other. Trains – Interstellar technology. A gunslinger with a Colt revolver is a spaceman with a ray gun.

The land has all been mapped. The territory has all been taken. But a new frontier opens again in the Southwest desert. THE RED MENACE STILL EXISTS! And beyond the Las Vegas skyline, past the Pioneer Club sign, a mushroom cloud rises.

John Ford – our man with a movie camera – seizes the drama that emerges from the debris. Geronimo is reborn – from a new womb – the BOMB.

BOOM.

DUST.

APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL