For Whom Does "the CIA" Really Work?

With this post we continue to explore connections mentioned by JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease, author of "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur," who focused on the sulphur company during times it was headed by John Hay "Jock" Whitney. Originally published in Probe, Pease's article discusses Freeport Sulphur's international nature as well as its close ties to happenings in Cuba during the time JFK was President. 

Valuable in the insight Pease's article gives us into the role of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of Freeport Sulphur, nevertheless it does not ask who really owns and operates the CIA itself. Perhaps looking back deeper into the company and its formative years will help in answering that question.

Who Was Jock Whitney?

Jock's father was William Payne Whitney, commonly known simply as Payne. As a youngster, Payne Whitney was caught in a feud between his father and his mother's brother, Oliver Payne, following her death in 1893. Promised a share of Oliver's wealth, he turned against his own father, who had married Edith Randolph, a woman scorned by the Payne family, whom he had been seeing before his wife died. According to the New York Social Diary website:

Jock and Betsy Cushing Whitney

In 1902 [William Collins] Whitney’s son, Payne Whitney, who’d sided with Oliver Payne, married Helen Hay from Cleveland, Ohio. Miss Hay was the daughter of John Hay who had been private secretary to President Lincoln and later Ambassador to the Court of St. James under President McKinley. Mr. Whitney who, like his father, went to Yale, was 26. For a wedding gift, Col. Payne gave the couple a Stanford White house at 972 Fifth Avenue.... After the Second World War, he started an investment fund, run by a friend he’d met in the War, to invest in new ideas of the men coming back from the War. He called it Adventure Capital and later dropped the “ad” to coin the now established term: venture capital. He was known for his ventures in Hollywood (“Gone With the Wind”), his industrious ventures, as well as being the last publisher of The New York Herald-Tribune.... Like his grandfather, he was also the Ambassador to the Court of St. James (under Eisenhower). Married twice, first to a beauty who loved horses more, and finally to Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, daughter of the famous brain surgeon Harvey Cushing, first wife of FDR’s son’s James, to whom he [Jock] remained married to the end of his life.... The Payne fortune, inherited by Payne Whitney, and then his children, grew far larger than the fortune left by William C. Whitney to his children. That was partly due to the fact that Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt produced more offspring who produced more offspring. Jock Whitney produced no off-spring, and his investments after the War catapulted him (and partially his sister [Joan Whitney Payson]) into the realm of what are now billions.

972 Fifth Avenue mansion

Payne Whitney had inherited his uncle's huge mansion in New York, and the 1920 census shows Jock and Joan living there with their parents--only four people at 972 Fifth Avenue--being cared for by fifteen servants, none of whom were American-born. Payne's business address, 14 Wall Street, was the Bankers Trust Company, set up by the White and Case law firm in 1903, and was controlled by J.P. Morgan affiliates in the days prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. Before 1930 Morgan bankers controlled United States government policy on currency. According to economist Murray Rothbard, the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank was:

Benjamin Strong, who had spent virtually his entire business and personal life in the circle of top associates of J.P. Morgan. A secretary of several trust companies (banks doing trust business) in New York City, Strong became neighbor and close friend of three top Morgan partners, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, and Thomas W. Lamont. Davison, in particular, became his mentor, and brought him into Morgan's Bankers Trust company, where he soon succeeded Lamont as vice-president, and then finally became president. When Strong was offered the post of Governor of the New York Fed, it was Davison who persuaded him to take the job....The main collaboration throughout the 1920s, much of it kept secret from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, was between Strong and the man who soon became Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Collet Norman. Norman and Strong were not only fast friends, but had important investment-banking ties, Norman's uncle having been a partner of the great English banking firm of Baring Brothers, and his grandfather a partner in the international banking house of Brown Shipley and Co., the London branch of the Wall Street banking firm of Brown Brothers. Before coming to the Bank of England, Norman himself had worked at the Wall Street office of Brown Brothers, and then returned to London to become a partner of Brown Shipley.

The Role of Brown Brothers Harriman

Montagu Norman had been called "the currency dictator of Europe" by the Wall Street Journal in 1927. Thus, when the U.S. government witnessed the decline of the Brown Brothers investment bank in 1926, it felt the need to shore it up with an infusion of capital and turned to the two Yale educated sons of robber baron E.H. Harriman to do so. Averell and Roland (Bunny) Harrison were the Skull and Bones friends and eventual partners of Prescott Sheldon Bush, the father and grandfather of two future presidents.

It is no coincidence that America's earliest attempts at setting up intelligence agencies called upon the talents of the sons of Wall Street bankers. Idealistic principles often fall by the wayside when big money is involved, and it is the wealthy elitists who think they have the most to lose in the games played in international market manipulations. The poor have only their lives, and are often treated as cannon fodder by such elitists on every front.

In the years between the two "great" wars the Brown Brothers partner, Montagu Norman, was actively concerned with handling Germany's reparations payments, working with the first head of the Bank for International Settlements, Gates McGarrah, whose grandson, Richard McGarrah Helms, would later head the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Within six months after the above photos appeared in the news, Norman had found the perfect rich kids to entice with the power of helping to run the world. Their father's death in September 1909, when the boys were mere teenagers, had been the top headline in newspapers throughout America. Their mentor became the man most trusted by their father to run his business, Robert Scott Lovett, who would see that the boys were educated at Yale alongside his own son, Robert Abercrombie Lovett. All would rise to power in the government as the second great war approached, with help from their brothers in Skull and Bones.

Prescott Bush, center, with Brown Brothers Harriman partners--Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley, and R.A. Lovett

By following the money, you often learn how the world really operates, who works for whom, so to speak.

Oliver Stone relates in his book, The Untold History of the United States:

Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another. Researchers have been trying for years to determine the precise nature of Bush's ties to Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist who played a crucial role in bankrolling Hitler, as revealed in his 1941 memoirs I Paid Hitler. Thyssen ultimately repudiated the Nazi dictator and was himself imprisoned.
While incarcerated, Thyssen's vast wealth was protected overseas, much of it by the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, through the holding company Union Banking Corporation. The account was managed by senior partner Prescott Bush. 

About ten years younger than the Harriman boys, Jock Whitney and his sister sat atop a huge pile of money which they would make available to those in power engaged in manipulation of international currency. Although Jock went to Yale, he was tapped for Scroll and Key, rather than the Bones secret society, and was a mere two years behind Scroll and Key member James Stillman Rockefeller (son of Elsie Stillman and William G. Rockefeller), whose Uncle Percy, married in 1901 to Elsie's sister Isabel Stillman, was a member of the Skull and Bones class of 1900. Only a year after his Yale graduation, James Stillman Rockefeller had united fortunes with the Carnegies by marrying the niece of the steel magnate whose fortune had been liquidated by the Morgan bank. Five years later, Chase Manhattan bank would acquire the Equitable Trust, another Morgan affiliate--thus shifting control of the New York Fed in 1930 from Morgan to Rockefeller-owned banks at the same time Freeport Sulphur's control shifted under the leadership of Langbourne Williams, Jr., a Stillman son-in-law, as will be detailed in the next installment.

Capitalizing Anti-Communism

A GOVERNMENT CULT

© 2005 by Linda Minor
(Updated in 2010)

Credit to Vanity Fair

The havoc caused by just these 16 words:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

President George W. Bush used just sixteen words (quoted above) in his State of the Union Message in January 2003 to justify his military attack on Iraq. It took six months for Ambassador Joseph Wilson to contradict those words in the public media — averring in a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed piece (“What I Didn’t Find in Africa”) that the Bush administration knew, or should have known, almost a year before his January speech that any report claiming that Saddam had obtained uranium from Niger in a quantity capable of using for weapons of mass destruction was a bald-faced lie. [1]

Dementia Admitted

Being called liars by Wilson came as quite a shock to the Bush administration—representing as it did the first time anyone with clout had publicly questioned the veracity of the reason given for precipitating the war in Iraq. Having been an ambassador in Africa (a Bush I appointee) and an envoy in Niger (for the Clinton National Security Council) until 1998, Wilson then returned to Niger early in 2002 at the request of CIA officials to whom Vice President Dick Cheney had posed a question regarding Saddam's access to nuclear weapons.

Hadley

Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, admitted two weeks after Wilson’s article in the Times that he should have deleted the “sixteen words” from Bush’s January speech because, as he later recalled, CIA Director George Tenet had  asked him to do so for a speech Bush gave in Ohio three months before the January speech..But, Hadley explained, he had “forgotten” Tenet’s warning during the intervening time.. 

Hadley’s boss, Condoleezza Rice, claiming the same amnesiatic excuse and sounding like a ditzy California valley girl, stated: 

“What we learned later (and I did not know at the time, and certainly did not know until just before Steve Hadley went out to say what he said last week) was that the director [Tenet] had also sent over to the White House a set of clearance comments that explained why he wanted this out of the speech.  I can tell you, I either didn’t see the memo, or I don’t remember seeing the memo.”  [2]

All that was missing was for Condi to have punctuated her statement with a couple of sideways head nods, a "duh," and perhaps to sprinkle in a "like" or two throughout her sentences.

While the Bush officials were thus admitting their dementia, Robert Novak, in his July 14 syndicated column—citing “two senior administration officials” as his sources—identified Valerie Plame, wife of their only accuser, as a Central Intelligence Agency operative who had worked in the area of weapons of mass destruction. [3]

Senior Administration Officials Spring Leaks

Wilson immediately jumped to the core of the matter, speculating as to the identity of these "senior officials":

“Senior advisers close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their fingerprints off the crime. John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don’t know either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without authority from a higher level.” [4]

Calling them "zealots," and part of a "government cult," Wilson traced the roots back to Albert and Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago— mentors both to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The ultimate mission in Iraq, he revealed, "was always about a larger neoconservative agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions." Roberta Mary Morgan's father, Edmund M. Morgan, Jr., a law professor at Yale in 1920, was later a Harvard Law colleague of Felix Frankfurter.

Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 

John Robert Bolton II, like many of his College Republican counterparts, became a Republican almost before he could tie his shoes, though he was not a member of the College Republican National Committee.[5]  Young Johnny was instead active in the Young Republican organization at Yale for four years—1966 to 1970.  He had cut his teeth, however, in the 1964 Goldwater campaign at his prep school in Baltimore—the McDonogh School—where he was awarded one of the scholarships to poor (in the financial sense) students for whose education the school was originally created. In 1964, when John Bolton was sixteen years old and his peers were thinking about girls, cars, football or baseball, Johnny was meditating upon Barry Goldwater’s classic statement: 

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Bolton would never thereafter be ascribed with the virtue of moderation. The vice of extremism is another matter.

Bolton fit the profile which the College Republican (CR) organization was seeking. Led by Morton Blackwell, CR was recruiting young political operatives in 1971, while Blackwell's fellow Virginia attorney, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (later appointed to the Supreme Court), was writing in his “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” addressed to his next-door neighbor, Eugene Sydnor (then in charge of the education committee for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [6]) that the immediate goal of recruitment was to ascertain “avenues of action” which could be pursued to correct the “imbalance” on campus and the public at large in order to save the free enterprise system. [7]

Pendulum Swings to the Right

Morton Blackwell, mentor for the College Republican organization, was trained by Tea Party hero, Richard Viguerie, who as a young man in his twenties, earned his living working for Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—founded in 1960 by William F. Buckley, Jr. (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1950). Buckley had previously served as a Central Intelligence Agency operative in Tokyo and Mexico City. [8]

Though Buckley’s National Review claimed to be the voice of proponents for free enterprise, evaluated on that basis alone, it was 

“a dud.

In its brief history, it has spent some $860,000 more than it has taken in.” [9] 

Since free enterprise operates on the profit motive, we have to assume that, since it continued to operate without profit, it was being subsidized by someone or something. 

Buckley started the magazine with $125,000 from his family and $300,000 “raised elsewhere.” [10]  Who was paying Buckley to run this right-wing rag so soon after his book God and Man at Yale had attacked the so-called leftist administration and faculty at Yale?

Bundy

In 1951 fellow Bonesman McGeorge Bundy “gleefully accepted an assignment from The Atlantic Monthly to attack William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Buckley, Bundy charged, was a ‘twisted and ignorant young man.’ Buckley, in turn, ridiculed Bundy as a ‘haughty totalitarian’ and a ‘Court Hatchet-Man.’” [11] Skull and Bones men must have been delighted to witness the Hegelian dialectic at work and play.

Skull and Bones at Play?

Equally as intriguing as Buckley’s ability to continue such a money-losing operation for so long is the list of names he attracted to serve on the board of YAF. Ronald Reagan was on the YAF’s national advisory board in 1962, and retired Major General Charles A. Willoughby was there by 1963. 

Willoughby, whose German birth and parentage are shrouded in ambiguity, enlisted in the Army as Adolf Charles Weidenbach, then changed his surname to Willoughby in 1910. [12] He served as General MacArthur's Chief of Intelligence in the General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area for the decade beginning 1941 and later joined the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC), a major funder of which was Nelson Bunker Hunt, son of Texan H.L. Hunt, who had been Willoughby’s friend since the 1950’s. [13]

Direct mail was a part of the advertising and public relations industry, and Viguerie was therefore working for these right-wing idealogues on YAF's board while he handled mail order operations. They sent mailings and fundraising letters out to the mailing list, hoping either to convince Americans of the need to pursue the cold war militarism against Communism in the Soviet Union and China or to raise funds for candidates. In 1964 Viguerie began his own direct-mail company, using the YAF and Goldwater’s mailing lists. Long before personal computers, iPhones or bloggers, he taught Morton Blackwell how to do direct mail and to train others under the auspices of the College Republican National Committee. Once Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, Morton Blackwell had a White House office as “liaison with conservative groups.” [14]  

Dolan

Such conservative groups included the National Conservative Political Action Committee, whose director—one of Blackwell’s College Republican trainees, John T. "Terry" Dolan—poured more than $7 million into Republican campaign coffers in 1980. [15] That was a lot of money in those days. Where did it really come from?  Could “direct mail” have been a cover for laundering illicit funds through the intricate layers of political action committees set up to flaunt the spirit of campaign finance legislation?  That’s a subject for further research. 

World Anti-Communist League

What our research to date does reveal, however, is that the career of Richard Viguerie—described in Time magazine as a “direct-mail conglomerateur” in Falls Church, Virginia (who, like Buckley at National Review, could afford to operate his monthly Conservative Digest at more than a million dollar per year loss) had suspicious connections early on to the World Anti-Communist League. [16] One time editor at Conservative Digest was Lee Edwards, who

“had a practice of starting up organizations like the ‘Underground Bible Fund’ or ‘Friends of the FBI,’ which were very good at soliciting donations but not so good at actually fulfilling their promises to distribute Bibles behind the Iron Curtain or defend the good name of J. Edgar Hoover.” 

In 1970 Edwards had also set up the first United States affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League called the “American Council for World Freedom.”  Edwards’ activities were mentioned in a book by another member of the New Right, Alan Crawford as follows: 

Then there is Lee Edwards, once a Young Americans for Freedom activist, the first editor of Viguerie’s Conservative Digest. When the Justice Department brought suit against the American-Chilean Council in 1978, it came out that one of the organization's activities had been to plant material favorable to the Pinochet government of Chile with Edwards, then a Washington-based public relations man, who writes and distributes his own newspaper column. Edwards included the information in his newspaper articles. The accomplishment was reported back to the Chileans by the Washington officer of the American-Chilean Council, L. Francis Bouchey, another product of Young Americans for Freedom, who had shared office space with Edwards back in 1975 when Edwards was working closely with representatives of the Taiwan government. (p. 197) [17]

Another book, Inside the League, written in 1986, described Edwards’ associates as neo-Nazis:

Bankrolling themselves by running “charities” with exorbitant operating costs, they sought out others who shared their apocalyptic vision of the takeover of the world by communists and their “fellow travellers,” whether in the American Independent Party or in the World Anti-Communist League. Today Edwards is president of the Center for International Relations, a conservative think tank funded by the Reagan Administration.... With the resignation of the American Council for World Freedom in 1975, the door was open for an energetic neo-Nazi to transform the face of the League in the United States and Europe, plunging it even further into the depths of fanaticism. [18]

NOTES:

[1] Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf,  2004),  p. 1.  The July 6 New York Times article appears at the Common Dreams News Center website.

[2] Wilson, The Politics of Truth, p. 353.

[3] Novak stated: “Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.... All this was forgotten until reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. Not until Wilson went public on July 6, however, did his finding ignite the firestorm.”

[4] Wilson, The Politics of Truth, p. 445.

[5] We saw in a recent Sanders Research article, “Killer Political Instincts,” that while Karl Rove was in high school in Utah he was working on the campaign of Republican Senator Wallace Bennett, whose son controlled a public relations firm that employed career intelligence operatives who were hired to re-elect Richard Nixon.  The article also mentioned that Rove’s recruiters, the College Republican National Committee, also trained Ralph Reed, Terry Dolan, Roger Stone, Grover Norquist, Lee Atwater, and Jack Abramoff (Tom Delay’s fund-raiser recently indicted for dirty tricks)—indoctrinating them into their future roles in political consulting and mail-order to elect extreme right wing candidates.

[6] The Chamber of Commerce was a pro-business lobby founded by Skull and Bones member, William Howard Taft in 1911 with a mission to create a “social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility." Chamber history, according to its website. The quote was attributed to Taft in a press release dated April 22, 2002 and is now the Chamber's Mission Statement.

[7] Before being named to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, Powell had served on a “Blue Ribbon Defense Panel” chaired by Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, Board Chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had made recommendations for restructuring military procurement procedures, as well as intelligence resources.  Powell’s memo is reminiscent of how Skull and Bones at Yale began in 1832 to take control of every facet of America’s established institutions.  See Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment (1986).

[8]  Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much p. 191.

[9] Time, Oct. 31, 1960.

[10] Time, Nov. 3, 1967.

[11]  Alfred S. Regnery, Upstream: the ascendance of American conservatism, Volume 2007 (Simon and Schuster, Inc.  2008), p. 50.

[12] Frank Kluckhohn, The Reporter (New York Journal) August 19, 1952.  In 1913, “having reached the rank of sergeant, he left the service to enter the senior class of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Graduated from Gettysburg, he studied for an M.A. at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and then taught languages at the Howe School for girls, in Howe, Indiana, and at Racine College in Wisconsin. Then in 1916 he re-entered the Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. He served on the Mexican border and later was sent to France, where he took aviation training, flew as a pursuit pilot, and helped train Allied fliers.”  While in Manila, “Willoughby became known as the close friend of Andres Soriano, the Spanish Club's most influential member and one of the richest men in the Philippines.... Soriano was not only Willoughby's friend; he was also the good friend of General MacArthur and of another principal MacArthur assistant, Major General Courtney Whitney, who before the war was a lawyer and promoter in Manila. Soriano had—and still has—mining interests, breweries, airlines, shipping, radio stations, textiles, jute plants, and the Philippine concessions for the products of many great American firms.”

[13] Dick Russell, p. 322.

[14] Time, July 5, 1982.

[15] Terry’s brother Anthony, incidentally, was a Reagan speechwriter.  Dolan’s name had been first mentioned in Time in 1979. 

[16] Time, December 8, 1961.   

[17] Crawford’s book is called Thunder on the Right.  A review appears in an article written by  Corey Panshin.

[18] Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League  (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986).  The connection between Viguerie, Rev. Billy James Hargis, the John Birch Society, and Buckley’s YAF was hinted at by the authors:  “The first American League Chapter was the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF), founded in 1970 in Washington, D.C. The main force behind its creation, and its first secretary, was Lee Edwards, head of a public relations firm and former director of Young Americans for Freedom, the youth arm of the John Birch Society.  Edwards was a stalwart of the emergent New Right in American politics and brought his own questionable background and motives into the World Anti-Communist League as a professional fund-raiser. Along with a handful of other New Right fund-raisers such as Richard Viguerie and Patrick Gorman, Edwards was in the business of raising donations for charitable or nonprofit organizations and then keeping a large chunk of the 'money, sometimes over ninety percent, for his ‘operation expenses.’ ”

Pecunia non olet

According to the historian Suetonius,Vespasian, who ruled the Roman Empire from AD 69 to AD 79, had a son named Titus who found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public toilets. Vespasian held a piece of money from the first payment to his son's nose, asking whether its odor was offensive to him. When Titus said "No," he replied, "Yet it comes from urine." 

The moral: Money doesn't stink.

But then any emperor would believe the same.

William Hathaway Forbes

© 2012 by Linda Minor

“By the late 1830s, opium was the basis of East-West commerce. It balanced the payments…Everyone needed it.”

 Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel, Hilary Conroy, America views

China: American images of China then and now, p. 61.

Shortly after his retirement from the China trade,  John Murray bought an island off the coast of Massachusetts near Nantucket in Buzzard’s Bay called Naushon. His son William Hathaway was then a mere lad of 7 or 8 years. Then one of the wealthiest families in New England, Forbes began a concentrated effort toward his son's proper education--without much cooperation on the part of the youngster.

William Hathaway Forbes failed to graduate with his Harvard class of 1861, in which he began as a freshman in 1857.[1] To his father's great embarrassment, he was summarily expelled, as revealed in the article below, which appeared in the Pittsfield Eagle during his junior year at Harvard. One biographer linked the scandal to the secret society called “Med. Fac.” that had been operating at Harvard since at least 1820. Not unlike the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, it had its roots much earlier among the medical faculty.

Fortunately for the Forbes family, war intervened and Will Forbes rose in the 2d Cavalry of the Union Army, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. His friend and brother-in-law, Henry Sturgis Russell (whose family had started Russell & Co.) served in the same regiment until he was promoted to brigadier general over the "colored" regiment (the Fifth). Henry married Mary Hathaway Forbes, Will’s sister, in 1863.[3]
  His father, John Murray Forbes, showed his disappointment in his son when headlines in January 1860 revealed him to be the culprit who almost killed an undercover cop who hid in Appleton Chapel hoping to catch a repeat burglar. Reminiscent of Barbara Bush when her son Neil was criticized for helping to loot Silverado Savings, Will’s mother also sped to her son’s defense. Boys will be boys, as the saying goes. But Will's father, usually called simply J.M. Forbes, didn’t want to rock the boat; he had only just begun to remove the stench of opium from his reputation.

William Hathaway’s friend and Harvard classmate from the class of 1860—Henry Sturgis Russell, son of George Robert and Sarah Russell—would join the Massachusetts Cavalry as soon as they heard the war drums. They were young and itching for excitement. Their fathers, grandfathers and uncles had all experienced that same adrenalin in the Far East decades earlier as merchant traders.

It was also war which consumed  much of the career of another descendant of Samuel Russell--William Huntington Russell--who in addition to operating a military school in New Haven also had helped to found the secret society Skull and Bones similar in many respects to the Med Fac society which operated years earlier at Harvard.

Henry’s Russell's uncle, Samuel Wadsworth Russell had started Russell & Co. at 2 Suy-Hong in Canton in 1824 in competition with the Perkins and Forbes family, with whom he merged his company in 1832. Henry’s father, George Russell was a partner in Russell, Sturgis & Co. formed in Manila in 1828.[2] They had more or less taken over the trade of the East India Company in China when the British departed.

By the time William’s own father, John Murray Forbes, first laid eyes upon the Chinese city of Canton, where his uncles (one of whom, James Sturgis, had married a Perkins girl, making him “Uncle Jimmy”) and brothers had garnered the family wealth, he was working for the larger firm which bore the Russell name. But it was all the same family business--trading mostly in opium in China and later investing profits in America for their Canton trading partner, Houqua, under the name of Russell & Co.

After his first tour in China, Will Hathaway’s father had returned to Milton, Massachusetts, married Sarah Hathaway, a friend of his sisters, and then quickly returned to China to seek his fortune. In the meantime, Russell & Co. had made him a partner of the firm, based on his close relationship with Houqua, who controlled the opium trade on the mainland. To please his new partners he stayed in China without seeing his new bride again for almost two years. Once he returned, however, he remained in Milton, working as Houqua’s agent until Canton’s importance was toppled by the rise of Hong Kong. 

After those best-forgotten days in China, where he and the Houqua hong had made fortunes working around China's leaders who wanted to keep opium out of the hands of its people, John Murray Forbes spent the remainder of his life investing those fortunes (both his and Houqua's) in what was then America's most high-tech industry. He built the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad.


Ten years after Will's Harvard class graduated  without him, the university finally awarded him a retroactive honorary 1861 Harvard degree. They had forgotten his adolescent indiscretion as well as his status as a drop-out, as soon as he struck it rich. Perhaps to celebrate this honor, Will built a summer house on the island his father had purchased with opium profits, a home which future generations of the Forbes family used as a networking base.

Harvard Crimson - October 13, 1897 

Colonel William Hathaway Forbes '61, died on Monday at his place on Naushon Island. W. H. Forbes was born on Nov. 1st, 1840. He was the son of J. M. Forbes and the brother of J. Malcolm Forbes. In college he was a classmate of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Col. N. P. Hallowell, W. P. Garrison and H. P. Bowditch. He left college during his first Junior term and entered business in Boston in '61. In December of the same year he was given a commission in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. In 1865 he married Miss Edith Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was engaged in active business in Boston until 1887. In 1872, by the vote of the corporation, he received the degree of A. B. 

Colonel Hallowell who was Mr. Forbes' chum in college speaks of his broad-mindedness and generosity of nature. He was always ready at college to help those who were struggling, and in later life he was never happier than when doing a generous act in behalf of some unfortunate who had appealed to him. 

With interests many and wide, for many years a prominent figure in Boston business and society, Colonel Forbes bore worthily a name that has been among the foremost and best in the life and progress of several generations.

Is it naive to question the source of the money that built the railroad? Does money somehow lose the taint when invested in good old American free enterprise? It's a question that persists until the present day.

---

[1] Edited by Albert K. Teele, The History of Milton, Mass.: 1640 to 1887, p. 356 (Boston: Press of Rockwell & Churchill, 1884), p. 356. Also see Massachusetts Historical Society papers of Edith Emerson Forbes and William Hathaway Forbes at the website for the Forbes Papers, accessed August 25, 2009.

[2]His partner was Henry Parkman Sturgis, later referred to euphemistically as a "merchant in the Far East," and there were three other Sturgis brothers involved in the firm—Russell, George and Samuel.

[3] Teele, History of Milton, p. 570. Also Mary Caroline Crawford, Famous families of Massachusetts Vol. I  (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930), p. 304.