OBITUARY

Congressman
Cornelius ‘Neil’ Gallagher

by Elliot Greenspan

[Print version of this article]

Upon viewing a 2013 LaRouche PAC video documentary titled, Profile in Courage: Congressman Neil Gallagher, Lyndon LaRouche emphasized, “This helped to close the picture of the history of the United States from the time of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, until the present time. . . . Justice was never done on behalf of Mr. Gallagher, even though he was a servant of the nation in various capacities in the course of his lifetime.”

Former U.S. Representative Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher passed away October 17 at the age of 97, after a long battle with brain cancer.

Neil Gallagher, as a leading member of Congress, was the only man alive who was not only a close personal friend of John F. Kennedy, but fought the apparatus associated with his assassination, that of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.[fn_1]

A Bayonne, New Jersey, Democrat serving in the House from 1959 to 1973, Congressman Gallagher was instrumental in bringing many elements of JFK’s legislative agenda to fruition, including the creation of the Peace Corps and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was a key member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee, chaired the U.S.-Canadian Interparliamentary Committee, and was a U.S. delegate to the Nuclear Disarmament Committee. He was so influential in Congress that he was on Lyndon Johnson’s short list for Vice President. He initiated an international battle against cancer through the United Nations, via a scientific dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union.

He was reportedly most proud of his initiatives in India and in Congress to “stop the genocide as perpetrated by Pakistan against the East Bengalis (then East Pakistan)” in 1971; “his legislative actions saved millions of lives and paved the way for the creation of the sovereign state of Bangladesh.”[fn_2]

But it was through Gallagher’s creation in 1964 of a House Subcommittee on Privacy and Constitutional Rights, to investigate the rapid emergence of the “surveillance state,” that he became a national leader—by exposing this treason, making it a burning national issue. And earning the hatred of J. Edgar Hoover, the first Director of the FBI.

Martin Luther King once wrote of Gallagher, “Here is a perennial warrior of penetrating intensity . . . who does something about civil rights rather than merely talk about it.” Author Ron Felber titled his book on the subject, The Privacy War: One Congressman, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Fight for the Fourth Amendment.

Gallagher’s courage and tenaciousness in taking on the danger of this burgeoning Hooverite police-state apparatus led to a witch hunt against him, his frame-up, jailing and removal from Congress. The journalist Anthony Summers, in a book on Hoover, described this as “the most savage attack on a government official in the twentieth century.”

Go back to April 1945. A decorated war hero, with three Purple Hearts, Neil Gallagher was just out of an army hospital after six months recovering from his wounds. He was reassigned to the position of honor guard for President Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York. The honor guard did not serve, however, because on April 12, FDR died.

Gallagher, Boggs Expose ‘Secret Government’

The historic enemy of the United States, the British Empire, and the Empire’s American assets—Truman, Joe McCarthy, the Dulles brothers, Hoover, et al.—attacked the FDR legacy, and any leader committed to the policies of FDR and the Hamilton-Lincoln-FDR “American System.” Gallagher’s friend, President Kennedy, was such a leader. In the LaRouche PAC video-interview, Gallagher said that “Kennedy gave hope to the young people. And all of the people around the world who had fought in the war [World War II], it was our turn to be on the stage. He truly was a leader of the world’s hope.” The Anglo-American genocidalists set out to crush that hope.

In the wake of the assassination of the President, and the Warren Commission cover-up, with a British-instigated colonial war escalating in Vietnam, with anti-war and civil rights upheavals building to a crescendo in the late-1960s, the Hooverite police-state capability massively expanded. The Anglo-American intelligence apparatus intended to control the Presidency and the Congress, and to impose a new paradigm of cultural pessimism on a shocked and demoralized population.

Gallagher fought this on several fronts, proceeding from his core commitment to fight injustice, and to protect individual freedom. Years before, as a Hudson County Freeholder, he refused to sponsor Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a communion breakfast at his Bayonne church. “I hated everything McCarthy stood for. I had an innate feeling against injustice and he was one of the worst provocateurs of injustice in those days.”

When confronted in Congress with Government injustice—intrusion into private lives, massive use of polygraphs, clandestine surveillance, illegal wiretapping and monitoring—Gallagher held hearings to expose this. He began to investigate and expose the evil of the “secret government” within the Government. The response was explosive: His first hearing generated 28,000 letters from American citizens about Government abuse. He was named Chairman of a new special House Subcommittee on Privacy and Constitutional Rights, which held dozens of hearings. Among his achievements was the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, and the defeat of a plan for a computerized National Data Bank.

This brought him into a head-to-head confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover’s FBI “National Gestapo.” At the time, Hoover was deploying his police-state operation to destroy Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, and demanded Gallagher’s help. Gallagher refused, and Hoover attempted to terrorize him, as he terrorized most of Congress—through surveillance, intimidation, blackmail and more. But, as Gallagher’s daughter said at his funeral, “He was fearless.”

In a March 1970, New Jersey speech, the Congressman warned, “Never before in our history, has the group of basic concepts embodied in the first Ten Amendments to our Constitution, been under such constant and concerted attack as now. . . . We are in the process of losing our form of Government and our way of life, as it has developed since the founding of our Republic.” He compared this to the unfolding of totalitarianism in Europe. “The ruination of individual privacy has always heralded the destruction of human freedom . . . as with Hitler.”

In the LaRouche PAC interview, Gallagher remarks that “In those days, the only two [Congressmen] who were really battling Hoover were Hale Boggs and myself.” Members of Congress became more and more aware that they were under surveillance, forcing legislators to meet with Gallagher in secret. “Hoover was a cancer to this country and a cancer to the Congress. You talk about behavioral modification, Hoover modified the behavior of the Congress.”

In 1968, Gallagher was uncovering the most damning secrets. His investigations went into Government programs for behavior modification, hypnosis and other forms of “drugging and modification of the mind, to make more perfect assassins and spies.” He, Boggs, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and others, were on the “trail of the assassins.”

By early 1971, Majority Leader Boggs called for Hoover’s resignation on the floor of the House: “When the FBI taps the telephones of members of this body, and the Senate, when it stations agents on campuses, when the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo, it is way past time to demand his resignation.” Boggs’ mission, to bring down Hoover, was in parallel with his attempt to reopen the investigations of the assassinations of the Kennedys and King.

Secret Government Strikes Back

Soon thereafter, in April 1971, Gallagher’s Invasion of Privacy Committee was shut down. He drafted a bill to create a permanent committee. Hoover blackmailed Congress to block it. “That was the last attempt to set up any kind of a permanent committee that would consider the impact of the new technology on the civil liberties of the American people and their civil rights.”

In April 1972, a federal grand jury indicted Gallagher on conspiracy, perjury and Federal income tax evasion. Gallagher went to the floor of the Congress, and for the first time there, put forward the details of the filth thrown at him from Hoover, the intimidation of Congress, and the incredible revelations that had been presented to his subcommittee regarding U.S. Army, FBI, and CIA abuses of Constitutional rights against Americans. He called for Hoover’s resignation or firing. Two weeks later, Hoover died, mysteriously. (Years earlier, at the height of Hoover’s fabricated smears against Gallagher for alleged ties to the mafia, and worse, luridly published in Life magazine, the Congressman told Hoover stooge Roy Cohn, “I will drive that old bastard into a heart attack. . . .”)

Seven months later, in October 1972, a plane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared in Alaska. Gallagher describes his response in the LaRouche PAC video:

I always thought they blew the plane up. Because Hale was starting to make a lot of noise, like I did, although he was a more serious guy, because he had been on the Warren Commission. He wanted to re-open the Warren Commission, and then the plane mysteriously blew up. And those guys were not against things like that.

Did somebody blow up his goddamned plane? Why not! They couldn’t shut him up! They shut me up! They dismembered my seat in the Congress, they indicted me, [but] there was never any corruption or payoffs or bribes, or anything. The Judge said that, but they gerrymandered me out of Congress, and soon to jail.

“They” did not quite shut him up. He carried forward this war for civil liberties and constitutional rights virtually to his death. He lectured in colleges, wrote and published widely about the degradation of privacy and the dramatic growth of the “surveillance state.” His fight was portrayed in books and movies and documentaw0ries. Congressional investigations echoed his, and Boggs’, wars. He had so earned the “undying enmity” of the “secret government,” that a nine-year FBI-IRS-ATF- DEA surveillance/investigation of Gallagher and much of his family culminated in a huge raid on his home in 1992, and a second jailing in 1996.

Neil Gallagher Meets Lyndon LaRouche

At a 2013 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign event for LaRouche PAC candidate Diane Sare, Gallagher hammered at the “Secret Government . . . the NSA and over 70 secret police agencies victimizing the American public.” A kind of “Dialogue of Heroes” ensued at the event with Lyndon LaRouche, who cited “a certain, special kind of affinity, because of what we’ve gone through, as well as our relative ages.” In fact, soon after his 17 months in jail, in 1973-74, the former Congressman met the LaRouche movement, subscribed to Executive Intelligence Review, and engaged in a 40-year dialogue with associates of Lyndon LaRouche.

In 1995, he joined 500 current and former elected officials internationally in a Washington Post ad calling for LaRouche’s exoneration. Often accompanied by vigorous debate, Neil Gallagher voiced his support for many policy initiatives, including the current LaRouche PAC campaign for a New Bretton Woods monetary system.

“I gave it a try.” Gallagher said in the 2013 LaRouche PAC video:

I gave it a try, and I smashed my whole career as a result of it. And I’m not sorry! Because, what the hell would be the sense of staying down there, not being able to look in the mirror, or anything. I think the overall picture, of the emerging of the secret-police apparatus in America, which really came to a head with the Kennedy assassination, is, today, bigger and stronger than ever.

You don’t really have a Hoover around today, but you have a heck of a lot of guys with the power that Hoover had, who are a little more quiet and a little more efficient in the exercise of that kind of power.

I worry very much about what the hell’s going to happen to this country, unless people become aware of it. The frailty of civilization, and the ability to destroy it is so widespread now. As long as people in the Congress don’t raise these questions about the role of the secret government in America, or the secret ‘governments’ in America, or the real role of the secret societies in America—as long as there’s no protection for them, they can be destroyed overnight. . . . Now it breaks your heart. It breaks your heart, since you see what has to be done, what should be done, what Congress as a whole could do, but can’t do any more. I think the most important lesson is, if you have an issue that’s worthwhile going to war about, you better damn well have an army behind you. I didn’t.

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