N.Y. TIMES CAUGHT IN TWICE-TOLD LIE

Lyndon LaRouche and the
True History of 20th Century America

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this article]

March 12—The failing New York Times goofed.

Someone, perhaps inadvertently, ran an accompanying picture with the paper’s Feb. 13 “fake news” article on the February 12 death of Lyndon LaRouche. The photo purported to show an angry LaRouche at a Trenton press conference during the Presidential campaign of 1984. The picture, however, also revealed a distinguished-looking African-American, who was clearly there in support of LaRouche. Who was he?

Then, on March 4, the Times ran a full-page article, titled “The Complex Story of Hulan Jack, The First Black ‘Boss of Manhattan’.” The general theme of that article was that Mr. Jack, the first African-American elected to the Borough Presidency of Manhattan, and the most powerful elected official of African descent elected to a Northern municipality up to that time (1953), had for some mysterious reason, sunk into obscurity. The Times reports, “Hulan Jack rarely gets mentioned today, even during Black History Month”—including by the Times, which ran their print copy of the article in March, after having posted the article in their digital edition of February 20. Why, then, did Hulan Jack suddenly become significant to the New York Times?

Since the Times has not run an article about Hulan Jack since his death in 1986, thirty-two years ago, is it possible—just possible—that the Times wrote and ran the article, not because of a sudden impassioned interest in African-American contributions to history, but rather because of their earlier failure to identify Hulan Jack as seated next to Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche? Is it possible that the Times failed to note, despite the fact that it is recorded in Jack’s readily available autobiography, Fifty Years a Democrat, that he endorsed Lyndon LaRouche as a candidate for President of the United States in 1980, co-founded the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) with Lyndon LaRouche, and attended that 1984 press conference because he supported Lyndon LaRouche for President in 1984?

The reader may have guessed by now, that the March 4 article on Hulan Jack did not in any way mention his involvement with Lyndon LaRouche, nor why Jack was present in the picture that had been published two weeks earlier in the same newspaper. If it had, the Times’ own “narrative” about Lyndon LaRouche, contrived 40 years ago, would have fallen apart, and many Americans, whatever their views on LaRouche as such, would become interested to know why, even in death, the New York Times fears him. To exonerate Lyndon LaRouche, is to first eradicate the “narrative” of America’s last 55 years.

LaRouche and the Lying N.Y. Times

Lyndon LaRouche, though deceased, has a bit to say on the matter of this recent Times faux pas. In a piece written February 15, 2000 titled, “He’s a Bad Guy, But We Can’t Say Why,” LaRouche recounts:

Following the Congress’ mid-1970s exposure of some shocking examples of the Justice Department’s other operations operating under “internal security” covers, there was a greater emphasis on running these same kinds of operations under nominally private covers. So, during the period of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s official reign inside the Carter Administration, 1978-1980, two private international organizations were key in launching the continuation of former Justice Department operations. These were a private branch of British intelligence, known as Friedrich von Hayek’s and Professor Milton Friedman’s Mont Pelerin Society, and such operations of the London-created New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as the Zbigniew Brzezinski-led Trilateral Commission.

On the basis of information received from multiple sources, several of my associates, under my direction, went up the back-trail of evidence leading to discovery of hard proof, that the Times was organizing a public defamation, a defamation intended, according to the voluntary statement of the Times’ agents themselves, to set me, personally, up for imprisonment, through widespread and persisting waves of defamation with charges which the Times then knew to be false.

In the course of this investigation, we were able to document the existence of precisely such an operation and intent. This included our investigators’ secretly tape-recorded restaurant interview with the relevant two Times reporters, Paul Montgomery and Howard Blum. That tape-recording was then promptly presented, at press conferences called for this purpose, in New York City and in Washington, D.C.

In an explanatory footnote, LaRouche comments: “In the July 23, 1979 meeting, reporter Blum stated that the proposed New York Times article was intended to start a government investigation of LaRouche and his associates and he needed an ‘eye catcher.’ Blum stated that, ‘the article does not have to be especially true.’ Blum went on to say, ‘A government investigation is what you and I want, isn’t it,’ and, . . . ‘while it might sound cynical, it is more important for the government that something appears in the New York Times than whether or not it is true’.”

Hulan Jack and the Lying N.Y. Times

Sensing the perfidy of the New York Times, however, does not always require such thoroughgoing investigation, and success, as is recounted above. For example, one reader of the Hulan Jack article, though not necessarily aware of the earlier LaRouche faux pas of the Times, still refused to be bamboozled by the benign Uriah Heep-styled “time-capsule” excuse for the appearance of the article, even taken at face-value. He smartly contested the intent of the Times piece, which attempted to blame the fall and subsequent obscurity of Hulan Jack on his legal troubles. The Times fraud purported to “report the facts” thus:

Harlem stood by Mr. Jack, at least initially, when prosecutors went after him on corruption charges in 1960 with particular tenacity, appealing a judge’s dismissal of the charges and taking the case to trial before a jury deadlocked. The state re-tried Mr. Jack successfully—for receiving roughly $5,000 in apartment renovations from a developer he’d been friends with for years, who was also seeking city contracts—leading to a misdemeanor conviction and a suspended sentence.

The suspicious New York reader responded thus:

To those who, “thank the New York Times,” I beg to differ. Hulan Jack was simply one of the Sugar Hill Gang who got shot down by white establishment politics and press in the City of New York. It is a question of undercapitalization and sheer pious hypocrisy being used to attack and strip any black politician who attained any power or authority in NYC by any means necessary. . . . But, it doesn’t stop there. The Times played a pivotal role in taking down Charles Rangel—attempting to indict him by bad press for renting a perfectly legal office apartment in the same rent-controlled building where he had two other apartments. Many of us believe this was a campaign whose authors were white hedge fund owners threatened by Mr. Rangel’s introduction of a resolution to tax hedge funds on individual transactions. . . .

This reader, whatever the limitations of his analysis may be, senses the “Uriah Heep” sliminess of the “oh so liberal” Times, which, paternalistically, did not even bother to include any of Hulan Jack’s own words in its crusade to save him from obscurity. Hulan Jack spoke quite clearly, in his autobiography, as to why he was gone after, and who did it—including a future New York Times editorial board member named Roger Starr. On pages 112-115 of his autobiography, Mr. Jack tells us:

During my first term in office, I placed a great deal of pressure on the New York City Housing Authority to increase the maximum income ceiling for eligibility for public housing, to allow clerks, busboys, porters, and other low-income categories of employed workers to live in low cost public housing. As a result of the Housing Authority’s eventual change in policy, more people became eligible for the project under its jurisdiction. However there were many other individuals who had been removed from their homes to make way for the construction of public housing, but who were nevertheless ineligible for apartments in the new housing that was built. These included unmarried persons, and the widow or widower without children. Through the assistance of my office, and the cooperation of the Housing Authority, a commitment was made to create a limited number of single occupancy size apartments for those single and elderly persons in new projects under construction.

I felt the city would be a poor place indeed if the entire middle class migrated to the suburbs, as some today think is desirable, and I worked to keep middle-class families and their children in Manhattan. . . .

. . . In the middle of my first term as borough president, my office began to receive an increasing number of complaints that site clearance for projects being carried out by the city’s Slum Clearance Committee were dispossessing large numbers of families. There were reports that hundreds of families were being turned out into the streets, having been given no assurance to find reasonably priced, clean replacement housing in the borough. My planners and engineers also reported the closing down of streets in entire neighborhood to make way for the construction of public housing projects. . . . These “superblock” building plans not only snarled neighborhood through-traffic during construction, but threatened to permanently foul up traffic patterns by eliminating through streets within the confines of the project or program. . . .

I thought the superblock construction concept was in most cases inappropriate to the needs of Manhattan communities, so I directed my engineers and planners to develop an alternative approach to ridding the borough’s neighborhoods of their most obsolete and inadequate housing. This new approach, which I put forward as early as 1954, . . . I dubbed “vest pocket development.” The vest pocket approach required careful assessment of the needs of each neighborhood, beginning with a building-by-building review of the housing stock to determine how the worst of it could be replaced without excessively disrupting the life of the community. In some cases this meant demolishing one or two buildings in a given block. At that rate, a minimum number of people would be dislocated, and existing sewer, water, and electrical facilities would not be disturbed. Another aspect of the plan was to make maximum use of vacant land, abandoned school buildings, etc. to provide space for new residential construction without the relocation of any families at all. By the end of my first term in office, we had pursued the vest pocket strategy successfully in several of the borough’s neighborhoods. . . .

The greatest objection to my vest pocket approach for urban development came from an individual by the name of Roger Starr, who was associated with a civic organization concerned with housing. He roundly denounced the plan as being a dream that was impossible to achieve. Starr publicly associated himself with the urban renewal effort to improve housing for Manhattan’s population, but it was clear even at that time his major concern was to drive people out of the city by tearing down and disrupting stable neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal.” About twenty years after he lined himself up in opposition to my neighborhood rejuvenation program, Starr came out in the pages of the New York Times endorsing a policy of “planned shrinkage” for America’s cities. This program, for which he offered New York as a pilot project, was to be carried out by gradually diminishing the population in working-class neighborhoods, by cutting off their vital services such as police and fire protection.

Jack’s first discussion with Lyndon LaRouche, held in Manchester, New Hampshire during the 1980 Presidential campaign, was in part about how to reverse the population reduction policies of Starr (who was a New York Times editorial writer from 1977 to 1992), policies echoed today in the Green New Deal, now becoming known as the “Soylent Green New Deal.”

Robert Moses and ‘Planned Shrinkage’

Another letter sent to the Times regarding Jack, references the Establishment’s enforcer, “British civil servant” Robert Moses. The letter states, “Hulan Jack made powerful financial enemies, including ‘power broker’ Robert Moses, because of his opposition to ‘urban renewal,’ referred to by Malcolm X and others as ‘Negro removal’ at the time.” Robert Moses personally testified against Hulan Jack, and, according to Jack, was central to Jack’s unjust conviction.

In his autobiography, Jack elaborates on his battle with Robert Moses:

I remember our controversy over the clearance of the site for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway in the neighborhood that used to be known as Hell’s Kitchen. After all the formalities have been approved, . . . a delegation of people from the neighborhood came to my office and reported that they were being harassed out of their homes. No alternative residences had been provided for them, and in several cases, families had been physically thrown out of their apartments in the middle of the night. . . .

I had the greatest respect for Mr. Moses and his determination to complete the construction of Lincoln Center as soon as possible. Today we have an international showcase for the arts and music due to his efforts, a center of culture the entire city is proud of. Nevertheless, I had no intention of allowing such procedures as the-dead-of night evictions that were reported to me. I ordered a halt to further demolition of housing on the Lincoln Center site until my office got some guarantees that the program for the location assistance promised by the Slum Clearance Committee in its proposal would be carried out to the letter. After several negotiating sessions, my office and Mr. Moses came to an agreement on how to proceed, but only after I had reminded Mr. Moses several times that Lincoln Center was being built through the sacrifice and effort of every one of the families that were forced to relocate off the site. . . .

I can remember becoming physically nauseated by what Robert Moses did when he took the stand . . . Although we had opposed each other on important matters of policy, Robert Moses and I had maintained cordial and good relations. . . .

When he got on the stand, sworn to tell the truth as he knew it, Robert Moses used every means at his disposal to create the impression that . . . I had conceived a program detrimental to the city.

He reported no facts. But when a man of the stature of Robert Moses is paraded in front of an uninformed jury and allowed to announce his opinions under oath, what he says is very likely to have a deep effect on the average juror. There is no doubt that this was the way things worked at my second trial. When the prosecution rested its case, the jury speedily convicted me on all three counts.

Develop Africa . . . Develop the World

The National Democratic Policy Committee which Hulan Jack did much to shape, was, together with Jack’s autobiography, his successful attempt to introduce government participation to people in general through an independent electorally active policy-driven third force in the United States. This became known as the LaRouche candidates’ movement, which successfully engaged thousands of Americans in the first half of the 1980s in electoral politics on the village, city, state and federal level. Hulan Jack’s role took him to many countries during the six years that he collaborated with Lyndon LaRouche and the NDPC. The New York Times knows that to tell the truth, about either Hulan Jack or Lyndon LaRouche, would be to reveal how fake the slanders against both are.

But there is something even far more terrifying to the Times, on the eve of a visit by the President of China to Italy, and a subsequent potential meeting between President Xi and President Trump. It was a topic discussed in depth by LaRouche and Jack in that December 1979 meeting—the development of the African continent, particularly through the creation of a “Second Nile River” by diverting the Congo River northwards. Now known as the Transaqua Project, it was then called the “Lake Chad Congo River Basin” by LaRouche’s European organization, which had held a groundbreaking conference in Paris, in June 1979 and later published a book titled, The Industrialization of Africa. Hulan Jack and Lyndon LaRouche formed the Committee for a New Africa Policy, whose first actions were to call for 18 million metric tons of wheat, grain and dry milk to be delivered to Congo (then called Zaire), which was in the midst of a famine, and to propose a Second Nile River Project as the true basis for permanent survival and development of Central Africa.

Is it possible that Presidents Xi and Trump might discuss the idea of joint construction of a new economic platform in Central Africa, after Xi discusses such ideas with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy? Will that discussion of forty years ago between Hulan Jack and Lyndon LaRouche resonate in a different way, today, among United States citizens, free to think again because the true history of the United States has been revealed, and LaRouche exonerated?

Ideas, and the great men who create, propose, and defend them, never die. The “planned shrinkage” of the American mind, the long-term effect of too-frequent reading of the New York Times, is being reversed, even as, and because, you read this.