Treats

The Devil II

As Allen W. Dulles roasts in hell (or runs it), historian David Talbot speaks with Len Osanic and Jim DiEugenio on a terrific episode of Black Op Radio.

Up the Rebels

Chris Hedges and Dr. Cornel West, the New School, New York City, October 2015.

The Devil

"That little Kennedy, he thought he was a God." -- Allen Dulles

The most important political history in many a year was published this week by HarperCollins: David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot -- author of the magisterial and deeply moving Brothers (2007) -- uncovers the life and enormous power of the most evil American of the 20th-century ('though Ronald Reagan comes close), capitalist gangster Allen Dulles. Dulles, flat-out WASP Nazi and little girl molester, spent his diabolical career destroying democrats and democratic movements across the world (and most certainly at home). A short list: through Sullivan & Cromwell, he bankrolled the Third Reich's extermination of home-grown and international anti-Hitler conspiracies; helped destroy the post-World War II freedom movements in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and West Germany; overthrew (or tried to) anti-capitalist governments and leaders in Laos, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Cambodia, Iran, the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Korea, India, Egypt, Haiti, Iraq. Dulles's crowning achievement: the murder of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy; and two days later Kennedy's accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

David Talbot speaks with Amy Goodman.