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According to the 1983 book by Harrison Rainie and John Quinn, Growing Up Kennedy, prior to his death in 1990, Steve Smith managed the family trusts and parceled out individual payments through the Park Agency to the 29 grandchildren of Joseph Kennedy. The Park Agency is “in effect a private family bank” which was managed by the late Steve Smith, according to the same book.
Growing Up Kennedy also noted that “there is a deliberate effort to obscure rather than reveal the extent and disposition of family funds” which are dished out to Kennedy Dynasty members, but indicated that Joseph Kennedy’s 29 grandchildren received their handouts according to the following procedure:
“Upon reaching 18, each grandchild begins receiving between $15,000 and $20,000 a year. The full inheritance income begins at age 21, when each grandchild collects up to $30,000 a year. Each cousin’s personal capital is said to be about $300,000. Some also share in their parents’ portions, and Caroline and [the now-deceased] John have separate income from earnings on their [now-deceased] mother’s $20-million share from the estate of Aristotle Onassis. A major advantage of the trust arrangement is that the Park Agency pays the taxes, so that each cousin gets spendable income, equivalent to a taxable salary of at least $50,000.”
The same book also revealed that several of Joseph Kennedy’s grandchildren “drive BMW sport cars” and all 29 of the grandchildren “take regular and spectacular vacations, which they arrange simply by calling a number at the Park Agency.”
One of Joseph Kennedy’s grandchildren, former Congressional Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, used $250,000 of his handout money to make a loan to his own congressional campaign fund when he ran for U.S. Congress in 1986, according to The Best Congress Money Can Buy by Philip Stern. Another grandchild of Joseph Kennedy, Maria Shriver [the wife of Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger] used to be seen reading the news on the Establishment’s television screen—although she didn’t often read us news about the latest developments at the Kennedy Dynasty’s Park Agency.
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Downtown 12/25/91)
I
n his book The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, John Davis described how the Kennedy Dynasty’s family holding company, Park Agency Inc., and its Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation operated in the early 1980s:
“The Kennedy enterprises that are managed in room 1850 at 125 Park Avenue represent money accumulated by Joseph P. Kennedy during the years 1920 to 1969 and consists of trust funds the patriarch established for his wife and children, several charitable foundations, and a string of businesses that feed those trusts and foundations. The aggregate value of these enterprises, which, taken together, constitute `the Kennedy fortune,’ has never been revealed, but it is thought to amount to something in the neighborhood of $350 million [as of 1983]...
“Since John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy [and Edward M. Kennedy] are dead, their trusts have passed on to their children. John F. Kennedy Jr. [now-deceased] and Caroline Kennedy receive income from Kennedy trusts worth from $7.5 million to $10 million each, in addition to the substantial trusts established for them by Aristotle Onassis, and the children of Robert F. Kennedy receive income off trusts worth about $1 million…
“Feeding the Kennedy trusts, foundations, and memorials are the various Kennedy-owned businesses that are either held or managed by the Park Agency.
“The largest of these, by far, is the Merchandise Mart, a 24-story structure in Chicago with 1,000 tenants, currently [as of 1983] worth about $200 million, which generate an annual income of about $25 million a year. Other Kennedy businesses include the Corpus Christi-based Mokeen Oil Corporation, and the Kenoil Corporation, worth around $20 million, with oil-producing properties in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and California. These are the principal moneymakers. Other Kennedy-controlled businesses include the Park Agency’s considerable real estate holdings, the Sutton Producing Corporation, a small oil company based in San Antonio, and the Forest Oil Corporation of Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is [was] wholly owned by [the now-deceased] Senator Edward Kennedy. Finally, rounding out the Kennedy holdings is a substantial portfolio of stocks and bonds containing such standard blue chips as Exxon, IBM and Eastman Kodak.”
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Downtown 3/25/92)
(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 6 of article).
Reader’s Digest was first published in February 1922 by DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, after a $5,000 [in 1920s money] loan from Mrs. Wallace’s brother—Barclay Acheson—was obtained. The initial issue consisted of 31 articles which the then-32-year-old “Wally” had clipped from old magazines in the public library, and then condensed for his own magazine’s use.
The son of a Minnesota college president, DeWitt Wallace was from St. Paul, Minnesota and “belonged to an elite that had virtually nothing in common with the masses who were to be his future audience,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. But the same book also asserted that during the 1920s the Reader’s Digest publisher “packed his magazine with articles pandering to the most reactionary elements among his readers” and by 1929 the adless magazine’s circulation had reached 216,000, “thanks to relentless direct-mail solicitations.” Between 1922 and the 1990s, the corporate headquarters of Reader’s Digest was always located in the Pleasantville-Chappaqua area of Westchester County, in suburban New York.
The Magazine In America: 1741-1990 reference book attributed the Reader’s Digest’s almost immediate success in attracting subscribers in part to the fact that “Wallace was offering his customers the `best’ from the periodical press, shortened to an easy length…for a bargain price.” But, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “a critical factor in the Digest’s…prosperity was that Wally paid nothing for the articles he selected and condensed from other publications—in other words, the entire contents of his magazine” and “Wally for years limited his direct mail promotion to points beyond a 500-mile radius of New York” so “no editor or publisher was likely to…discover that it was stealing copyrighted material wholesale.”
The same book also recalled that “for the first eight years of its existence, DeWitt Wallace took great care to hide the extraordinary success of his magazine” and “since it did not carry advertising, he did not have to submit to an annual circulation audit.” Among the articles the Reader’s Digest published during the Roaring Twenties was an article in its January 1926 issue which was entitled “The Klan: Defender of Americanism” and the magazine also exhibited “an almost rabid hostility towards immigrants and Catholics” during the 1920s and 1930s, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The Reader’s Digest also was profitable enough to start publishing an edition in Braille for the visually-impaired in 1928. (end of part 7)
(
Downtown 10/27/93)
(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 5 of article).
Reader’s Digest was also connected, historically, to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—one of the giant “Big Five” insurance companies which apparently stood to benefit most from the 1990s Clinton administration’s [initial version of the Democratic Obama Administration’s] health care reform plan. During the early 1990s, the then-chairman of the board at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Robert Schwartz, also sat on the board of the Reader’s Digest Association’s corporate board and another Reader’s Digest Association board member in the 1990s, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense named Melvin Laird, also sat on Metropolitan Life’s corporate board in the 1990s.
In the 1990s, the “non-profit” Metropolitan Museum of Art then owned about 11 percent of the nonvoting stock of the then-highly profitable Reader’s Digest. In 1991, for example, the net income of the Reader’s Digest Association exceeded $200 million and it was then the 209th largest corporation in the United States.
Coincidentally, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1990s—George Grune—was then the chairman of the board of the Reader’s Digest Association and he took home an annual salary of $1.2 million in the early 1990s. In addition to being Reader’s Digest’s board chairman at that time, Grune also sat on the corporate of Chemical Bank in the early 1990s.
Downtown telephoned the Communications Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art three times in the Fall of 1993 to ask a museum spokesperson to characterize the nature of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s historical connection to Reader’s Digest. But no one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Communications Department was available to communicate any comments about its historical Reader’s Digest connection in the Fall of 1993.
Sitting next to then-Reader’s Digest board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s was the then-New York Times Company Board Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. In the early 1990s, Sulzberger was the chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees and Sulzberger’s son—Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—held the post of New York Times publisher. Another New York Times Company board member in the 1990s—former IBM corporate board chairman John Akers—also sat next to then-Reader’s Digest Association board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s.
The then-Reader’s Digest Association Chairman Grune also sat next to the following other “art lovers” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art board of trustees in the early 1990s: then-CBS Chairman of the Board Laurance Tisch; then-CBS Director James Houghton; then-New York magazine owner Henry Kravis; and Kissinger Associates Chairman Henry Kissinger. (end of part 6)
(
Downtown 10/27/93)
(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 20111 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 4 of article).
In addition to apparently collaborating historically with the CIA, the Reader’s Digest apparently acted, historically, as a propaganda tool of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]. As Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon recalled, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, led by J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 to 1972, had long cultivated sympathetic contacts in the media” and “these included journalists such as…Reader’s Digest editor Fulton Oursler.”
In 1973, the book Investigating The FBI also noted that “Over the years, Hoover maintained extremely close ties with several magazines—U.S. News & World Report and Reader’s Digest being perhaps the closest.” The FBI, for instance, “fed” Reader’s Digest Washington bureau editor John Barron “information on a spy case and then, during the trial, deposed him as a professional witness,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also recalled that “Hoover’s byline appeared frequently in the Digest, which was his favorite publication,” “between 1942 and 1972 at least 12 articles” by FBI Director Hoover were published by Reader’s Digest, and the magazine’s Washington bureau during the 1950s and 1960s was used by Hoover “as if it were his own personal PR firm.” (end of part 5)
(
Downtown 10/27/93)
(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 3 of article).
In a 1993 telephone interview, Downtown asked Reader’s Digest’s then-press spokesperson, Craig Lowder, what the magazine’s response is, to the criticism that it has acted as a tool of the CIA since 1948, as asserted in John Heidenry’s book Theirs Was The Kingdom.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate to respond to every allegation made in Heidenry’s book. But I can comment generally on the book. Frankly, we feel his book is full of a lot of gossip, a lot of unsubstantiated innuendos, and many factual inaccuracies,” replied Lowder. “We learned about Heidenry’s plans to write a book and were initially excited about it. But then we found out what he was doing, when we received complaints from some former employees about the kind of questions he was asking. They didn’t believe what he was doing. His book became an unfair character assassination of [Reader’s Digest co-founder] DeWitt Wallace. There’s so much in that book that’s completely false. There are some charges made in which his only alleged sources are people who are now dead.”
The Reader’s Digest then-spokesperson, however, wasn’t willing to specifically confirm or deny the specific allegations in Heidenry’s book regarding the magazine’s historic CIA ties.
Despite its history of apparently using Reader’s Digest as a secret propaganda instrument, the Central Intelligence Agency wasn’t too eager in the early 1990s to let the many readers of Reader’s Digest read about the exact nature of the CIA’s relationship to Reader’s Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace and the magazine. Theirs Was The Kingdom author Heidenry, for example, noted in 1993: “An FOIA request to the CIA for its files on DeWitt Wallace and on the Reader’s Digest was denied, as was an appeal…” (end of part 4)
(
Downtown 10/27/93)
(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 2 of article).
In Mexico, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry, an “outspoken critic of the Reader’s Digest’s cozy relationship with the CIA was Manuel Buendia,” a muckraking columnist. In his 1983 book, La CIA En Mexico, Buendia charged that the Spanish-language edition of Reader’s Digest in Mexico—Selecciones—frequently published articles by a U.S. writer named Daniel James, who, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “has only written what he has been ordered to by the CIA.” Theirs Was The Kingdom author John Heidenry also noted that “Buendia further identified Antonio Rodriguez Villar, director of Selecciones in Mexico City as a CIA agent…” and “Buendia claimed the CIA,`a longtime friend of Selecciones [had] taken over its Latin American editions, through individuals such as Rodriguez Villar.’” Shortly after Buendia’s book La CIA En Mexico, was published, the muckraking columnist was “shot four times in the back at point blank range in a parking-lot” after leaving his office on May 30, 1984, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom.
Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon also noted that “The CIA cultivated high-level contacts within the most prestigious media in the U.S., including the three TV networks and the newspaper of record” and “more than 20 other American news organizations occasionally shared a bed with the CIA, including Reader’s Digest…” The same book also observed that “It was rather convenient that people like…Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest sat on the board of directors of the National Committee for a Free Europe [NCFE], which functioned as a thinly-veiled private-section cover for channeling funds to neo-Nazi émigré groups…” and “other NCFE board members included CIA director Allen Dulles…” (end of part 3)
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Downtown 10/27/93)
