Whyte Wm Pwl Memo
master plan ep 4
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9 24 the lever podcast series
trailer: Master Plan | Listen Now
ep 4
3 mtg orlando dallas and --- samer time? jerry ford vp
white of US steel
devos amway pal, joe coors/ AILES
aei 1944 baroody, bunch of CoC, biz rdtble
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ntbcw
james j cassidy H&K pwl memo mtg 21973 20 pp report
There were promotions galore yesterday at Hill & Knowlton, the public relations company.
John W. Hill, founder and chairman, moved, up to honorary chairman and chairman of the executive committee. Richard W. barrow, chief executive since April, takes the chairman's turning over the presidency to James J. Cassidy, an executive vice president and a Hill'& Knowlton man for 21 years, who will also be chief operating officer.
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Cassidy & Associates is a Washington, D.C.-based government relations firm established in 1977 by Gerald S. J. Cassidy. The firm focuses on lobbying the United States government for corporations and organizations.
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disney mtg:
JARED:Well, the main coordinator behind this gathering was a guy named William G. Whyte. He was the top lobbyist in Washington for United States Steel, one of the biggest steel producers in the world.
He was also picked to serve as Chairman of this newly-created Powell Memo Task Force. We’ll talk more about Whyte in a minute, but first I want you to check out this — it’s a roster of other Task Force Members
DAVID:Let’s see, there’s… Richard Jencks, president of CBS… Jay Van Andel, who co-founded Amway with the notorious Richard DeVos… let’s see, there’s top brass from Phillips Petroleum… I also see a bunch of executives from JC Penney, 3M, the American Medical Association, General Motors… deans from a couple universities....
Officially, Congressman Jerry came to Florida to take part in another work-related junket on the invitation of William Whyte — a junket paid for by U.S. Steel, of course. But, instead of heading to a golf course, Gerald Ford was going to the Happiest Place on Earth to schmooze and collaborate with the Powell Memo Task Force.
According to the conference schedule, the Honorable Gerald R. Ford was the official speaker at the luncheon on Friday.
But there may have been an ulterior motive for his participation in that day’s session — strategizing about the upcoming congressional elections and about how to deal with legislation that was problematic for the master plan — the “Federal Election Campaign Act.”
JARED: FECA!
So, remember, back in episode 2, we told you that Ford signed the amendments seeming to make FECA even stronger when he became president. So this is right before that, when they are discussing those amendments.
DAVID: When Ford did sign those amendments, it was seen as a big win for the reformers, not the master planners there at Disney World.
JARED: For the most part, it was a win for Common Cause and the reformers. But the master planners were desperate to get around FECA’s restrictions on corporate-funded political action committees that funnel money to politicians and political parties.
This Powell Memo meeting at Disney World was where they perfected their plan.
I got a letter for you to read, David. This was written by one of the attendees, a week before he went to Disney World on behalf of his boss John Merrill Olin.
DAVID:Olin, the wealthy industrialist. We’ll talk more about him later.
JARED:In this letter, the executive writes about the Powell Memo Task Force in intimate detail, especially their lobbying effort to amend the regulations around corporate campaign donations
He wrote,
“We should be able to get many companies to follow our own pattern of political fundraising…”
DAVID:He’s talking about political action committees, PACs. And without getting too far into the weeds, the corporate guys at this Orlando meeting wanted an exemption to an older law that was standing in the way of huge multinationals, like the Olin Corp, from dumping money into corporate PACs.
The effort was being opposed by Common Cause and a senator from Wisconsin named William Proxmire, who was threatening to filibuster.
JARED:Check out this line:
“I have suggested to some of my corporate associates that we might contribute to a special fund to have Senator Proxmire get a few more hair transplants… provided the operator drills a little deeper this time.”
DAVID:Okay, so they’re like joking about murdering Senator Proxmire, basically, or at least lobotomizing him.
JARED: Yeah, and remember: We know that Ford was there. We know that amending FECA was a major item of discussion at the meeting. And we know the meeting took place right before Ford’s keynote speech to the Powell Memo Task Force.
DAVID: So, let’s review: while drinking mai-tais at Disney World’s Polynesian Hotel, the master planners are specifically scheming to end restrictions on corporate PACs, and they’re schmoozing directly with Gerald Ford — the then-House minority leader on his way to becoming president.
JAREDAnd then, guess what? A provision killing those restrictions ended up in the FECA reform bill that Gerald Ford first dealt with in Congress… and then later signed into law as president!
DAVID:Wow! What a shocking coincidence! Remember what Ford said in episode 2, when he signed the bill into law?
GERALD R. FORD: …all the compromises that were necessary in the process…
DAVID:I guess now we know where some of those compromises came from.
So, under the guise of post-Watergate campaign finance reform legislation, the master planners from this Powell memo meeting ended up creating their first corruption loophole.
And as soon as that law took effect, there was an immediate explosion in campaign spending by corporate America… no more secret bags of dirty cash smuggled through airports, a la Nixon.
The Chamber wanted all of its members to write checks for millions of dollars to totally official, totally legal, and extremely powerful business PACs.
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But if they were going to create a movement to counter the Left, they needed something that would not only inspire the insiders, and powerbrokers, and elites — but also something that would motivate the masses.
JARED: And this is why I’m skeptical about whether the Powell memo was leaked to the Washington Post without the knowledge of the top leadership at the Chamber of Commerce.
Because right after the memo went public in 1972, you see that the Chamber is immediately publishing it and distributing it far and wide. They mailed thousands of copies to members. They printed it in their official magazine with an elaborate design treatment like it was some mysterious quasi-religious text that must be read.
DAVID:It really was kind of like the conservative movement’s version of the “Anarchist’s Cookbook” — it was kinda like contraband, a publication everyone had heard about but wasn’t on the newsstand.
JARED: And even though the Powell memo was never an officially published book, according to the Chamber’s estimates, hundreds of thousands of copies of it were circulated, reaching millions of Americans and sparking numerous discussions, speeches, and articles. It was an underground bestseller.
DAVID: And by early 1973, activity around the memo was intense.
JARED: So intense, in fact, that at the same time Gerald Ford was at Disney World delivering his keynote address to the Powell Memo conference… it turns out there was another event — a rival event — about the Powell memo that was happening at the Marriott hotel in Dallas, Texas. AILES
DAVID:At the same time?
JARED: The same exact day, March 30th, 1973. I want to show you this.
These are notes taken by a man named John A. Howard. Howard came from the world of academia and was the President of Rockford College in Illinois. He was an influential figure in the emerging conservative movement during this time.
insert
DAVID:
“Roger Ailes outlined the power which advertisers would be able to exert upon TV programming if they were moved to do so… the Chamber members not only need to understand the problem, but be informed about where and how they can apply leverage and be given the tools to exert the leverage.”
DAVID: In my time working in politics and media, I have been eye-rolled and depicted as some sort of deranged conspiracy theorist whenever I’ve suggested that corporate advertisers at times try to, and have the power to, influence the news with their advertising dollars. But here at this meeting, it looks like the future founder of Fox News spelled that out as an explicit political strategy?
JARED: Yeah, and John Howard loved this idea. At the time, Ailes was a young up-and-coming TV producer turned political consultant. His ideas about shaping public perceptions through media, they found a receptive audience at this Dallas meeting, as well as other meetings that he attended about the Powell memo.
DAVID:Listener, if you’ve ever looked at the Republican Party of today and wondered — how did country club Republicans and the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, wind up in bed with hard-right libertarians? And how did Fox News become the obnoxious bullhorn of the conservative movement? This is the moment when those coalitions started to form. The Powell memo served as the connective tissue.
JARED:And to be clear, the hard-right libertarian faction was different from the Chamber of Commerce crowd at Disney World.
DAVID: The libertarians had previously felt marginalized in the Republican Party. While the pro-business Republicans at Disney World wanted favors from the government, the libertarians were anti-government idealogues who wanted to tear it all down.
JARED:We’re talking about some of America’s wealthiest and most influential families — direct descendants of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, who were committed to the destruction of the federal government bureaucracy expanded under the New Deal.
But in 1973 and 1974, you had these convergences — some bigger and more formal, some smaller and more intimate — where the Powell memo served as a unifying document. Its promise of freedom and enterprise went viral among both groups and brought them together.
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JARED: It wasn’t. The Chamber of Commerce sent the memo to its members, and then it spread organically, from person to person, probably using snail mail and lots of Xerox copies.
DAVID: Imagine some vice president of a company opens up his mailbox and finds a copy of the memo. He loves it so much that he makes a copy.
JARED: Then the memo arrives at the mansion of wealthy industrialist John Olin, who inherited his fortune from his family’s chemical and munitions empire in the 1930s.
DAVID: So Olin is like, “Oh my God, this guy Lewis Powell, this guy is saying what I’ve been thinking!”
JARED: Olin would go on to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative think tanks, media organizations and become a main backer of a conservative legal group called the Federalist Society.
DAVID:We’ll talk about the Federalist Society in depth later in the series.
JARED:Then… the Powell memo shows up in Wichita, Kansas at the estate of Charles and David Koch.
DAVIDThe Koch brothers.
JARED:I don’t even think we need to explain the impact of the Kochs, but the Koch Brothers are recognized as some of the biggest financiers of conservative politics.Their father built an empire in oil and gas and they inherited his businesses along with his hard-core libertarian ideology.
And Charles, we know, found inspiration in the Powell memo. In 1974, he read an excerpt of the Powell Memo to a group of like-minded conservatives, and said he didn’t think it went far enough actually. So he co-founded the Cato Institute, another think tank dedicated to stuff like deregulating campaign finance.
DAVID: These guys really took to heart Powell’s urging to play the long game, to invest money in creating alternative institutions to shift the country in a new direction at every level.
JARED:Another copy gets made… now imagine the memo arriving at the estate of Richard Mellon Scaife, the mogul who inherited his family’s oil and banking fortune.
DAVID: Wait, Scaife’s name came up in Episode 2. He was one of Nixon’s secret donors who got exposed by the Common Cause lawsuit
ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:$800,000 from Richard Scaife of the wealthy Mellon family.
JARED: Yeah. And after reading the Powell memo, Scaife began a decades-long mission to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative causes and organizations.
DAVID: This includes the Heritage Foundation.
JARED:Yes, exactly, this brings us to our last figure.
A copy of the memo arrives in Golden, Colorado at the headquarters of Coors Brewing Company. Joseph Coors, a grandson of the company’s founder, told a historian that the Powell memorandum “stirred” him and made him realize American business was “ignoring a crisis.” So he tapped his family’s brewing fortune for a venture led by Roger Ailes, which laid the groundwork for what would evolve into Fox News.
But his biggest investments were put toward making radical changes to the intellectual and policy landscape of Washington, D.C. He became one of the first and biggest funders of the Heritage Foundation, which was founded in February 1973.
DAVID:For listeners who vaguely recognize the name of the Heritage Foundation, it’s because the organization and its policy agenda have been touted by Republican presidents for the last four decades.
You don’t have to trust me on that. The 2024 Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance explicitly said that, writing “the Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
And Vance wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote that. Here’s Ronald Reagan in the 1980s:
RONALD REAGAN:I mentioned the things that were on the minds of conservatives at the moment, the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Joe and Holly Coors, and so many of you in this room in bringing to Washington the political revolution.
DAVID: And here’s what you’ve been hearing in the news about Donald Trump:
NEWS CLIP: The conservative Heritage Foundation leading this draconian and at times extreme policy plan, Project 2025, a 900-page sort of wish list or proposal for the second term
DONALD TRUMP:Heritage does such an incredible job and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.
DAVID:So there it is, another direct line from Lewis Powell’s manifesto to the present era — in this case from the Powell Memo in 1971 to Project 2025 today. The Powell Memo inspired oligarchs to fund the Heritage Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation then became the author of the agenda of the entire conservative movement all the way into this current moment we’re now living through.
JARED: But back here in 1973, this was all still underground — just a bunch of ideologues, eggheads, activists, and oligarchs cross-pollinating with one another.
DAVID: So, the question for the master planners at this early moment in the 1970s was: How do they take the Powell memo’s ideas and start implementing them? How do they begin infiltrating the courts and infiltrating American culture? That’s where we’re going next.
Let me set the scene: It’s November 12, 1974, 19 months after the meeting at Disney World with Gerald Ford and the meeting in Dallas with Roger Aisles.endit
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You may recall that the Powell memo recommended mimicking Ralph Nader’s focus on the courts — filing lawsuits designed to get specific policy outcomes and amicus briefs pressuring judges to deliver specific rulings.
WILLIAM WHYTE:…since expanding the program, the Chamber has participated, or is in the process of doing so, in 13 cases… nine of these are in the labor area…
DAVID:Whyte brags that the Chamber has participated in cases over things like whether unemployment benefits should be paid to striking workers or changing the guidelines for how chemicals can be discharged into waterways.
WILLIAM WHYTE:We have been successful in gaining our point of view in important instances, and we expect these judicial actions to be one of the most far-reaching and productive elements resulting from Task Force recommendations.
DAVID:Whyte says the Chamber has educational programs, symposiums and conferences going on nationwide.
WILLIAM WHYTE: … to create rapport and a better understanding of our private enterprise system among youth and educators...
DAVID: OK… so here’s the question: What then was done after this meeting? What specifically?
JARED: Well, on the media front, they launched an operation to change the hearts and minds of normie Americans. One guy in that room, the advertising executive named Barton Cummings, spearheaded a massive PSA campaign through the Ad Council.
DAVID:Wait, I thought Ad Council ads weren’t political. I remember them being really Mom and apple pie kind of stuff. Like, Smokey the Bear.
JARED:Right, but in the 1970s, Cummings and Jerry Ford’s administration partnered with the Ad Council to do a comically ideological ad series about validating capitalism, basically — a campaign funded by corporate giants like Procter & Gamble, Mobil Oil, Exxon, William Whyte’s own U.S. Steel, all in partnership with the U.S. government!
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JARED: Remember the film projects that the Chamber of Commerce said it was putting into production as part of the Powell Memo Task Force? Well, this is one that the Chamber released in 1976 for the 200th anniversary of America’s founding.
ARCHIVAL FILM FOOTAGE: Happy Birthday USA!
JARED:…narrated by Jimmy Stewart.
JIMMY STEWART:What do you get for a country that has everything? Well, almost everything… government bureaucracy is becoming a paternalistic monopoly that is burying us in paperwork and red tape. It stifles initiative, and it erodes the basic self reliance, which is our American legacy…
DAVID: So Jimmy Stewart — the guy who in 1939 played an earnest government-reforming outsider in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — was working with Washington insiders in 1976 to convince the public that the government is the problem?
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[### President - Personal Prior Travel Records
Gerald R. Ford Museum (.gov)
https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov › document](https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0019/4520835.pdf)
Met at airport by Bill Whyte and taken to Polynesian Village at Disney World. You were the luncheon speaker on the final day of three-day meeting of the Public ...