[PEN-L] Frank L. Kluckhohn follow-up

[Louis Proyect]

Yesterday, after I reported on the pro-Franco 
reporting of NY Timesman Frank L. Kluckhohn 
during the Spanish Civil War, I was somewhat 
surprised to discover a comment in his defense 
from one of his relatives, a man named R.H. 
Kluckhohn who describes himself as a retired man 
keen on model railroads and active in his local Episcopalian church:

"Ya gotta love those ad hominem diatribes and 
partial quotes. Fact: Franco won and kicked Frank 
Kluckhohn out of Spain. So much for polemics."

If Frank Kluckhohn was kicked out of Spain for 
anything he wrote about Franco, that seemed to 
have eluded the attention of his editors who 
simply noted that he had been reassigned to 
Mexico in 1936. (It should be added, however, 
that he was expelled from Mexico for reporting 
“the woes of foreign businessmen with such zeal 
that Mexican authorities lost patience”, according to Time Magazine.

If anything, his tender concerns for foreign 
businessmen in a radicalized Mexico seems 
completely in line with his hostility to the Spanish Republic.

When he was in Mexico, Kluckhohn filed a number 
of articles on Leon Trotsky. At this time, he was 
pals with a character named Frank Jellinek, who 
according to Trotsky’s bodyguard Joseph Hansen, 
was a GPU agent using the cover of a reporting 
job for PM Magazine in New York. At a press 
conference on the findings of the John Dewey 
Commission of Inquiry on the Moscow Trials, 
Jellinek showed up with Kluckhohn but had to be 
removed for making a disturbance.

After leaving the NY Times, Kluckhohn became an 
adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the Truman 
administration in 1948. From that point on, he 
kept shifting rightward steadily until his death 
in an auto accident in 1970. In the 1960s, he 
directed an outfit called “Committee to End Aid 
to the Soviet Enemy” and then moved on to the 
Press Ethics Committee, which the NY Times 
obituary described as “designed to ferret out 
slanted reporting and editing of the news”–in 
other words a forerunner to Reed Irvine’s 
Accuracy in Media, David Horowitz’s Frontpage, et al.

Here’s a good article on what Kluckhohn was up to around this time:

The Washington Post, Apr 25, 1969
The Washington Merry-Go-Round
Neo-Nazis Plan Press Ethics Unit
By Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson

One of the most significant operations of the 
secret neo-Nazi movement In the United States is 
a plan to establish a press ethics committee to 
rate newspapermen and broadcasters and to censure 
those who embarrass “the movement.”

Director of this committee is Frank Kluckhohn, 
who has been close to Willis Carto, chief 
mainspring of the neo Nazi underground and 
organizer of the Liberty Lobby. Carto helped 
raise $90,000 which was distributed to 
conservative Congressional candidates last year.

Chief danger of this underground is its influence 
with a long list of Congressmen to whom it contributed heavily.

One of those enlisted was the sonorous, 
oratorical, naive Sen. Everett McKinley Dirk sen 
of Illinois, Republican Leader in the Senate, who 
has played directly into the hands of the underground.

Dirksen did exactly what Kluckhohn and the 
Liberty Lobby have been hoping to do by attacking 
the New York Times and its reporter, Neil 
Sheehan, for digging into the manner in which 
Otto Otepka raised the money to pay his attorney, 
Roger Robb, plus other defense expenses in his 
battle against the State Department The 
Department, under Dean Rusk, had dropped Otepka 
for leaking classified information on Walt Rostow 
and others to Sen. Tom Dodd (D-Conn.). Rostow was 
the National Security Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

President Nixon has now promoted Otepka from his 
former $14,000 job in the State Department to a 
$36,000 job on the Subversive Activities Control 
Board. By so doing, Mr. Nixon rebuffed his own 
Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, who 
refused to reinstate Otepka. Robb, Otepka’s 
attorney, has been promoted by Mr. Nixon to the 
U.S. Court of Appeals, one of the most important 
judicial appointments in the nation.

Persecuting N.Y. Times When the New York Times 
dug into the John Birch Society and other 
right-wing sources from which Otepka had raised 
his legal defense fund, Sen. Dirksen took the 
unusual step of denouncing the Times, and 
threatened to denounce on the floor of the Senate 
the reporter who wrote the story. It was the New 
York Times, incidentally, which fired Kluckhohn. 
And it was Dirksen who urged President Johnson to 
save the Subversive Activities Control Board, to 
which Otepka has now been appointed.

What the New York Times did was a straight piece 
of reporting, which every newspaper has a right 
and obligation to do in order to keep the public 
informed. Reporter Sheehan showed how Otepka had 
been palsy-walsy with the John Birch Society and 
had raised at least $22,000 from its members or its fronts.

Sheehan queried Otepka about these activities. He declined to discuss them.

Though the Times did a thorough Job of probing 
Otepka’s ties with the John Birch Society, it did 
not go into the equally significant manner in 
which the Liberty Lobby and the neo-Nazi movement has backed Otepka.

Stifling News Criticism

If Sen. Dirksen’s angry blast at the New York 
Times stands as a precedent, it means that 
newspapers cannot report on the activities of a 
presidential appointee facing Senate confirmation 
without risk of being attacked in the Senate. 
This is exactly what Willis Carto and Frank 
Kluckhohn, with their press ethics committee, are 
trying to accomplish. They want to hamstring critical comment by newspapers.

For instance, the Abilene Reporter-News in Texas 
recently exposed the John Birch Society 
connections of certain candidates running for 
mayor and city council of Abilene. The background 
of these candidates was relatively unknown to the 
electorate prior to the Abilene Reporter-News 
expose. As a result of the newspaper’s 
enterprise, the Birchite slate was badly defeated.

Frank Kluckhohn, the man who would head the 
proposed press ethics committee, had a 
spectacular career as a New York Times 
correspondent, being jailed by the British in 
Africa, arrested and deported by President Peron 
of Argentina. U.S. Ambassador George Messersmith 
in Buenos Aires sent a 20-page report to the 
State Department after the Argentine incident, 
calling Kluckhohn irresponsible and unbalanced.

Dropped by the New York Times, Kluckhohn got a 
job under John Foster Dulles in ‘ the State 
Department, later switched to the Republican 
National Committee, where he worked for four years.

While working for the Republican National 
Committee Kluckhohn ghosted two of the most 
scurrilous of the anti-Johnson books—”The Inside 
on LBJ” and “Lyndon’s Legacy.” Though the 
Republican National Committee steadfastly denied 
it had any connection with these smear-books, the 
committee’s vouchers for July 1964 showed a $1000 
payment to Frank Kluckhohn. Kluckhohn collected 
another $1000 from the right-wing “Americans for Constitutional Action.”

This is the man whom the neo-Nazi underground 
proposes to put in charge of a press ethics 
committee to pass judgment on what should or should not be published.