Author Archives: Advocate

Out of Sorts

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I’ve heard this expression many times, and understood it to mean someone was frustrated or not feeling well. However, I asked myself “what is a sort, and why would someone find themselves out of them?” I found a detailed explanation in World Wide Words.

“The most common story about this phrase refers to the printer’s word sorts for the individual metal characters in his boxes of type, so called because they have been arranged, each into its own compartment, with all of one kind together. It would obviously be a substantial inconvenience if a printer were to run out of a sort during composition. The problem with this story is that the figurative expression out of sorts is recorded much earlier than the printers’ term.” A second idea is that the saying came from saying that a pack of playing cards hadn’t been shuffled. The author isn’t convinced about this origin, and instead thinks the origin derives from Latin. “The Latin original of our word sort was applied to a piece of wood that was used for drawing lots…it developed into the idea of one’s fate, fortune or condition…It survived until shortly after Shakespeare’s time, until about the point that out of sorts is first found.

Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley

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Published by The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1951
(Buy this book on Amazon.com.)

Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American who served as a courier for Soviet espionage cells who became disillusioned, and like Whitaker Chambers (see the “Witness” review), went to the FBI.  Bentley was a well educated liberal who became concerned about Fascism during a year in Italy and became a Communist when she had trouble finding work after she returned to the United States.  Her intelligence and dedication attracted the attention of members of the Russian Secret Police.    One was a woman named Juliet Glazer (actual name Juliet Poyntz) who scared her.  Glazer was liquidated by her Soviet handlers not long after meeting Bentley.  Over the next few years Bentley would work with others who would suffer the same fate as Glazer (Poyntz).

Elizabeth called herself a “steeled Bolshevik” by the time she went to work for a man called “Timmy,” and she was told to cut off contact with all her Communist friends to go deep under cover.  “Timmy,” who she later called “Yasha,” was Jacob Golos, chief of Soviet espionage operations in the United States.    Elizabeth, whose Venona code name was “Clever Girl,” served as courier for Golos, and the two became lovers against orders from the Soviets and despite the fact he had a wife in Lithuania and a mistress in Manhattan.

Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and orders came to Golos to get as many comrades as possible into the U.S. government.  Bentley assumed the name of “Miss Wise,” and she found a job in the United States Services and Shipping Corporation.  Bentley was surprised at how easy it was for hard core Communists to be hired into sensitive U.S. government jobs.  There were so many agents that she and Golos worried that American intelligence would “trip over one of them.”  So much information was stolen that it was difficult to keep up with the microfilming.  The information included plane production data, planned destinations, and performance data.  “Besides this purely military information, we had a steady flow of political reports from the Treasury…the Office of Strategic services, the Navy, the Army, and…the Department of Justice.  We knew what was going on in the inner chambers of the United States Government.” Continue reading →

Witness

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by Whittaker Chambers
Originally published in 1952; reprinted in 2001 by Regnery Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 0-89526-789

This 800 page small print book is regarded as reference material about the dangers of liberalism by conservatives. I assure you I can’t sort out all the key points in a short review, but I’ll give it a try.  The book chronicles the life of Jay Vivian Chambers (who, after a lifetime of embarrassment about what his parents had named him, changed his name to the one listed as the author above).    Chambers grew up in a destructively dysfunctional family and turned to Communism out of despair over world events.  He was the courier for an active espionage network in the government for several years, and began to doubt the validity of communism after word began to spread about the extent of the Soviet purges.  He decided he had to leave the party after Stalin signed a mutual defense pact with Hitler.  He initially went into hiding, remembering the Communist saying, “Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes and artist to commit a good natural death.”  He went to Adolph Berle of the FBI in 1939 and told him about his association with the Communists and named several of his associates.  He omitted discussion of espionage.  (Berle’s notes on the meeting begin on page 466.)  Berle briefed FDR on the information, who laughed at him.  When Berle became insistent about the information,   FDR told him to “go fly a kite,” only in less polite language.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which included a young Richard M. Nixon, called Chambers to testify nine years later.  Chambers had been accepted into the Communist party by Ben Mandel, who was the research director for HUAC when he was called to testify.  His testimony accurately repeated the allegations he had filed previously with the FBI, and mentioned (once again) that Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official in the then Truman administration, was part of his spy ring.  That allegation ignited a storm of publicity and controversy.  Hiss denied the charges (and maintained his innocence until his death in 1996).  There followed years of investigations, including two Grand Jury trials, and the eventual perjury conviction of Alger Hiss. Continue reading →

The Sugar King of Havana

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Subtitled, The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba’s Last Tycoon
by John Paul Rathbone

This is a great book!  It elegantly intertwines the fascinating biography of Julio Lobo and his rise to be the most powerful sugar broker in the world with Cuban history. Much of the history is of revolutionary events, including Castro’s revolution and the close association of Cuba with the United States.  The author’s mother was a friend of Lobo’s daughters, and I think that allows richness to the book that is possible because of the personal connections.

I intend to begin with an overview, which is mostly quoted from the flap of the book, followed by  selected snippets with page numbers for reference.

Overview—The legendary wealth of sugar magnate Julio Lobo and his reign as the most powerful force in world sugar markets ended 18 months after Castro marched into Havana.  Lobo was born in 1898, the year of Cuba’s independence, and he had “…an extraordinary life that mirrored, in almost lurid Technicolor, the many rises and final fall of the Cuban Republic.”  Lobo not only often had the world sugar market cornered, he also had the largest collection of Napoleonica outside of France, faced a firing squad only to be pardoned at the last moment, survived a gangland shooting, and cavorted with numerous movie stars and several mistresses.  He described himself as being a good son, good brother, and good father, but correctly did not mention that he was a good husband. Continue reading →

All the Shah’s Men

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All The Shah’s Men, An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
By Stephen Kinzer
Published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

The United States took the lead in organizing, funding, and carrying out the 1953 coup that removed the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, and restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne. Iranians generally had admiration and respect for Americans, but the coup created hatred and distrust. The oppressive regime of the Shah led to his overthrow in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.   Predicting alternative history is at best imprecise, but perhaps without this coup Khomeini would not have come to power. Perhaps the United States would not have decided to give the Shah asylum, which precipitated the Iranian hostage crises. Perhaps Jimmy Carter would have been elected to a second term. Perhaps the Iranians would not have supported insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, and perhaps they wouldn’t be pursuing development of nuclear weapons. Of course that is all meaningless speculation, since the CIA did engineer the overthrow of the legitimate leader of Iran and installed a replacement who used brutality to remain in power until the Carter administration decided Khomeini and his plane full of supporters should not be killed when they landed in Tehran.

Iran was poor but strategically located at a time when the Russians and the West were vying for advantage. The country became even more important when massive deposits of oil were discovered. The British moved in, negotiated a deal to control the oil with most of the profits going to the English, and acted like selfish imperialists. Their refinery managers lived in luxury next to the Iranian workers who lived in squalor. Iranians were pleased when Mohammed Mossadegh became their leader. He inspired memories of the Persian Zoroastrian religious belief that people have the right to enlightened leadership, the duty to obey wise rulers, and a further duty to rise up against the wicked. Mossadegh saw the British as wicked, nationalized the oil resources and refinery of the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and pushed the British out of the country. Time Magazine named him “Man of the Year” in 1951. 

 Continue reading →

Shellacked

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President Obama recently characterized what happened in the November elections as a “shellacking” of the Democratic Party. Word Detective explains that shellac was introduced in the 17th century for use as furniture polish. The slang became a description of very drunk, badly beaten, or vanquished. The word detective proposes that those meanings “comes from the fact that shellacking is often the last step in furniture manufacture, so when someone is ‘shellacked’, he or she is absolutely, positively finished and done.”