Perspective –

William Bulger’s Inquisition
Is Aggressive GOP Opportunism

BOSTON - If there was ever a need to illustrate a double standard, it could easily be shown by how today’s news media treats the Republicans and the Democrats. The most recent example is the Congressional trial of William M. Bulger. 

Mr. Bulger, of course, is in many ways an unsympathetic character, having smoothly wielded power for many years as the controlling force on Boston’s Beacon Hill, using Irish charm effectively, but always prepared to achieve the goal with a steel fist if needed. 

How it must have rankled some people when he left his post as president of the Mass. Senate and segued directly into the presidency of the University of Massachusetts, overseeing all of its far-flung campuses and offshoots from a palatial office, yet simultaneously showing everyone how he could use his skills and connections to assure solid funding for the state college system. How galling this must have been for his political opponents, and for those who simply felt he had become arrogant after holding legislative power for so long, an image often fed and fostered by Boston's major media..

Nonetheless, the current attack on Mr. Bulger has the same stink attached to it that we should all be familiar with from the never-ending and often scurrilous attacks that the Republicans mounted against Pres. William J. Clinton. And of course the unquestioning media continues to tacitly give its approval to the process.

Hauling Mr. Bulger before Congress is nothing more than trial by fishing expedition. The attack on Mr. Bulger is a GOP power play, and the media is providing the stage without even an attempt to view and illustrate to the public the bigger picture, which is after-all supposed to be its job, its reason for existence.

Mr. Bulger and his family would seem outsized if they were the protagonists in a novel – several brothers grow up in a tough Irish neighborhood, and two of the brothers succeed, one as a clerk magistrate in the Boston court system, and the other as an elected official, ultimately attaining the top leadership position in the state legislature. But the third brother – James, the oldest – was a 1950’s tough guy who wound up being one of the state’s most infamous gangsters, outsmarting the local Italian branch of the mafia and playing a double game worthy of the CIA with the Boston FBI. Nonetheless, James "Whitey" Bulger is clearly a vicious outlaw who stands in stark contrast to his most successful younger brother, William. If this were a novel, it would be overdrawn.

But do we really think that Massachusetts’ GOP Governor Mitt Romney is simply outraged that a public official could have a gangster for a brother, and maybe have given his brother some family assistance? Or that he has not provided all the information he could that might lead to his brother’s arrest?

Isn’t it much more likely that either Mr. Romney sees his role in this trial by assumption and smear as one that will curry great favor with the ultra-conservative administration of George W. Bush? Or that some of Mr. Bush’s colleagues have been whispering in Mr. Romney’s ear?

But while all of that is important, it pales in contrast to the larger picture, the greater perspective. What we are now witnessing is another version of the great and continual GOP Congressional Witch-Hunt! The Republicans have absolutely mastered the technique.

One could say they first began using the technique in its modern, televised version during the era of Joseph McCarthy, a good Republican tail-gunner from Wisconsin. This is the man who gave Richard Nixon his first moment of national prominence. But the GOP has a longer and darker history with this sort of American inquisition. One must recall the 1930’s and ‘40’s, and the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, that had to rely on radio and newspapers to publicize most of its dark work. And who can now remember or even recall reading of the black work of Martin Dies, the reactionary Texan who during the Great Depression struck terror in honest hearts at the thought of having to appear before ‘the Dies Committee?’ His coalition of Republicans and reactionary Southerners turned HUAC into a full-blown star chamber, but he was highly admired by the America First people, and by "Isolationists" in general. And on his Texas home-front, he was well loved by the KKK.

Innuendo, character assassination, black lists, unsubstantiated charges, and all similar pseudo-investigative techniques have over the years been employed by the GOP, usually masquerading under the guise of super-patriotism. The Republicans developed this technique during the Civil War when the Republican Party was less than a decade old. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president the Republicans have ever had, was appalled by the reactionary committees that sprang up in Congress among his own party. He was forced to fight them, placate them, and work around them.

The Civil War was not a year old before the most radical members of the new Republican Party created The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a Congressional watchdog organization that combined the most vitriolic Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate. This first Republican committee of inquisition was chaired by Republican Congressmen Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio, described by Shelby Foote as "an all-out abolitionist with keen little jet-black eyes and bulldog flews, the upper lip overhanging the lower one at the corners of his mouth, a figure to frighten the disloyal or the inefficient or the merely unlucky…star chamber-like, the committee’s meeting room was in the Capitol basement…"

Republican William Fessenden of Maine and Massachusetts’ own Charles Sumner were prominently associated with this committee. Throughout the Civil War this radical GOP committee beleaguered Pres. Lincoln with inquisition-like hearings, hailing before them military officers, public officials and private individuals alike with one goal; to test their adherence to the most severe policies aimed at destroying the Confederacy and exacting retribution. Many careers were destroyed by these men in their effort to purge anyone whom they perceived as blocking them from their absolutist goals. Some of the more radical of those goals included the concept of denying the Southern states a return to full status as part of the Union, once the war was over; the idea was to keep the Southern states as vassal territory occupied and governed by the military until the area could be resettled with people from the Northern states. Mr. Lincoln always stood in their way.

How ironic that today the New South, rising as promised and threatened, has adopted the party of its demise and refined the Republican methods of inquisition in an obvious effort to destroy the Democratic Party, which originally was its pathway back to self-sufficiency within the Union.

That we as a nation are facing an internal threat to our system by the radical conservatives now in control of the Republican Party is clearly illustrated by the facts at hand, but the media is so intimidated that it can only strike hard in one direction, toward the Democrats.

William Bulger is but a small example of the ongoing onslaught.

All that is needed to illustrate the point is a recollection of the eight-years of unremitting Congressional attacks against Pres. Clinton. Hundreds of millions of tax dollars were wasted attempting to destroy Mr. Clinton’s Presidency, apparently because he got in the way of the plans that Paul Wolfowitz and other extreme conservatives had for global Americanization following the Ronald Regan and George H.W. Bush Presidencies.

Now these GOP radicals are having it their way globally and nationally, with a hard-core conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in support, and a fast and furious effort underway by the Bush Administration to pack the federal judiciary with like-minded right-wingers. It should not be too surprising that the national GOP leadership is at this juncture confident enough to reach into that most Democratic of states, Massachusetts, and seek to exert power by dividing the Bay State electorate.

How convenient a tool is Billy Bulger? A longtime and major power broker in local Democratic politics with a brother who is a nationally known criminal!

But is it surprising that the GOP gave Mr. Bulger immunity from prosecution? It shouldn’t be for anyone conversant with our system of government. 

Giving Mr. Bulger immunity was not a gift, it was a trap. Once immunity is provided, whether sought or not, the individual can then be subpoenaed before Congress and anything that is said under oath can be scrutinized for the slightest discrepancy from other facts or testimony, and if any can be found the person with immunity can then be prosecuted for lying to Congress. 

That is why Mr. Bulger’s own testimony was so guarded; how could it be otherwise? He hasn’t committed any known crime for which the GOP can prosecute him, but the GOP, having conferred immunity upon him from any misdeeds he may now admit under oath, can and did press him harder, claiming to be seeking the whole truth, since there will be no penalty for an admission of guilt. Yet should Mr. Bulger maintain his innocence, which he has done in understandably guarded terms, his inquisitors - the GOP Congressmen and their staffs and party affiliates  - are now free to conduct a wide search for any possible misstatement, any problem with the facts of his immunized testimony or conflict with the testimony of others, etc.

If contradictory facts or any conflict in testimony can be found, the Congressmen can then seek to prosecute him, putting him into the position of trying to prove his facts are accurate and that he wasn't the one who lied, but that instead the other information or testimony is wrong. This is a double-sided prosecutorial trick from which the 5th Amendment to the Constitution is designed to protect Americans; the Founding Fathers, and many who came after them, understood the star chamber history of Europe.

It is no disgrace to use the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution when being questioned by the government; it was designed to prevent Americans from self-incrimination. But immunity from prosecution interrupts those Constitutional safeguards. In effect, this conferring of immunity twists the process so that the person being interrogated is guilty until proven innocent. 

It's a great technique. If the person admits former wrong-doing, he or she can't be prosecuted but will be disgraced and political capital will be provided to the opponents of the accused; in this case the GOP could then crow about how a corrupt Democrat was revealed. But if the individual has nothing to admit to the inquisitors that would justify immunity, that individual's testimony can still be scrutinized to see if it conflicts with other testimony or other information, and if so the Congressional committee will have something to call a crime, something it can prosecute. And in all instances, the prosecutors can make it appear the person being interrogated is obfuscating and is therefore tarnished, even if they can't be officially prosecuted. 

This technique also provides great headlines because so much of the print media, and the electronic media that follows it, is seeking a simple and quick way to grab attention. That's why everyone was treated to a recent barrage of media coverage implying that Mr. Bulger was not very straightforward and may have been trying to hide something, therefore even though there was no proof he had lied or done anything incorrect, he was tarnished. Again, a great tool for the prosecutors.

Republicans, not surprisingly, have long cast the 5^th Amendment in a bad light, since it conflicts with their prosecutorial approach to Congressional hearings. How the GOP misunderstands the founding document, the Constitution, was shown during the Bulger inquisition by the dramatic comments of Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, who told Mr. Bulger that, "it blew me away when you exercised your Fifth Amendment rights," during hearings last year.*

These are the same clever, manipulative tactics that the Republicans have been using since the Civil War, only now the goal is not the reunification of the nation and the punishment of those who seceded, along with thrashing those who were half-hearted in their persecution of rebels and slaveholders; the current effort is actually the polar opposite of the initial goal of those original GOP radicals, who in the 1860's tried to purge the country of the autocratic and  imperialistic national and international viewpoints of the Southern leadership and its States Rights agenda. 

The original radical agenda of the first Republicans has been replaced by a new, "modern" radical agenda that ironically embodies a great deal of  the conceptual, expansionist and elitist viewpoints of the 19th Century rebels. The GOP has been co-opted. The old leaders of the Confederacy must be smiling somewhere.

Today the New South GOP leaders and their new-found modern and neo-conservative adherents have resuscitated the old ideals and goals, cloaking them in 21st Century terms, and now they are seeking the elimination of any opposition to their right-wing agenda,  which clearly seems to be focused on world-wide domination without any internal dissent or national dialogue. Autocratic imperialism is on the march, only now the goal isn't the annexation of Canada,  Mexico and South America, but the remaking of global politics.

Staging an attack on a prominent Massachusetts Democrat is but a small example of the overall effort. But in its context, it isn't at all surprising that Indiana Republican Dan Burton led the inquisition against Mr. Bulger. Burton was one of the most vituperative critics of Pres. Clinton, long before the GOP and its operatives were able to find and develop the Lewinsky scandal, and he was a driving force in the attempt to Impeach Mr. Clinton and his presidency.

That the media is culpable in all of this is equally clear.

Competent reporters and editors know all of these facts. But they are referred to obliquely, in the middle of a story if at all, and usually in the most polite and deferential terms. In the best of the major papers the facts are there for the astute reader, but they are not boldly portrayed or clearly outlined.

The sad and dangerous fact is that the American media is now innately conservative and always lags behind events, waiting to see the public reaction before taking a position. The majority of media leaders today are the hard-right publications, which include such papers as The Wall Street Journal. The Journal and others don’t let a day go by when they are not hammering away at the Democratic Party and its elected leaders, and when they don’t have an individual in their sights, they are either taking aim at Democratic policies and philosophies, or supporting the actions and policies of the GOP.

That newspapers are more conservative shouldn’t be too surprising. Most publications are now corporate entities with ties to Wall Street and so-called stockholder demands for 20% profit year in and year out. Also, the major news corporations are largely owned and operated by registered Republicans.

The nation is in dire need of newspapers willing to be blunt about the GOP and its policies and goals, but aside from The Washington Post the Republicans have little to fear. Even The Boston Globe, now owned by The New York Times, bends over backwards in its attempt to show it has no liberal or Democratic bias and as a result fails to underscore the apparent impetus of the current GOP attack on the Democrats. This is a particularly sad state of affairs when it is remembered that newspapers are the only media protected by the Constitution; unlike all the electronic media – TV and radio – they do not have to be licensed by the government.

Mr. Bulger is indeed a convenient target for the GOP, but so far he has shown a thorough understanding of his attackers, and an unwillingness to play into their hands. Despite his controversial political background his performance is in fact admirable, since the political goals of his inquisitors should make everyone who believes in American democracy quail.

In late June, 2003, the Trustees of the University of Massachusetts voted to support Mr. Bulger in retaining his position, declaring that they saw no indication he had violated the law or the precepts of the institution, prompting Gov. Mitt Romney to announce his plan to replace the Trustees, appointment by appointment, until he has a sufficient majority that will follow his dictates and oust Mr. Bulger. 

* As quoted in The Boston Globe, June 26, 2003.