Jeff Sachs: An Academic with Chutzpah

                              

One of the most disturbing aspects of the contemporary media scene is the use of so-called academics, or experts, as commentators.  In the seventies and eighties the conservative power brokers began creating citadels of pseudo scholarship e.g. The Heritage Foundation, The Manhattan Institute.  Basically, the concept was to pay for “experts” to write articles and to appear on broadcasts promoting a rightwing agenda.  To put it mildly, it was successful. To exemplify how successful it was, even PBS booked many of these conservative mouthpieces. This disturbing trend is made even worse in times of war e.g. Iraq, Ukraine.  Because then the think tank rent a scholars are complemented by former military men who work for defense contractors. (Washington Post, 10/4/23, article by Missy Ryan)

This even extends to actual coverage at the war fronts. The Pentagon, realizing it made a mistake in allowing reporters to roam free in Vietnam, now utilizes “embedded journalists”.  These are  reporters pre-screened by the military to cover the war on the ground.  This was reduced to absurdity in Iraq by the choice of Judith Miller of the New York Times, the woman who was at least partly responsible for the myth  that Saddam Hussein had secured weapons of mass destruction. That reportage was later revealed to be based upon manufactured intel. (Franklin Foer, “The Source of the Trouble”, New York magazine,  5/28/04)

This is why today, many viewers have simply given up in using this mainstream formula. Therefore men like Scott Ritter and Col. Douglas MacGregor have attracted large followings in the alternative media. Viewers trust their coverage of what was and is really happening in the war in Ukraine. For example, by interviewing these men, Judge Andrew Napolitano has created a nearly 400,000 subscriber base on YouTube.

Another recent guest that Napolitano hosted was Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs was educated at Harvard where he ended up with a Ph. D. in economics. In 1983, at age 28, he became a full professor there. From 2001-18 he was a special advisor to the UN Secretary General.  He was a consultant to Eastern Bloc countries trying to convert from communist economies and he has a special interest in trying to eradicate hunger and poverty in Africa. (Vanity Fair, June 5, 2007 ”Jeffrey Sachs’ 200 Billion Dollar Dream”)

In a book he published on President Kennedy back in 2013, To Move a Nation, he wrote that before Ted Sorenson died, the two had met. Sorenson told him how wonderful he thought Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University was. The two planned on writing a book together.  After Sorenson passed on, Sachs went ahead and wrote the book himself. The book had a special focus on the American University speech and Kennedy’s successful campaign to get the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty passed.

At around that time, Sachs was a rather frequent guest on MSM television, e.g. MSNBC. As he himself has noted of late, he does not make that many appearances on the MSM today.  After watching and reading some of his more current video spots and editorial column I can see why that is the case. For as time has gone on, Jeff Sachs has become more and more opposed to mainstream views, ideas, concepts and opinion.  In fact, there is no other way to say this: Sachs has become an outspoken critic against the present Democratic Party.  And he has become even more straightforward and blunt about, not just the presidency of John F. Kennedy, but about his assassination.

Let us take the former subject first.

If one goes to his web site, you will see a column entitled “Why Joe Biden is a Foreign Policy Failure”. He begins his column by stating—quite sensibly I think—that any post World War II president has two main aims in foreign policy 1.) To rein in the military industrial complex which always wants a war, and 2.) To also hold back our allies who want us to go to war on their behalf.

He then uses two instances of presidents who managed to do this.  He first names Dwight Eisenhower. In the first category he points out Ike’s resistance to go into Eastern Europe to defend the Hungarian Uprising in the fall of 1956. That rebellion lasted 12 days before Moscow sent in tanks and troops. There were approximately 2,500 casualties on the Hungarian side. Eisenhower understood that since Hungary was part of the Warsaw Pact, the country was clearly in the sphere of influence of the USSR.

The other Eisenhower example Sachs uses occurred around the same time as the Hungarian Uprising,  This was the Suez Crisis of October 1956, when Israel, France and England invaded Egypt. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had just nationalized the Suez Canal, and the invasion objectives were to depose him and take back the canal. There is a debate as to how much Eisenhower knew about this plan and if his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles kept it from him. Whatever, Eisenhower objected to it and then Dulles condemned it at the UN. Therefore, the invasion ended.

With Kennedy, Sachs uses the examples of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his passage of a Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as instances of JFK standing up to the Pentagon. He then contrasts this with President Biden’s endless spending on wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He closes by saying that American foreign policy today is rudderless “with a president whose only foreign policy recipe is war.” At the end he tacks on the fact that Biden also intends to ship more arms to Taiwan over strong objections by China.

In a column at Common Dreams dated May 23, 2023, Sachs makes the argument similar to John Mearsheimer. Namely that contrary to what the MSM says, the Russian attack on Ukraine was not actually unprovoked. Sachs does not endorse it, and says that there were other methods that Vladimir Putin should have pursued in advance.  But he states that America’s relentless push to expand NATO, until it virtually rings Russia, plus American participation and encouragement of the overthrow  of the Ukraine government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, that these cannot be ignored. And Sachs reminds us that in the first case, this was in direct violation of a promise made to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand eastward once Germany was unified. In the second case, State Department employee Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planned a post-Yanukovych government before his overthrow. (Sachs could have also mentioned the war in Donbas, with over 14,000 casualties.)

In another column at Common Dreams dated May 29, 2024, entitled “Presidents Who Gamble with Nuclear Armageddon”, he attempts to equate several presidents to the establishment by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the Doomsday Clock in 1947. Today the clock is placed at 90 seconds before midnight, “the closest it’s ever been in the nuclear age.”  He then compares that with the performance of President Kennedy who had pushed it “back to 12 minutes to midnight, a magnificent and historic achievement.”

Here I want to concentrate on a long interview that Sachs did with Tucker Carlson.  In my opinion, that 150 minute discussion was close to a tour de force on the contemporary political scene. And it shows why Sachs is not a pet subject of the MSM today.

In that interview, Sachs traced the rise of the Neocons and their desire to expand NATO.  This, in spite of the fact that the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved in 1991 by formal announcement in Prague. Sachs traces the concept of NATO enlargement to President Clinton’s Ambassador to the UN and his later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Clinton announced the concept in January of 1994 at a Brussels NATO Summit.  As Sachs also noted, Russia expert and foreign policy scholar George Kennan strongly disagreed, correctly predicting that it would antagonize Russia and endanger arms control treaties.

In December, 1997 Albright supervised the first round of NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (she was born in Prague.) Later rounds brought the total membership number to thirty.  This included the former Baltic states of the USSR: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Sachs notes that Vladimir Putin protested this eastward expansion as early as 2007. In a meeting with Biden in December of 2021 he again warned against doing so.  And Sachs himself called the White House around that time and warned National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan not to risk war over this issue.

But in that interview and in at least one other article, Sachs made some bracing comments about the John Kennedy assassination. As he and Carlson were mentioning CIA overthrows abroad, Carlson said: What about domestic CIA activities. At this, Sachs unloaded.

The Ivy League professor now mentioned the disclosures by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis and the bullet discovered  in the back seat of the limousine. He also said that Kennedy’s murder was most likely a CIA rogue operation, it was not done by Lee Oswald. He also added that everything we now know, and all the evidence, points in the direction of a conspiracy.

Carlson then agreed there was a coup. Sachs quickly added this: “…and we never got over it….We covered it up from the beginning.” Sachs continued in this vein by stating that there were so many things wrong with the official story that it was preposterous. Then comes this humdinger:

Almost nobody believes it or should believe it.  But its also interesting for all that we’re discussing, most likely it was a government coup in broad daylight with the tremendous amount of evidence that it was a conspiracy at a high level.

Sachs segued into the Church Committee and their discoveries about the CIA plots to kill both Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. He then circled back with this: “Look, if you can kill a president in broad daylight and get away with it for 61 years…you can do a lot of things.”

In returning to Albright’s enlargement of NATO, he suggested that Bill Clinton was not the kind of president that Kennedy was. He would not think things all the way through and then apply the brakes to a potentially deleterious idea. He added that Kennedy learned his lesson about this the hard way, after the Bay of Pigs disaster.  He then repeated this theme: he was probably “killed by our government for trying to keep his foot on the brakes.”

Sachs has also written in this vein in his columns. In his Common Dreams column of May 29^th, he wrote that JFK’s death “may well have been a government coup resulting from Kennedy’s peace initiatives.” In his previously mentioned column criticizing Biden, he writes:

Many believe that Kennedy’s peace initiatives led to his assassination at the hands of rogue CIA officials.  Biden has joined the long line of presidents that have kept classified or redacted thousands of documents that would shed more light on the assassination.

This is accurate. There are still well over 4,500 documents that are still being withheld in part or in full on the JFK case.  And this is seven years after the 1992 legislative act dictated that all the records on that case should be disclosed.

The Democratic Party does not like critics of its Ukraine policy. Especially those who mention that it was the USA which rejected a peace agreement in March of 2022. Neither do they like voices who say that CV-19 likely escaped from a lab. (Which Sachs maintains through the work of Emily Kopp and The Intercept.)  The MSM especially does not like voices that proclaim that they were completely and utterly wrong to accept the nonsense of the Warren Commission Report about the JFK murder.

Jeff Sachs is an honest man with courage.  He has risked becoming an outsider over what he thinks is right. I tip my hat to him for that.