Inside the Rand Corporation and Out (i)
from Anthony Russo with Louise Kollenbaum & Elihu Blotnik at Ramparts
“The RAND Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project . . .
Wait a minute. Were we handing out turkeys at Tet? Was RAND running Human Resources and Public Relations for the Vietnamese Communist Party? Naming a Charlie of the Month? What?
Nah. That first sentence and 2 paragraphs without context across the top of the left-hand page 46 are not the beginning of Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My Story by Anthony Russo in Ramparts magazine. They are a design element meant to attract the eye and pique interest, called a pull quote. Like this:
Louise fucked it up. She turned John T. McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, into John T. Naughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Internal Security Affairs.
Art director Louise Kollenbaum pulled out quotations from 4 pages later in the 11-page story. Pulled in, you may find their originals at the end of the second-to-last paragraph in the left-hand column of the left-hand page 50 shown below.
Louise fucked it up. She turned John T. McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, into John T. Naughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Internal Security Affairs.
We have long enjoyed a law against any such role in our federal government. We legislated the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 to liberate the Ku Klux Klan in the defeated states from the United States Army. By that law the War Department stopped enforcing internal security. Exceptions have probed that rule to keep the Department of Defense on a leash through the present day.
Posse Comitatus is something you learn about when you involve yourself in the affairs of the United States of America. However, Louise’s mistake in transcription and the failure of those reading proof to catch it are understandable. Anthony Russo had interfered with the internal security of our federal government to oppose a war the USA of the USA was waging abroad.
His story was important and urgent and novel. It won 3 more pages than the next longest, on the more urgent and more important but old news of “Vietnam and the Elections.” The editors ran Anthony’s story on the cover where Louise flagged it as a matter of internal security, with a mock-up of a “Top Secret” file.
That illustration is another flub. The papers on the war that Anthony Russo had Xeroxed with the minor Robert Ellsberg and his father Daniel were not filed in folders in a cabinet but bound in volumes and kept on a shelf in an office safe at RAND.
Louise’s cover art departs from the fact of the matter to use the issue of secrecy to attract attention. Fine. Her pull quote on the first page of the article itself is a typographic device with a typographical error in a chunk of type that does not command attention and comprehension. Not so good.
However her design of the article itself is beautiful. I blame the magazine cover and the pull quote on the interference of editors. I credit the illustration of the story to Louise Kollenbaum’s respect for the person and work of Anthony Russo.
Just look at that portrait by Elihu Blotnik for the story. A man and his coin-operated public Xerox machine. Not the one the pirates worked in an advertising office of a lady friend, but it gets the point across.
And that beautiful man. I need to tell you if you weren’t there: that is not a hippie. First off, hippies were not political, that was the whole point. That is a Southerner in a real worker’s cap, not a retro Lenin or exotic Mao or oversized pimp one,
behind Army-style glasses frames, not granny spectacles, wearing an imitation leather jacket not a fancy bomber one, and jeans, not bell-bottoms, flared over his boots. A pistol in sideburns like the truckdriver Elvis. Might or might not have been doing drugs. Everyone here who breathed was addicted to nicotine.
Alcohol had won against temperance after losing the proxy wars with abolition and suffrage. That money had introduced speed as well as cigarettes to healthy young men through the military and downers to women through medicine. Then the intelligence service funded their wars with highland Southeast Asian opiates through Marseilles and promoted psychedelics among rising thought leaders in the universities on the left and right coasts.
If our guy was drinking wine and smoking dope only - and that lovely shot doesn’t rule any drug in or out - he was a health nut of that day, whether biker, hippie, or political. What is his story? Who is Anthony Russo and what did he do Inside RAND and Out? Let’s start again next time. This is the quote I pull to pull you along:
I grow up in a small Southern town and prepare for an imperial manhood amidst the rubble of slavery and the ruins of a colonial past; I become a helper at NASA and witness the death of Buck Rogers dreams. I seek greener pastures.
Anthony [Joseph] Russo [Junior] is my favorite among the Pentagon paparazzi, those who pirated and published the papers on the war. Then comes Robert Ellsberg, the Catholic Worker author and editor. We published the first Viet Nam letter of 1 so far about his father Daniel on April 5, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.