Why The British Assassinate U.S. Presidents

Why The British Assassinate U.S. Presidents

November 23, 2008 (LPAC)--The following is an excerpt from a chapter from a pamphlet issued in December 1994, by New Federalist newspaper. Prompted by the then-skyrocketting threat of assassination to President Bill Clinton, the LaRouche movement pulled together its historical dossier on previous (successful) British assassination efforts, namely those against Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, and Garfield. The series was written by EIR history editor Anton Chaitkin.

EIR is in the process of updating and expanding this file for future publication, because of its crucial relevance to the strategic threat the British represent to the incoming U.S. president today.

We begin here with the cases of Presidents Lincoln and McKinley. Tomorrow, we will publish those of Presidents Kennedy and Garfield.

Part 1: Abraham Lincoln

Francisco Duran opened fire on the White House Oct. 29, seven weeks after Frank Eugene Corder had crashed his plane into the White House. Asked for his view on these violent acts, Lyndon LaRouche said last week: ``I think there's a very high level of threat-potential-related activity against the President. I think this President is more in danger even than President Ford was when the Manson crowd tried two attacks to kill Ford, and probably the highest-level threat against any President since those against President John Kennedy....

``It's serious. The nature of the thing is essentially the conflict which the President has with London, which is pretty obvious. And the faction in London which is particularly after the President, the faction which is represented by the American Spectator and similar other channels of the Hollinger Corp. in this country--they kill. They kill at a very high level. It's very serious.''

The British have killed U.S. Presidents in the past. To aid in a competent understanding of the present threat, we offer in this series a summary of how and why they have done it. The ``British'' authors of these murders are not the English people, but the oligarchy ruling Great Britain--the ``Venetian party'' feudalist aristocrats and bankers, headed by the Royal Family, and the European princes intermarried with the British Royals.

American Presidents who have been assassinated, were advancing U.S. interests in fierce conflict with British geopolitical aims. In each case, the killing, and the accession to office of the Vice President, hindered or reversed the policy direction of the murdered President. This is true of those shot to death--Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. It is also true of the two 19th-century Presidents who died abrupt and surprising deaths in office, purportedly of natural causes, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

The interrelated Lincoln and McKinley murders, with their sharply defined strategic issues, will figure in the first two articles of this series. Then we will review, in light of those cases, the other presidential murders and suspicious deaths, the attempts against Ford and Reagan, and the current threat to President Clinton.

- The 19th-Century View -

John Wilkes Booth shot and mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army surrendered in the Civil War.

In their biography of him, Lincoln's two private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, brought up the question of Booth, the Confederate Secret Service headquartered in British Canada, and how the murder plot was financed:

``[O]ne of the conspiracies, not seemingly more important than the many abortive ones, ripened.... A little band of malignant secessionists, consist[ed] of John Wilkes Booth, ... Lewis Powell ... a disbanded rebel soldier ... George Atzerodt, ...a spy and blockade runner of the Potomac, David E. Herold, ... Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlin, Maryland secessionists and Confederate soldiers, and John H. Surratt [a Confederate spy and dispatch lander]....

``Booth ... visited Canada, consorted with the rebel emissaries there, and at last--whether or not at their instigation cannot certainly be said--conceived a scheme to capture the President.... He seemed always well supplied with money, and talked largely of his speculations in oil as a source of income; but his agent afterwards testified that he never realized a dollar from that source; that his investments, which were inconsiderable, were a total loss.''

The Confederate Secret Service was headed by the Virginia-based Confederate Secretary of State, Judah P. Benjamin, who had been born a British subject in the West Indies, and the London-based James Bulloch, uncle of the later U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt. They coordinated the supply of British rifles and British naval vessels to the Rebellion, and the transfer of gold through the then-British colony of Canada.

Some months before he shot Lincoln, Booth deposited funds in the Montreal bank used by Benjamin's operatives. John Surratt, who confessed in 1870 to plotting with Booth to abduct Lincoln, admitted to using that Montreal bank for the secret service funds. Surratt told of the days preceding the murder, and of his trip to Montreal carrying money and messages from Judah Benjamin.

At Ford's Theater, where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, the U.S. National Park Service now displays a decoding sheet found by police in Booth's trunk, and a matching coding device found in Judah Benjamin's Richmond office.

Benjamin fled to England immediately following the assassination and became a wealthy Queen's Attorney. Booth was shot by pursuing U.S. troops, and four co-conspirators were hanged.

James G. Blaine, a Lincoln-allied Congressman and later U.S. Secretary of State, wrote that Judah Benjamin sought to create ``a confederacy whose ... one achievement should be the revival and extension of English commercial power on this continent.... Benjamin took quick refuge under the flag to whose allegiance he was born.... [T]he manner in which he was lauded into notoriety in London, the effort constantly made to lionize and to aggrandize him, were conspicuous demonstrations of hatred to our Government, and were significant expressions of regret that Mr. Benjamin's treason had not been successful. Those whom he served either in the Confederacy or in England in his efforts to destroy the American Union ... eulogize him according to his work.''

- Why Lincoln Was Killed -

Henry C. Carey, creator of the nationalist economic platform of Lincoln's Republican Party, wrote just before the 1860 election that the British Empire waged continual political and economic ``warfare ... for discouraging the growth of manufactures in other countries ... for compelling the people of other lands to confine themselves to agriculture ... for producing pauperism.''

During his presidency, Lincoln defied British Free Trade doctrines and revolutionized the United States economy. Lincoln's 50% tariff started the American steel industry, while his transcontinental railroads, subsidies for mining, science-educating Agriculture Department, free land for family farmers, free state colleges, and full-scale immigration policy forced the transformation of a bankrupt, cotton-exporting country into the world's greatest industrial power within 25 years.

In a brutal conflict versus the Wall Street firms representing Britain's Rothschild and Baring banks and the British Crown, Lincoln fought to reassert the national government's control over credit. He put through anti-usury and other strict federal banking laws, sold bonds directly to the people, and issued hundreds of millions of national currency. He was seeking to crack down on the Anglo-American manipulation of gold when he was killed.

- * * * -

PART 2 - William McKinley

Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and promised rewards for the arrest of the ``rebels and traitors ... harbored in Canada'' who had ``incited, concerted and procured'' Lincoln's murder.

Johnson was himself a free trader. But Lincoln's nationalist political legacy was revived by Presidents Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77) and James A. Garfield (assassinated in 1881). Despite the tightening grip of British-run banking over U.S. finances, America persisted in Lincoln's nationalist measures and became the world's economic superpower.

The ``McKinley Act'' of 1890 was the great protective tariff law of the last generation of American nationalist leaders. Its author, Ohio Congressman and former Union military officer William McKinley, said that ``the law of 1890 ... gave work and wages to all such as they had never had before. It did it by establishing great industries in this country.... It had no friends in Europe.''

McKinley was elected to the presidency in 1896 on a platform of high wages and defiance of British free trade doctrines. McKinley's first act as President was to push through a law heavily taxing British and other imports, so as ``to preserve the home market ... to our own producers; to revive and increase manufactures; to relieve and encourage agriculture ... to aid and develop mining and building; and to render to labor in every field of useful occupation the liberal wages and adequate rewards to which skill and industry are justly entitled.''

- McKinley Versus T.R. -

In the 1900 election campaign, the only serious issue was who should replace Vice President Garret Hobart, who had died in 1899. President McKinley and his leading adviser, Sen. Marcus Alonzo Hanna, bitterly opposed the nomination of Great Britain's fanatical political ally Theodore Roosevelt, or ``T.R.'' (When Roosevelt sent Nicholas Murray Butler to sound out McKinley about T.R., McKinley laughed, and Hanna cursed and banged on the table).

Teddy Roosevelt's identity had become clear to American patriots in 1883 when James D. Bulloch, Teddy's uncle, hero, and later military-history ghostwriter, published his famous anti-U.S. historical work, ``The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe.'' Bulloch, in permanent exile in Britain, had been one of the two coordinators of the secret service whose operatives killed Abraham Lincoln.

But, under immense pressure, the McKinley faction capitulated to the naming of T.R. as vice presidential candidate. The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket was elected. The President was shot to death by anarchist assassin Leon Czolgosz less than six months after the inauguration, and Teddy Roosevelt became President.

The attack had been fully expected. McKinley's chief of staff, Sen. Hanna, had requested in a security report the previous year ``that proper safeguards be thrown around the person of the President,'' because the government had been informed that ``anarchists or Socialists through their various organizations resolved to rid the earth of a number of its rulers [starting with] the Empress Eugenie of Austria ... the King of Italy ... [and] then the President of the United States ... and ... the first two calls ... have come to pass as predicted.''

After the election of the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket, the New York City Police Commissioner, through his detective Lt. Joseph Petrosino, had issued a warning: that the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City, then the U.S. political headquarters for anarchist leader Emma Goldman, was a center of assassination threats to the life of President McKinley.

The assassin Czolgosz told police after his capture that he was a disciple of Emma Goldman's, and had heard her lecture on the destruction of government two weeks before he killed the President. Emma Goldman, who had helped plan the murder attack against industrialist Henry Frick nine years earlier, was now arrested on suspicion of complicity in the McKinley shooting. She left police custody when charges were not pressed, and immediately launched a public sympathy campaign for the assassin.

London: `Breeding Ground for Plots

Emma Goldman and the anarchists were sponsored in high style in America and in England. New York's Henry Street Settlement House was built in 1893 by Wall Street's Jacob Schiff, in cooperation with his partner Sir Ernst Cassell, personal banker to the British Royal Family and to the Fabian Society. Emma Goldman wrote about a Russian anarchist revolutionary who came to New York and met with the Anglophile elite backing the overthrow of the U.S.-allied Russian government. ``I acted as interpreter ... at most of the private gatherings arranged for her ... among [those participating was Anson] Phelps Stokes'' of the Phelps-Dodge Corp. and the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Co. ``Lillian Wald [head of the Henry Street Settlement House] ... arranged receptions ... and succeeded in interesting scores of people in the Russian cause.''

In 1901, the Russian journal Svet wrote: ``Let us hope that the death of [President McKinley] will rouse those lands which ... harbor bad elements and become the breeding grounds for plots, to action against the enemies of civilization.'' ``In England,'' Belgium's King Leopold had explained years earlier, ``a sort of menagerie of [revolutionaries] is kept to let loose occasionally on the continent to render its quiet and prosperity impossible.''

Emma Goldman wrote in her autobiography about flourishing ``Anarchist activities in London.... England was the haven for refugees from all lands, who carried on their work without hindrance.'' She described her London headquarters, the home of William Michael Rosetti. There the anarchist journal Torch was published. The brother of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Michael had been a senior British government official and the manager of the ``Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,'' which openly advocated the return to the feudal Dark Ages of the 14th century. Goldman helped organize Britain's worldwide Neo-Malthusian League. Following her deportation from the U.S., neo-Malthusian leader Bertrand Russell sponsored her return to England.

- Reversing American Revolution -

Teddy Roosevelt had been the leading representative of the British Imperial-model war party, whose intrigues had dragged the reluctant President McKinley into the 1898 war against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines. But McKinley had pursued peace, reciprocity, and mutual industrial development with the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

As President, Teddy Roosevelt blatantly attacked and intimidated Latin America, blackening the name of the American republic. He broke up the U.S. alliances with Japan, and with Russia, and with Germany. He closed the American West to settlement, canceled all of Lincoln's economic development measures, and turned over national financial power to the British banking cartel of Rothschild and Morgan.